Autumn is often our busiest period. The time of the year when people are most likely to decide to take some training or embark on a new project to develop a learning programme or course.

And naturally, starting a development project or a training course means thinking about objectives and outcomes. So this week, I wanted to share a personal story with you that vividly highlights the importance of getting this kind of stuff right.

It's a cold February day. I'm in a hotel in Bournemouth running a 5-day open (public) course for a fairly well-known training provider. It's morning break and I've locked myself in a cubicle in the gent's toilet.

Do I need to use the facilities? Actually, no. Am I having a nervous breakdown? Thankfully, not. So why the heck am I there? Easy. To be absolutely sure of having a delegate-free 20 minutes! (I did take a newspaper with me to avoid getting bored - this is a pre-smart phone era story, I'm sure you will have realised). 

Before I go any further, I should point out, the delegates would have had no idea I was so desperate to escape them.

So how, you may well ask, did it get to this? Well we need to go back to Monday morning. Andrew to mission control: we have a problem. Unfortunately, mission control didn't give a stuff. 

By break time on Monday morning it was quite clear half the delegates were entirely unsuited for the course. Being a smart bunch of people, they had realised this, too. Hence the call to mission control. 

The solution seemed obvious to me. Refund of money or offer of a place on an alternative course at a later date. Problem solved. Mission control was having none of it. No refund. No transfer. Stick with the programme as advertised. Good luck…

As you can imagine, not a great start to any training week.

A couple of delegates left, vowing to fight the battle with mission control from back at the office. But most stayed. 

Did I stick with the programme as advertised. Of course not, how could I. Did I have one of the worst weeks of my training life? Without doubt. Every spare minute was frantically spent devising exercises and activities, typing up worksheets, trying to think of ways to effectively run two courses in one. And this was when internet resources were nothing like as plentiful as now.

Every session was a struggle, trying hard to manage a demanding group of people with very disparate needs.

So you can see the attraction of the toilet cubicle by the time the course was almost done (we finished at lunchtime on the Friday).

This example, of course, was about a problem with the sales people. Not knowing (or properly understanding) the course objectives and the content, resulting in the wrong people to the wrong course. 

But let's be honest, it's a problem that could just as easily be caused by poor audience and content analysis, unclear or unstated objectives or just not getting to the heart of why a piece of training is needed in the first place.

We're probably all guilty of seeing planning and analysis as a bit boring, something we want to get done as quickly as possible, so we get on to the interesting bits. But this experience seared into my little brain, how utterly important it is to get the early stages of the training development process right and that it is worth taking the time to do this.

If planning and analysis is one of your current challenges (or you have challenges in other aspects of developing training for the classroom or online mediums) then take a look at  our instructional design training programme. Modular. Highly flexible. Continually updated. Lots of options and choice.

One big problem with games and learning: our first experience of them is usually part of play.

We generally watch or take part in games for pleasure. Playing games is not something we typically associate with 'serious' activities such as work or learning.

Understandably, many learners struggle with the idea of games for learning. The reason? Often, their only experience of games for learning is an attempt to replicate a well-known game or game-show format in a classroom or e-learning setting.

I recall a head of L&D telling me about one of the highlights of his tenure at a big-name corporate was setting up a Mastermind-style competition for a big chunk of employees, as a way fo teaching them new-product information. No expense was spared. A set was built, the same lighting and music was used as on the TV series.

A memorable event, no doubt. But not in the right way.

Would it have markedly increased product knowledge? For the finalists in this pretend 'game show' maybe. But for everyone else? I'd be surprised.

To me, this is a perfect example of someone wanting L&D to make a big impact but going about it in entirely the wrong way. Which begs the question why would you consider an approach like this?

Probably because it’s a well-intentioned attempt to make learning more effective and enjoyable. But it rarely works. It moves the learners far, far away from a context that is relevant for and authentic to how they might actually use their learning back in the workplace.

If you are teaching your learners about money laundering regulations, don't be surprised if a version of The Weakest Link designed to reinforce their knowledge of money laundering concepts seems trivial or irrelevant to them.

In reality, the key to successful gamification of your learning is about identifying the components of a game that are most relevant for your learners (see my previous email for link to a summary).

Once you have identified appropriate elements, don’t rely on using them within a generic, well-known game. Rather, use your creativity and design skills to create a relevant and authentic game-based context and activity.

One that will make sense to your learners and really enable them to practice and reinforce their learning.

