Learn. Show. Repeat.

Author: Matt Guyan

4 Ideas for Combining Text and Images in eLearning

E-Learning Heroes Challenge #152 – Combining Text and Images in E-Learning. The brief: This week, your challenge is to share an example to demonstrate how text and images can be used in e-learning.

For this challenge I shared four simple ideas that were all created within Storyline. Click the image below to see what I shared for the challenge:

Slide 1: Text coming out of the image

For the title page, I wanted the text to look like it was coming out of the skyline and to create this effect, there’s actually two of the same images placed exactly on top of each other. However, the image at the front has been cropped:

In the timeline, the complete image is at the bottom and the cropped at the top:

Placing the text box in the middle creates the effect that it’s coming out from behind the buildings but really it’s just coming out from behind the cropped image. There’s a ‘Fly In’ animation on the text with the duration set to 3.5 seconds and coming in from the bottom (set in Effect Options).

Slide 2: Text overlay 1

This slide full screen image with a rectangle shape containing some text) placed to the right. The shape has a ‘Fly In’ animation (1 sec duration and coming in from the right). I also made the shape slightly transparent by right-clicking on it, selecting ‘Format Shape’ and adjusting the transparency to 25%.

Slide 3: Text overlay 2

On this slide, I coloured the background pale grey, and positioned my image at the top of the slide. Then I added a rectangle that slightly covered the image and didn’t completely fill the space at the bottom. The text itself sits in a text box on top of the shape and I applied a fade animation (1 sec duration). From the ‘Effect Options’ dropdown I chose ‘By Paragraph’ which makes each paragraph of text appear separately.

Slide 4: Question

This slide wasn’t built using a quiz slide (but it could be) which meant I needed to create everything from scratch. I started with my background image and added two new states – a correct and incorrect:

For each of the new states, I went to the ‘Format’ tab and increased the brightness by 10% and recoloured the images:

Then I added four rectangles, one for the question and one for each answer. For the demo, Option C is the correct answer, so I also created a state for each option:

Lastly, I added a layer that contains a button to replay the demo (the trigger is to jump to the first slide when the button is clicked) and also prevents another answer being selected (go to ‘Layer Properties’ and tick the box next to ‘Prevent the user from clicking on the base layer’).

Then I needed to add triggers to each answer option to make it all work:

So that’s how I created each of my slides for this challenge. There were lots of other creative ideas shared by community members in this challenge and you if have ideas, please share them in the comments area below.

All images used in this demo came from Death to the Stock Photo.

Like this:
Like Loading…

December 4, 2016
5 Books Every eLearning Professional Should Read

Even though we live in a digital world I still love reading paper books. This post has been floating around with me for a while and the idea for it came from a post by Ryan Tracey called ‘5 papers every learning professional should read’.

This post is pretty much the same but with books instead of papers. I’ve chosen each book because they’re easy to read (over a period of time rather than one sitting), they provide useful strategies that you can implement and they provide a great reference that I go back to.

I’ve listed them here in no particular order:

eLearning and the Science of Instruction by Ruth Colvin Clark and Richard E. Mayer

One of the first books I read when I started in eLearning and over time I’ve discovered that anything written by Ruth Colvin Clark is well worth a look. What I like about this book is the theory (working memory, cognitive load and related principles) is explained in a straightforward way and there’s practical examples based on research of what can be done to improve eLearning design.

Design for How People Learn by Julie Dirksen

This one also has a good mix of evidenced-based theory and ideas that can be implemented into your own designs. It looks at learning from a wide perspective – how we process and store information, how to design for skills and for knowledge as well as motivation and the learning environment. I’ve got the first edition but there’s a second edition now available.

The Accidental Instructional Designer by Cammy Bean

This book written by someone who started out much like I did – transitioning into the role of instructional designer. There were many times throughout the book that I related to Cammy’s experiences. She covers a lot of ground – different skills of an ID, working with SME’s, ideas for gaining attention, writing, visual design and meaningful interactivity – that includes avoiding what she calls ‘clicky-clicky bling-bling’.

Visual Design Solutions by Connie Malamed

Graphic design is a skill that I’ve had to work on (and continue to work on). This book is chock full of ideas to improve the visual element of your modules and looks at how to organise screen objects, working with images, typography and using imagery to enhance explanation and as part of storytelling.

