Learn. Show. Repeat.

Tag: e-learning

  • Letter to an eLearning Creator

    Dear eLearning Creator,

    I don’t normally do this but after what was one of the greatest hours of my life, I felt that I must. I’ve just completed a wonderful eLearning course that you created and I wanted to personally let you know how much I enjoyed it and that I was so engaged from start to finish.

    Day-to-day I’m quite busy in my role, however when I received the notification that I needed to complete my module I was happy to stop what I was doing, set my phone to voicemail and get started. Actually, a quiet hush fell over the entire office when they found out that another course was ready as everyone was hungry to consume more content.

    I love PowerPoint! I often see it in meetings so right from the beginning of the course there was a cosy familiarity about it. Even though I was sitting at my desk at work, using my company computer and sipping from my company branded coffee cup, I was delighted to see that our logo was visible throughout the entire course to remind me of where it came from. Not only that, you applied the our branding guidelines consistently and faultlessly throughout – the fonts, the colours and even the distance of the logo from the top right-hand corner of the screen – which really added to the experience.

    I was thankful for the navigation instructions you provided up front. I use computers and the internet a lot here and at home, and I did have to log into our learning area and click on a link to open the course, but I was pleased to find out that clicking on a ‘Next’ button would take me forward, ‘Back’ would take me backwards and ‘Takeaways’ would have some extra information. The progress area came in handy too as it was useful to see how many of the 143 slides I’d completed.

    I must admit that I was a little unsure about what I’d get out of completing the course but to my relief you let me know on the objectives slide what I’d be able to do by the end. I don’t quite remember what they were (they were some good verbs though) but if you say that I can do those things then I believe you!

    Having the audio narration read everything on the screen for me was delightful! It allowed my senses to really soak up the material and it was clever that I couldn’t skip ahead until the audio had finished (meaning that I wouldn’t miss out on anything). I found the pictures in the course made the text less dull and the characters used reflected the happy and diverse mix of people working here. The animations you used certainly jazzed up the information and my right hand got a good workout from all that clicking, dragging and hovering!

    You saved the best part until last – the knowledge check! (by the way, this sounds so much nicer than quiz or test). I thought that presenting the questions in a game show format was so fun! How did you know that true and false questions are my favourite? Multiple choice questions are a bit trickier but luckily I could have as many tries until, by process of elimination, I finally picked the right answer. I appreciated that I wasn’t just right or wrong but that I was Correct! or Incorrect! Funnily enough, that’s just how my boss says it when I answer one of his questions.

    It was a bittersweet moment when I completed the course. I was sad that it was over however the gazillion points I received plus five gold stars did cheer me up as did the ability to print out a certificate to keep and treasure (which incidentally now hangs proudly on a wall in my home).

    Well, that’s all I wanted to say and even though I will probably never meet you, keep those information courses coming – more often and longer would be great. I speak on behalf of my all colleagues when I say THANK-YOU!!

    Signed,
    The Engaged Learner.

    Image source: JPPI on morgueFile.com

  • Learning and Development: You Have One Job

    In many organisations, the learning and development (L&D) area are known as the people who deliver information – mostly via courses – either online or in a classroom. Many of which are essentially nothing more than one-off, content dumps.

    We say that we want to be business partners and express our desire for a seat at the table so we talk about “capacity building”, “a learning organisation” and “ecosystems” in an attempt to achieve this.

    We talk about blending, flipping, shrinking, socialising and gamifying learning events but often the execution has the wrong focus.

    We’ve become overly fixated on frameworks and models and waste time debating their proportions instead of using them as a guide and not a prescription.

    We cling to concepts that don’t exist yet dismiss others despite the evidence from research that exists.

    However, the role of everyone working in learning and development is simple:

    To support the people in our organisations who do the actual work.

    We’re not operating machines, or digging trenches, or serving customers in shops or on the phone, or treating patients or selling widgets. We’re not working outside in the elements. We’re not (usually) working night shift or on the weekend. But the people in our organisations are and we must ensure they can perform whenever and wherever they are working.

    I’ve been reading Innovative Performance Support by Conrad Gottfredson and Bob Mosher and they refer to the ‘Five Moments of Learning Need’ (p37-38):

    New: when people are learning how to do something for the first time.

    More: when people are expanding on what they have learned.

