Articulate Storyline

So the buzz last week at the e-Learning Guild's Learning Solutions Conference in Orlando was all about Articulate Storyline.

Articulate Community Manager Jeanette Brooks confirms that it's all true:

"We are indeed building an amazing new e-learning authoring tool called Storyline, while at the same time working on exciting new enhancements to Articulate Studio."

Rumor has it that Storyline will include some great features like a screen capturing tool! And saved text inputs! And it will make coffee for you, too! (OK, maybe that part's not true...)

Some feature rundowns here: http://community.articulate.com/forums/p/1694/9102.aspx#9102

So. For those of you who saw the demos last week, what do you have to say? Does Storyline live up to the buzz? Can you hardly wait to get your hands on it?

Live in NY! It’s Kineo…

Wednesday, November 10, Kineo hosted a live workshop in New York on rapid eLearning in the Enterprise.

We started the morning with introductions, asking people to share their burning issues.  Here’s some of what people shared:

• I’m a one-stop-shop – how do I learn more about tools?
• How do I speed up the process?
• Our sales team just wants text messages.
• My biggest problem is Apple’s war on Flash.
• How do I create more effective training?
• What about audio narration – am I doing it right?
• A lot of courses in a short amount of time.  How do I engage learners in a short time with a limited budget.
• Our challenge is creating eLearning for teachers when they can’t install anything on their computers.
• My bugaboo is that YouTube is blocked in schools.
• How do I scale development while maintaining instructional integrity?

The New York workshop included short sessions from Kineo’s Mark Harrison, me!, and Tom Kuhlmann of Articulate.  Here’s a quick rundown of what we each talked about:

Kineo’s Mark Harrison on Learning Models:

How often do you need to have an interaction?  The myth of needing an interactive exercise every 3-5 screens.  That is often the closest to a learning model that most interactive designers get. (A very simple model).

We need models to help stop the stream of consciousness writing.  These structures are crucial to building better elearning and can actually help you speed up the process.

• Knowledge and skill builder model (tutorial) – great for policies, processes, and procedures
• Scenario model – learn and apply or simulation – great for decision making, soft skills, and policies, processes and procedures
• Process or Systems training model (show me, try it, test me)

Mark tells the story of a 3 hour certification program he had to take before he could travel to a country abroad.  He had to pass the test before the ticket was issued. His solution? Screen grabs of the entire program that he then referred to as he took the test.  Is this what your learners are doing? Maybe you need to rethink your programs…

So let’s take a closer look at those models:

Knowledge and Skill builder (a variation on Gagne’s 9 Events):

• Get attention
• Set direction
• Present info
• Exemplify and practice
• Assess and summarize
• Action and support

See Kineo Design Hour: Learning Models presentation for more details.

AIDA: Attention, Interest, Desire, Action (see the Kineo Top Tip: Learning from the Ad Men)

Cammy (that’s me!) on tone and writing for elearning:

Five guidelines:

• Keep it light
• Give it spirit
• Have a conversation
• Call for action
• Be adult

See the Kineo Design Hour: Tone of Voice presentation for more details.

Tom Kuhlmann The Rapid eLearning Story

Many of the people Tom talks to are one/two person eLearning shops.  As we evolve in our eLearning journeys, we often follow this path:

1. “convert this course” (when you’re just getting started, you need to get it online)
2. “make it look better” (I see that my course could look better. How do I do that better without being a graphic designer?)
3. “make it interactive” (how do I make my courses more learner-centric?)

1. Convert the course

Provide a structure for the course. When you’re just getting started, this structure can work well: welcome; instructions; objectives; section of content – intro, object, content, wrapup; assessment; summary

Basic graphic design principles:

CRAP: Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, Proximity

Using graphics to craft meaning (it’s not just eye candy)

• The Non-Designer’s Design Book Robin Williams
• Slide-ology Nancy Duarte

If you want to be able to create more interesting PPT presentations, you need to learn more about PPT.

You’re developing meaning as you put things on the page.

Great resources from Cathy Moore:

• Dump the Drone
• Action Mapping

Take a company policy and build it the typical way, then apply “dump the drone” – before and after

Create your own eLearning style guide – and then tell the marketing department that’s what you use for eLearning.

Working with SMES: SMES don’t care about learning theories. Show them before and after.

 2. Make it look better

If it looks good, people will be more interested. the aesthetic is important.

Visual design creates meaning. We direct the learner’s attention through layout and what we put on screen and where.

Visual voice – imagine a western movie poster. It has a “voice” – probably a bit dusty, frayed, font is in that “Wanted” style.

Give your course a visual voice.

Tom describes a mind mapping process they use to create a visual identity for a program

3. Make  it interactive

Some rapid ID models you can follow to assemble your course:

Information & Interaction

one track that gets information in linear mode OR one track that gets right into the interactive mode

(See Christian Aid course example that Tom and Dave Anderson built for Lingo’s -- on Tom’s blog)

RSI – Rapid Situational interaction

Place your content in a relevant situation – you get all of your content in this route, but it’s presented through the situation.

