Less is more: it’s a concept that learning material creators should keep in mind when preparing content for a learning management system course. Specifically, less is more when it comes to one’s e-learning writing voice. The ideal e-learning writing style is optimally readable, relevant, and concise.

In developing robust e-learning content, you’ll have to factor in issues ranging from what kind of visual and audio media and graphics, to your writing style and the best course format. These are just a few important decisions involved in developing e-learning material. But one consideration is key and resonates throughout–the writing style. In fact, a strong or weak voice can make or break an e-learning course.

What are a few guidelines to creating a powerful writing style?

Courses that merit a student’s time and dedication are usually grounded in an author’s personal experience and subject matter expertise. And taking into account the infinite amount of course topics that are taught in higher education and training programs–not to mention the different learning and pedagogical styles–it makes sense that the appropriate writing style greatly depends on the context.

So why does “voiceless writing” still reign supreme over the e-learning world? Many content creators have yet to discover their authorial voice and use it to create engaging and effective content.

It’s unfortunate but still true–the most popular style of e-learning content writing has involved “voiceless writing,” in which a writer strives to do away with her or his own voice. The goal is to create a formal tone without any moisture or color peeking through.

However, more and more courseware creators are moving away from this old style and are excited about the idea of writing with more affect and style. After all, studies show that online courseware students respond in a more engaged manner to a writing style charged with affect and tone, rather than stiff and wordy writing.

Of course, it’s true that in some situations, “voiceless” writing is truly unavoidable–and there’s nothing wrong with that. But to write material with formality and blandness as the ideal is unwise. And all too often, course creators purposefully write difficult-to-read content, in an attempt to arouse student respect for the material.

Learning management system course writers can avoid these tendencies by simply staying true to their own voices, trusting their own knowledge and expertise, and keeping information concise, relevant, and simple.

Before you can format or edit your text, you need to highlight it. Highlighting your text is a way of telling Microsoft Word that you plan to work with a certain piece of text. (Highlighting is also known as selecting.)

The easiest way of selecting text is to position the cursor where you want your selection to start, click and hold the mouse button down and drag to the position where you want to end the selection. It is not necessary to drag across every single line that you want to select. It is sufficient to move in a straight line from start to the finish.

To deselect your text and remove the highlight, simply click anywhere in your text. The flashing text cursor will then reappear.

Another simple way of selecting text is to select the entire document. This is done via the “Select All” command. In Word 2007, the “Select All” command is found in the “Editing” section of the “Home” Tab. Click to display the “Select” menu and choose “Select All”.

The “Select All” command is found in lots of programs and lots of environments. It can also be accessed via the keyboard using Control-A: that is to say, hold down the Control key while typing “A”.

As well as highlighting characters by dragging across them, Word also allows you to select whole lines. To do this, position the cursor in the left margin and you’ll notice that the cursor changes to an arrow pointing to the right. Once the cursor has changed, you can simply click to select a single line or click and drag to select several lines.

Another way of highlighting text is to click multiple times. To highlight a word, double click on the word; to highlight an entire paragraph, click three times on the paragraph.

It is also possible to select text via the keyboard. Most of these techniques involve using the Shift key. One popular technique is click followed by Shift-click. First, click to set the start of the area that needs to be selected; next hold down the Shift key and click to set the point where you want the selection to end. All the text between the two clicks will then be selected.

To select text without the mouse, use the cursor keys on your keyboard to position the cursor where you want your selection to start. Next, press the Shift key in conjunction with one of the cursor keys. To highlight character by character, press the right or left arrow depending on the direction that you want to move. To select line by line press the down arrow or up arrow.

The Shift key can also be used in conjunction with Control. For example, if you hold down the Control and Shift keys and press the right arrow, you will select word by word instead of character by character. In a similar way, if you hold down Shift and Control and press the down arrow, you will select paragraph by paragraph.

The Home and End keys can also be used in making selections. For example, if the cursor is positioned in the middle of a line, pressing Shift and Home will highlight from that position to the start of the line while pressing Shift and End will highlight from the cursor position to the end of the line. Holding down Control and Shift while pressing the right arrow will highlight from the cursor position to the start of the document. Control, Shift and End will highlight from the cursor position to the end of the document.

Because Adobe Illustrator is a vector-based drawing environment, each Illustrator drawing consists of independent elements or objects. Much of the process of creating a drawing consists of transforming objects, either to customise them or to derive other objects. In this article, we will examine some of the key techniques used when carry out such transformations.

In Illustrator, transformations can be carried out in three different way: using the selection or free transform tool, using the transform tools (scale, rotate, shear and reflect) or using the options in the Transform sub-menu of the Object menu. Using the selection or free transform tools is very much like transforming vector and other objects in most non-specialist programs such as Microsoft Word or PowerPoint.

Moving objects is one of the simplest forms of transformation. To move an object with the pointer or free transform tool, simply position the cursor over the object, click and hold down the mouse button and drag the object to a new position. If you hold down the Shift key as you do so, you will constrain the movement of the object to the horizontal, vertical or diagonal plane.

Another technique is to select the object and then use the cursor keys on your keyboard to move it up, down, left or right. The amount of movement is dictated by one of the settings in your preferences. To change this, choose Preferences from the Edit menu (Windows) or choose Illustrator from the Apple menu (Macintosh). In the general category, enter a setting for “Keyboard Increment”. (The default setting is 0.3528 mm.)

