Learn how to create your courses engaging and highly effective through the eLearning Authoring Tool iSpring Suite Max:
Education is rapidly moving online due to COVID-19, the massive implementation of digital tools in our lives, and a general change in the modern world. This applies to all types of learning, be it academic education, corporate training, or self-development.
If in the past, educators could engage learners with their charisma, entertaining activities, or force students to concentrate on studying by prohibiting mobile phones during class, now there are only learner and learning content.
If your course is dull, a learner will scroll social media or watch a movie instead of going to the trouble of completing it.
Modern SCORM authoring tools allow you to solve this issue by creating fascinating courses that engage learners. But there’s another challenge: you might need IT skills to use some of these tools, and few people have them.
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Online Course with iSpring Suite Max
iSpring Suite solves these issues. It’s an authoring tool with powerful content creation capabilities and an intuitive interface that’s familiar to everyone (iSpring Suite works as a PowerPoint add-in).
With this tool, you can quickly create various types of eLearning content that will make your courses engaging and highly effective. In this article, you’ll learn how.
Creating a Course From Scratch
A course typically consists of two parts: presenting information and assessing knowledge.
iSpring Suite allows you to enhance these components by making them interactive, professional-looking, and more diverse. That means learners can gain knowledge not only through texts and images but also through videos, voice-overs, and dialogue simulations.
Let’s see how you can do this in more detail.
Step 1: Create Slides
iSpring Suite Max offers slide creation and editing options similar to PowerPoint and provides even more advanced ones.
For example, iSpring Suite offers more theme options tailored to business needs, such as product presentation, timelines, and company mission. If you need to create an onboarding training program, these themes can make your development process much shorter and more straightforward.
Step 2: Add Interactions
A sure way to engage learners is to let them interact with educational materials. It’s turning the learning process from passive to active. Instead of putting all of your information on different slides, you can select from 14 customizable interactions that will work best for your topic and let learners discover new knowledge by clicking on their screens.
Step 3: Add Narration
You can make your course more exciting and comprehensive by adding narration to slides and assessments. To do this, you can either record your voice or convert your text to a lifelike machine voice-over.
The built-in iSpring Audio Editor allows you to edit your voice recording, remove noise, adjust volume, and add effects. You can also upload your recordings that were made with other tools.
Adding narration can be even easier if you use a computer-generated voice-over. You just need to add your text to iSpring Suite, choose the voice, and the voice-over will be ready in a click. The tool supports 52 languages, including English, Arabian, Chinese, French, and Danish.
Step 4: Create a Video Module
Videos are one of the most popular modalities of learning content. People tend to watch short video tutorials to learn something new because they are informative and engaging. iSpring Suite has a built-in video studio that allows you to record and edit instructional videos.
With this tool, you can create videos in three formats:
- Screencast: A format that shows only your screen. It’s handy for teaching how to use software programs.
- Camera recording: It is a well-known format many people use, from YouTube vloggers to university professors. Viewers see the speaker during this video.
- Picture-in-picture video: It is a mixture of the above-mentioned formats. You can see both the speaker and their screen. You can also use this video format to create training content with a hearing impairment.
Once you’ve recorded your tutorial, you can edit it in the video studio. The tools can help you cut out or trim parts of your video, add and edit audio, enhance the image with annotations, and select transition effects.
Step 5: Create Dialogue Simulations
A dialogue simulation is an interactive exercise that imitates real-life conversation. This is an extremely helpful tool for retail training and developing soft skills. Few authoring tools allow you to create dialogue simulations, and most of them make the creation process too difficult for most L&D specialists, as they require IT skills to code the exercise.
iSpring Suite makes the process much easier by providing users with an option to develop dialogue simulations without coding. All you need to do is select a character and a background, choose the emotion for the scene, and then insert text for the character’s phrase and reply options.
Create scenes for each reply option, then repeat the same process until all of your scenarios are finished. In iSpring Suite, it might look like this:
As a result, you’ll have a fully interactive course or a course module that develops according to the user’s replies. In sales training, trainees can work on their communication skills and learn how to land clients without risking losing actual potential customers – they can make their mistakes in the digital world, not the real one.
Step 6: Build Assessments
Assessments are an essential part of any learning process. Not only do they help you evaluate how well your trainees gained new knowledge, but they also help trainees remember course materials and reinforce knowledge. However, many people find tests and quizzes stressful and dull.
This might originate from school and university settings, where students typically have to complete many assessments regularly and believe a lot depends on their grades. Stress-driven results can differ from the actual knowledge of learners. That’s why educators should do their best to make tests more comfortable to take.
iSpring Suite allows you to create tests that are more engaging. Unlike traditional assessments, here you can drag-and-drop answer options, click on spots on an image, and more. Overall, iSpring Suite Max offers 14 question types, from traditional ones such as true/false to interactive sequencing or matching questions.
To create a question, select a question type. Let’s take Multiple Response as an example. Write the text in the question field, add answer options, and mark which are correct.
You can also edit feedback to make the quiz more personalized. If a learner chooses the wrong answer, you can also let them know which one was correct so they’ll remember that information in the feedback.
Quizzes are fully customizable. You can select a background, add images, videos, or audio instead of questions, and set needed parameters for further quiz grading.
For example, you can set the score for each question. Let’s say a learner can get 10 points for a correct multiple response answer and 20 points for a correct Matching response. Depending on your settings, a learner will either pass the quiz or fail it if they didn’t get the required minimum of points or percentage.
You can also create a survey using the same question types. There will be no points in this case — you’ll only collect learners’ feedback on your course that might help you implement changes to improve it.
Speeding Up Course Development
Course development with iSpring Suite is quick and easy, yet it can be even faster and more convenient with iSpring Suite Max. With this tool, you can create courses in literally no time, starting from just 60 seconds.
Two features make this possible: iSpring Content Library and iSpring Space.
Let’s take a closer look at both of them.
#1) iSpring Content Library
iSpring Content Library includes over 81,000 eLearning assets:
- 2,200+ slide templates tailored to the specifics of corporate training and academic education.
- 74,000+ characters of different ages, ethnic groups, and professions.
- 2,300+ locations related to various fields, such as office buildings, colleges, car salons, and fire departments.
- 3,200 icons and objects from navigation arrows to office mugs and chalkboards.
With Content Library, you no longer need to spend hours searching for free high-quality images and templates. You can select the best-fitting temple using a comprehensive menu and make your course professional-looking with a few clicks.
If you need dialogue simulations for your training programs, you can find the characters you need by setting the required parameters: age, ethnicity, action, direction, and emotion.
#2) iSpring Space
iSpring Space allows you to collaborate with your team on eLearning projects. You can create micro-courses online, leave comments, fix issues, and get approvals fast so your project doesn’t get stuck on hold.
You can also upload your ready-made course to iSpring Space and send its link to your learners so they can view the course whenever they have time.
Conclusion
iSpring Suite Max allows you to create fascinating courses with slide templates tailored to your needs, with interactions, voice-overs, video lectures, dialogue simulations, and interactive cheat-proof assessments.
That’s the type of learning content that will engage your learners. And a great bonus is that you can create such courses quickly and effortlessly because the iSpring Suite tool is a tool that anyone can use.