Following on from Part 1 of this post, where I identified three key challenges for e-learning designers when thinking about games and gamification, here's a summary of some key game elements you could include in your learning design and their relevance to your learners:

• Creating an abstract of reality: actual reality is messy. Providing an abstraction of reality is a great way to minimise complexity, focus your learners on what's really important and help them understand cause and effect in a given situation – with much greater clarity than is usually possible in real life.
• Setting goals: including a clear goal in a game adds purpose, focus and the ability to measure outcomes.
• Setting rules: these can range from simple operational rules (i.e. how you play the game) through to implicit behavioral rules. In a learning context, you can also include instructional rules that relate specifically to the knowledge or skills being learnt.
• Working with or against others: others here can include the game itself, not just other players. Working with or against others, provides plenty of opportunity for conflict, competition or co-operation.
• Working against the clock: time can spur your learners into action and apply additional pressure to their environment. Additionally, time can be used as a resource that learners need to use with thought and care.
• Giving rewards: you may decide to make getting rewards and points easy - as a way of hooking people into your game early on. Alternatively, you may decide to make rewards and points hard to achieve, as a means of increasing motivation
• Providing feedback: there is plenty of opportunity to build in intrinsic feedback. In other words, your learners can immediately see or feel the consequences of their actions and decisions.
• Enabling different levels of engagement: you can vary the level of challenge and difficulty available to your learners as a way of building motivation.
• Telling a story: this always helps provide context and meaning.
• Keeping flow and sequence: a good flow and sequence helps 'hook' the learners early on and maintain their interest throughout – this is sometimes referred to as the 'curve of interest'.
• Thinking about visual design: this definitely doesn't have to be about realism, but your game should be visually appealing and recognisably authentic.
• Providing a replay option: this provides a very important opportunity for your learners - the opportunity to fail. This enables your learners to re-consider their actions and decisions - particularly important when you are teaching principles or approaches that can be applied in several different ways.
•  

If you are looking for some help in incorporating these elements into your e-learning design, consider taking some of the modules in our instructional design training programme.

"Good game, good game", was the regular catch phrase of the late Bruce Forsyth when he hosted the popular TV programme The Generation Game, way back in the 1970s.

No wonder it was so popular. Most people love to either watch or take part in games of some kind. We do so from childhood and the allure of a good game rarely weakens as we move into adulthood.

And with the popularity of games in general and computer games in particular, it's no wonder that gamifying learning is something many people believe is a must.

But what is gamification exactly? No surprise, perhaps, that different people have different definitions. But for the purposes of this article, let's call it, applying game-based elements or components to your learning to promote effective outcomes.

And applying these elements and components is about much more than awarding badges or points to increase motivation and participation - although all these are, without question, important components of game-based activity.

One important aspect of gamification for learning that is often overlooked? It is not new. If your view of learning is "chalk and talk" or good old page-turning e-learning, then gamification of your learning might seem like a new (and possibly scary) addition to your world view.

However, for skilled and knowledgeable instructional designers and trainers, gamification is old news. They have been adding elements of games to their learning for decades.

The challenge ahead is not about whether adding gamification is something your learners will enjoy. First-hand experience and anecdotal evidence suggest that when done right (and 'done right' is an important caveat) learners are pretty satisfied with it. Nor is the challenge about whether gamification works. There's a fairly substantial body of research to suggest it does.

The real challenge is threefold:

First, until there is a massive shift in the availability of cheap and easy technology to produce so-called 'serious games', most L&D professionals will never be able to consider the fully-fledged computer gaming experience advocated by some. For most of us the issue will be about whether we can apply the benefits of gamification without busting our budget.

Second, we need to better understand the components and elements that make up a game. Then we can make informed, intelligent decisions about which components or elements to apply to a given piece of learning.

Finally, we need some practical, realistic and cost-effective ways to use the game elements we identify within our existing delivery mediums, such as classroom and e-learning courses.

Looking for help with incorporating 'game' elements into your e-learning, then check out our instructional design training.

I've done more than my fair share of PowerPoint-bashing in the past. And with good reason. Because there's no getting away from it. Misuse of PowerPoint is responsible for some truly awful e-learning content. 

But today, I want to present a more balanced view of PowerPoint's plus and minus points.

Because the fact of the matter is, e-learning created using PowerPoint doesn't have to be awful. When used well, PowerPoint can be a very versatile tool.

