Learn. Show. Repeat.

Tag: e-learning

100 Not Out
In life, if someone reaches their 100th birthday it’s significant achievement. In cricket, to score 100 runs and still be batting is also a significant achievement. So when David Anderson announced the E-Learning Heroes Challenge #100, another significant milestone had been reached.

The challenges started back in 2013 and from a modest beginning, with just a few people sharing their demos, the number of people participating has grown significantly over time (to date over 2,300 demos have been shared). When I first came across them, I must admit that I thought they were a bit silly. They weren’t whole courses and while the examples were good, there was no way that many of the designs shared would be appropriate in my workplace. Plus, I was busy and didn’t really have the time anyway.

So I dismissed them without even trying to complete one myself.

In 2014, David and Tom Kuhlmann presented at a workshop in Sydney and they kept talking about practicing in order to develop your skills and that these challenges were a good way to do that. So I thought I’d give it a try (Visual Storytelling with Photo Collages #27 was my first challenge) and I realised that I was missing the point and I soon discovered how the challenges can be beneficial to you and your career. After all, if you want to be great at something you need to make the time to practice no matter how busy you are.

To celebrate 100 challenges, here are 100 reasons to give them a go:
1. There’s a new one every week
2. Participation isn’t compulsory
3. Be inspired by other designers
4. You can always complete older challenges
5. Gives you a chance to practice
6. Connect with other community members
7. Demos only need to be a slide or two
8. Showcase your skills
9. Work free of the usual constraints
10. You can suggest ideas for future challenges
11. Develops your creativity
12. Builds community
13. Helps you run faster*
14. Helps make you more visible in the eLearning space
15. They’re fun!
16. You can use PowerPoint to create your demo
17. Helps to build your portfolio
18. Get ideas from others
19. Learn new skills
20. Experiment with new ideas
21. Cures baldness*
22. Spend as much time developing a demo as you want
23. Break old design habits
24. Develops resourcefulness
25. There’s no right or wrong way
26. Give something back to the community
27. You get to promote yourself
28. Makes world peace possible*
29. You can see how you’ve improved over time
30. Develop friendships
31. See how others interpret the same brief
32. Try out new techniques
33. You’re in control of the whole demo
34. Helps you to lose weight*
35. They can still be a work in progress
36. There’s heaps of topics to choose from
37. It’s free professional development
38. You can make others happy
39. Opens your mind to new possibilities
40. Improves your IQ*
41. There’s a recap each week of all entries submitted
42. They only focus on a small part of a course
43. You can test yourself against yourself
44. Develops a show your work habit
45. Proves that eLearning doesn’t have to be boring
*Individual results may vary.

Ok, I could only get to 45, so please help me get to 100 by adding to the list via the comments below.

A big thanks to David for starting the challenges, growing them into what they’ve become and for positively supporting everyone who submits a demo. Well done also to everyone who has been brave enough to share their work in public as many more have benefitted from you doing this and from seeing just how many talented folks work in this field.

To see a list of all the challenges, click here.

Image source: Shutterstock

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September 27, 2015
Bingo Time!

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 #98 – E-Learning Buzzword Bingo Games. The brief: This week your challenge is to create an e-learning buzzword bingo card or interaction.

My first idea for this challenge was to create a bingo card using the most overused words in learning, for example engagement or thought leader or wearable technology. But then I had another idea, instead of using words you might hear at a conference why not pictures of people you might see at a conference (so strictly speaking I did deviate from the brief a little with this one).

As DevLearn is coming up soon I figured that would give me a good list of folks who I could include and as it turned out, they’d be the ones whose sessions I would like to attend if I was going to the conference. The idea is that you mark them off if you see their session or see them around during the conference.

The first thing I did was make a list of people to include on my bingo ‘card’ and then locate an image of each. I inserted my first image into PowerPoint and used the cropping tool to make the image as close to a square as I could. Then as I wanted a round picture of each person I was able to use the ‘Crop to a Shape’ feature and select a circle:

Once I had my circle image, a quick right-click ‘Save as Picture’ and I was done. I then repeated this process for each image.

Next I jumped into Storyline and inserted a background image of stars in the night sky (from Shutterstock) because these folks were some of the stars of DevLearn! I placed each image on the slide and because it’s a game, I wanted to allocate points for each person you see. To do this, I used the ‘states’ area and I created a second state for my first image:

I used the disabled state (because then it could only be selected once) and I just darkened the image and placed a text box on it with their name and points value. Then when I was finished, I clicked ‘Done Editing States’. To save some time, I used ‘Format Painter’ to copy the formatting from my first picture to all my other pictures and all I needed to do was change the name of each person on their disabled state.

