A few related resources:

• 58 Tips for Breakthrough eLearning Instructional Design
• Thinking Outside the Toolbox

Afterward, I’ll post more recommended resources here, both from me and (hopefully) the session participants.

More Share/Save Options

I drank Chainbreaker White IPA and Brian drank Angry Goat.

More Share/Save Options

Cammy Bean:

When your business partners know that they can trust you, when they know you are going to follow through, you have more opportunity to push them toward better, more creative, solutions.

Kevin Thorn:

You can never take for granted the extra 10 minutes you have at lunch to grab a book or find a tutorial. Because today, there is no excuse for not learning your craft.

Craig Wiggins:

Some of the research we’ve uncovered is that L&D professionals don’t challenge their peers, they don’t challenge their clients, and they don’t always advocate for the best possible learning creations. And that’s unfortunate, because that’s how we can bring value.

Abigail Wheeler:

…Being sensitive to the culture of an organization—and learning as much as you can about the organization as you begin the work—can go a long way toward making everyone more comfortable, especially if moving into eLearning production is a new experience for many involved.

More Share/Save Options

You can spend $800,000 on a certain special effect, and the audience can yawn. Enhance it with a genuine laugh and the audience is vibrating

— Ruben Bolling (@RubenBolling) May 5, 2012

More Share/Save Options

More Share/Save Options

Proposals will be accepted May 7th through June 11th and the conference will be in San Jose, January 30th – Feb 1, 2013. Complete instructions and submission form here.

See you in San Jose!

More Share/Save Options

E-Learning Uncovered: Articulate Storyline, by Diane Elkins and Desiree Ward at Artisan E-Learning, is available from CreateSpace or Amazon. If you go the CreateSpace route, use code 97H8TCFF for 20% off through May 7th. There’s a free chapter available on the book’s website.

There’s another one on the horizon, as well: Storyline for Starters, by Phil Mayor, Steve Flowers, and Russell Still. Contents and some helpful resources are on their website and you can sign up to be notified when the book is ready.

Any books available that I haven’t seen? Feel free to post updates here.

More Share/Save Options

Check out the session information here, and when you register, be sure to use the code JudyKeynote for a 25% discount — special for onehundredfortywords readers. If you’re not able to attend, follow hashtag #leapahead. Hope to see you there!

More Share/Save Options

1. overhyping it
2. downplaying it (common among vendors whose tools don’t do HTML5 output), or
3. making promises that their tool doesn’t support (not relevant here, as ZebraZapps currently doesn’t do HMTL5 output at all).

But speaking of that last item… I have to consider this paper an sign, kind of like how Michael Allen and Ethan Edwards blogged for a couple of years about more powerful authoring tools prior to the launch of ZebraZapps. They have already acknowledged that they’re working on HTML5 output in response to ToolBar Episode #8… so maybe this means they’re close.

More Share/Save Options

And at the same time… Less and less do I consider courses the answer. These days I’m working more on performance support, small interactions, communities, and games. I’m increasingly concerned about responsiveness and appropriateness of the content to the delivery environment and device. I’m very concerned about the ways in which the content reports interaction data for storage and analysis. And this isn’t new; what’s new is how much I’m starting to prefer these delivery methods over courses.

I’m thinking more expansively about design and looking more and more at tools outside of the “elearning authoring” world.

Shakeups are good. I encourage using this one to re-examine strategies and design processes in addition to comparing tool features. Courses may still suit your needs, but don’t choose them just because the tools enable their easy creation.

More Share/Save Options

What makes Storyline a departure is that it’s a best all-around. It’s as powerful as Lectora. It’s as easy as Articulate Studio. It has all of PowerPoint’s slick graphic tools. It has killer screencasting — better than Captivate. It’s ahead of any of the rapid power tools in mobile and HTML5 publishing. And possibly its best feature is the community that Articulate has fostered around its tools, many members of which are active in promoting not only on better use of the software, but better instructional design.

I’m thrilled with all of those features and it’s about time that learning designers had a tool that serves good course design this well.

…And Why It Isn’t.

More Share/Save Options

Today’s was from Connie Malamad: 10 Ways to Occupy eLearning. In it, she puts together some of the best messages for the learning community to hear right now, including not being an order-taker, getting out of your design rut using Thiagi’s 4 Door Model, making prototypes, learning from other fields… she’s on fire! Love it, love it, love it. When you visit, be sure to add your own idea.

It also reminded me of a post of hers called Is Design Thinking Missing From ADDIE? that she pointed me to at Learning Solutions, in response to my post-UTAOU post. We had a conversation about learning processes and techniques from other design fields… something that she is already exploring well on her blog.

Rock on, Connie!

More Share/Save Options

I haven’t done an incredibly deep dive yet, but the chapters I’ve read are conversational, well explained, and illustrated using realistic examples. Lee has also provided project files to practice on (free in the Zapps marketplace) and screencasts. The two things I find most impressive, though, are the attention he gives to higher-end features (often overlooked in software guides) and the amount of the book (almost half!) that is devoted to guided practice on a reasonably advanced project.