PowerPoint sits somewhere in between a free-form rapid authoring tool and a form-based one. And this is its great strength. 

If it's a familiar tool to you already, it wouldn't take that much extra time or effort to learn its more advanced features. This would give you the option to build graphics, audio and animations onto your slides, as well as linking those slides in a non-linear sequence.

So PowerPoint's big strength? You can achieve quite a lot without any specific programming knowledge, but you have more freedom than if you were using a form-based authoring tool. 

If that all sounds like too much trouble, quite a few authoring tools allow you to create a basic framework of slides in PowerPoint, import them into the authoring tool and develop something more sophisticated from there. However, this approach comes with a big health warning. Plenty of really bad e-learning has been produced this way, too.

Which brings me to the other side of the argument. Because PowerPoint is so widely used and because its basic features are relatively easy to learn, lots of people with little or no instructional design knowledge or experience end up 'designing' e-learning courses. In many cases, very, very badly.

This is made worse because many of these courses started off as (bad) presentations. They hardly get altered in their transition to 'e-learning' and so end their life as truly dreadful online slide shows which consist of nothing more than slides of text, brightened up by a few cheesy graphics here and there.

If you care about creating effective e-learning that improves performance, it's easy to hate or demonise PowerPoint.  And in demonising PowerPoint, it's also easy to lose sight of the real problem which is not the tool, but the lack of instructional design knowledge and experience of the people using it. 

So the perennial challenge is not so much about how to get better at using the tools themselves (although that's important). The challenge is how to apply good instructional design while using those tools.

Get the balance right and you can create quality e-learning that embeds knowledge and skills and improves performance over time.

Creating Boredom-Busting E-Learning focuses on e-learning instructional design, not the point and click of the authoring tool. Take a day out of your schedule to dramatically shift the way you think about e-learning.

Go round any learning technology-focused trade show or exhibition and you  won't be able to move for them. Who am I talking about? The sharp-suited sales people hanging around on those flashy, expensive stands, of course. 

These are the people promoting their latest rapid e-learning application. You know, the one that's going to help you build e-learning courses in no time at all, with no required programming. All your e-learning problems will be solved. All your Christmases will come at once.

When money's tight and everyone is finding it harder to make a buck, the promise of rapid e-learning is a deeply attractive one. Especially if you are the stressed L&D professional constantly trying to achieve more for less.

But what is rapid e-learning exactly? Is it an urban myth? And if it does exist, does it actually improve learning and performance? 

Put a bunch of e-learning practitioners together in a room and I'm not convinced they'd be able to come up with a definition of rapid e-learning they could all agree with. But let's live dangerously and see what we can come up with here.

For some people rapid e-learning is all about the software. In a software-driven paradigm, it's all about tools that allow just about anyone to create and publish e-learning courses with little or no programming knowledge. It's about the change from the early days of e-learning when you needed significant programming skills to achieve anything of worth.

For others, rapid e-learning is defined by the ease of the production process. In this view of rapid e-learning, just one or two people can wear many hats. Gone are the days of huge development teams and endless production cycles.

Whatever your definition, rapid e-learning needs an authoring tool of some description. And broadly speaking, development tools fall into two broad categories: free-form and form-based.

Free form: the name gives it away, really. Free form tools start with a blank screen which allows the e-learning author to create a structure s/he wants. Inevitably, this still requires some setting-up and choosing functionality.

Form-based: in a form-based authoring tool, the software does pretty much everything. All you have to do is add the content. The negative here, of course, is the forms. They only give you what they are designed to. If you want anything outside of this, you are back to needing programming skills.

But whatever tool you use (whether you consider it 'rapid' or not), there's no getting away from one central question: Just because you can create a course rapidly, should you? And one central problem: not everyone given an authoring tool (and the training to operate it) is going to develop a great course. In fact many will (and have) built truly awful ones.

The answer to the 'should you' question has to be answered by individual organisations. Only people in that organisation can best work out if e-learning is really the most suitable solution for them.

In answer to the second point, I'd say this. When the technology is new and exciting, all the focus is on the technology. This has been the problem with e-learning for too long now. 

In the software-driven paradigm I mentioned earlier, rapid e-learning was meant to democratise development. In many cases, all it did was empower lots of people to create online slideshows with little or no value or effectiveness. 