I then added a trigger to my first image to change the state to disabled when clicked:

Again, to save time I copy and pasted this trigger onto each image:

In order to keep score, I needed a number variable which I created and called ‘Points’ and then I added a trigger to add points to the variable:

I was also able to copy and paste this trigger onto all my other images saving me some more time. Finally I added a reference to this variable in the bottom left corner %Points% that changes each time an image is pressed.

The only thing left was to make something happen when all of the people were chosen so I simply added a layer with the following trigger:

As the challenges are a good place to practice using Storyline, I also thought I’d try something that I haven’t done before which was to add an image as a background to the published HTML output (behind the Storyline project). I reused the stars image and this tutorial from David Anderson explains how to do it.

All up the demo took less than two hours hours to put together. You can see it for yourself by clicking on the image below to launch the demo:

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 20, 2015
Looking Behind the Facade
Since I was young I’ve always enjoyed stopping whenever I come across a construction site. I’m interested in how buildings, from houses to skyscrapers, are put together. It really doesn’t matter what stage of construction the building is at either for me to pause to take a look. I like to see things like the depth of the footings or the size of the columns and supporting beams or the length of the cantilevered balconies or how the wall framework will divide an empty space or how the roof structure will finish off the building.

Image source:Shutterstock

While completed structures often look impressive, I find there’s more value in knowing how it all fits together (but that could be just me!). I think that’s why the practices of working out loud and showing your work appeal to me and I learn more from seeing how something was created as opposed to trying to figure it out when looking at the finished product.

Working in the eLearning space I often see people sharing some great samples of work and many times I wonder:
- How did they do that?
- Where did their ideas come from?
- How long did that take to create?
- Why did they do it that way?
I figure that I can’t be the only one who wonders these things and when someone shares this information, it’s like looking at their construction site and I’m happy to stop and take a look.

I’ve shared the ‘how’ behind some of the demos I’ve created, some examples are here and here and here. I don’t do it all the time and on reflection, it’s because I can be so caught up doing the work that I forget about sharing the work at different stages. So, it’s a habit I need to develop to make it part of the work.

From my experience, some ideas for showing your work are:
- Start with something small; share a part of a project or a tip or a discovery you’ve made.
- Find a method of documenting that works for you; it could be via blog post or a video or a photo or a tweet or a combination of these.
- Don’t worry about what other people think; the aim is to make your tacit knowledge visible.
- There’s no right or wrong way; I’m just making it up as I go but I do get ideas from what others do.
If we make time to document our planning and construction phases and then make this information public, there’d be many more opportunities for others to learn from our experiences. It might just encourage them to share what they know too.

After all, the best type of learning is when we learn from each other.

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September 2, 2015
Making Videos Interactive

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 #94 – Interactive Video: Visual Interviews in Online Training. The brief: This week your challenge is to create an interactive video interview.

Every so often David Anderson posts a weekly challenge that I know I want to participate in (even if it’s not in the current week) and this was one of those challenges. I haven’t done a whole lot with shooting my own videos (apart from the Smartphone Video challenge) so I wanted to have a go and complete this one at some point. I noticed that for some reason, there weren’t as many entries for this challenge and I wondered if folks thought that it would take too long or that they didn’t have the right equipment. My demo was put together fairly quickly (using myself as the victim, I mean subject, also saved some time) and my equipment was not high tech. While the result was a simple looking entry it still does the job and here’s how I did it.

On a recent plane trip for work, I mapped out my ideas on paper (as I usually like to do):

I didn’t want to create anything too big or too complex, so my idea was to use four questions and I would be in the centre of the screen with the questions around me. When you click on a question, the video answer would play. I also had an idea to add an ‘introduction’ clip which give some instruction as to what to do – so I’d need five clips altogether.

Over the past few weeks, I seen David and other Community members who had used video make them look more interesting by placing a cover over the video so that it didn’t have the standard rectangular video on a slide look. I really liked the idea and I wanted to try to do something similar. Here’s the slide with the video sitting on it:

and the same slide after the cover is put on:

I used PowerPoint to create my cover and the first thing I did was to set up my PPT slide in the same aspect ratio as my Storyline project (4:3). Then I inserted a rectangle the same size as the slide and then inserted a circle shape (with no fill) and positioned it in the centre of the rectangle. Then by selecting both shapes, I was able to use PowerPoint’s ‘Merge Shapes’ feature and ‘Combine’ to create a rectangle with a circular hole in the middle.

I filled the shape with my chosen blue colour and saved it as a picture that I was able to then insert into my Storyline project. I now had a cover!

In Storyline, the video intro sits on the slide itself (also known as the base layer) and each of the video answers sit on their own layer, so I also put my cover image on each layer too so that the demo would look the same as each layer is shown. I kept my questions simple and in keeping with the circle theme, I added four circles with a question in each. The triggers would be a simple ‘Show Layer’ when a question was clicked.

