For those of you who missed Jane Bozarth's session yesterday: Better Than Bullet Points: Creating Engaging e-learning with PowerPoint -- a recording of the session and handouts are now available (you'll have to register):
http://www.trainingmagnetwork.
Jane has posted some links following the webinar which you can find here (you'll also have to register):
http://www.trainingmagnetwork.
Jane Bozarth: Better than Bullet Points: Creating Engaging eLearning with PowerPoint.
Session hosted by Training Magazine.
Effective design using PPT as a tool.
Not PPT 101. But will talk about how to make instruction more engaging, interactive and interesting.
Why PowerPoint?
We have it. It’s cheap. It’s idiot proof. Pretty universal. Easy to deal with.
Many tools out there that still have to start with ppt
Use it as a storyboarding tool, prototyping.
Can do an awful lot with PPT.
Most of Jane’s examples – from people with lower budgets – not the glitzy example (we need to make learning engaging, not pretty).
Creating asynchronous instruction.
Frustration with eLearning:
Becomes dumping ground for slides, text, content
All the fun stuff kept for the classroom.
Info dumps are not instruction!
How BAD can e-learning be?
73 slides of text. Inexplicable clip art. Not elearning, but ereading.
“etorture” (said by someone in the chatroom!)
Pages and pages of scrolling text. Pretty much just a policy manual.
Even when you make programs like that mandatory, still only have a 5% completion rate.
Better than Bullet Points
Taking an existing classroom course – think about TRANSFORMING it, not converting it.
1. Select a Treatment
Don’t just present lots of data.
put it into context (create a story around it – example: A. Platura Art Detective to each about perspective).
Use hyperlinks to answer questions.
It’s very easy to load content on slides – but it takes more creativity to move learner to actual understanding!
Use scenarios – apply what you know to make a decision..Ask the learner to take info that’s not clearcut and apply it using a question (in PPT – picture of a farmer and 3 images of “experts” to ask for advice. Whose advice do you follow?)
SMES get married to the content and often lose sight of the bigger picture.
Present the info – not as a text dump – but rather “what happens in the real world?”
Example:
You decide:
When you see something you like, try to do it in PowerPoint.
Idea Kickstarters
Talk to others outside of your area of expertise
Use the Goofus and Galant approach – compare and contrast the good example vs. the bad example
2. Apply Mayer’s SOI Model
Where projects derail. Have a good idea, but want to put too much stuff into it.
Richard Mayer – research on multimedia learning.
“Select, organize and integrate”
Select:
Help the learner understand what they’re going to do. Filter info for them.
Use good headings.
Organize:
Integrate:
Take all of the info and make better sense of it for the learner.
“Effective design is done when there’s nothing left to take out.” [not that you’ve found a way to put more stuff in.]
Intregrate text with graphics – don’t have a picture on one side and the list of items to look at on another side of page. Might look neater, but too much cognitive load. Put the labels right on the picture.
Taking information and applying it to a real problem
How do we keep from overloading learners?
3. Choose Graphics with Soul, animations that teach, interactions with meaning.
Finding graphics: flickr, istockphoto, etc.
Useful feedback in an online quiz
Use feedback to help the learner learn.
Other tips:
Insert photos instead of cutting and pasting them – smaller file sizes!
Bad elearning can be horrible no matter what tool you use. It’s about design, not software!
Less is more.
PPT Blunders when designing eLearning:
My review: Jane is a fabulous presenter. Very fluid delivery. Lots of great examples. Time well spent.
Update:
For those of you who missed the session, a recording and handouts are available (you'll have to register):
http://www.trainingmagnetwork.
Jane has posted some links following the webinar which you can find here (you'll have to register):
http://www.trainingmagnetwork.
When we talk about the “industry”, we (and by “we”, I of course mean those of us in the industry) often refer to it as if it’s this monolithic thing that you can touch.
The Industry.
Ummm. Yeah.
So. What is the eLearning Industry?
Is it the vendors? -- The LMS companies, the custom content developers, the off-the-shelf content creators.
Is it the tools we use to create eLearning?
Is it the companies and people who create those tools? – Adobe, Articulate, Microsoft, etc.
Is it the pundits and bloggers? – the names we know and associate with eLearning – Jay Cross, Ellen Wagner, Tony Karrer, Brent Schlenker, [insert your name here].
Is it the associations? -- the eLearning Guild and ASTD.
Is it the research organizations that produce the industry reports?
Is it the companies that give out the awards?
Is it the companies who use eLearning to train their employees?
Is it the Learning & Development/Training departments within all of those companies?
Is it the little companies who don’t even have training departments but still have a lot of training needs?
Is it the schools who use eLearning to teach their students?
Is it the teachers at those schools?
Is it the non-profits who create eLearning for their members?
Is it the institutions that issue the certificates and degrees in ID and whatnot?
Is it the professors who teach at those institutions? The students who come out of them?
[What did I miss?]
The point is – and I don’t really know what the point is – the point is, that’s a whole heck of a lot of perspectives.
The eLearning Industry.
***********
This post and a few others have been itching to be written for a couple of weeks now. Since I had the opportunity for a nice schmooze fest after the eLearning Guild ID Symposium in Boston.
I didn’t attend the sessions, but I DID get to eat a nice Arctic Char at Jasper White’s Summer Shack with the likes of Ellen Wagner, Brent Schlenker, Steve Martin and Kay Wood.
And then Dave Ferguson incited me further. He was going to talk about Canada in reference to this rant. C’mon, Dave. I dare you.
Photo credit: Liverpool Street station crowd blur by victoriapeckham
Product knowledge training creates major challenge for organizations, including:
The free Kineo webinar will use real case studies to demonstrate:
The one hour webinar will be held at 3pm UK time/10am Eastern on July 16th, 2009.
If you would like to reserve a place please contact Kineo at info@kineo.I’m new to Articulate. Although I’ve been r
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.