All in all, this book and the accompanying resources seem like an efficient and fun way to go from novice to proficient.

The Starter’s Guide to ZebraZapps is available for Kindle and Nook for a reasonable $9.95, and the book’s website allows you to download Chapter 1 for free.

More Share/Save Options

Now, there are plenty of things Curious George encounters that would never happen in real life, but bad user interface design is not one of them. Take this unfortunate example. And, well, the vast majority of enterprise software, which for the most part doesn’t kill, but wastes incredible amounts of time and money in lost productivity, decreased morale, and unnecessary training development. Mostly, buyers seem to put up with it because they don’t understand those costs or don’t feel like they have better options.

That thought always gets me down, so I re-read this article written by Marcia Conner at the beginning of this year. I love her parting words:

Start now. Pressure your vendors to do better. Don’t settle. Run simple usability testing with eight new hires. If you must, have a transition plan.

Be courageous and doggedly determined to create a healthy year.

More Share/Save Options

Some parts of the post had me scratching my head and checking for updates to make sure there weren’t new features in Lectora that I wasn’t aware of. Even more of it just muddies the waters on HTML5, mobile delivery, and mobile design… waters that really could use more clarity now, not more confusion.

Here are a few passages, with my comments.

Lectora leads the way for mobile learning capabilities as the only major e-Learning to HTML5 authoring tool on the market. Whether you plan to implement a mobile strategy on smartphones and tablets to provide job aids and performance support or want to deliver mobile access to all of your training materials, Lectora e-Learning software makes it easy.

As is fairly typical with anything written by elearning authoring tool vendors, this bit is the only nod given to performance support, which is a far more appropriate use of smartphones than teensy tiny courses. Maybe I’ve missed it, but I haven’t seen any resources from Trivantis on using Lectora for performance support. Their mobile templates, sized for the iPhone, are just resized website and course templates with too-small hit areas for buttons and links and lots of space wasted onscreen.

Tips and How-tos for Mobile Learning with Lectora

• Create mLearning Content – This recorded webinar will discuss the capabilities of Lectora for your mobile learning content, provide tips for sizing and content development as well as a few examples of mobile learning in action.

Again, promoting courses on mobile devices… not a terrible thing on tablets, but generally a bad thing on smartphones. And the mobile advantages that are listed at the end of the post aren’t even necessarily things that you can develop with Lectora — in particular, augmented reality.

• Build Engaging Games for Mobile Devices – Watch this recorded webinar to learn how to create custom games from scratch – without using Flash.

Yes, you can totally build games from scratch using Lectora, but “from scratch”, in this case, shouldn’t invoke the warm and fuzzy connotation of eating your mom’s homemade biscuits. It means custom-building your own games because all of Lectora’s pre-built “games” are Flash-based. Truthfully, though, since I would never use Lectora’s pre-builts, it’s kind of a moot point for me.

• Lectora e-Learning Leads the Way with HTML5 Support – Learn how Lectora continues to lead the way with mobile capabilities for your learners.

Well… yes and no, and mostly no. The elearning authoring tool industry right now is pretty much a three-legged dog race in terms of HTML5 publishing, and Lectora is toward the front. As I wrote in the T+D article that Trivantis quotes under the above link, right now we have older tools that have always published to HTML (Lectora and ToolBook) and newer tools that publish to HTML5 more reliably, but aren’t as powerful (and therefore I have little interest in them). ToolBook takes advantage of some features that are new in HTML5, such as geolocation, but as I wrote in that same article, Trivantis hasn’t done much yet to take advantage of the new parts of the HTML5 specification. That is still the case.

So you may be wondering why Lectora is so often mentioned as an HTML5 development tool and why Trivants feels free to do so. Here’s my guess: HTML5 includes most of the elements of previous versions of HTML, so any tool that publishes to HTML can be claimed, at least partially, to publish to HTML5. But unless the tool is publishing features and elements that are HTML5-specific, such as geolocation, canvas, and audio and video tags, it’s a very misleading claim. When I write and speak about tools that publish to HTML, I’m very clear on those limitations.

Personally, I don’t care whether Lectora is the only “major” authoring tool that publishes to HTML. I don’t even care whether an authoring tool is supposed to be used for elearning. I just care whether the tool will serve my design and deliver in the format my audience needs on the devices they need to access it on. Things being as they are, I have to agree with Chad Udell about the current elearning tool market (as quoted by Cammy Bean at the recent ASTD Learn Now): “Anything that’s out there now, is not doing it well. If you want to build high quality mobile learning apps, you have to use dedicated mobile tooling.”

If you are using Lectora to create content that will be accessed on mobile devices, I highly recommend this post by Diane Elkins on the E-Learning Uncovered blog, which details which features in Lectora create content that works properly in iOS and which don’t… and I second her recommendation to test, test, test. Trivantis also links to Diane’s tests, reporting that 13 of the 17 features tested work, which they seem to think is a good thing. To me, 24% of features that don’t work is enough for me to get out of my comfort zone a bit and see what tools the wider web development world has to offer in terms of publishing to HTML5.