But now we seem to be moving into an era when technology is evolving again. It probably won't be that long before almost no programming skills are required to create sophisticated e-learning

For me, this moment can't come fast enough.  This could be the moment when we can finally shift from what I call 'point and click' thinking to instructional design thinking. Finally we can shift the focus to where it's needed to be all along:  not about how to programme, but about how to build better courses and more effective learning experiences.

If Articulate Storyline is your authoring tool and you need some training for yourself or your team, take a look at our in-house and publicly scheduled training options.

Before Christmas I posted on LinkedIn about how many of our clients often vent their frustrations about their existing LMS.

I mentioned that we have been having our own LMS growing pains and promised an update on this. 

As small business, our LMS is primarily about providing access to learning materials for our clients, rather than internally for ourselves. So our need for an e-commerce element is greater than for many. 

The companies that I would call legacy corporate LMS providers tend to have a basic e-commerce offering and almost always go with the conventional pricing model of charging per user account (sometimes combining that with restrictions on the number of courses you can upload).

None of these mainstream offerings really suited our particular needs, so we started casting a broader net. Which has resulted in us settling on a Wordpress-based LMS plug-in.

We have run our website using Hubspot for the best part of 15 years now, so Wordpress was not a product/community we had any first-hand experience of. 

Now I’ve had some exposure to Wordpress, my view is that the core Wordpress software is a clunky old dog that doesn’t exactly provide a winning user interface.

However, if you can get over that poor back-end usability issue, you find yourself in an astonishingly innovative marketplace of plug-ins and extensions, all offering a huge variety of add-on functionality.

Like any thriving marketplace, there’s the good and the bad and we certainly test-drove a couple of horrible LMS plug-ins before settling on the one we did.

Is our chosen option completely perfect? No. Has it been a project and a half to get it to do (more or less) exactly what we want? Absolutely. Will it be a massive improvement for us on what we have been using up until now? Most definitely. Have we avoided our very own LMS boondoggle? Thankfully, yes.

Which, I think, verifies the point made by one of the commenters on my LinkedIn post. That is, that LMS needs vary dramatically from business to business. So just because one LMS works well for business A, it might be the worst possible LMS solution for business B.

In other words, unless you are super-clear about what you need to achieve with your LMS, you may well end up with a solution that you are cursing, not far down the line.

That’s why, you’ll notice, that I haven’t named any names in this post. Given how much needs can vary, it seems very unfair to publicly call out products that may not have been suitable for us but could be perfect for you.

If you are interested in talking with me more about our Wordpress LMS experience or the specific products we tested, I’m happy to do this offline.

This Articulate Storyline training blog post, fouses on Storyline’s freeform interactions.

But you may not know that totally flexible versions of these interactions are also available – and only a mouse click away.

These flexible freeform interactions completely transform your ability to create really authentic, context sensitive activities that are a world away from their pre-formatted siblings.

And knowing about these freeform interactions is crucial if you want to produce more authentic, task-based e-learning. Why? Because, by definition, the pre-formatted variety can only ever be about an abstract style of practice activity.

By contrast, freeform interactions are only about the functionality. It’s entirely up to you how you apply that functionality. In other words, you have complete freedom in how your interaction looks and what skills or knowledge it gets your learners to practice.

Suddenly (provided you are prepared to think a bit differently about your e-learning) you can use the interactions’ functionality to make your practice activity seem authentic and meaningful to your learners.

And by the way, if you need some help in thinking differently about your e-learning, check out a free 12 page boredom-busting e-learning guide here.

Freeform interaction benefits

So what about other benefits of using freeform interactions? Crucially, they allow you start with the instructional idea.

What is it you ideally want to create to help your learners get authentic practice in the skills you are teaching?

You can sketch the idea out, share it with others, get their feedback and then refine it a bit. Only then do you need to think about which of the interaction type will best help you to achieve your goal.

This is in complete contrast to the pre-formatted variety of interaction, where you are simply having to fit your content into a pre-existing approach, format and layout. Little or no creativity, authenticity or context. Highly abstract for the learners. Very dry. Extremely predictable.

Using freeform interactions: in summary

Just to recap, you start with your idea. Sketch it out and (where possible) share this with your colleagues and some candidate learners to get feedback and refine the idea.

Create the idea either as a standard Storyline slide or in an external tool such as PowerPoint and then import the content into Storyline.

With your slide all ready to go, choose the Freeform Interactions button in the XX menu. From the list that of interactions available, choose the one suitable for your needs.

