Cammy Bean's Learning Visions: eLearning Guild DemoFest Highlights #dl09

Follow up to the eLearning Guild’s DemoFest held at DevLrn in San Jose this November. These are favorites of that event.

(These are my live blogged notes from the presentation. eLearning Guild will make recorded presentation available on their website. http://wwww.devlearn2009.com/demofest)

Brent Schlenker: This year a lot of great entries. This year didn’t do awards format – wanted it to be a sharing format for attendees to show what they do.

iPhone App: Helping Parents Grades K-5 (Terri Gutierrez)

Oregon Center for Applied Science

http://www.orcasinc.com

Took parenting website and converted to iPhone.

Innovative use of mobile technology. There was a lot of buzz around this app at demo fest.

Had created 4 parenting programs on website. Organized by Family Challenges – branching exercises. - “Unfinished Chores” – included situations in families via videos – then you pick one of three responses after seeing video. After viewed each choice, got a testimonial from each family member.

Then went to a Q&A – open text response and you compare your response to the suggested response.

The iPhone App – 5 folks working on this program. Took a week to go through iPhone App training. Took content and pared it down to work on iphone.

“Your kids won’t do their chores. There’s an app for that.”

Had to edit video content from website – rechunking scenarios, etc.

Maintained branching scenarios.

Text pages with responses and key concepts.

Spent a lot of time figuring out the flow of the application. On the iPhone more restricted in navigation – needed to make sure people weren’t stuck in an endless loop.

5 weeks of development time, 1 week of training time. Design of application was only about 4 days.

http://iphone.orcasinc.com/

Stanford University iPhone Programming class: http://www.mobileorchard.com/take-stanfords-iphone-programming-class-for-free/

Advancing the Common Good and LIVE United: An Overview (Patrick Gallen)

United Way – largest non-profit in the world. 2.5 million volunteers!

Course was to provide staff with basic information about work. Source materials were PPTs. Created an Adobe Connect Meeting Room – Chapters – added chat pod. Could go into meeting room while learners were in there to interact with them.

Asynchronous courses were offered in a room – so you could interact with other learners who were in there, instructors, etc.

Content generated in PPT, used Presenter plugin to upload to Connect. Used some Captivate for interactivity.

4 month project, 2 people working 1/4 of time.

Tools: PPT, Presenter, Captivate, Photoshop, Adobe Connect

Lessons learned: maximize simple tools, partner with SMEs to make content more accessible, trimming fat, being creative/outside box, put self in the learner’s shoes, get something out there.

United Way had never developed an online course before.

Journey’s New Hire Training Allen Interactions (Scott Colehour)

New hire training dilemma for a younger generation -- (Journeys is a pre-teen/teen focused shoe store) . Retail store employees selling shoes and working stockroom/backroom. If can’t find the shoes, can’t sell them.

Introduced general concepts of stockroom. intro screens with diagrams and text. Then took them right into an activity. Look at a stockrrom and organize it – a few boxes are out of place.

Once they got the basics, took them into more of a game with timed interactivity (boxes rolling in on conveyor belt).

Selling Activity:

Sales Scenario is the culmination.

Customer comes in and you need to make observations and greet customers.

“Sellometer” -- shows how well they are doing and get some coaching as they go along.

University of Central Oklahoma: Creative use of green screen to add personality to online courses (Andrea Stone, Bucky Dodd, John Gillmore)

Support faculty and staff.

Problem: online instructors are anonymous. Want to help people recognize their instructors when see them at the grocery store!

Add personality to the online course with video that allows them to walk across the page.

Online host/video instructor guides through this module.

Faculty/online instructors using this to introduce their courses “Hi, I’m Professor X and we’re going to do…”

Get a sense of who the instructor is vs. just reading onscreen text.

Process for creating green screen:

Equipment:

Botera/Chroma Key Collapsible Background $130
Need good lighting for even background to help with chroma – light kit was about $460.
Laptop computer *800
Use PPT in place of a teleprompter for the instructor.
Use Premiere Pro (because they already had it).
Borix FX Chroma Key software $300
Sanyo High Def Camcorder $350
Do at 720p resolution so get higher quality green screen filter and then reduce it.
Shure Lavalier wireless microphone System $299.
Their total kit without laptop and Cs4 was under $2000

See slides of this info here:

www.uco.edu/cpde/presentations/greenscreen/UCOGreenScreen.pdf

Connect Writing (Nick Floro)

Product helped developed for McGraw Hill Education.