Shall we sum this up?

• Lectora is a good elearning development tool… one of my favorites, actually. But I would not describe it as a fully fledged HTML5 publishing tool, and in my opinion, it’s pretty brazen of them to do so.
• Publishing to HTML — or even HTML5 — is not the same thing as creating good mlearning.
• If you’re expecting your Lectora content to work on your learners’ iPads, you should check out the testing published on the E-Learning Uncovered blog and be ready to do lots of testing.
• If you’re creating mlearning, you need to think differently about design (and not just visual design), and for development, you’re best served by looking outside of the current elearning authoring tool set.

Agree? Disagree? Have I overlooked something? Feel free to let me know in the comments or on Twitter.

Update: When I posted this, I commented on one of Trivantis’s posts with a link to this post, and in a separate comment, linked to the full text of the T+D article I wrote that they quoted so liberally (and took such liberties with). The next morning, my comments were gone. It baffles me why any company or any blogger would choose to take this route, but I still invite them to address my (and other users’) concerns here, on their blog, or on Twitter.

More Share/Save Options

This book is so accessible… you can jump in at any point that’s interesting to you and just explore. And the author has distilled lots of great research into powerful and easily applicable lessons for designers.

Check it out at Learning Solutions Magazine and if you’ve read the book, share the love… feel free to tweet your thoughts or your favorite of the 100 “things” at #lswellread.

More Share/Save Options

I’m thrilled to share that this episode features Jason Early, founder of Gruntmonkey, mentor at Code Academy (not to be confused with Codecademy, by the way), and all-around kick-ass Designer. And I’m going to steal his synopsis of the show, since I like it better than what I wrote on the Emergent Radio site:

This week I was a guest on #TheToolBar, talking Design, Education, and Giving a Damn w/ @briandusablon & @jkunrein. bit.ly/JD9YPL

— gruntmonkey LLC. (@gruntmonkey) April 24, 2012

Jason drank Grimbergen Dubbel, Brian drank Left Coast Brewing Company Una Mas Amber, and I drank Fremont Brewery Interurban IPA.

More Share/Save Options

And while I do think there is value in those conversations, my primary concern about the gamification trend is less about the terminology being used and more about the possibility that the hype will continue to promote the creation of two things in the broad field of learning design and development:

- interactions that are amusing but not meaningful (which are already promoted by so many authoring tools promising easy engagement), and

- learning games that are just lame… perhaps the content is meaningful, but the addition of game mechanics isn’t.

Knowing how challenging game design is and keeping those possible undesirable effects in mind, I decided to read The Gamification of Learning and Instruction with one lens only:

Assuming you are a typical instructional designer — whatever that means — what will you gain from this book?

And here are my answers to that question.

1) Possibly more than anything else, you will be able to articulate why and in what circumstances games can be more effective than other learning interventions. It may sound trivial, but full-on game development is more expensive and time-consuming (so, again, expensive) than ordinary elearning and stakeholders may not consider “games” to be serious, effective solutions. So instructional designers who want to explore game design (or explore hiring a game design company) may well need facts, research studies, and either a full round of ammo or +10 to charisma to get their points across.

2) You will have an appreciation for how many pitfalls there are in educational game design. And I think this is a good thing… not to discourage designers from stretching their skills, but to discourage them from doing so lightly and creating, as I said, lame designs.

3) You will be familiar with some of the reasons that people play games in ways that go far beyond “because they’re fun”. In particular, I liked Kapp’s inclusion of Richard Bartle’s gamer types, because they help us understand that different people will derive value from different aspects of gameplay. Designing to those preferences may or may not improve the outcomes of the game, but knowing about them is a start.

4) You will learn about a variety of games created for both educational and corporate use. This is an extremely important part of skill development for me and pretty much all instructional designers that I know; seeing examples is great first scaffolding for skill-building.

5) You will be encouraged to learn more about games in the best possible way — by playing them!

Truthfully, there are many more reasons to read this book, but now I have to come back to the original lens and ask what a typical instructional designer would be able to do with these gains. Will you go out and create large-scale, well-balanced serious games? No. But I do think you’ll have a good background to determine whether a game is an appropriate learning intervention, hire a game development vendor and evaluate game designs from a much more educated standpoint, and, if you want, dip your toes into designs of your own… even if just for practice.

All in all, this is a great resource to gain a foundation in the aspects of game design for learning.

The Gamification of Learning and Instruction by Dr. Karl Kapp is available through ASTD* or Amazon.

* Don’t forget your local chapter code — or if you don’t have one, use CH8029 to support mine!

More Share/Save Options

As you might have seen in Learning Circuits, Dr. Karl Kapp’s Gamification Blog Book Tour Starts Today.

