“Design is not just what it looks and feels like. Design is how it works.”- Steve Jobs

Online education today has quickly become an accepted platform for both formal and informal learning. Therefore instructional design software is extremely important in elearning. Almost every company has its own process for developing online courses. Some organizations pursue a linear procedure while others an iterative one. However, some choose to provide complete training at once while others prefer to make small sections within training and expand them simultaneously through collaboration. Factors such as budget, training requirements, clients’ expectations, development time, flexibility, and complexity influence an organization’s instructional design process. There are some steps in every instructional design process that are very important when creating software.

Consideration of the principle of each compulsory step will help you effectively attain the required productivity at each stage, irrespective of your approach. Let’s have a look at these steps.

Step 1- Analyze Requirements
Analysis is the main step of the instructional design process. When analyzing, you should never decrease your efforts to understand the needs of the business and how they relate to training. There is a need to stretch your analysis into four areas: Technology, Content, Expectations, and Audience.

Step 2- Identify Learning objectives
After analyzing the requirements, there is the need to frame learning objectives. This will help you to distinguish between nice-to-know and need-to-know content. Moreover, it also helps to determine the emphasis of the information required in the training. You need to draft your assessments according to learning objectives.

Step 3- Develop Design
The first step in the development of design is to segregate content into small chunks of information and then organize them in a proper manner. When your list is ready, decide on an instructional approach for your course, such as game-based, video-based, and problem-based, or another. Include engagement points like motivational videos, scenarios, real-world examples, and so on in your instructional design.

Step 4-Create a Storyboard and Build a Prototype
A storyboard is a visual document that helps you to arrange your data with visuals and present a flow for themes. You can display your content using icons, characters, development notes, and so on. The prototype will allow your customer to visualize how the storyboard will eventually be converted into a purposeful module.

Step5- Develop and Deliver Training
Start your development of training courses and upload to your LMS, which will host your courses. This involves knowledge checks, developing visuals, and assessments per permitted storyboard. You can also download and utilize e-learning templates that fit with your content type. Make sure that your course is well-suited with the LMS on which the training will be hosted.

Step 6- Evaluate Impact
Evaluation of training is done at both the organizational and learner level. At the organizational level, it is evaluated whether it has had a positive effect and fulfilled the requirements of business. The learner level is used to analyze whether learners found the training to be user-friendly and valuable.

However, every project is different and has its own expectations. Freely modify these steps and create your own checklist for developing the best instructional design software and process.

Author's Bio: 

If you are an eLearning designer, you should consider using agile instructional design for your learning initiatives. Unlike the traditional methods of course creation, the agile method offers some significant benefits that will ensure that your results are outstanding yet also efficient. Below, we look at some of the top benefits of the agile design method.

Highly Interactive
Agile instructional design is heavily focused on the learners and how they will interact with the course material. At every step of course development, the needs of the learner and the manner in which they will participate and engage with the course will be taken into consideration. As a result, course developers are able to develop training materials in exactly the way a learner would find it easy to understand. This is one of the reasons why many instructional designers are switching over to agile design. After all, if you can produce high-quality, engaging content using agile, why bother wasting time on other, inefficient instructional design methods?

Rapidly Produce Content
A big challenge faced by most course developers is the time required for developing training material. This is mostly because developers usually tend to focus on creating the entire content of the course all at once. Obviously, this is normally a massive undertaking fraught with so many issues that the project will end up taking a lot of time. But with agile design processes, designers can now develop courses faster, using less time and fewer resources. This is because agile methods look at the course development process as consisting of little chunks of content that need to be developed sequentially. Only when one section is finished can the development team move on to the next section. This process of course development ensures that the training material is created within a short period of time.

Better Collaboration
A huge benefit of the agile design process is that it facilitates easier collaboration among multiple individuals. Everyone involved in the course, right from the organization that invested in its development to the actual learners, can collaborate with each other and offer suggestions to improve the course. As a course developer, this gives you the chance to hear the feedback and understand which aspect of the course needs to be developed and what new, potential features should be implemented. This can go a long way in helping you fine-tune your next course.

No Last Moment Revisions Necessary
In the traditional course development scenario, developers often tend to make numerous changes and revisions to the content. This mostly happens because the course is developed all at once, and then largely revised later on at the end of development. As a consequence, designers often need to correct a lot of errors to ensure that the training material complies with expectations. However, since agile development involves completing the course in portions, all errors and changes are addressed along the way. As such, last-minute, large-scale revisions become unnecessary.