Hosted by Omniplex, an official certified Articulate partner and an Articulate Centre of Excellence, as a service to its clients and customers, the event gave Tom, who's particularly associated with the Articulate suite of rapid-authoring products, an opportunity to outline his personal philosophy with regard to building online learning materials. He began considering "interactivity" by posing three questions:

• What content needs to be in the "course"?
• What's the right "look and feel" for the course?
• What does the learner have to do?

"Once you start to consider the learner, you start to get involved in 'interactivity'," he said and suggested that people interact with online learning materials for only three reasons: in order to navigate; collect information, and make decisions.

"Avoid creating a 'clunky course'," Tom advised. "Get to know how to use the authoring tools you're using - otherwise you'll create a clunky course that will only generate negative feedback."

Tom said that in addition to creating content that's relevant to the user, designers should also consider the visual aesthetic. He said: "A good-looking course isn't necessarily a great course, but it won't get the users' attention if it doesn't look good. I'd rather have a good- looking bad course than a bad-looking bad course!"

"Give the learners control of the learning. Give them a map - to enable them to see where they're going. Let them choose how to learn - allowing those who need more and those who need less information to find the course helpful."

"Give the users a reason to explore the course and collect the information they need. It's the 'push versus pull' argument: Let the users decide how they get the information they need."

Tom outlined a simple course scenario:

• Challenge understanding - find out what the users already know and, therefore, what they need to know.
• Offer some choices because choices produce consequences

Tom went on to outline a model for rapid interactivity design called "SAID". It's an acronym for

• situation - during which the user is given relevant, clear expectations
• advice - the user has to explore and collect ('pull') advice to get the necessary information to make an informed decision
• interpret - the advice to make a
• decision - and get the appropriate feedback

The learner has control over the "interpret" section of the course. The decision aspect is based on the "challenge / choices / consequences" scenario.

Commenting at the end of the event, Katy Burrows, of Thomas Cook, said, "I've been following trends in eLearning and social media developments for some time. Tom's presentation 'tied everything together' and the models he discussed - especially the 'SAID' model - provided some good ideas, too."

Sharon Probets, of the South West London and St George's Mental Health Trust, added, "Tom's presentation was very inspiring. I took lots of notes - and got lots of ideas from today's event. We produce a great deal of eLearning for 'compliance' purposes. The challenge is how to make this attractive."