Learn. Show. Repeat.

Tag: E-Learning Heroes

Looking Back at 2016

Another year is almost over and it’s time to look back on the year that was. At the beginning of 2016 I chose a word for the year which was ‘Build’. Specifically, my aim was to build my skills in some different areas which I’ve listed here as well as some reflections on what I did and didn’t quite do:

Coding

I stared an online HTML 5 coding course via Code Academy which I began in earnest. There we small lesson that started with some simple programming and gradually built from there. Unfortunately, I didn’t keep up with it and it fell by the wayside but it’s still on my list of this to learn about for next year.

Webinar Delivery

My role at work changed and as a result I didn’t deliver as many webinars as I thought but before this happened I bought a copy of Donald Taylor’s ‘Webinar Master’ eBook. It’s got lots of practical tips and advice from someone who has delivered many webinars himself. It’ll be my go to resource when I start presenting more webinars.

Screencasting

Earlier this year, David Anderson ran a few screencasting challenges via E-Learning Heroes and the timing was just perfect as it gave me a chance to build some skills in this area. I wrote some initial reflections in a post Learning About Screencasting. I’ve also found that a good way to build skills in screencasting is to watch others do it and make notes – what works well, things to avoid etc.

Since the challenges ended I’ve continued to record screencasts on using Storyline and I also discovered that if you have a Google account, you also have a YouTube channel which is where I upload all my recordings. You can take a look at what I’ve created at my YouTube Channel. I plan to record more next year but include other topic areas such as learning theory and design tips.

Learning Theory

This will continue to be an area to explore for me and I came across a presentation by Donald Clark called ‘2,500 Years of Learning Theory’ which has given me some avenues to pursue.

Curation

I keep seeing curation being mentioned as an L&D skill but at the time of writing this not being able to find many examples of curated content. I started to think about curation in this post: Getting Started with Content Curation.

In a follow-up post Continuing with Content Curation I curated some posts on content curation.

I’ve also curated some content via topic area in this case accessibility in eLearning for Everyone.

I have been experimenting with some curation apps – Anders Pink, Pocket and Flipboard – they’re ok but I find that they filter the content they show so will keep playing with them because maybe I’m not using them properly?

Build Connections

This is something that I always want to do and while the number of my connections has grown I’d like to deepen those relationships by more face-to-face meet ups. I didn’t do much of this in 2016.

Fitness

My goal was to complete the City2Surf run in Sydney and while I didn’t train as hard as I should have I still completed the 14km run!

So a mixed bag in terms of building in all areas but I’m happy with the progress I’ve made and having a focus does help. I already have a word in mind for next year.

This year, I didn’t complete as many ELH challenges as I wanted to focus on other areas but here’s a couple of posts about ones that I did participate in:

4 Ideas for Combining Text and Images in eLearning

Sliding Along with the Force

Looking Closer at Images

How I created a custom Quiz style Interaction (not a challenge but Storyline related)

I also started the year with a post called Happy Same Year!? and I wonder if much has really changed at all in the world of L&D…

Thanks to everyone who has read or commented or liked or shared something from this site, I really appreciate it and I hope it was helpful. I’d like to wish you all the best for the festive season and I’ll catch you in 2017 🙂

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December 12, 2016
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.

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December 4, 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

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October 30, 2016
Learning About Screencasting

A few months ago David Anderson started a new type of E-Learning Hero Challenge – creating screencasts (which are short ‘how-to’ video clips). I mentioned in an earlier blog post that one of the areas I wanted to build knowledge and skills in was screencasting so these new challenges would be a great opportunity to get started.

Another reason why these challenges appealed to me is that most of my role at B Online Learning is about teaching others – how to use Storyline 2 and the process of creating an eLearning module – so the challenges also seemed like a good fit in that regard just a different way of teaching and sharing what I know and a way to help develop my communication skills.

Creating these short how-to videos is something new for me so these early ones were a bit rough but I figure they’ll get better over time. Anyway, here’s a few of things I’ve learned so far when creating my screencasts:

Planning

I’ve found that the recording works better if you plan what you’re going to record and have a run through to make sure that things work the way you want them to and you know where you want to click. I don’t have a word for word script but I like to think through what I’m going to say as I do the practice. I tried off-the-cuff but it didn’t work for me.