The Usual Suspects

Have a situation (some context),…interviewing or surveying some choices – see Tom’s blog for examples.

Wrapping it up

All in all it was a great event – although it went by in quite a blur!  Thanks to all of you who attended and I just wish we’d had some more time for chatting at the end.

Check out Sasha’s e-learning blog

A new blog to add to your feed reader, chock full of instructional design tips as well as hands-on practical info and templates for you Articulate users. 

Here’s a really slick PPT template Sasha has created (and he’s even giving it away – what a guy!)

Check out Sasha’s e-learning blog!

Audio Interview with Tom Kuhlmann of Articulate

If you've been around eLearning for at least a few weeks, you've heard of Articulate and Tom Kuhlmann. Tom writes the Rapid eLearning Blog, sending out weekly doses of practical tips and info.

I was fortunate to interview Tom last week. We could have gone on for hours...

We talked about:

• The controversy surrounding rapid eLearning -- rapid or crapid?
• Empowering subject matter experts and the democratization of eLearning
• Getting better at visual design
• Committing to the craft of eLearning

Listen to the interview with Tom Kuhlmann and then let me know your reactions.

Anything you would have liked to have heard more of from Tom?

Designing for Articulate: A Newbie’s View

I’m new to Articulate. Although I’ve been reading Tom Kuhlman’s Rapid E-Learning Blog now for a couple of years, I’ve never actually designed (or for that matter, built) an Articulate course.

My canvas for the past four years has been custom Flash. I’d have an idea and then someone much smarter than me would go figure out how to make it work.

At Kineo, we often work with our clients’ tools of choice. That is, if a client uses Articulate in-house, they may ask us to build a few courses for them in Articulate. (We also do a lot of custom Flash, Mohive, etc.)

For the past few weeks I’ve been designing and scripting my first Articulate courses. I’m such a n00b.

I started off feeling a bit pegged in: “I have to design and write for a set of templates? How constricting!”

But now I’m starting to loosen up a bit, with help from my Kineo colleagues. (Thanks especially to Matt!). It’s a fun challenge.

Some beginning tips:

Keep variety. Don’t use an Engage Tab screen for every other page. Mix it up.

Intersperse questions throughout the content. Formative questions break the content up with momentary pauses for reflection and to reinforce the learning process.

Use Engage Labeled graphics as question pages. “Which of these widgets would you use to paint a monkey?” There’s no penalty for a wrong answer. Let the learner explore.

Spice it up with scenarios. This is true for any tool. Keep it interesting with a story. Compel the learner to want to find out what comes next.

Use interesting images. I’m lucky to have some graphic artists on my team who know how to turn a page into something quite lovely! That doesn’t hurt.

I uploaded a final script last night for the UK team (five hours ahead of me) to start working on. This morning, when I logged on to email, I saw a message that the course had been built! Holy cow. That’s rapid.

Reminder: Boston & Chicago Articulate/Moodle Seminars This Week

Just a reminder that our Boston and Chicago free seminars on Articulate and Moodle are this week. The response has been great. (So great, in fact, that we had to move the Boston session to another location to accommodate the crowd.)

Join the Kineo team in
Boston on June 9th
and Chicago on June 11th.

Delivering Quality at Speed - Articulate & Moodle

This seminar will focus on getting the best out of Articulate and Moodle with case studies from Motorola, BP, Apple and McDonald's.

The seminar will cover:

• Rapid e-learning design with Articulate
• Top tips for getting the best out of Articulate
• Rapid development processes
• Delivering engaging learning portals with Moodle
  

To learn more and sign up, visit the Kineo website. Hope to see you there!

Thoughts on ASTD

This past week, I spent Monday and Tuesday at the ASTD International Conference & Expo in DC. Not attending sessions, mind you, but working the Kineo booth and fine-tuning my schmoozing super powers.

My first impressions of ASTD: ‘wow, what a huge conference’ and ‘wow, these are traditional training people for whom most of this eLearning stuff is kind of exotic and/or quite overwhelming and threatening.’ There were over 350 booths selling their wares: from “are you a squiggle, a circle, or a box?”people to big LMS companies to leadership/management classroom trainers up the wazoo.

From Kineo, Steve Rayson and Mark Harrison from the UK office were there, along with my new US boss, Steve Lowenthal. It’s nice to meet people for the first time and give them hugs. Especially the people you work with.

At the show, we talked to a lot of people about Moodle and Articulate. Could see lots of light bulbs going off in people’s heads as they viewed our demos and heard about pricing options for Moodles. More on that later, but I do see us at a Tipping Point with the Corporate Moodle.

But more important than all that, and what you, my fellow bloggers/twitterers will be most interested in, are all the cool bloggers/tweeple I got to meet face to face!

Wendy Wickham. We went for a walk and had coffee. Jealous? I know you are. We talked about some of the sessions she attended (go read her blog for all the news).

