Instructional Designer

7Taps


All over LinkedIn there is this 7taps challenge. This web program called 7Taps is challenging everyone to create a micro-elearning course in 7 taps. Having a little extra time on my hands this week, I decided to do it, and see if the program was worth it.

Lets start with ease of use. The program is very easy to use. It’s setup like a book, broken up into chapters. Each chapter has a title page and pages within it. The max number of pages (including the mandatory title page) is 10, but they recommend no more than 7 for micro-learning courses.

I decided to do a quick course on working with your ADHD (as an adult). This is a personal project for me, as I have adult ADHD and I try to manage it without medication. Some days are harder than others! I wanted to create a course that showed what experts say to do as well as what has worked for me.

As is my normal M.O, I did not take any tutorials for this, and I just jumped right in.

After some fiddling, I realized that the T button turns off the titles, the 3 lines turn off the description text, and, of course, the image icon allows you to add an image. In the free version – you can only add images that exist in GIPHY.

Adding images allows you to do top aligned, bottom aligned and full screen GIPHYS.

That looks better, don’t you think?
This is where I desperately needed to get rid of the title. It’s redundant, and takes up too much space. What I want to say is lost.
Here we go. Turn off the title, and it all looks better!
Took me a little bit to figure out how to do links. Sadly, they are one per page, so my references are each on their own page.

Links are a page type on their own, along with Soundbites and Quizzes (Neither of which I used or played with today) – All of my pages are either Card style or Links.

What I like about the program, is this view. I liked being able to see each card, and chapter easily. To see how it looked against everything else, and to quickly make changes to it.

What I don’t like about the program. – Well, it’s very simplistic. I wouldn’t design courses like this, and can’t think of any way that I would use this in my designing. Generally, I get better functionality out of PowerPoint or Google Slides, so other than the view (which I liked) there isn’t anything that would cause me to use this program. All in all, it FEELS like an ID cheat, or a basic tool for people who are not ID’s to use when they need something quick and perhaps don’t have the PowerPoint skills to accomplish what they want in there. Also – giving attributions was difficult. With such limited word space, it was hard to figure out and properly attribute some of the pieces in my course.

I also don’t care for the course view. I suppose it would work fine on a mobile device, but it’s not my favorite way to display the content.