How to make a system of online education easy for both students and instructors?
Learning is a crucial aspect in the context of Business Intelligence. What we didn’t know before was that teaching is also important for professionals in this field. To run the strategy, we need professionals all over the country to be aware of methods, tools, and resources, and those professionals also need to teach what they know.
We needed to create a platform to make it equally easy to learn and to teach. That’s how DataSebrae Academy was born. The idea is that any employee can go there and create their own online course, without any previous instruction. To do that, I followed a few principles.
1) There should be no separation between the reading area and the writing area
Most of the systems for content management split their interfaces. On one side, you see the users’ perspectives, in the other one, you see the editors’ screen. By itself, it creates some learning barriers for authors. They feel like having to learn something new to publish their own content.
To solve that, there is only one sight: the user’s one. What happens is that authors can just switch to the mode where the edition becomes available. They feel like typing the exact page that will be seen by the students. After that, they can simply press “Save†and the content is updated.
2) Authors will have all the necessary tools and only the necessary tools
Another key aspect of making things simpler for authors is giving only the tools that they really need. And it only appears when they can use that. I’m talking about the toolbar, for example. It shows up in the right superior corner when they try to edit some content. It reduces the number of elements that are shown at each time, making it sound easier to use.
3) Courses are created before the first topic and can be updated at anytime
To make a new course, you only need to fill the form, telling users what your course is about. At this point, it already exists inside the system, even if not yet displayed for students. Just like a notebook, authors only need to create a new chapter, write the next page, and so on. Whenever they feel that’s ok to be published, it only takes a click from my team.
Updating is the same easy. It happened a few times with me. I was looking at my own courses for some references and I just updated some information in only 2 clicks.