Learn. Show. Repeat.

Tag: David Anderson

Practice and Sharing: The Keys to Success
These were the two messages that stood out over three days in Sydney at last year’s iDesignX Australian Instructional Design Conference (21^st March) sponsored by B Online Learning & Articulate and the eLearning Design Workshops with Tom Kuhlmann and David Anderson (22^nd and 23^rd March). I was fortunate to attend all the sessions and for me it was a dream come true to not only be in the same room as Tom and David but to hear and learn directly from them (I also got to meet them which was an incredible experience and a real highlight too).

Practice

As someone with a keen interest in learning generally, but eLearning in particular, I’m always looking to other experienced people in the learning field to find out how I can improve my own skills and knowledge. While it would be great if there was a magic pill you could swallow and voila! you’d be transformed into an eLearning whizz, the reality is that when you look at anyone who is successful in their field, the one thing they have in common is a commitment to developing their skills over a period of time. Tom and David are no exception to this. Over the years they have worked on many projects but they also make time to experiment and try new things. The speakers at iDesignX also showed that they have put in a lot of effort over the years to get to where they are today.

Tip: a good place to start practicing your eLearning skills is in David’s Weekly Challenge. You can also learn more about building great eLearning courses at Tom’s Rapid eLearning blog.

Sharing

Tom and David are role models when it comes to sharing. Their jobs at Articulate along with their travel schedule must keep them extremely busy. However, they are extremely generous with their time and have a great willingness share what they know, provide advice and help anyone who needs it. It’s something all learning professionals can learn from and do more of.

So, in the interests of sharing, here’s firstly what I took away from iDesignX:

“Instructional design is about crafting the appropriate learning experience. We need to reframe content so that it’s meaningful and relevant. Then we need to give learners something to think about and have them make decisions.” Tom Kuhlmann – VP Community at Articulate

“Tips when using virtual training: prepare and support participants, consider cognitive load, design for different levels of engagement, have learners interact often, support facilitators, pilot the training and test, test, test, test.” Brenda Smith – Medibank Health

“When using video in learning experiences, authenticity is very important.” Mark Parry – Parryville Media

“Clean and balance (in graphic design) creates stability and can direct learner focus.” Minh Nguyen – DEEWR “Using curation for learning design > collect, filter, evaluate, arrange, present, distribute.” Anne Bartlett-Bragg – Ripple Effect Group

“Before you gamify your eLearning course, make sure it meets the learning objectives.” Ruth McElhone – B Online Learning

“Learning experiences should be meaningful, memorable and motivating.” Ruth McElhone – B Online Learning

“Using video for manual or process tasks shows the correct way to do something.” Tony Nye – Australian Red Cross Blood Service

“Pictures clarify words and stories add context to content.” Blair Rorani – Ever Learning

“What makes an industry pro? Experience; Skills (practice your craft); Authority and Luck.” Tom Kuhlmann – VP Community at Articulate

“Luck is where opportunity and preparation meet.” Tom Kuhlmann – VP Community at Articulate

“You need to be proactive and look for opportunities. Sharing expertise creates opportunities.” Tom Kuhlmann – VP Community at Articulate

And from the workshops with Tom and David:

On designing an eLearning course:

Ask yourself:
1. What content needs to be in the course?
2. What is the right look and feel?
3. What is the learner supposed to do?
Be intentional, stick with a consistent design and don’t settle for defaults (colours, fonts etc.)