Be sure to check out all of the blogs involved — linked up on the Learning Circuits post above — including this one. I had the privilege of making a small contribution to this book and will participate in the tour later this week.

Congratulations to Dr. Karl on the book release! I look forward to visiting the blog-stops over the next couple of weeks.

More Share/Save Options

Brian and I catch up on the comings and goings of the last few months while we’ve been busy with stuff other than podcasting.

Brian drank Guinness and I drank Le Freak Ale.

More Share/Save Options

…last night’s experience reminded me the power of good design, and the pure joy it is to work with a professional designer. Someone who’s dedicated their life to be able to create something specific.

It prompted me to reflect on what it’s like to work with me as a designer. Am I an order taker (sadly, I’ve been that before), a naysayer (at times, I’ve been that too), or a professional who can take an idea that someone has and deftly tease out the important parts to keep, the actionable parts, the parts to help them let go of… and then help them start on a path toward a solution?

Good reminder of what that experience is like from the other side.

More Share/Save Options

1) that poor visual/interaction design can be excused for “sophisticated users” (sometimes couched in “digital native” terminology in our field), and

2) that poor visual/interaction design can be compensated for with a few onscreen instructions (or a How to Use This Course screen).

It’s not that the “sophisticated user” doesn’t exist; it’s that…

…better design benefits everyone. Having a proficient audience is no excuse to slack off. You’re still designing for human beings, and human beings, one and all, have better things to do than try to make sense of a weak design.

Word.

More Share/Save Options

In addition to ADL’s upcoming webinar on April 5, lots of other resources and learning opportunities have been announced this week, including:

• Tim P. Martin’s upcoming webinar for DC-ASTD’s Tech SIG
• Aaron Silvers’s post on the philosophy behind Tin Can and the future of SCORM
• Megan Bowe’s outstanding exploration of what the Tin Can API does and some of the implications for learning about our learners (using the Tetris prototype from scorm.com)

Have more? Share with others… send a tweet or comment below!

More Share/Save Options

This month, I re-read Drive, a book that I’ve wanted to write about for some time. It was somewhat of a challenge because he calls into serious question the very culture that so much of a corporate instructional designer’s work comes out of… it can be daunting to even think about where to start applying these concepts.

I’ve given some starting points in this column, but I’m sure you have more. Feel free to pitch in at Learning Solutions Magazine!

More Share/Save Options

Others who deal with the technical aspects of HTML5 development are continuing to do great advocacy work — chief among them, Nick Floro — so rather than repeating the same information in articles and presentations, I’ve created and am planning to maintain a permanent “curation” of resources for HTML5 learning development, right here on onehundredfortywords.

And here it is: HTML5 Resources for the Learning Community

This will be a living collection, so if you have suggestions, questions, or comments, please feel free to comment here or on the resources page, or send me a tweet.

More Share/Save Options

Yesterday’s post from the ADL announcing a kickoff webinar for Next Generation SCORM (aka Project Tin Can) reminded me that I’ve been wanting to get a better feel for how this emerging standard works, so I spent a bit of time playing with the prototypes that I learned about at DevLearn 2011 (yeah, I know… procrastination what?).

This has been a really interesting idea to me since I first started hearing about it last year; I’ve done a couple of projects in which I wanted to track and report on much more than completion and score (including my M.Ed. capstone project) and in previous versions of SCORM, I had to sort through a lot of suspend data to get what I needed. If Tin Can can easily report granular enough information to serve a research project, it’s interesting to think of what other learner stories it could help you tell.

You can make your own prototypes at scorm.com, and while I haven’t taken that step yet, I thought it would be interesting to look at the data generated in my capstone project and compare that to what output would look like in Tin Can.

A little background: I built two versions of a course with one slight difference, and I built in some variable storage on the back end so that I could go back and look at how much the learners explored within each version of the course. (In other words, I had Lectora add data to a variable string for each time a link was accessed and each time a page was loaded, then had it retain variables so that all of that would be saved in the suspend data.)

This is the suspend data for one learner/tester using SCORM 1.2…

VarResourcesUsed=*P01*P02*P03*P18*P20*P18*P04*P05*P27*P06*P07*P08*P09*L35
*P10*L37*P11*P12*P31*P32*P14*P33;VarS01=Strongly%20Agree;VarS03=Strongly%
20Agree;VarS02=Strongly%20Agree;VarQ05=YouTube;VarQ04=To%20create%20a%20s
trong%2C%20memorable%20impression;VarQ03=LinkedIn;VarQ02=Join%20only%20as
%20many%20networks%20and%20groups%20as%20you%20have%20time%20to%20contrib
ute%20to%20well.;VarQ01=Mention%20how%20you%20met%20or%20rewrite%20the%20
message%20to%20personalize%20it%20in%20some%20way.;VarD105=I%20prefer%20n
ot%20to%20say;VarD104=Some%20college%20or%20Associate%27s%20degree;VarD10
3=White;VarD102=18-25;VarD101=Female;VarCourseVersion=1;

…and this is what that same activity would look like using Tin Can:

