Keeping a small footprint is an ongoing theme for the 21st century, even with regard to certain areas of technology. Reducing the size of your AsULearn course is a good practice for several reasons:
- Course content loads faster, which can be especially important over mobile devices
- Server space is optimized, which allows the campus teams supporting AsULearn to keep courses online and available longer
- Course backups are smaller in size, which provides for faster automated backups, easier transfer of backup files, and optimized server space for backups (so more files can be kept, for longer)
There are several things you can do to reduce the size of your AsULearn course.
Use pages instead of documents
Create pages for your content in AsULearn instead of uploading Word documents. In addition to reducing the size of your course, you will enhance the experience for your users, since a page can be viewed without downloading a file and with no additional application necessary.
Use online repositories for your documents
Create documents in your MountaineerDrive account (Google Docs, Sheets, Slides) and link to them from your AsULearn course, rather than uploading document files. Not only does this keep the size of your course smaller, it makes editing those resources much faster and easier since the file doesn't need to be re-uploaded after it is changed.
Reduce the size of your documents
Where creating pages is not an option, be sure to reduce the size of your document files as much as possible. Most document applications (Microsoft Word and PowerPoint, Adobe Acrobat) have tools for optimizing file size by compressing images, etc.
Reduce the size of your images
Make sure you have resized your images to the actual size they will be displayed in your AsULearn course before uploading them (i.e. 1280x720 pixels to 640x360 pixels). You can also compress the images when saving them to JPG, GIF or PNG to reduce their file size.
Use online repositories for your media
Rather than uploading your audio or video content to AsULearn directly, store it in an online repository and link or embed it in your AsULearn course for playback. Appalachian provides several easy-to-use options for hosting media (YouTube, Panopto).
Do you have other ways you keep your course content optimized? Contact us to share your ideas!
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