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    3 min read

    Articulate Storyline Training: Masters and Layouts Explained

    By Andrew Jackson on Thu, Jun 2,2016

     

    Many people are familiar with the idea of a software template. This is a great way of providing some pre-existing structure for the creation of documents, PowerPoint presentations or pieces of e-learning.

    And like many authoring tools, Storyline has template functionality, allowing you to create a high degree of consistency in how your courses look and function. In short, templates get plenty of attention – for very good reasons. 

    However, software features that get lots of attention aren’t necessarily the only (or the best) way to achieve your goals. Many people using templates might be better off using a Storyline feature which tends to be overshadowed by templates: namely masters and layouts. 

    Spot the difference

    So what’s the difference between the two features and why would you bother with masters and layouts when you’ve already got templates to help you.

    The key thing to remember about a Storyline template? It’s a way to save and share ALL elements of a Storyline project. When you decide to save a project (large or small) as a template, absolutely every element of that project is saved within the template – not only content, but also things like triggers, navigation, variables etc.

    So you would use a template when you want to save the exact structure and functionality of your project. When you want to lock-down design and restrict flexibility. When you want to provide a complete course blueprint that others can work from. In short, templates are an easy and robust way of sharing a complete project and all its elements.

    But what about if you like the idea of being able to create some time-saving consistency, but still need a reasonable degree of flexibility in how you create and populate slides within your project.

    If this sounds like your goal, then masters and layouts may well be a better option for you than a template.

    Masters and layouts explained

    You’ve probably heard of a master slide and may already be clear about it’s function. But its likely you’ll be less clear about layouts and their function. So before we go any further here’s a quick video for you to watch explaining exactly what masters and layouts are all about. 

     

     

     

    As you will have gathered from the video above, a master slide and its associated layouts provide an easy way to consistently set the placement of slide content and then apply it to selected slides within your course.

    Let’s just take a minute to review masters slides first, followed by layouts

    All about master slides

    Master slides are great for any global content that needs to appear on every slide in your course. A master slide can save you going through your course and manually putting the same pieces of content onto every slide. And because the content on a master slide is managed centrally, the placement of that content will be precise and consistent throughout your course.

    So master slides are extremely useful, but a little bit limiting. The reason for this? There is probably not that much identical content that will need to appear on every single slide of your course.

    However, it’s quite likely that you will have quite a bit of identical content that does need to appear on certain individual slides, say, or all the slides in a specific scene. 

    All about layouts

    That’s why you can add layouts below your master slide. The real power of the master slide comes with its associated layouts. Layouts give you targeted control over and flexibility with the content that needs to appear on a given individual slide or slides in a scene.

    It should come as no surprise, then that planning is the key to success with both masters and layouts. To get their real benefit, you need to have your course well planned out in advance, so you are clear from the word go which pieces of content will consistently need to appear where.

    Some extra points to remember

    There are a couple of other important points to make here. The first is that masters and layouts are not just about the consistent placement of content. You can also add triggers to the content on your masters and layouts making this functionality available on selected slides as well.

    The second point is about the flexibility I mentioned earlier. Even when you have applied a master or layout to a slide, you can still add more content, triggers or layers to that individual slide.

    So you’ll often end up with individual slides which are a flexible combination of preformatted content and triggers drawn from a master and its layouts and content and triggers which are specific to just that individual slide.

    In summary, if what you need is flexibility and creativity and not the locked-down, restrictive approach that templates are designed to achieve, then masters and layouts are likely to be for you.

     

    This article first appeared on the Training Zone website.

    Topics: e-learning e-learning software
    3 min read

    Custom E-Learning Design: Is Your Authoring Tool Holding You Back?

    By Andrew Jackson on Thu, May 26,2016

    Increasingly, if you are working in a learning and development role associated with designing and developing e-learning, you’ll probably be expected to have some ability in using an authoring tool.

    This should be good a thing. It increases your overall skill set and more important, it enables you to create more effective learning for your learners.

    But what about if this isn’t what is happening. What about if your e-learning authoring tool is actually holding you back?

    This might seem like an odd question to ask. Surely an ability to use an authoring tool will mean you are creating really effective e-learning. Not necessarily.

