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.
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E-learning can be intimidating. This collection of articles looks at elearning as part of a learning and development strategy.
The 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 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 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 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 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.
Continue reading5 Lessons Learned Writing Training for a Global Audience
We’ve been pretty busy over the past few years developing both instructor-led and elearning for a variety of organizations that are doing work around the world. As we’ve expanded projects with learners across the globe, we’ve learned a number of design lessons ourselves in the process.
If you happen to be working on training or learning projects with a global audience, perhaps these 5 lessons learned, as summarized by my colleagues Lauren Wescott and Erin Clarke, will help your projects move forward more smoothly.
Can you spot the difference between these two images?
7 Sites for Elearning Templates, Tutorials and Inspiration
Elearning projects are so much more fun to develop when you aren’t sitting at your screen, just staring, trying to determine how to bring that amazing idea in your mind to life with your authoring tool. Following are seven places you’ll be able to visit for inspiration, short tutorials or actual templates you can download and accelerate the pace of your development.
Some of these sites may be authoring-tool specific, but all of these sites will offer you ideas that can be transferred to whatever authoring tool you may be using.
Continue readingWhat’s on the horizon for L&D according to Andrew Scivally
Over the past two years, ELB Learning (formerly eLearning Brothers) has acquired 6 companies and, as you can see, has changed its name from eLearning Brothers to ELB Learning.
Last week I had a chance to sit down with the co-founder and CEO, Andrew Scivally, about the path that led him to start eLearning Brothers (alongside his brother), the evolution of the field of learning and development that led to the company’s name change, and his thoughts on the challenges that L&D professionals will need to be prepared to face over the next few years.
Continue readingWhen creating eLearning, these five differences between ILT and eLearning can be helpful to keep in mind
I’ve had a chance to work with a number of people who have a background in classroom facilitation or k-12 education, but who are just starting out in their journey as eLearning designers.
In today’s podcast, I walk through five big differences between instructor-led training and eLearning, and I also offer a few ways to navigate, and in some cases take advantage of, these differences when creating eLearning experiences.
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