On eLearning makeovers:

Review the five common components of eLearning courses:
1. Text – should be from the same font family
2. Elements – the goal is unity not uniformity
3. Colours – use colour for contrast and emphasis
4. Background – it should contribute to the visual and not dominate
5. People – if you use characters maintain unity
On interactivity:

Interactivity connects the user to content. There are two types of interactivity:
- Touch – the learner interacts with the screen (by clicking, dragging or hovering)
- Decision – the learner interacts with the content.
On Learning Objectives:

When thinking about learning objectives, ask yourself:
- Who is the learner?
- What is the situation?
- What do you want them to do?
- How can they prove it?
On building interactive eLearning:
- Know your tools – don’t build clunky courses
- Create relevant content
- Use stories for learning especially if there’s a lot of content
- Remember the 3 C’s:
1. Challenge the learner
2. Give them choices
3. Have consequences for decisions
There were at least a couple of hundred people at the conference and about 80 people each day at the workshops. If everyone incorporates just one or two of the things they learned into their eLearning courses the quality would certainly improve. But if everyone also shared what they’ve learned with others in the field, it would help to improve even more courses and contribute to building a strong community of learning professionals!

All in all it was a great three days of learning from the best in the field and also chance to meet lots of people who I’d only known via Twitter and make the physical connection. Let’s follow Tom and David’s example by practicing our skills and sharing what we know so that we can develop ourselves as well as others.

Footnote: This post originally appeared on my old blog site “Learning Snippets” and the B Online Learning blog in 2014.

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March 20, 2015
Showing My Work #9

Often when we talk about our work, we talk in terms of ‘what’ we did. The Showing My Work series of posts aim to also capture the ‘how’ something was done.

E-Learning Heroes Challenge #71 – Teaching Math Concepts with E-Learning. The brief: This week your challenge is to design a short lesson to teach one or more math concepts. The inspiration for my demo came from one of the source material examples that David provided, where teachers are using LEGO bricks to teach kids fractions. I also went to their website to check it out further.

$Teaching fractions with Lego$

My idea was to re-create this method for learning about fractions in an eLearning piece for this challenge. After playing around with some ideas on paper, I came up with a three screen demo: Introduction > Visual Explanation > Try it Out.

Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at how I did each screen.

Screen One: Introduction

I like to have a brief intro to my demos and most of my challenge entries have one. Originally, I had a LEGO character and some LEGO pieces (I created the pieces using shapes – circles and rectangles – along with some shadow) flying onto the screen but it wasn’t quite what I wanted as I felt it was a bit dull. As I’m using LEGO as the teaching method for this demo, the LEGO Movie was in the back of my mind and I thought it would be cool to make the pieces come alive and enter onto the screen. I created a basic ‘animation’ using multiple copies of the images and the timeline. Here’s what the Slide View for this screen looks like:

Each image has been duplicated five times and I used the timeline to display an each image from each group one after the other (less than 1 second for each image). Here’s a section of the timeline that shows what I mean:

So when you look at the intro screen, it looks like the same image is moving from off-screen onto the screen. I deliberately wanted the objects to change position as they move in and I think the effect looks pretty good.

Screen Two: Visual Explanation

Next, I wanted to explain the concept of fractions and to do this I used an 8-stud LEGO brick because it can be divided into 1/2, 1/4 and 1/8 pieces. On this screen I showed the whole followed by the fractions and then how the fractions add up to the whole. For this, I used the timeline to introduce the pieces individually and show their relationships with one another. Here’s part of the timeline:

Screen Three: Try it Out

This is where the learner gets to have a go. I used the 8-stud brick and the learner needs to select from a group of bricks the one that would cover half of it. A layer shows depending on the brick they select and gives feedback on their choice. Learners can also have another go if they select incorrectly or repeat if they want to try it again. My original idea was to have lots of bricks and have different combinations that would cover half e.g. 1 + 3 and 2 + 1 + 1 etc. but I found it became too complex with all the different combos and keeping track of the selections. I tried using number variables but it didn’t work like I wanted to so I abandoned the idea.

If this was a longer course, I would have included more ‘trying out’ as well as other fractions – 1/3 and 1/5 as well as more try it out screens.

I was also reminded of the importance of clearly labelling all objects in Storyline projects especially when you have a lot of them, it makes it easier to keep track of everything!

Anyway, here’s my demo, you can click on the image to view it:

$Math Concepts$

Let me know what you think and you can see all of my ELH Challenge entries on My Portfolio page.

