Throughout high school and college, I was a DJ at the college radio station. As technology improved around the turn of this century, our little radio station became much more automated, and the massive compact disk library moved to digital files. One thing that didn’t change before I left college was the soundboard that we used to fade music and microphones and do some light mixing. Continue reading
Elearning
E-learning can be intimidating. This collection of articles looks at elearning as part of a learning and development strategy.
eLearning Interactions: Comic Strip Panels
Comic strips tell a story in a linear timeline that read from left to right. Anyone who opened a newspaper as a kid, read comic books or graphic novels, or has ever seen a panel meme is familiar with the style of storytelling.
One obstacle in eLearning is that our participants cannot tell us a story. Continue reading
eLearning Interactions: Puzzles!
Last week, we began looking at some of the limitations of eLearning interactions, and how to work within those constraints. Your comments and feedback indicated that this is a topic of interest to many of you. Over the coming weeks, we will continue to discuss effective ways to design eLearning interactions on the Thursday posts to this blog. Continue reading
Quiz Style eLearning Interactions
eLearning instructional design has different challenges and advantages than instructor-led training. Interactions are limited to the learner interacting with keyboard and mouse functions, and you have to shift your thinking of how an interaction is executed. eLearning design can be a challenge for those of us who spend most of our time designing instructor-led training. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be covering various eLearning interactions and how to incorporate them into your eLearning courses. Continue reading
Word Export for Storyline Reviews
Reviews and feedback are critical to making any project a success. That feedback coming in a meaningful and useful way can be challenging, especially when faced with timelines and with several content experts. By the time a project is at the development phase of an eLearning project, many decisions should be final. However, feedback is still very important at this stage, and not always easy to document. Continue reading
Periodic Table of eLearning
A few weeks ago, Brian introduced the periodic table of learning. In his post, he discussed this table from an instructor-led training perspective. Training isn’t isolated to instructor-led training (ILT) programs and I thought it might be fun to look at the application of the Elements of Amazing Learning Experiences from an eLearning perspective. Continue reading
Tying It Together with Thesis Statements
Recently, our team developed an eLearning module and during testing, we realized it was overwhelming to take in all of the information. It started to feel a bit like cognitive overload, and we needed to find a creative way to present content in smaller, more pithy ways. The content was right, the subject matter had been reviewed, it just lacked a bit of clarity. Continue reading
What’s most important when you need to take a “Mobile-first” instructional design approach?
Last week I was talking with a team in Uganda to scope out an elearning project.
“Tell me about the audience. Do they have computers and reliable Internet at home? Would they take the courses in an office with an Internet connection?”
“Actually,” the response came, “some would gather around a computer in an office, but many others would probably need to use their smartphones.”
I paused. For whatever reason, I hadn’t anticipated this response.
Our client asked: “So what implications does that have for the design of this project?” Continue reading
After certificates have been handed out, how does training continue to live?
I’m currently working with a client who needs to deliver the same online training program to two different audiences. The first audience is located in their US-based headquarters, the second audience is located in regional offices around the world.
The headquarters has a thriving community of practice for training alumni that meets regularly, in-person. Furthermore, the headquarters has a critical mass of people in this role who can see each other in the break room, daily meetings, the hallway or walking by one another’s desks for informal conversations about challenges and key learnings.
People in regional offices are a little more isolated when it comes to ongoing opportunities for informal learning that can reinforce the initial training. So what are regional and remote staff to do?
Online Communities of Practice
Technology offers a lot of opportunities to shrink the distance between people and allow for greater communication, yet the ability to seed an active online community of practice remains elusive to many organizations. Continue reading
Making Your LMS More Valuable For Your Employees
If you’re anything like I am, you’ve tried to bring people to your LMS on several occasions, adding courses that your data suggests are needs for your organization. For all the promise that online learning holds – with its 24/7 access, no-need-to-travel-for-training – many organizations continue to struggle to bring their employees to their online learning platform.
Having worked with several organizations that have invested significantly in online learning, there seem to be three letters often missing from resources uploaded to an LMS.
Those three letters are: Continue reading