Show Your Work by Jane Bozarth

The practice of showing your work is about making the stuff in your head, the ‘how-to’, visible for others to see and use. Find out more about what it means to show your work and see the many, many real examples shared by folks from all walks of life.

What do you think? What books would you add?

Like this:
Like Loading…

November 26, 2016
eLearning for Everyone
The guiding principles around accessible eLearning come from what’s known as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines or WCAG (in the US the guidelines for accessibility are known as Section 508). Following these guidelines will make our content accessible to a wider range of people with disabilities but they’ll also often make our content more usable to everyone in general which is really what we need to be thinking about.

As I travel around the country delivering Storyline 2 training, I usually ask whether people are factoring in accessibility in their eLearning module design. From the responses I get, those working in the corporate environment either don’t know much about accessibility or aren’t required to do anything about it and for those working in government it’s something they need to include as part of the design.

WCAG 2.0 is a stable, referenceable technical standard comprising of 4 principles and to comply with WCAG, anyone producing online content must ensure that it is:

Principle 1: Perceivable – This means that users must be able to perceive the information being presented – it can’t be invisible to all of their senses.

Principle 2: Operable – This means that users must be able to operate the interface (the interface cannot require interaction that a user cannot perform).

Principle 3: Understandable – This means that users must be able to understand the information as well as the operation of the user interface (the content or operation cannot be beyond their understanding).

Principle 4: Robust – Content must be robust enough that it can be interpreted reliably by a wide variety of user agents, including assistive technologies.

To help remember these principles, think POUR.

There’s also 12 guidelines that are organised under these principles and for each guideline, there are testable success criteria, which are at three levels: A (the minimum), AA (more enhanced), and AAA (advanced compliance). The guidelines and success criteria lay the foundation necessary for anyone to access and use Web content. They’ll help you to ensure that everyone can access your learning experience.

There’s two factors that contribute to creating accessible eLearning. The first is the authoring tool itself and generally can do things like:
- Allowing content to be navigated by using the keyboard
- Allowing us to put alternative text on our images
- Allowing for the screen objects to be read by a screen reader
But in addition to that, and more importantly, our design decisions impact heavily on the level of accessibility (and therefore useability) of the module, for example:
- The types interactions we include
- Colour combinations we use
- Fonts/typefaces we use
- What we use for alternative text
- The language we use and the way we write
- The layout of our screens
After all, authoring tools don’t build eLearning by themselves they require human input and design. So many of our decisions can impact on accessibility for our users.

Accessibility is a big area and there’s lots to learn and I’ve certainly learnt a lot about it over the past 18 months. Here’s some resources that contain practical advice on incorporating accessibility into eLearning design (click on a title to view):

Quick reference guide: How to Meet WCAG 2.0

A guide showing all of the principles and guidelines and what you need to do to meet them.

It’s Not Just About Compliance: Accessibility in eLearning by Jane Bozarth

In this post from Learning Solutions Magazine, Jane points out that accessibility goes beyond those with disabilities.

6 Best Practices for Designing Accessible eLearning (ebook)

This ebook comes from Articulates E-Learning Heroes Community and provides some practical steps you can incorporate into your eLearning design.

Do’s and Don’ts on Designing for Accessibility by Karwai Pun

This post contains 6 posters developed by Karwai showing the dos and don’ts of designing for users with accessibility needs including autism, blindness, low vision, deaf or hard of hearing, mobility and dyslexia.

Making eLearning Accessible for Everyone (video – 31mins)

This was a presentation I gave at LearnX where I spoke about accessibility and some things you can do in Storyline 2.

An organisation called WebAIM (Web Accessibility In Mind) has lots of useful articles and tools to help create accessible eLearning:

Fonts

Colour Contrast Checker

Alternative text

If you have any more useful resources or tips on creating accessible eLearning, please share them in the comments below.

Image source: Shutterstock

Like this:
Like Loading…
October 30, 2016
Rules of Engagement

In the eLearning space, a phrase that I see used a lot by designers and developers is their ability to ‘create engaging eLearning experiences’. But what does that really mean? Well, according to dictionary.com the word “engage” is defined as:

“To occupy the attention or efforts of (a person or persons)”

Sounds reasonable and definitely something we should be doing but if engaging eLearning is being created by so many, why is there still so much poor eLearning around? (Sidenote: I realise that an eLearning module isn’t always the solution to a performance problem so I’m coming from the instance of when it is).