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March 6, 2015
Showing My Work #8

Often when we talk about our work, we talk in terms of ‘what’ we did. The Showing My Work series of posts aim to also capture the ‘how’ something was done.

E-Learning Heroes Challenge #57 – Preventing Workplace Violence. The brief: This week your challenge is to show scenario examples designed to prevent or address workplace violence. You can structure your demo any way you like – just be sure to include some type of scenario.

For this challenge, I decided to use a branching scenario. This type of scenario gets learners involved in a situation and takes them down a path based on the choices they make (as opposed to just being right or wrong).

One of the first things I did was to re-read a couple of great posts about branching scenarios:

Build Branched E-Learning Scenarios in Three Simple Steps by Tom Kuhlmann

When Do You Need a Branching Scenario? By Cathy Moore

Because this was a demo and I had limited time, I decided to create a simple branching scenario around the theme of workplace bullying. In the scenario, you are an observer to a situation and you need to make a choice as to what you should do if you saw these events happening.

Out of the four possible choices, there is one correct action and three different results for the other three actions. Rather than using feedback layers, you move to a new screen based on your selection. You’ll see the consequences of your decision and have the opportunity to select another action.

None of the consequences say directly if they are ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, instead there is a reaction by one or both of the characters in the scenario and another decision may have to be made. For an incorrect choice, the follow-up question is ‘Now what will you do?’ I used radio buttons for each response and depending on the selection made; it takes you to one of the four slides. The different actions are repeated on each slide (except the action that was selected).

For the background I used an office style picture (to give context) and made it semi-transparent so it didn’t dominate the screen. I place the image on a Master slide to keep everything consistent.

While branching scenarios take longer to develop and build, the experience for the learner is much improved and, in the real world, if we make an incorrect choice we can often make another decision to get things back on track.

Here’s my demo, you can click on the image to view it:

Let me know what you think and you can see all of my ELH Challenge entries on My Portfolio page.

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December 11, 2014
Showing My Work #7

Often when we talk about our work, we talk in terms of ‘what’ we did. The Showing My Work series of posts aim to also capture the ‘how’ something was done.

E-Learning Heroes Challenge #42 – Smartphone Video. The brief: This week, your challenge is to record, edit, and publish a training video using your smartphone. Choose a topic that allows you to record multiple videos for your project. The focus on this challenge is as much about editing as it is recording.

I almost didn’t do this challenge because I thought I wouldn’t have time but I did, and it turned out to be one of the most fun challenges I’ve participated in. The first thing I needed to figure out was the subject and I gravitated towards my Nespresso coffee machine and I thought about creating some a ‘how to use’ clips – setting up, using and cleaning. In this demo I was also able to put into practice a couple of tips that I picked up from David Anderson and Tom Kuhlmann.

Filming the videos
As the challenge was about using your smartphone to create the videos, I wasn’t sure how mine would turn out as I was using my trusty old iPhone 3G. I have zero equipment for holding the phone steady so I made this little stand using some post-it-notes and bulldog clips:

I also made supports using different combinations of books to give me different heights and angles:

The whole thing was shot in my kitchen. I just moved things out of the way so only the coffee machine was in the shot:

It was pretty basic but it got the job done (I think so anyway).

The visual layout
How a course or module looks, plays an important role as it creates an atmosphere or a context for the person completing it. Literally, it sets the scene.

Tip #1: Have a look at the company website to get some ideas for the look of your module.

So that’s what I did. Here’s a screen shot of the Nespresso website:

See how it’s quite dark – black is a prominent colour and the text is white. As this was going to be some help videos on how to use the machine, I thought it was appropriate to use similar colouring in the demo so that it fits in with the company look.

When creating a piece of eLearning I like to use ‘Master Slides’ because they ensure consistency and they save lots of time. You can have multiple master slides in your project to use when you need them. So, I started with a black background and found a couple of images from a Google search:

But I had a slight problem. See how the image of the cup of coffee doesn’t go right across the screen. It looks like its floating and I needed to do something with that. In this case, I couldn’t just expand it across the slide because it would give a ‘stretched’ look, like this:

Tip #2: Take a grab of part of the image that won’t be affected by stretching.

