In an effort to help you build online courses and simulations quickly and efficiently in myudutu, here are some thoughts on how I approach building a course.

Step 1: Build the Structure

• Pick your topic.(now you've got a course name)
• Define the learning objectives, (What will the learners have accomplished, and how will you know ).  These outcomes are the smaller topics that will make up the subject matter of your course.  Create a group for each learning objective and name the groups accordingly.
• Now start adding static and interactive screens to each group.  Start to think about what you want to say about each learning objective(static screens) and how you want to reinforce that.(interactive screens)
• Optional: Maybe you've already created a PowerPoint presentation on your chosen topic.  Why not import it into myudutu?  This will give you a great starting point.  Once your PowerPoint is in myudutu you can move the slides into your learning objective groups and enhance them with the interactive screens.

Step 2: Refine and Enrich

• Now that you have a basic structure start you can begin to tell your story using your voice. Add text, images, flash animations, audio, even video to really help your learner understand the subject.
• You'll also want to use our interactive screens to reinforce the subject.
• With our branching and interactive screens you can create a non-linear path for your learner based on their skill level.
• As you begin to fill in your course you may notice you need less screens here or more screens there, you may even re-think your learning objectives.  At any point you can add, delete or move screens and groups to provide a better experience for your learners.
  
• Optional: Because myudutu is an online tool and you can add unlimited authors, you can be working on one screen while another author works on a separate screen.

Step 3: Publish

• Publish your course and host it on our server OR:
• Extract your course as a self contained ZIP file.  After this you are free to host your course on your own website, distribute it to your learners via CD, or insert it into an LMS of your choice.

These three steps should give you a good start on course and simulation creation in myudutu and covers just some of it's features.  Now we want to hear from you.

Maybe you like to pour your knowledge into screens first and then organize them into groups later.  Maybe you don't like to use groups at all.  Maybe you just want to use the interactive screens to create a prior learning assessment for a face to face training session.  We've created myudutu to be as flexible as possible.

Tell us about your philosophy when it comes to building online courses and simulations.  Or tell us how we can refine ours.

An area that seems to stop a lot of people is using the scenario function. It is important to understand that when you place a scenario into your course structure, the normal navigation is disabled by default. This means the only way past the scenario is to complete it.

If you add a scenario to your course in the outline, but have not yet got around to populating it with screens, you need to put in at least one empty "jump to" screen with an option to leave the scenario, or else your preview will stop when it gets to the scenario with no way forward.

We will add some simple scenario design templates this week to help people get started.

There are three quite common designs. One is to use the scenario as an assessment, where each choice the user makes can lead them to a different path with different outcomes, no going back, but with the possibility to make corrective choices along the way and achieve a final scored outcome.

Another is to establish the problem you are posing at the outset, and then allow the user to choose branches that will help them solve the problem or fill gaps in their knowledge. At all times in this type of scenario, they can jump to the end and solve the problem.

A third model is the "best practice algorythm" where the correct path through the scenario is established first, and then you place choices along the way that lead to remedial learning if they get it wrong, but always return them to the proper path.

There are many other ways to build scenarios, and the beauty of doing it in myUdutu is that you can continue to improve and expand or change your scenario as time and experience gives you new insights. So the most common problem of scenarios is defeated. (thats when your learners discover the logic and spread the word).

We will add scripts to create the screen structure for each of these scenario types, and add others as we hear from you. Any interesting models you create and want to share would be most appreciated.