Sound quality

I record my screencasts in my office at home and I shut the door and window to reduce any background noise. Initially I found the audio still wasn’t that great but I was using an old headset with a mic. I do have a USB microphone (Audio Technica) but when I tried it, it seemed to pick up ambient noise. So, I went to JB Hi-Fi and I found a Skype Headset (it has a USB connection and a noise cancelling microphone) and I’m much happier with the quality.

Recording Window Size

I use Articulate Replay to record my screencasts as it came with my SL2 licence and meant that I didn’t have to buy another program. It’s easy to use and I’m happy with the output. When you open up Replay you can set the size of the recording window to whatever size you need and initially I was recording at about 1000 x 700 but I found that when I looked at the recording on a larger monitor that it became a bit blurry and I think it was because the recording was being enlarged to fit on a bigger screen? Anyway, I asked my friend Veronica (another regular screencaster) what size she used and she said was using around 1430 x 860. Hers looked cleaner so I increased the recording size and it seems to have helped in the latest recording – ‘Using Master Slides’. So I’ll keep experimenting.

Click on the image below to see my most recent screencast and you can see all the recording that I’ve created in the Videos section of this site. Let me know what you think.

If you’re wondering about the circle animation that you see in my recordings, it’s a setting on your computer. Go to the Control Panel > Mouse > Pointer Options tab > select Show location of pointer when I press the CTRL key > Ok. That’s it!

To see all of the screencast challenge topics, click here.

If you’ve done any screen recording before please share any tips you have in the comments below.

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May 21, 2016
Sliding Along with the Force

A few weeks ago I was delivering a Storyline 2 session in Brisbane and we were looking at the slider interaction and how you can use a slider to change the state of an object and also use it to show layers. In the change of state example we were looking at, you slide the thumb along the track and the colour of an image changes. One of the participants asked if it were possible to change the colour of the thumb to match the colour of the image and my response was “I’m not sure, I haven’t tried that before but let’s check it out and see if it can be done”.

So, I clicked on the slider and went to the states area and I was pleasantly surprised to see that sliders have ‘states’. As it turns out, you can add new slider states and then format the slider for your new states (in our class example, I could change the thumb colour to match the image colour). Cool! I was also happy that person asked this question or I may never have known about slider states!

Flashback to late 2015, and David Anderson created an ELH Challenge to coincide with the release of the new Star Wars movie, The Force Awakens. E-Learning Heroes Challenge #110 – Awaken Your E-Learning Force. The brief was to build a Star Wars-themed interaction, this week your challenge is.

Sometimes ideas for challenge demos come to me quickly but sometimes I need to percolate ideas in my subconscious for a while and this was one of those challenges. I did have some illustrated Star Wars characters that I wanted to use for the demo and an idea of a trivia type interaction, just no solid idea for bringing them together in a different way.

Jumping back to the present and after I discovered that sliders have states, I thought that’s it! I could create a slider state for each character (six in total) and I could also have a question for each character to correspond with the change in image.

So this is what I did:

I inserted a slider and in the Thumb Fill area, filled it with a picture of my first character. I had to play around with the sizing of the thumb so that it wasn’t too small. For the track, I chose no fill and no outline which made it transparent. Then I created a new state for each character and named each state to correspond with the character:

The thumb picture changes using a change of state trigger (one for each character):

Each of the questions is built on a layer:

I used shapes for my questions and feedback with 40% transparency and shapes for my answers choices too. As there was only one correct answer, I grouped the choices in a button set which only allows one answer to be selected at a time. The correct/incorrect feedback boxes are on this layer too and they both start as ‘hidden’ and change state to normal depending on which answer is chosen. This is what it looks like for the Stormtrooper layer:

To save some time, once I had the first layer working the way I wanted, I duplicated it and then changed the information and adjusted the triggers. A show layer trigger based on the slider position makes each layer show. So as you slide the thumb along, the picture changes to a different character and a question for that character is also shown along with some feedback (and where possible, I used a quote from that character from one of the movies).

You can try the demo yourself by clicking on the image below:

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 7, 2016