So I took a snip of a section of the coffee image and saved it as a picture (see the red box below). I used the Snipping Tool on my PC but something like Snagit would also work. Then I inserted the snip image back into the slide, positioned it on the same place where it came from then pulled it across the screen:

The end result is that it looks like one image and there’s no stretched look:

Now I have a Master Slide that I’ve set up once but can use multiple times.

The demo itself
To create the demo, I made one of the screens a ‘home screen’ which has access to each of the three videos. When you click on an iPad screen, it zooms in and the video starts to play and once it’s finished, it zooms out again. It looks like it’s happening on the one screen but each time you click on an iPad, you are actually going to a separate screen that has the video file in it.

The reason I did it this way was because I wanted people to be able to choose which video they watched based on what they need to do and I couldn’t do this and use the zoom function three times on the one screen.

When you look at the ‘Home’ screen you can see what looks like the videos ready to play but they are actually a screen shot of the first frame of the clip. When you click on it and zoom in, you are actually going to a different slide. When the video ends, you automatically go back to the Home screen.

What I learned
One of the things that I learned from this challenge is that you don’t necessarily need a big, high-end production to create some videos to use as performance support. I mean sure, it can look quite slick if you did but I was able to create this demo in just a few hours and it gets the message across. It also taught me to be resourceful and that you can do more than you think you can!

Here’s the demo, you can click on the image to view it:

Let me know what you think and you can see all of my ELH Challenge entries on My Portfolio page.

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October 20, 2014
Showing My Work #6

Often when we talk about our work, we talk in terms of ‘what’ we did. The Showing My Work series of posts aim to also capture the ‘how’ something was done.

E-Learning Heroes Challenge #50 – Flat Office Design The brief: This week your challenge is to design an office or desktop theme based on your own workplace environment. Design as many objects as you like. For variety, try adding both top and front views of your workspace. Extra credit: Share a photo of your office workspace so we can compare it with your flat design template.

According to Wikipedia, “Flat design refers to a style of interface design which removes any stylistic choices that give the illusion of three-dimensions (such as drop shadows, gradients, or textures) and is focused on a minimalist use of simple elements, typography and flat colours”. Flat design is a style that seems popular nowadays and I’m noticing it more and more, for example, the apps on my phone are now flat. So the aim of this challenge was to create an office design using this style.

One of the first things I did was to take a photo of my desk; after all, I wanted that extra credit! Then I started thinking about how I could recreate the elements that are there (and add some more) using shapes. I thought about each item individually and what shape I would need to create it in both the front and top views and for some things it was a matter of trail and error before I got it right. To give the flat appearance, I used no outline on the shapes I inserted. As an example, here are of the shapes I used for the coffee cup that have been split apart:

Each time I created something for the front view, I followed it by creating the same item in the top view but changing the perspective. So, the cup is a rectangle and a half circle in the front view but becomes a rectangle and two circles in the top view. I also made sure that I kept the sizes the same in the top and front views – the width of the rectangle in the front view is the same as the diameter of the circle in the top view:

The whole demo is created on one slide in Storyline 1 but it could also be created in PowerPoint too as it has the same shapes functionality. I made use of layers in SL and built the top and front views on separate layers and then I added two buttons on the base layer. I took away the player altogether to give the whole demo a flat look and I thought this was fine but I wanted to make the demo a bit more interesting. I needed something that would add to the demo in some way but still fit in with the brief. What I came up with was a short introduction to the challenge and given that the office furniture came from IKEA, I worked that in too which ties in nicely with the flat design theme. I used entrance (fly in from the right) and exit (fly out to the left) animations to move the text in and out of screen and staggered the text boxes along the timeline to make it flow from one text box to the next:

Here’s the demo, you can click on the image to view it:

Let me know what you think and you can see all of my ELH Challenge entries on My Portfolio page.

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September 30, 2014