Best practices

Before you get too far into your development, it's important to take some steps to streamline your approach by establishing best practices–doing this will help you become more organized and efficient. Everyone has their own process, so this is by no means a prescribed format for the proper way of doing things. These are just some recommendations, from personal experience, that have proven effective as an e-learning developer. Please note that these best practices are not necessarily Storyline-related, but are best practices to consider ahead of development within any e-learning project.

Your best practices will likely be project-specific in terms of how your clients or how your organization's internal processes work. Sometimes you'll be provided with a storyboard ahead of development and sometimes you'll be expected to rapidly develop one. Sometimes you'll be provided with all the multimedia ahead of development and sometimes you'll be provided with multimedia after an alpha review. You may want to do a content dump at the beginning of your development process or you may want to work through each slide from start to finish before moving on. Through experience and observation of what other developers are doing, you will learn how to define and adapt your best practices.

When a new project comes along, it's always a good idea to employ some form of organization. There are many great reasons for this, some of which include being mindful of reusability, maintaining and organizing project and file structure, and streamlining your development process. This chapter aims to provide you with as much information as necessary to ensure that you are effectively organizing your projects for enhanced efficiency and an understanding of why these methods should always be considered best practices.