    Apply: when people need to plan what they need to do, remember what they may have forgotten or adapt their performance to a unique situation.

    Solve: when people need to deal with problems, something breaks or doesn’t work as intended.

    Change: When people need to learn a new way of doing things that requires them to change ingrained skills.

    My takeaway is that different moments of need require different solutions and the current one size, one event fits all approach is not effective. So, before we launch yet another information overloaded course, we should ask ourselves a question – is this really supporting our people to do the work they need to do?

    Image source: Morguefile

  • Valuing all Sources of Learning

    Each year I meet quite a few people who work in the eLearning field, usually they’re developers or eLearning creation is part of their L&D role. Most are newbies to eLearning and we come together in a classroom setting to get them started on their eLearning development journey. At the beginning of each session I like to find out a little about each person – such as their background, their experience – and while most people are brand new to eLearning authoring usually there’s at least one or two who have been experimenting with the tool or they’ve watched some ‘how-to’ videos on YouTube or they’ve read some articles on websites/blogs or they’ve asked questions in (or visited) the eLearning communities.

    However, there’s one thing that these people do have in common, and that is they all finish their introduction with:

    “but I haven’t had any training”

    These people still learn from the sessions but they can do a lot more than they give themselves credit for. The classroom setting for learning (at least in this case) is still valuable especially for novices and even those who have basic experience learn a few things they didn’t know prior. Plus, they can ask questions specific to their context, get answers straight away as well as being able to interact with and learn from other people in the room. But, there’s two things I find troubling about the above statement.

    Firstly, they seem to put a much higher value on formal training events for learning as opposed to learning something via other more informal means. It’s like they don’t quite trust the information that comes from a blog post, a website or a YouTube video. They seem to need the security of an “expert” in a room to tell them. I’ll let you in on a secret, I’ve had no formal training in creating a WordPress site or in blog writing and yet here I am…

    The second, and more concerning aspect of this situation, is that these same people who “haven’t had any training” are working in the learning area within their organisations. This leads me to believe that a reason why the default response for many L&D folks to always create a course is because they themselves only see courses as a way to truly learn something. There’s also another (perhaps bigger) issue – if they only see formal, instructor-led learning as a necessary requirement for their own learning, then they’re probably less likely to embrace blogs, videos, just-in-time resources, curation, communities and working out loud/ showing your work to either supplement, support or perhaps replace some formal learning ‘events’ within their organisations.

    The course mentality that is so prevalent in L&D won’t change until the very people charged with improving workplace performance get past the ‘formal learning is the only way to learn’ mindset and start to see the value in and embrace other options. Perhaps if they put a higher value on other sources of learning for themselves they’d be more likely to introduce other methods into their workplaces and create conditions from which it can flourish.

    While I do believe that formal, instructor-led courses have their place to improve performance there are many other options available to L&D practitioners. We’ve been conditioned throughout our lives that real learning only comes from structured learning events so we tend to stick with what we’re comfortable with. The problem is that one-off events take people away from their work but people need to learn and have tools and resources available to them in the flow of their work – at the point of need.

    So, if we are to move forward, things need to change starting with our own how to learn something mindset…

    Informal learning

    Image source: Shutterstock

  • Working with Images in eLearning (part 2)

    In my last post, I covered some terminology associated with images and different image file types. For part 2, I’m going to share 10 tips when using images in Articulate Storyline and for some you’ll need to click on the image and go to the Format tab under Picture Tools.

    Tip #1

    Break the text-on-one-side-and-image-on-the-other habit! Go full screen with your images and overlay the text. There’s lots of way to do this, here’s some ideas that I wrote in another post along with links to even more ideas.

    Tip #2

    When you want to resize an image (larger or smaller), drag it from the corner to keep it in proportion. Dragging from a mid-point can make the image look stretched.

    Tip #3

    Remove parts of the image you don’t need by using the Crop tool which is on the right-hand side of the Format ribbon. Unlike Storyline, you can crop an image to a shape in PowerPoint (it could then be saved and inserted into your Storyline project).

    Tip #4

    If you have a few images on a slide, you create even spacing between them. Select all the images and click on Align. There’s a few options but I generally use Distribute Vertically or Distribute Horizontally. This also works for other objects such as shapes or buttons.

