Three ways to organize the authoring process at an organization level

Our client teams range from small one and two-person teams right up to teams of more than 100 authors around the world.

Not surprisingly, our larger client teams typically have authors with a wide range of authoring skill and experience levels.

Some authors have strong backgrounds in multimedia, web design and other authoring tools and they really dig into the tool set and use its advanced features. But most larger teams also have authors who don't have that background, sometimes coming into the tool with just PowerPoint experience as their starting point.

Here are some approaches our larger client teams often use to help their users work quickly and easily in our tools.

If all (or many) of your courses have a standard course structure, then it’s easy to create a course that everyone can use to get started.

It’s pretty straight forward to create a course that has all the standard pages you need, like:

• Title
• Welcome
• About this Course
• Conclusion pages
• Commonly-used content page designs.
• Test and practice questions

These pages can even have timed events in place so they have a dynamic build effect when viewed.

To make this even easier you could create this course from one of your first projects. Duplicate it then tweak it as needed to be the starter framework for everyone to use.

Once it’s in place, authors can duplicate the framework to get started quickly. In a lot of cases, they’ll only need to copy and paste text and change media files like images.

Here's how authors will do that:

Larger client teams often also create their own libraries of Page Templates for their authors to use.

From an organization’s perspective, Template pages help you standardize on  official branding, styles, designs, etc.

From an author’s perspective, the Template pages are very easy to use, especially in conjunction with the course framework described above.

Custom Templates are made in a Template Library, which is similar to working in any other type of content project.

Here’s how to make a new custom Template Library:

Creating a template page follows all the same authoring options as any other page.

Your Template Pages are only available for authors to use once you publish them.

Another great way to help your authors is to use the Media Library’s Company Assets section to store all the media files that everyone should have access to.

The Company Assets section is accessible to all authors, no matter their privilege level. So, it’s the ideal place to load up the media files that everyone should be using, like company logos and other branding-related media files as well as stock media collections that everyone can use.

This approach saves authors time looking for things to include in their content, plus simplifies the update and maintenance process as time goes by. If everyone is using the same logo in the Company Assets section, then if the company branding changes you can simply replace the logo in the Library and it will be updated in all pages that have used it.

Only Administrators can add, replace or delete files in the Company Assets section of the Media Library, which means that there’s a level of content security in using this feature as well.

To add content to the Company Assets section of the Media Library:

These three strategies will help not just new elearning authors, but even your team's advanced authors.

They really do help your team work together, better.