How I Created Help Tutorials for My LMS

Since I had so few people come out to my drop-in sessions about the new LMS I was completely unable to train the 2700+ staff on how to use the system. I do think that we were able to configure it and create labels that make it fairly self-explanatory. Also, although it looks nothing like something staff here familiar with online learning would be use to, I believe the navigation is similar and this should help minimize the panic calls that will inevitably come to me.

Another step to creating this LMS more user friendly is that I am creating small one to two minute tutorial videos for learners to walk through should they need help. I’ve broken them into very small chunks and the reason for my thinking here is to allow the user to only have to view those sections of the system where they need assistance.

The steps to create my little videos isn’t quite as streamlined as one might imagine, but after doing 4 or 5 of them now, I believe I’ve got the process worked out.

1. First I open up the LMS as a student would. I take many screen captures walking them through one step to the next (i.e. the screens one would see when looking to see what courses they are enrolled in). There are tons of tools to use to grab a screen capture, but I’ve been using the function included within Evernote.
2. I put all my screen shots into PowerPoint and then add some “pretty” text bubbles to each screen shot explaining in a few sentences what they see on that screen. I then copy the text in the bubble into the notes area to function as a script for the tutorial.
3. Next (I’m using Articulate) I open up the option to record narration and I read the “script” out loud. I am not producing my tutorials with sound because too few computers here have speakers, but it does create a good timing mechanism for advancing slides based on the spoken text.
4. After this step, I use the annotations to highlight or point out what is being shown on that screen shot.
5. I then go into the Audio Editor and “silence” the sound on each slide I just recorded text on. This is more a cosmetic aspect because I don’t want the speech to be accidentally heard if I produce the tutorial in a different manner. I haven’t been reading the text as perfectly as I would want to if I was expecting someone to actually listen.
6. Once this step is done, I publish the file and then view it in my browser window.
7. The next piece was finicky only because of the intranet system we use and the LMS feeds into it. The intranet does not accept FLV files it only takes SWF files. The reason I say this is it would have been very easy to capture the published file with Screenr.com (another articulate fabulous tool). But I couldn’t figure out how to get the flv to swf without buying something somewhere. So instead I minimize my browser window to “just the right size” use Jing and start walking through the tutorial I created.
8. As the tutorial indicates to the learner to advance the page, I do manually and the video capture continues to capture the entire tutorial as if it is running on its own. The reason for video capturing the tutorial and not just loading it is again an intranet quirk that doesn’t let me load up all of the files that are created when one publishes a “course” using Articulate. It wouldn’t matter what I used, the intranet allows one file at a time and that is all.
9. Finally on my “login” screen to the LMS I have listed beside the login button all the tutorials I have created. They are not perfect in that they are only 500 px x 375 px (again an intranet limitation). Within the LMS however, I also video captured the tutorials in a larger size so that they are readable.
10. Lastly I plan on breaking down the original slides I created and minimizing them into a more handy printable version as well that learners can take away with them should they choose too.

Here is an example of one of my tutorials (captured with Screenr.com):