    Tip #5

    You can move images around on your slides using the arrows on the keyboard. If you want to move your image 1 pixel at a time, hold down the Ctrl key while you press the arrow keys. Again, this works for other objects too.

    Tip #6

    If you want to have different images in the same positon across a few slides, start by placing the first image where you want it to be. Then you’ll need to find out its position on the slide, so right-click and select Size and Position. Next, click on the Position tab and take note of the horizontal and vertical position. Go to each of your other images, follow the same steps and when you get to the Position tab, type in the position information from your first image.

    Tip #7

    If you insert a picture but then decide you want to change rather than deleting it and reinserting another, there’s an option on the left-hand side of the Format ribbon called Change Picture. When clicked on you’ll be able to choose another image and it will replace the current one.

    Tip #8

    Some people use Ctrl C (to copy) and Ctrl V (to paste) but I still use the mouse! If you want to maintain the alignment of images when you copy and paste, hold down the Shift key and Control key and then move your mouse to the edge of the image. When you see a + sign and dotted rectangle, left-click and drag your mouse. This also works for other objects on the slide.

    Tip #9

    Sometimes you don’t want your images to sit squarely on the slide and while you can rotate them manually, the Format tab has some built-in options in Rotate. I find the Flip Vertical and Flip Horizontal options useful to create a mirror reverse of the original image and if you click on More Rotation Options and the Size tab, you can set the degree of rotation.

    Tip #10

    Storyline does have some basic image editing options on the left-hand side of the Format ribbon. You can adjust the brightness, contrast and recolour. I’ve also used these options when creating additional image states to make the new states look different to the original.

     

    So, there’s a few tips for working with images in Storyline that will help improve the look of your eLearning modules. If you have any other tips, please share them in the comments area.

    I’ve also created a short video that demonstrates how to do many of the above tips, click on the image below to watch.

    Tips when working with images video

  • Working with Images in eLearning (part 1)

    As eLearning developers we regularly work with images in our projects and while we aren’t all graphic designers, it helps to have a basic knowledge of the terminology around image properties and file types which is what this post is about.

    A ‘pixel’ is the unit of measurement used for digital images and when you see the size of an image, let’s say 450 x 300, the first number is always the width and the second is the height:

    width then height

    The resolution of an image is different and is usually expressed as pixels per inch (ppi) or dots per inch (dpi) and this describes how many pixels there are in a liner inch. When sourcing images from a photo website I look for a high ppi or dpi number:

    In this example I’d choose the medium (or maybe the large) over the small as it would be a higher quality and better for resizing.

    There’s two main categories of images – Bitmap and Vector – and here’s the difference between the two:

    Bitmap images are made up of pixels of different colours, they often have large file sizes and when you resize a bitmap graphic larger than the original, it tends to lose quality and become grainy or pixelated.

    Vector images use mathematical expressions to represent the image, they tend to have small file sizes and are scalable so when you resize them larger, which means that they don’t lose quality. However, vector images typically require software to create and edit. You may be able to edit the vector image in PowerPoint as Tom Kuhlmann describes here.

    It’s also handy to know the differences between the most common image file formats so that you’ll be able to use the right type depending on your purpose.

    Types of bitmap image formats:

    JPEG or JPG (stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group) – supports millions of colours and are used for displaying digital photos in a compressed format. You can’t have a transparent background with a JPEG and they tend to lose quality the more times you edit and save them.

    PNG (Portable Network Graphics) – an alternative to GIF images and can support millions of colours as well as transparent backgrounds.

    GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) – only supports 256 colours but they can have a transparent background (one colour can be transparent) and can also be used for creating simple animations.

    TIFF (Tagged Image File Format) – great for when you want to display high quality images for printed documents.

    Types of vector image formats:

    EPS (stands for Encapsulated PostScript) – this format supports both bitmap and vector images and are created with drawing programs like Photoshop.

    WMF (Windows Metafile) – also supports bitmap and vector images and was used for Microsoft Clip Art. These files can be edited in PowerPoint.

    SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) – this is a newer format for web graphics that support interactivity on newer web browsers and is also good for animations.

    So that’s a brief overview of image terminology and file formats. If you’re interested in learning more about image formats as well as visual design, Connie Malamed has a great book called ‘Visual Design Solutions’ which I referred to in putting this post together. In part 2 of working with images, I’ll share some tips (and a video) that I’ve found useful when working with images in Storyline.