Now the framework of the demo was set and all I needed to do was record the video introduction along with the answers to each question. I don’t have a proper video camera or equipment, so I used Storyline’s ‘Record Webcam’ from the insert video options and recorded each of my answers using my laptop. As you can see my set up was very basic:

Yes, that’s our spare room which has all our clean washing that we need to put away (everyone has a room like that don’t they?) and my laptop is sitting on the clothes dryer to get the right height but you can’t tell from the clips although the sound quality could be better.

It took a few takes to get my eyes looking straight ahead and for me not to make a mistake with my answers, so it probably took about half an hour all up to record.

As I was putting the demo together, I had an idea that instead of separate video clips, I could include a GIF image of myself that would create the effect of me waiting for the next question. For this it sliced a five second clip of myself from one of my questions and went to a website called http://makeagif.com/ where I uploaded the clip and it created a looping GIF image for me that I could add into my demo.

Unfortunately this idea didn’t turn out as good as I would have liked for a couple of reasons, one was that the quality of the GIF wasn’t the same as the clips so it looked different and secondly I really needed to start and end each clip with the same pose and expression, which I tried to do but it didn’t quite work.

Because of this extra clip, I needed to add an extra layer to my project and the triggers became show the ‘GIF Layer’ after the introduction and then for each layer, it was show the ‘GIF Layer’ when the media completes (i.e. after each video on the layer had finished). So essentially the demo jumps from an answer layer to the GIF layer.

When I placed my videos on the slide and each layer, all I had to do was make sure the cover sat in from to the video file and adjust the position of the video so that my face is roughly in the middle of the circle.

After some testing and adding some animations I was ready to go. All up it took about four hours to put together and while it’s a simple demo, I think it works but you can see for yourself by clicking on the image below to launch the demo:

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

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August 25, 2015
Spinning Around with Storyline 2

A few years ago, before I was working with Articulate Storyline, I saw this cool interaction where you could spin a group of on screen images around in a circle. I later found out that this was referred to as a ‘carousel’.

While I liked the carousel when I first saw it, I haven’t see it around much – the closest I’ve come is where the images scroll from side to side. So I thought I’d try and build a circular carousel in Storyline 2. In my head, the way I saw the interaction working was by using a slider and as you move the slider along the images would rotate in a circle.

I was on the train on my way into work the other day and I started to sketch out my idea on paper. I always like to start this way no matter if it’s for a client project or a simple demo like this was going to be. I find that I can jot down ideas quickly and play with them on paper as I try to arrange and re-arrange my thoughts. So this is how it started:

Then once I have a bit of a clearer idea of where I’m going (it’s never usually finished or fully formed at this point) then I’ll start playing in the tool however I’m still experimenting at this point and I don’t actually know if my idea will work!

To start with I inserted a slider and four coloured rectangles onto a new slide just to get an idea of the layout. To help with the look of the interaction, I made the two rectangles behind the front one slightly smaller and the back one slightly smaller again to give the look of perspective – as the objects move around the carousel they’ll appear to move closer and then further away.

Initially, I thought I’d use a change of state and what would happen is that as you move the slider along, each rectangle would change its state and the new state would be the rectangle in the next position. I started with just two different coloured rectangles (so that I could keep track of which was which). Plus if I started with two and could get it to work, then I could add the other two. It turned out to be a good plan because using states proved to be unsuccessful.

The first two moves worked just fine:

But the next two didn’t:

The problem was that objects on a slide sit at different ‘levels’ depending on where they are in the timeline and in this case the blue rectangle is always going to be above the red one:

So it was back to the drawing board.

This time I thought I’d try it again but using separate layers for each position of the rectangle. That way I could control how the rectangles were arranged as each layer is shown. Thankfully, this way worked much better. Each time the slider moved a position, a different layer would show and because the rectangles are in a new position on each layer it gives the effect that they are moving in a circle:

The next step was to replace the shapes with images and see how it looks. I also decided to add a couple of extra pictures – meaning two extra layers. I wanted to make the front picture stand out so I increased the brightness of the front image and changed the back images to black and white and decreased their brightness. I did this on one image and then used format painter to apply the changes to the other images. I also adjusted the layout and sizing of the images slightly and in the end it turned out like this:

Click the image to view the working demo.

While it isn’t exactly how I envisaged it originally (in my head I wanted the movement from position to position to be much smoother but would be much more complex to create given the objects change size as they move) this method does give a revolving effect and I was happy with the end result. Maybe I could try using motion paths next time…

I reckon the slide could be used for images or videos or even as a different type of menu where you could click on the front image and jump to a topic. You can download the source file from here.

Note: I also want to develop more of a habit of working out loud so I tweeted my progress as I went. It’s the first time I’ve done that as I went along and not just at the end. It’s my habit in progress.

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July 19, 2015