Clark Quinn. He’s with me on the impending Moodle explosion. Clark, I’m sorry I missed you at the beer meetup. I got there too late!

Kevin Thorn. He’s the guy who does really cool cartoons. Also one of the nicest human beings on the planet.

Mark Britz. Turns out to be one of the nicest human beings on the planet.

Dave Ferguson. When I finally made my way to the Monday night Beer & Bloggers session at Fado, Dave was the only one left from the crowd I had hoped to mingle with. Dave was regaling some Germans in the corner with amazing stories and singing the Liechtenstein National Anthem with great gusto. Then we sat down and talked about “Ten Steps to Complex Learning.” What an amazing human being. Too bad I didn’t get a picture.

Marcia Connor. She arrived at the Beer & Bloggers session even later than I did, having just driven 2.5 hours to get to DC! And then she drove me to my hotel, for which I will be forever thankful.

The reason I missed most of the Beer & Bloggers session (after doing my best to get it organized), is that the crew from Articulate took Kineo out to dinner at Clyde’s. I sat next to the very famous Tom Kuhlman and talked about everything from the amazing Articulate community to home schooling and virtual office worker issues to passports. (Tom, my passport just arrived in the mail yesterday!)

The Articulate booth was just around the corner from us and there was always a big crowd listening in to Tom’s sessions. This company really cares about helping people create better eLearning with their products. Thanks to Mark Schwartz, Articulate CEO, for the great meal.

I wished I’d had more time as I missed some key people I would have loved to have connected with:

Robert Kennedy (Robert stopped by the Kineo booth on Tuesday while I was at a client meeting.)

Craig Wiggins (he came to crash the Beer & Bloggers party. So bummed we didn’t meet!)

I returned to Massachusetts late Tuesday night after having a great dinner with my brother, visiting my Dad’s grave at Arlington National Cemetery and seeing my cousin’s two-week old baby.

What a two days! And that was just the beginning of the week. I’m still bleary, but invigorated.

Free Articulate & Moodle Seminars in Boston and Chicago

Are you in Boston or Chicago? Want to learn more about Articulate and Moodle? Want to meet me?

Join the Kineo team in
Boston on June 9th
and Chicago on June 11th.

Delivering Quality at Speed - Articulate & Moodle

This seminar will focus on getting the best out of Articulate and Moodle with case studies from Motorola, BP, Apple and McDonald's.

The seminar will cover:

• Rapid e-learning design with Articulate
• Top tips for getting the best out of Articulate
• Rapid development processes
• Delivering engaging learning portals with Moodle
  

To learn more and sign up, visit the Kineo website. Hope to see you there!

Instructional Designers' Tools

There's been a good conversation going on over at Christy Tucker's Experiencing E-Learning blog about instructional design.

Christy has been writing about how to get started in instructional design and what technology tools you might need.

I think I'm somewhat of an anomaly in the field. I don't do any programming. I don't build courses. I don't do any graphic design. I use Word, PowerPoint, Visio. I can now also say that I use blogger and wikis.

If you want to know what I do on a daily basis, read my job description. Maybe I'm not an instructional designer at all.

I think my dinosaur status as an instructional designer stems from the fact that I've always worked for e-Learning vendors where the programming, graphics, and ID are distinct, separate job roles. I have my expertise, you have your's.

If you're an instructional designer within a corporate training group, it seems -- most likely -- that you'll be asked to both design and build courses. Christy uses HTML, Dreamweaver, and sess Flash in her future.

Rapid e-Learning tools, like Articulate, change the amount of actual technical skill an ID would need within such a group. My company creates customized course development templates for organizations. Course developers (who may or may not be instructional designers) use Flash to create courses, but they don't need to know how to use Flash at all.

Rapid e-Learning tools make building courses almost as easy as writing documents in Word. Easy breezy. So instructional designers won't need to be technical at all. That's what I like.

Kineo Rapid e-Learning Podcast with Gabe Anderson

Another good podcast from the folks at Kineo: an interview with Stephen Walsh (Kineo) and Gabe Anderson (Articulate).

Part 1 is a nice definition and description of rapid e-Learning. Good for beginners.

If you don't have tons o' time, just listen to part 2. I thought it had more useful nuggets:

• Who should be developing rapid e-Learning? Always a good discussion topic -- SMEs, IDs, some combination?
  
• Next generation of Articulate tools -- and where rapid e-learning tools are going (less linear, more interactivity, more branching, integrated quizzes, more 'human element' with characters, more flexibility in general to help folks think "outside of the PowerPoint box").
• Some discussion on moving to more collaborative, online tools. At this point, Gabe sees no plans to move away from a desktop authoring tool -- in his view, there are too many limitations.

Big challenges ahead:

• It's all about design
• Integrating content with Learning Management Systems. Even though Articulate products are SCORM/AICC compliant, LMS are not created the same way so there always has to be tweaking. This is why they brought Articulate Online onto the market.

But why don't you just go ahead and listen yourself?