{time/date} Amy selected “Strongly Agree” for Survey Question 01
{time/date} Amy selected “Strongly Agree” for Survey Question 03
{time/date} Amy selected “Strongly Agree” for Survey Question 02
{time/date} Amy selected “YouTube” for Quiz Question 05
{time/date} Amy selected “To create a strong, memorable impression” for Quiz Question 04
{time/date} Amy selected “LinkedIn” for Quiz Question 03
{time/date} Amy selected “Join only as many networks and groups as you have time to contribute to well.” for Quiz Question 02
{time/date} Amy selected “Mention how you met or rewrite the message to personalize it in some way.” for Quiz Question 01
{time/date} Amy loaded page 33
{time/date} Amy loaded page 14
{time/date} Amy loaded page 32
{time/date} Amy loaded page 31
{time/date} Amy loaded page 12
{time/date} Amy loaded page 11
{time/date} Amy accessed link 35
{time/date} Amy loaded page 10
{time/date} Amy accessed link 35
{time/date} Amy loaded page 09
{time/date} Amy loaded page 08
{time/date} Amy loaded page 07
{time/date} Amy loaded page 06
{time/date} Amy loaded page 27
{time/date} Amy loaded page 05
{time/date} Amy loaded page 04
{time/date} Amy loaded page 18
{time/date} Amy loaded page 20
{time/date} Amy loaded page 18
{time/date} Amy loaded page 03
{time/date} Amy loaded page 02
{time/date} Amy loaded page 01
{time/date} Amy selected “I prefer not to say” for Demographic Question 05
{time/date} Amy selected “Some college or Associate's degree” for Demographic Question 04
{time/date} Amy selected “White” for Demographic Question 03
{time/date} Amy selected “18-25” for Demographic Question 02
{time/date} Amy selected “Female” for Demographic Question 01
{time/date} Amy started Course Version 1

Obviously it’s much cleaner, but the primary benefit in terms of data analysis is that all of the activities are discreet items that can be collected and analyzed. So it seems to be both more human-readable and more machine-readable.

Also, storing all of this in the suspend data isn’t exactly a best practice in elearning development, so while suspend data can be used to report on interactions, your LMS database may not actually be built to store that much data. I have to imagine that storage that accommodates Tin Can records would have to be more robust (indeed, that’s listed as a weakness on scorm.com), but at the same time, wouldn’t it be an advantage to plan/build for what you want to use?

If you’re yet not familiar with Tin Can and want to learn more, I recommend starting with scorm.com’s overview, capabilities list, and weaknesses list. And of course, there’s the webinar linked above, which will take place on April 5th. Also, this is probably the first post of many as I continue to learn about this topic; feel free to jump in with questions, comments, and ideas, and other resources, and maybe we can get some of the leaders on this project to respond, too.

Update: I really should be referring to the technology as the Tin Can API now, rather than Project Tin Can. 

More Share/Save Options

The diagrams are based on a revision of the taxonomy from Slide:ology, and they’re categorized as flows, joins, networks, segments, and stacks. Each is available as a downloadable and fully customizable PPT; change sizes, colors, text, etc. at will. Best uses: inspiration on representing data and information, and speed up graphic development.

I’m not a big fan of templates, but I love ones that save development time without locking you into a certain look, feel, or interaction. These definitely qualify.

onehundredfortywords readers can use the code 3forfree for 3 free diagrams. Enjoy!

More Share/Save Options

The Wilderness Downtown
All Is Not Lost
Nike Better World
MTA.me (And I think I forgot to mention that you can also “play” the routes by clicking or plucking!)

After a brief overview of some of the challenges facing those working on HTML5 delivery, we talked about some of the best tools you can use to deliver web-standard multimedia. As promised, I’m posting the links here.

One of the questions asked was how to learn more about HTML5. I’m putting together a permanent page on this site to answer that question and more; stay tuned!

Update: Here’s that permanent page on HTML5 resources that I promised.

Update: Thanks to all who blogged and tweeted this session, including Kelly Meeker of Open Sesame and Sumeet Moghle, The Learning Generalist. You guys make me blush.

More Share/Save Options

A few Q&As from the table:

Q: I have legacy content that was created in Articulate Studio. What’s the easiest way to publish it for tablets?
A: Wait for Storyline to come out; convert and re-publish your content. Also, see this Rapid eLearning Blog post.

Q: Most of the elearning in my company is created by SMEs. How do I prove the importance of the designer?
A: Continue to sell what you do through great work and don’t expect change overnight. Let your org get tired of boring, inconsistent content dumps and be prepared and ready for them to come to you for solutions. Celebrate great designs regardless of who makes them. Help SMEs solve the easier challenges through style guides, templates, etc. Quit for a job at a company that places due value in what you do. There is no one right answer here (except for the first one); this is an organizational issue and any combination of the above may be right for you and your org.

Q: Will you just tell me which tool to buy?
A: Nope. But I only consider tools that have certain features; I’ll tell you more about that — and why — on Thursday!

