Description: Scriptbuilder is an MS-Word template I created shortly after joining the Employee Learning and Development (ELD) team. Using MS-Word “quick parts,” styles, and other MS-Word features, I created the tool to improve the production and consistency of our course development scripts used by ELD instructional designers (ID), HTML developers (HD) and our client subject matter experts (SME). With this tool IDs can quickly design a course script that closely matches the HTML screens of a finished online course. SME’s and other stake holders can gain a better understanding of what the finished course will look like once it’s uploaded to SkillSoft. HTML developers, using our associated course shell, can easily develop the web pages by applying complementary library objects and CSS within the shell.

 How does this benefit the University? From an ELD perspective it has increased productivity in our course design and development procedures and improved the quality and consistency of the CU custom courses university employees must take on the universities learning management system, SkillSoft.

From an HTML developer’s standpoint, it provides a fairly accurate template for creating the course web pages.

From a SMEs (or other stake holders) perspective, it provides a pretty good view of what each page of the final course will look like when completed and uploaded to SkillSoft. Using the “track changes” feature of MS-Word, it also provides for excellent collaboration, feedback and communication during the design process. 

Implementation status:  As mentioned above, each course script created using the Scriptbuilder tool has been used to collaborate with SMEs and other stake holders during the design process, for about 3.5 years now.

In the past, ELD course development (the HTML part) was outsourced to CITT, a custom web development team at UCD. Now, in part due to the results created from Scriptbuilder, ELD is able to develop in-house.

Scriptbuilder and our course shell have been shared with OUC, Office of University Controller who design and develop their own set of courses. OUC has been using Scriptbuilder for about 2 years now.

Submitted by David Sprouse, Sr. Technical Developer / Instructional Designer, Employee Learning and Development, System Administration