Two of my colleagues, Hannah Radant and Lindsay Garcia, have made the transition from k-12 classroom teacher to elearning developer with striking success. They recently spent some time talking with me about what they found transferable from their teaching roles to their current roles, and how they’ve been able to overcome challenges, including the lack of confidence in their ability to do this work.
Continue readingThe Challenges of Creating a Wordle in Storyline
Wordle has captured the minds of many, with a simple, yet challenging concept. Guess a word through trial and error, hints along the way, and a little bit of luck. When our team was brainstorming ways to prepare learners to engage in a new topic, we decided to use a Wordle-type puzzle as an anchor activity with a little bit of a twist. Paired with a hint about the word, the learner is challenged to think about the upcoming content while also being presented with an intriguing problem.
If you’re into Wordle, or if you simply want to see what it is that I’m writing about, then take a few moments to play our little Storyline-based version of the Wordle (read on to find out why you shouldn’t open it on your phone). What follows is how we created it and some of the challenges we had to address.
Continue readingAdvice for Starting Your Own Training Consultancy
Jason Meucci and Eric Girard both left the comfort and stability of working inside of larger companies in order to start their own training consultancies. While the scheduling flexibility and opportunity to “be their own boss” have been nice, they shared with me some of the challenges they’ve faced and some advice they have for anyone out there who may be considering the idea of starting their own training business.
Continue reading4 Things to Consider Before Translating Your eLearning for a Global Audience
As Instructional Designers we are always looking for creative ways to engage learners and teach content within a training. One of our (the team at Endurance Learning’s) proud moments of brilliance came in the form of a crossword puzzle. The idea: Define a few concepts and then assess the learner by having them complete a crossword puzzle to see if they can match the term to the definition.
It was super cool!
Until the client told us they needed it translated into Spanish.
Continue readingQuiet Quitting for Training Professionals
Yes, I shamelessly jumped on board the “quiet quitting” bandwagon this week with a podcast around how training professionals can adopt some sort of boundaries when it comes to the work we’re asked to do.
Continue reading4 Tips for Creating More Accessible eLearning Courses in Storyline using Alt Text
How inclusive are your learning programs?
If I was asked this several years ago, I’d have rolled my eyes. Of course I strive to make my courses inclusive! I scour stock photo sites to find images that aren’t just white males. I make sure the names in case studies are generally representative of the learners.
There’s much more to fostering an inclusive learning environment than simply images and names. In today’s post, my colleague Lindsay Garcia describes a key feature of elearning that can make self-guided, asynchronous online modules more accessible and inclusive.
Continue readingCreating Better PowerPoint Decks, Faster
It’s so easy to simply open up PowerPoint and start cranking out a deck for training. It’s also a little too easy to make a poor training session that way. My colleague, Erin Clarke, has spent a lot of time recently on projects requiring PowerPoint presentations, and in today’s post she shares some helpful hints (and a template) for how to organize your thoughts before throwing those slides together.
Sometimes it’s helpful to get a “peek behind the curtain” and see what other people’s internal processes look like. In my many years as a one person training department, I often found myself googling things like “storyboard example” or “sample script” to get an idea of what best practices were out there. In the end, someone else’s exact processes don’t matter much, as long as what you are doing works for you. Of course, borrowing some things that could be useful from someone else and then leaving the rest is what all sorts of creative people have been doing since time began. So in that spirit, I want to share what we’re doing at Endurance Learning to organize our thoughts when it comes to creating PowerPoint decks and invite you to find what’s useful (and discard the rest)!
Continue readingCreating Elearning that Feels More Like a Dynamic, Facilitated Session
Keeping learners engaged in elearning with a limited number of interaction types is always a challenge. To make courses more engaging and give our customers more ways to solve problems, it is good to occasionally push the boundaries and try something different. In response to an E-Learning Heroes community challenge, I chose to make a simple 3 slide interaction in a pro/con list format. It allows the learner to enter some basic information about their dilemma, move forward to drill down on the potential pros and cons of their decision, and finally view the results. Problem solved!
Continue readingAn Easy Form of Low-cost, Immediately Applicable Team Development
A few weeks ago, a former colleague emailed me this note:
Today I introduced your book to my ID team at work and will be running through the exercises to define how we can advance the company’s training modalities. Just want to say thank you for creating this valuable resource and for building an intuitive website that centralizes various resources along with the related podcast episodes.
This has been helpful for some of our trainers who are really the department SMEs and for our instructional designers who are learning to incorporate different training elements in their projects. Your book is a definite win for the team!
While I’m always happy to receive positive feedback from someone who has read my book, I was curious to hear a little more about her team book club, how they went about organizing it, and what specifically had changed. Last week I had an opportunity to get some answers from Dustin Cole, Carlos Merlo and Jessica Bailey, all people who are responsible for training at Unifi.
Continue reading5 Ways that isEazy Makes Content Development, well, Easy!
There are lots of articles out there about elearning development that suggest “you should do _____” or “it’s so simple to _____”. While maybe you should do whatever the article is talking about, and maybe it is simple for the author, sometimes it’s not so easy for the reader.
In today’s post, my colleagues Hannah Radant and Lindsay Garcia go beyond the “you should’s” and “it’s so easy’s”, and just point you in the direction of an actual tool that can really make things simple for you. If you need to develop a self-guided, asynchronous elearning module, Hannah and Lindsay offer you five good reasons that isEazy is a tool you’ll want to check out. You may have heard of Articulate’s Rise authoring tool. isEazy is similar in the way you can quickly develop slick-looking elearning modules, and it seems to offer more templated layouts than you’ll find in Rise.
Don’t get us wrong, we love Articulate products like Rise, but for those who are searching for a tool or an alternative, isEazy is a pretty nice option.
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