When moving elements via the keyboard to move an object, you can increase the amount of movement by a factor of ten by holding down the Shift key in conjunction with any of the cursor keys. Also, bear in mind that keys repeat; so if you keep a cursor key down, the object will move continuously. You don’t have to press the key repeatedly.

There is also an ultra-precise way of moving an object: use the menu command Object-Transform-Move. This displays a dialogue in which you can enter the precise distance that you would like the object to move. There are four settings: horizontal, vertical, distance and angle. Any of the four can be modified and the other three will be automatically updated. For example, if you enter 10 for horizontal and 10 for vertical, Illustrator will automatically enter 45 degrees for the angle and 14.1421 for the distance. If you then enter 10 for the distance, Illustrator will change both the horizontal and vertical settings to 7.0711; and so forth. The Move dialog also contains a preview option, so that you can verify that the object will end up where you want it to as well a Copy button allowing you to duplicate and offset the original object.

Core XML

XML seems to be popping up everywhere nowadays; but what exactly is it? Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a specification by the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) for creating markup languages such as XHTML. The XML specification is being used in an increasingly wide range of applications for exchanging data between different environments, platforms and media. One of the main reasons for its rapidly growing popularity is its flexibility. It allows developers to define their own hierarchy of tags which reflect the structure of their data. In addition to the core XML specification, a number of other technologies have been developed for working with XML projects.

XML Schema

Closely linked with XML documents, we have XML schema. XML schema documents and schema languages are used to validate and document XML markup languages. They allow developers to explicitly lay down the syntactical and structural ground rules for particular classes of XML documents. A number of schema languages have been developed but perhaps the two most important are those defined by the W3C: Document Type Definition (DTD) which was built into the original XML specification and the more XML schema language developed a few years later.

XSL, XSLT AND XSL-FO

Next we have XML technologies for transforming XML. Extensible Stylesheet language (XSL) comprises two parts: XSL Transformations (XSLT) and XSL Formatting Objects (XSL-FO). XSLT stylesheets are essentially XML documents which transform a given class of XML document (referred to as the source tree) into a different class of XML document (referred to as the output tree). XSLT documents can be compared to CSS documents but are much more powerful. XSL-FO documents are written in XML and control the formatting layout in an output document in a very detailed manner. It allows the definition of layout masters from which are derived page sequences for generating the final document pages. Flow objects are then used to bind data to the various regions of pages.

XPath, XLink, XPointer and XQuery

When you need to target elements within XML files, there are a number of technologies we can call upon. XPath, XML Linking Language (XLink), and XML Pointer Language (XPointer) are all provide solutions for linking and addressing when working with XML documents. XPath is a declarative language which uses expressions that resemble the directory paths used to describe locations in computer file systems. XPath expressions are used in XSLT documents to address specific nodes within the hierarchy of the XML source document.

XLink is basically a method of creating hyperlinks within XML documents. It overcomes some of the limitations of the hyperlinks used in XHTML, such as the fact that each hyperlink has only one source and one destination. XPointer allows you to create links which point to very specific points within the hierarchy of an XML document by including XPath expressions in its syntax. XQuery is designed to query XML data in much the same way that SQL is used to query databases. It uses XPath expressions to extract elements and attributes within the structure of an XML document.

In that long ago time previous to the information era, e-learning tools like learning management systems were a mere idea still undeveloped. Most instructional material was paper-based, meaning its authors were subject to the will of the publishing industry, and its profit model. Trainers might have thrown a few video or audio aids into the mix, often willy-nilly, but otherwise, paper was everything.

Of course, the publishing industry still exists today. Additionally, the idea of creating one’s own instructional material is still exciting for many subject matter experts. Someone with expertise in any field could be a content developer.

However, the traditional paper-based system of creating and distributing academic or training material is not sustainable, practical, or easy. Nor is it cheap for anyone involved.

In the past two decades, textbook prices have grown 2-to-1 compared to inflation, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office. Textbook prices have gotten out of control. And it’s not hard to see the impact of this trend on university students. The outlandish fees of textbooks are enough to prevent learners paying their own way through college from signing up for courses which require them to buy a textbook that costs hundreds of dollars.

When all of these factors are considered, one can safely say that paper-based instructional material is on its way out. And learning content developers should take this state of the industry into account.

That is why an increasing number of subject matter experts are taking their learning content online. Learning management systems (LMSs) and other elearning systems allow course developers a full range of tools as well as absolute power over their learning material.

Some of these tools are podcast recording, video, animation, screen and audio recording, and simple migration tools. Web 2.0 tools are also a great option for allowing students to discuss, collaborate, and share information.

E-learning creation is very unlike textbook content creation. When you create learning material using a known elearning platform, you maintain full copyright and power over its fate. You can choose to alter it at any time, or delete it. You can also choose to syndicate it, meaning you allow other relevant web publishers to feature it on their websites. Doing so gets your product out there on the market, expands your market, and oftentimes greatly expands your revenue.

Of course, preparing and gathering learning content still requires time and patience. Just like preparing a semester’s worth of lesson plans, the content doesn’t fly directly from an expert’s head onto his or her computer. But the actual transferal of your e-learning content onto an online course format should be easy and fun. Additionally, some learning management systems allow you to use exciting and innovative tools to create your course content, free of charge.