Thanks to all participants for sharing your stories and helping each other!

More Share/Save Options

At UTAOU, I was thrilled to have lots of drawing/learning experiences, including Dave Gray teaching the visual alphabet, Liz Burrow facilitating the development of the “signature person”, and Kevin Thorn demonstrating visual storytelling. And though I’ve been sketching more since, I’ve recently found something to up my game a little more: Draw Something.

This iPhone/Android app is similar to Pictionary; you choose one of three words to draw for a friend, draw it, and then they guess what you’ve drawn and draw something back.

It keeps me drawing — and, more importantly, thinking about how to visually represent ideas. And, of course, it’s fun. Still a bit buggy, but fun. Only 99 cents right now or ad-supported for free.

HT: David Kelly and Tim P. Martin for telling me about the app, and thanks to David for letting me use his drawing and his screen shot of my drawing in this post!

More Share/Save Options

1. Don’t require that I waste my time on a sales call – or, worse, in a “webinar” – before I can give you my money…

2. Don’t make it hard for me to try your software. If I can’t play with a trial version or sandbox immediately, I’m moving on.

3. Don’t hide your pricing behind a sales process, and don’t play pricing games…

8. This should go without saying, but don’t cold call or spam me. If your product is good and meets my needs, I promise that I’ll find out about it…

As someone who tries a lot of software, I’d love for authoring tool vendors in particular to take note.

HT: TThor Newsletter

More Share/Save Options

The 2012 Visual Thinking Conference is for anyone focused on visual approaches to thinking and communication. So whether you are a business leader giving presentations, a marketing manager designing websites and materials, or a grade school teacher looking for new ways to reach students, no other event offers you more of today’s solutions… and tomorrow’s vision.

I’m continuing to see the importance of visual thinking and problem-solving in instructional design (and everyday life), but if you still need convincing of the connection, notice that Matt Pierce, TechSmith’s manager of Customer Engagement and host of the Forge, is one of the facilitators.

Extra props to the organizers for including a pre- and post-conference happy hour.

HT: Koreen Olbrish

More Share/Save Options

One of my team's mascots... I think it fits well in any discussion of learning styles.

First, it’s kind of intimidating to write about something that a lot of other really smart people are writing about — on the same day, even — and even more so because many great things have been published about learning styles recently that I couldn’t hope to touch in terms of thoroughness.

So I’m just going to share an experience from a workshop I gave recently to my local ASTD chapter, which largely covered choosing training/performance support modalities for different situations. I didn’t bring up learning styles, but when participants mentioned it — several times — I shared with them my opinions, which are that it’s entirely unfounded (okay, that part is far from just my opinion) pseudo-science that is being used to guide a lot of bad design and sell a lot of so-so authoring tools, and that humans are such overwhelmingly visual creatures that if we simply catered better to that one sense, we could improve the vast majority of our designs.

One of the participants countered that learners certainly had different preferences, though… for example, some generally want a full multimedia experience and some prefer to just read a help file and get back to their jobs, and didn’t that verify that there was something to the learning styles theories?

Well… no. I have observed the same phenomenon among learners, but my takeaway is that this is a preference for different kinds of interaction, and furthermore, that it can change with context. A learner may prefer a full course or immersive experience in most cases, but have different needs at different times. Consider these scenarios:

• If it’s on a topic that the learner is already well versed in, he may just want to start by testing himself to find the gaps in his knowledge, so that he can skip the parts that would just bore him.
• If the learner is new to the topic and interested in it, but is in the middle of a time-sensitive situation, he may prefer just skimming a help file to handle the situation at hand and come back for an A-to-Z course later.

The question is, if these learning preferences (based on type of interactivity) do exist, how to accommodate them… and especially when they could change not only from person to person, but from context to context? The best way I’ve found is to incorporate at least the spirit of Thiagi’s 4 Door Model… essentially, designing for different interactivity needs/preferences and allowing the learner to choose their own experiences. This seemed like a really labor-intensive process the first time I thought about it, but I’ve found that the most difficult thing about it is creating an interface that allows the learner to immediately understand that they’re being given options and what those options are (at least, if all interaction types are being presented in the same place). It seems to be wildly beyond learner expectations.

What do you think? Have you designed for interaction preferences? What were your results?

More Share/Save Options

Many thanks to Aaron Silvers and Alicia Sanchez, respectively, for the book suggestions! And if you have a suggestion for a book that is not directly about learning, but influences or speaks to what we do, please feel free to contact me. One of the best parts of doing this column has been receiving people’s suggestions and having my mind broadened by how truly multidisciplinary our field is.

More Share/Save Options

Some of the participants, learning the visual alphabet from Dave Gray

I’m going to make what I anticipate is a bold statement: If you’re reading this, you have little or no training in the process of design.

