Learn. Show. Repeat.

Tag: eLearning

  • 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.

    Crowd of people

    Image source: Shutterstock

  • Rules of Engagement

    shutterstock_144207847

    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

  • 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):

    Slide layer propertiesUsing 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:

    Show layer trigger

    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.

    quiz style interaction demo

  • Continuing with Content Curation

    Since my last post on curating content, I’ve been keeping an eye out for articles and posts that discuss this topic especially for L&D folks. Generally speaking I find that lots of people are saying that curation will be a required skill for L&D but these same people are either not practicing curators or getting into the detail of how to curate content.

    One of the challenges I can see regarding content curation is finding ‘quality’ content in a sea of information. With such a huge volume you can’t be across everything but maybe that’s ok? Then what about sub-categories of content? As an example, in eLearning there’s content about authoring tools, learning theory, accessibility, graphic design, writing and many more.

    So some questions I’ve been thinking about are:

    Can the curated content be a mixed bag that falls under a common theme or is it better to sort by a category? For example eLearning or something more specific such as learning theory?

    How do you keep track of content you find from different sources?

    What tools are there to help with curating?

    How do you build skills in curation? (I’m taking the jump in and give it a go approach).

    Here’s my attempt at curating some content about content curation. The reason for selecting these particular posts was that they provide some diverse perspectives into content curation as well as a couple of examples of curated content (click the title to view).

    A Framework for Content Curation by Ryan Tracey

    In this post, Ryan proposes a practical framework for curating content. Built upon Tell me, Show me, Let me, Test me and focusing on quality being more important than quantity. The comments section is also a good read.

    We are the Curators of the Learning Revolution by Ruth McElhone

    As learning and development professionals move towards being curators in a world where there’s ample information, this post provides three good starting points for content curation.

    Seven Approaches to Content Curation by Marc Rosenberg

    I hadn’t thought of different approaches to curation until I read this post where Marc describes seven different approaches to curating content. Keep an eye out for Marc’s other articles on the topic.

    Content Curation for Learning by Anders Pink

    This is a FREE eBook from the folks at Anders Pink all about curation – why curation matters, the role of learning professionals in curation, examples and more.

    Content Curation, How can it be used? by Lorraine Minister

    Lorraine commented below and left a link to a post that describes a model she developed about different levels of content curation.

    eLearning Guild Twist

    A carefully selected list of articles on a variety of L&D topics for the Guild’s community that comes out every week. In my opinion a good example of content curation.

    A Week in Review by David Anderson

    Another example of curation, each week David gathers links to demos, discussions, articles and more that all come from the E-Learning Heroes Community.

    Pick of the Posts by Jane Hart

    Jane does a monthly curated post but hers is focused around a particular topic area. For the month of August it was posts about social learning.

    deathtostock_wired6

  • 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.

    Screencasting

    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.