I used Articulate Storyline 360 to create a set of IT Acronym Flash Cards for the Elearning Academy.

PLANNING AND DEVELOPMENT

There are a lot of acronyms to remember in IT. I created this set of flashcards to be used as a last-minute study tool for students studying for entry-level IT exams.

Flashcards are good for repetition and “drilling” information. Flashcards help the learner to create a relationship between two pieces of information. Keeping the information to a minimum can help prevent cognitive overload aka too much information!

There is a lot of controversy over the use of flashcards as a study aid (similar controversy to brain dumps), however, if you ONLY revise using flashcards, then your chances of passing an exam are going to be low.

TECHNIQUES

I started by compiling a list of IT acronyms a student would need to remember. The flashcards needed to consist of the acronym, followed by the answer, an associated image and a short description. I didn’t want to description to be the focus of the course, so kept this short. I decided to include information such as port number and OSI layer in the answer slides, as these pieces of information are important to remember alongside the acronym.

The design needed to be fairly simple – a start screen, an exit screen, then the flashcards. I created the flashcard slides as a question bank in Articulate Storyline and set them to shuffle – this means that the order of the cards would be randomised each time the learner launches the course.

There is no navigation, the cards simply show the acronym, the answer, then move to the next card.

SUMMARY

Watch the video below to see a demo of this project.

SKILLS DEMONSTRATED

• E-learning design

TOOLS USED

• Articulate Storyline 360