Don’t get me wrong. You may have a degree in instructional design. You may have participated in a number of workshops, webinars, and conference sessions on instructional design over the years. You may have read books on learning theory and taken courses to develop your proficiency with authoring software. But if you’ve read the same books, gone to the same workshops, and yes, even have the same degree that I have, you have learned few processes for working out creative solutions to problems.

And don’t feel bad… Frankly, until this last weekend, I hadn’t either. That’s not to say that you and I aren’t good designers, but I’ve now realized how much of that is probably due to natural talent and hard-won experience, rather than a full toolbelt of design techniques. The more I read books by and talk to designers in other fields, the more I realize that all of them, through their culture and/or formal education, do have these tools. They’ve learned them, developed them, continue to refine them. That isn’t really part of the education of most instructional designers, whether formal or informal.

But something happened this last weekend to change that. The first Up to All of Us, an unconference geared toward design in learning, technology, and society, took place in Sedona, AZ. Designers from several fields, primarily learning, gathered to think, sketch, play, learn, brainstorm, bodystorm, and design some wicked problems and even more wicked solutions. I’m happy to have helped create some new directions, but I’m even happier to have come away with some new ways to look at problems and start to creatively unravel them. I feel like I’m always telling our industry what it needs more of — in a sense, that’s how I choose the books for Well Read — but I hope this message comes across as a positive one. Because I’m learning more and more every day that what we need already exists; they just exist in different disciplines. We can learn those, adapt them, improve them for our use.

There’s so much to be shared from Up to All of Us, so I’m grateful that David Kelly has included it in his conference backchannel posts. And as resulting projects get launched and calls for help with projects go out, you will hear about every single one of them here, too.

Thank you to Aaron Silvers for conceiving and organizing — or, as he has said, summoning this event, and thank you to all of the people I was lucky enough to connect with. We’re going to build ships together. Great. Big. Ships.

Photo credit: jaycross on Flickr

Update: Jay Cross has published an outstanding list of the actual activities we did, games we played, and things we learned about on his blog. Definitely check it out.

More Share/Save Options

And no worries… this blog isn’t going anywhere. I think we all know by now that my thoughts and opinions are my own, right? I’m still still blogging and tweeting and writing Well Read, and The ToolBar will be off of hiatus soon. I have stuff planned. Stay tuned.

Picture of Nike’s main campus by shemp65 on Flickr.

More Share/Save Options

Wednesday

11:00 – Facilitating the Storyline Creation Station

12:30 – Panelist-ing for the Authoring Tools/HTML5 TK Chat

2:00 – Moderating the Gamification TK Chat

Thursday

11:00 – Facilitating the Storyline Creation Station

12:30 – Moderating the Experience Design/Activity Streams TK Chat

Other than that, I know I’ll be at the general sessions and I’ll be at TechKafe a lot. (By the way, if you have an iPad stylus you like, meet me at TechKafe and let me try it out!)

Looking forward to meeting lots of new people… Find me on Twitter and say Hi!

And whether you’re at home or in Vegas, remember to follow the backchannel with hashtag #astdtk12.

Update: Remember the conference app!

More Share/Save Options

• Linking to other pages within the course. This is a huge step up in interactivity because it enables branching. Woot!
• Interaction templates. Think Engage/Quizmaker-type interactions and other common types. You can also create your own.
• Characters and clipart. They’ve licensed eLearning Brothers and other clipart packages to provide a variety of characters, clothes, and poses, as well as general clipart. I really like the design of the “People Browser”; they’ve put a lot of thought into the usability of it, particularly the filters that remember your choices on a course level so that it’s easy to come back and choose a different pose of the same character you’re using.
• New, extensive template library.
• Tables and shapes. Just what they sound like.
• Various usability additions such as find/replace, new keyboard shortcuts, a color picker, and the ability to change formatting on lists.
• Easy reviewing on a mobile device. I think you’ve always been able to email a link to a course for review, but now you can also pop up a QR code, point your device at the screen, and review. Just like that.
• Ability to copy and paste pages between mobile and regular versions of a course.

Other enhancements since the review include publishing to SCORM Cloud and, most impressively, a much more developed separation of the content layer from the navigation and visuals. If you aren’t familiar with it, so I’m going to suffice it to say (for now) that if you have content that resides in several courses, it’s possible — and easy — to update it once and have those changes reflected in multiple places.

All in all, this software is becoming more and more interesting to me. It still lacks variables and highly customizable actions, but for people who want easy, usable, reviewable online, and HTML5 publishing, I like how it’s shaping up.

Update: An earlier version of this post stated that Claro included an eLearning Art package instead of eLearning Brothers. Thanks, dominKnow, for notifying me of the error!

More Share/Save Options

And I just came across some excellent blog posts written by their technical director, Alex Mackman (@AlexAtCMGroup). In the age of the Flash vs. HTML5 Ring of Death, I really value well-reasoned opinions and correct information, and he’s giving both. Flash and HTML5 for eLearning is the most recent.

I should note: Luminosity Studio publishes to both HTML5 and Flash.

More Share/Save Options

And we have another special guest episode: Brian and I talked with my boss, Diane Elkins, about accessibility: philosophies, design, and tools.

