Want to Create the Best Responsive Courses? Follow These Best Practices

blog_BestPracticesRCD

With mLearning on the rise, learners are starting to expect to be able to take courses on their mobile devices—and they expect them to look good. There are certain best practices you should always follow to ensure your courses provide the best user experience.

First things first: bigger isn’t always better.

I know my phone is constantly telling me that I don’t have enough memory to even update the apps already on my phone—let alone download an entire eLearning course! (I use my phone to take a lot of pictures of my cat, as loyal Everything eLearning Blog readers have probably noticed.)

John Blackmon, Chief Technology Officer of Trivantis, recommends that you always keep course bandwidth in mind when creating mobile learning.

“That 500MB HD video that looked so great on the desktop version of your course just takes too long to download on your student’s phone to be useful. You can create a much smaller resolution version of the video, or perhaps cut out any unneeded sequences so that it is quick and to the point for your mobile user,” says Blackmon.

File size isn’t the only thing you want to cut down on. You should also consider how long your course would take for the user to complete.

“Generally, when the course is being consumed on a mobile device, the user is on the go, and doesn't have time for a three hour sit down course. Keep the material short and pertinent to the task at hand,” says Blackmon. That probably means you shouldn’t add any superfluous cat photos, unfortunately…

Embrace the touch screen.

“Whether you’re building content for delivery on a smartphone or tablet, remember to design for touch,” says Laura Silver, VP of Product Management at Trivantis. “This naturally applies to buttons, which you’ll want to make 'finger friendly'—easy to tap with the pad of your fingertip.” You can check out her tutorial on building finger-friendly buttons for mLearning to learn more.

Sergey Snegirev of BranchTrack recommends avoiding drag and drop questions when designing mobile learning. Why? “They can be challenging to non tech-savvy users (or users with disabilities),” he says. “With touch-screen devices entering the picture, dragging and dropping items around becomes even more of a nuisance to your learners.”

Ready to create some amazing mLearning? The upcoming Responsive Course Design™ in Lectora® is just what you need! Check out this whitepaper for more information and stay tuned for the Lectora desktop beta test of Responsive Course Design (RCD) coming in mid October.