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Creating Interactive Reference Cards in Your Online Courses

by Anand Tiwary July 15, 2020

Reference cards are popular amongst all learners because of one major reason: Condensed information.

Have you ever been rushing through your course content at the last possible moment before an assessment? Well, then you probably know how important reference cards are when you’re out of time and you need to revise your material. Reference cards, as well as summarised sheets, are the best way to put a concept into the revision timeline of your students. So how do you go about creating these reference cards? What should you highlight using these cards?

In this article, we are going to take you through some simple steps that will help you create and sell online courses with interactive reference cards to guide your learners. Worried about the creative process and the strategies you need to know before creating interactive reference cards? Here’s how you can get started with basic reference cards that are easily readable and a high impact learning aid for your learners.

  • Research your target audience: If you want to sell online courses then you must have a target audience in mind. Research the needs and weaknesses of this audience group. Do they learn more via pictures? Do they struggle with formulae and numerical problems? Next, you need to analyse their weak spots and begin creating a list of references that might help them.
  • Curate references smartly: While communicating with your target audience and learners, smart work is always a good idea. Your learners do not need help with their areas of strength. To create online courses that your students benefit from, you need to analyse references and pick the ones that are the most relevant or the easiest to understand. Do not over complicate your reference in as reference cards are meant to be condensed and simplified sources of content. CreateOnlineAcademy.com provides you with the ultimate online course building tools that allow you to design interactive reference cards with graphics and visuals to help your learners with their needs.
  • Organise, analyse, categorise: After the designing phase is over, you are often left with too many good references and not a structural product that you can implement immediately. Well, now is the time to look into your course from a student’s perspective and curate what needs to be there and what can be deleted. Organise your references that focus on the same topic, analyse their merits and demerits and categorise the final winners into a list that you can publish to your students before an assessment or at the end of learning modules.
  • Watch out for competition: Checking out the work of your competitors never hurts. After finalising your choices, you need to go through other solutions to the same problem. What did others do? Did they use graphics or visuals to enhance their reference cards? While this exercise may send you back to the designing phase to come up with a better solution, it also helps you judge the effectiveness of your work.
  • Use test cases: No matter how hard we try, sometimes our research fails us. Our audience may not respond as we expect them to. Before launching your finalised reference cards to the audience, you might want to selectively make them available to a few learners to gauge their reaction towards the final product. This feedback will allow you to judge the merits and demerits of the final product that you have created. Interact with the students who test your reference cards to come up with a more effective solution if needed.
  • Improvise as needed: No product is set in stone. As your learners progress through the course, their needs might change or their response towards your reference cards might change. In order to maintain your support in helping your students learn, you need to come up with improvements constantly. Add graphics or visuals to your cards. Sprinkle in some interactive internal assessments that help them track their progress. COA offers a dynamic LMS that can handle your designing needs. Not only that, but they also offer you a bundle of tools and aids that will make the designing and research phase much easier for you. Work to improvise the current version and create something that is more useful for your learners.


Createonlineacademy.com offers you the best arsenal of creative tools as well as marketing support so that you can create online courses and sell them to learners with minimum effort or frustration.

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