Brian drank Sailing Santa, I drank Collaboration #2, and Diane drank apple cider and Captain Morgan.

More Share/Save Options

Well Read will highlight books that are outside of the traditional learning milieu but that have an impact on our practice. The idea is to explore the many aspects of our work through experts in other fields, then apply this expertise in a meaningful way to our challenges. Kind of a Liberal Arts approach to the field of learning.

One of the first topics I wanted to explore was the creative element of learning design — and in particular, how to help creativity thrive with the fluorescent lights and deadline pressures that most learning designers labor under. So the initial installment explores The Creative Habit with choreographer Twyla Tharp.

I discovered when writing this first installment that there were far more takeaways in the book than I could address in the normal column length, so I encourage you to read the book and add to the comments what you found you could apply to your own work. And if you have ideas for future installments, feel free to leave a comment here or get in touch on Twitter (@jkunrein).

Enjoy!

More Share/Save Options

In this special episode, Brian and I grill Julie Dirksen on usability, learner experience design, and her new book, Design for How People Learn.

Brian drank St. Arnold Christmas Ale, I drank Dead Guy Ale, and Julie drank Woodchuck Dark and Dry Cider.

Thanks for stopping by, Julie! We had a blast and we hope you come back soon.

More Share/Save Options

Short version: I loved it. Buy it. Great job!

More Share/Save Options

New features include:

• An option for publishing accessible courses that turns on alt tags, turns off “web 2.0″-style popups, and makes video controller buttons more easily read by screen readers. All of these can be done individually within the program, so it’s more of a failsafe for developers who are already aware of accessibility guidelines than a “now-there-is-a-checkbox-that-makes-my-course-508-compliant” thing, but it’s nice to have.
• Ability to add text blocks to forms
• Ability to add streaming audio
• Ability to select font size, type, and color for imported questions

…And the biggest feature is ReviewLink, currently in beta. Diane Elkins wrote up a comparison among ReviewLink, Adobe Captivate Reviewer, and Rapid Intake REVIEW on the E-Learning Uncovered Blog.

You can see the webinar demonstrating these new features here.

More Share/Save Options

Have you ever seen better-looking panels? I think not.

More Share/Save Options

I’ll still keep up here now and then, and I’ll link up all posts below…

Dec 7: What Do We Mean When We Say HTML5?

Dec 14: HTML5–What’s the Urgency?

Dec 23: Gearing Up for a Laptop-Free TechKnowledge 2012

Dec 30: Looking Forward to TechKnowledge 2012!

More Share/Save Options

1) Don’t panic. This doesn’t mean someone is going to reach into your phone or computer and take away software that you — or your learners — already have. How long has it been since Internet Explorer 6 has been in active development? And yet… it’s still around in more organizations than I want to know about.

2) Having said that, mobile devices and mobile browsers get upgraded more frequently than desktop/laptop ones, so there’s an increased chance that your — and your learners’ — next mobile devices won’t play Flash content.

I’m still seeing a lot of posts covering this issue that are either very sensationalistic or self-serving, in my view. But what I find most interesting in the whole “HTML5 vs. Flash” debate is that people are mostly arguing about when the future is getting here. There is very little disagreement that the future is HTML5.

More Share/Save Options

It seems like a long time in advance to make this announcement; I can’t remember that happening before (but feel free to correct me), so I started reflecting a bit on the timing.

A year and a half ago, I wrote that software that has delivered HTML content all along (including Lectora), was poised to seize huge opportunities in the market. Since then, Trivantis hasn’t released many improvements to Lectora that either take advantage of new-in-HTML5 parts of the HTML spec or improve existing capabilities so that they work better in mobile browsers.

In the meantime, rumors of Storyline’s ease-of-use are rampant, and since it’s a new tool that will publish to HTML5, it’s reasonable to expect that it is developed with modern technology — particularly mobile devices and browsers — in mind. And Storyline was widely rumored to be launching at DevLearn in early November.

Gotta think it was smart of Trivantis to let their customers know before DevLearn that they’re on the job, but the fact that they don’t say anything about features — particularly publishing — gives me pause. If I worked for a company that used one main authoring tool and it was Lectora, I would be happy with the prospect of a new interface in nine months or so, but I would also want to know that Trivantis is finally making Lectora that kick-ass, powerful, HTML5-publishing software I’ve been waiting for.

If you’re interested in getting in on the beta for the new Lectora, sign up here.

More Share/Save Options

…friends that keep me sane.

…a professional network that constantly opens my mind to things I don’t yet know.

I hope you all have a wonderful day!

More Share/Save Options

In this long-overdue episode, Brian and I chat about DevLearn 2011, the stuff we learned there, the sessions we presented and some of the ones we attended that are still on our minds, HTML5, Claro, ZebraZapps’ much-anticipated launch, and… probably more.

And… we now have theme music! Big thanks to Scott Unrein for composing and producing it.

More Share/Save Options