Set the interaction’s functionality as required for your activity. Remember you van toggle between the slide view and the interaction’s back end form view as much as you need.

Once all the settings are complete, test your interaction.

So in summary, freeform interactions give you all the kind of e-learning interactions you know and love already – they simply provide you with a powerful, new way to apply them to your learning

This article first appeared on the Training Zone website.

In the previous Articulate Storylline training blog post, I explained what Storyline variables are and why they are so important. I also wrote about the three types of variables available for you to use.

In this blog post, there's a video which takes a look at an example of creating one of these three types of variables – a text variable: 

In summary, then, variables give you the power and flexibility to start thinking about how you can link you design across an entire course and break free of the restrictions of just designing on a slide-by-slide basis.

This video was first published as part of an article on the Training Zone website.

In some ways, this is not surprising. They are invisible to the learners (so don’t make for very glossy website visuals). They are a little bit abstract (not an easy thing for light and fluffy marketing types to get their heads around). And learning to use them takes a bit of concentration and effort (not exactly a great sell if you’re trying to persuade prospective clients that creating e-learning is quick and easy).

Which is a pity. Because one of Storyline’s greatest assets barely gets a mention most of the time.

Why variables are so important

So what are these things called variables? Before I explain that it’s worth mentioning why they might be so spectacularly useful and important.

 Most of what people focus on when they are creating e-learning with Storyline happens at slide level.

 In other words, you are using tools and features to control elements on a specific, individual slide. Of course, this is really important. The more functionality and control you have over what happens on an individual slide (or one of its layers) the better.

But imagine if you want to control what happens between slides. What about if your instructional design thinking is moving beyond a slide-by-slide focus. What about if you want to design your course in such a way that what a learner does on slide 5 has an impact on what they can do or what they can see on slide 25, for example?

This is where variables come into their own. Because variables operate at a global level within your Storyline course. They are available to you at any point in your course from any slide. 

Variables explained

So what are they exactly? Well, first of all, there are three types: text; number and true/ false. Think of the first two as containers and the third as a switch you can flick on and off.

As the name suggests, text variables allow you to store and retrieve a piece of text the learners type into it. Number variables allow you to store and retrieve a number or changing numbers that are relevant to your course. True/False variables can be set to equal one of two different values. It will come as no great shock to discover that the values you can switch between are (you guessed it) true and false!

If this is all still a bit, too conceptual for you, let’s take a look at a simple example of how you might use each one. 

Text variables in action

Let’s start with text variables. We all love it when something is “all about us”. Making something about us – personalisation – always goes down well. This is just as true for a piece of learning as for anything.

So a text variable is a great way to personalise your piece of learning. First you create your text variable and give it a name. At the start of a course, you can ask learners to type their name into a special text field. This automatically stores whatever name they type in the field inside the text variable you created.

While the course is running, this piece of text (in this example, the learners’ name) is available to you at any time on any slide – you just need to retrieve it.

So, for example, instead of an instruction on a screen saying, “Please select the best response”, it could say “Debbie, please select the best response” (assuming Debbie was the learner’s name).

When you create the text box with this instruction in it, you would just make sure you insert the name of your text variable at the start of the sentence. This way, you are telling Storyline to retrieve what’s stored in that variable and display it at the start of the sentence. 

This means you could pepper your course with personalised references to the learner using the learner name stored in the variable. Note that once the course is finished, the name stored in the variable is lost, so if the learner returned to the course a second time, they would have to type their name again at the very beginning. 

Number variables in action

Similarly, number variables can store a number, retrieve it and display it at any point. You can also add, subtract, divide and multiply any numbers stored in your number variable.

So you might, for example, want to keep track of the number of times a learner clicks on a particular button on a slide and when they reach a pre-defined number of clicks either show them a specific piece of content on that slide or take them to another slide. 

True/false variables in action

Finally, as previously mentioned, true/false variables act as a kind of switch. You can choose to start the ‘switch’ at either true or false. When the learner does something (like click on a button) you could set their action to flick the ‘switch’ to the opposite of its starting point (i.e. from false to true or from true to false).

When the learner reaches a slide later in the course, you might decide to show one piece of content on the slide if the variable ‘switch’ is set to false and a different piece of content if the variable ‘switch’ has been flicked to true.

In conclusion

In summary, then, variables give you the power and flexibility to start thinking about how you can link you design across an entire course and break free of the restrictions of just designing on a slide-by-slide basis.

This article was first published on the Training Zone website.