Authoring tools alone don’t create engaging eLearning, not without human intervention consisting of design and adding objects into them. So I suggest that perhaps there’s different ‘types’ of engagement in eLearning experiences used by designers and developers.

Visual

Visual engagement comes from the appearance or look-and-feel of the eLearning. It’s about the colours, fonts, images and layout used. It’s how these elements are connected and how well they support the message and content. But while a visually appealing module can draw you in (and occupy your attention), looks are superficial and will wear off on long, dry, content driven eLearning experiences because boring is still boring even if it looks pretty.

Physical

Physical engagement comes from having to actually do something during the module and in many cases this will probably involve a combination of clicking, dragging and hovering (requiring some attention and effort). Now I’m all for doing in eLearning but I do question whether clicking/dragging/hovering does anything for real engagement, I mean if there’s some information and instead of just displaying it, users need to click some buttons to reveal the same content but in small pieces, is that any better? I wrestle with this sometimes – is more clickable/dragable and hoverable more engaging?

Mental

This type of engagement is about using the mind. It’s about provoking thinking, providing a challenge or challenges. It’s about applying information to situations, making decisions and dealing with the consequences. It’s using stories. It’s making you feel something. It’s also about creating an experience that’s relevant and useful to people that will ultimately improve their performance. For me personally, these things are what really makes an eLearning experience engaging.

In creating an eLearning module, all these types of engagement are needed (maybe there’s more?) but often the mental engagement is left out and what’s left is just beautiful, interactive content that’s quickly forgotten.

So, what are your thoughts on engagement in eLearning? What about measuring engagement? Do you do it and if so how?

Image source: Shutterstock

Like this:
Like Loading…

October 16, 2016
How I created a Custom Quiz-style Interaction in Storyline 2
Recently a friend of mine contacted me as he had an idea for an interaction he wanted to create in Storyline 2 and needed some help with building it.

He wanted the interaction to work like this:
- A question with five answer options.
- Two of the five answers were correct.
- Only a maximum of two answers could be selected.
He also wanted a ‘submit’ button and once clicked, then he wanted:
- Feedback for each answer to be shown.
- An indication of which two answers were correct.
- To still see which two answers were originally selected.
With a bit of experimentation and a few prototypes I was able to create something that met his needs and this post is about how I got there.

Originally I thought about using a freeform question slide but as I didn’t need to worry about scoring so I went with a regular slide.

I started by inserting a place for the question and the five answer options on a slide and I also created a ‘selected’ state for each answer option. Next I created a submit button and set the initial state to hidden – my idea was to change it to normal when two answers are picked (or become selected). I’d also need to make the other three un-selected answers become inactive once the second answer had been chosen. I abandoned this idea when I realised all the triggers I’d need to make it work.

My next idea was to create a layer and place the submit button on this own layer. The reason I did this was because I remembered that in the layer properties there’s a setting where you can prevent the use from clicking on the base layer (click in the box to turn on the setting):

Using this setting would take away the need to come up with triggers for making the un-selected answers not work as once this layer is showing nothing on the base could be clicked on. But I did need to figure out triggers to make this layer show – which was after the second answer was selected – based around the state of my answer options. So with 5 answer options there’s the following 10 selection combinations:

1 and 2, 1 and 3, 1 and 4, 1 and 5, 2 and 3, 2 and 4, 2 and 5, 3 and 4, 3 and 5, 4 and 5.

So my 10 triggers to show the layer with the submit button on it (based on the state of the answers) were variations of this:

Note: In this trigger, the order the answers are chosen doesn’t matter so choosing answer 1 then answer 2 is the same as choosing answer 2 and then answer 1.

Once the layer with the submit button is showing, users are not able to click on the base layer and select any other answers (in hindsight, the way interaction is set-up means that you can’t change your answers once you’ve picked two). The trigger on the submit button is to show another layer that contains the feedback, which answers are correct/incorrect and it still shows the selected answers on the base. I positioned the answers on this layer showing which are correct/incorrect directly over the answer options on the base which means the selected state showing.

As this is a prototype I haven’t focused on the slide design, it was more about seeing if I could achieve the functionality he wanted. Click on the image below to see a demo and if you’d like to download the .story file click here.

Like this:
Like Loading…
September 19, 2016