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Tag: WOL

10 Blogs Every eLearning Professional Should Read

Recently my friend Ryan Tracey posted a list of 10 journals every e-learning professional should read in response to my list of 5 Books Every eLearning Professional Should Read which was in response to his 5 papers every learning professional should read (this feeling like the blogging equivalent to a game of tennis).

So I’m returning the ball with a list of blogs that are worth checking out if you are an eLearning professional and you are looking to improve your craft as each blog is written by someone working in the field. They’re a mixture of writing styles and content – sharing practical tips, showing their work and lessons learned, looking towards the future of online learning and some offer reflections on their own personal learning. Many of these folks can also be found on Twitter and LinkedIn.

The one thing that each blog has in common is that the author is making a positive contribution to the wider eLearning field (IMHO).

Here’s each of the blog authors listed in alphabetical order (click on a name to go to their site):

Kristin Anthony – Kristin also has a podcast series called ‘Dear ID’ where she interviews instructional designers

Helen Blunden – Activate Learning Solutions

Donald Clark – Plan B

Tom Kuhlmann – The Rapid E-Learning blog

Melissa Milloway Mel’s Learning Lab (Mel also writes articles via LinkedIn)

Cathy Moore – Saving the world from boring training

Clark Quinn – Learnlets

Mike Taylor – Ask. Learn. Share

Will Thalheimer – Will at Work Learning

Christy Tucker – Experiencing E-Learning

I’m also adding Ryan Tracey himself whose blog I came across a few years ago and s one of the first I started to read on a regular basis.

Feel free to add to this list via the comments below.

Image from Morguefile.

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February 19, 2017
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
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):

Using 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:

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.

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September 19, 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