    First, it’s your instructional design skills that should determine the effectiveness and quality of the e-learning you create.

    But what about if you are not going down the road your instructional design leads you because you find yourself thinking, “No point in doing that because I’ve no idea how to implement it in my authoring tool. Better stick with a less ambitious design because I know how to do that.”

    Hey presto, before you know it, your authoring tool is most definitely holding you back. The good news? It doesn’t have to be this way.

    The problem with legacy authoring tools

    Going back 10 or 15 years, most easy-to-use authoring tools were so limited in their functionality, they really restricted truly creative instructional design thinking.

    Only if you were lucky enough to work in an organisation with a massive budget for creating e-learning and unrestricted access to programmers could you really pull off much that was original or really effective.

    This is one of the key reasons we have had years of deathly boring e-learning. Lots of slides with dense text and stock photos. A Back and Next button applied to each slide – and not much else.

    The emerging new breed of tools

    Fortunately, the world of authoring tools is changing. While there are still far too many rubbish ones out there, we are seeing a new breed emerge. Much more powerful. Fantastic functionality. Much fewer limits on what you can achieve with your e-learning.

    So here’s the rub. Lots of people using one of these new style of authoring tools don’t really know about some of the more powerful features available to them. Instead they are still churning out e-learning, barely removed from the deathly dull variety just described above.

    What a pity! This is like owning a Porsche and only ever driving it around your local neighbourhood at about 20 miles an hour.

    Getting the most from your authoring tool

    So what’s the solution? Well, it’s twofold. First, you really need to make sure your instructional design thinking is up-to-date and fit for creating e-learning that is more focused on delivering practice of skills, than delivering screens of knowledge.

    And, by the way, if you need some help with this, you can download a free 12 page guide to creating boredom-busting e-learning here.

    Second, it’s time to up your game and start learning about the more powerful features of your authoring tool.

    To help you with this, I’ll be writing three more articles focused around one of the most popular of this new breed of authoring tool, Articulate’s Storyline.

    Why focus on Storyline?

    Why the focus on Storyline? It may not be absolutely the most sophisticated and capable of all the tools out there, but it does offer a great balance between being relatively easy to learn and achieving well above average functionality and interaction.

    In each of the articles that follow this one, I’ll be focusing on a different Storyline feature. Features that you’ve quite possibly heard of or maybe even used a little.

    But you may not be aware of their real power and how they can help you create much more effective e-learning. Features which can really help liberate your instructional design thinking and save your learners from the boredom of endless knowledge presentation.

    The best bit of all this? Once you feel confident in your ability to get your authoring tool to implement your instructional design ideas, it really will be your instructional design thinking that drives your development and not your authoring tool.

    This will almost certainly make your role as an instructional designer more interesting and satisfying. It will also turn you into an e-learning hero in the eyes of your learners. Don’t underestimate how much they will thank you for NOT making them sit through hours and hours of dull, sleep-inducing e-learning!

     

    This article first appeared on the Training Zone website.

    Topics: Course Design e-learning
    3 min read

    Will Convergence Finally Kill Off E-Learning?

    By Pacific Blue on Tue, Sep 17,2013

    I've recently been watching the much-praised series House of Cards produced by and starring Kevin Spacey. I was a big fan of the original BBC series and I think he's done a great job of adapting the story for the American political landscape.

    Spacey has also been in the news recently with his keynote address to the Edinburgh TV Festival. His main focus was encouraging new talent and innovation in the media world, but in talking about this, he made some observations that are as pertinent to the world of learning as they are to the world of the media luvvies.

    A couple of months ago I wrote an article about mobile learning for the TrainingZone website. My main point: despite all the hype from the vested interests (desperate to flog you their products and make their big investment gamble pay off), very few people are actually doing anything with mobile learning.
    Related to this, I also noted that it's become rather difficult these days to even define mobile learning given the blurring that's going on between different types of device.

    I've also written previously about how, in general, learning and development folk tend to obsess about delivery mediums and devices and not enough about instructional design the effectiveness of learning. How we get distracted by the technology. How we tend to see learning in silos.

    So my ears pricked up and my attention was immediately grabbed, when I saw this clip from Spacey's speech featured on TV (the bold text is mine, the block capitals are Spacey's):

    "One way that our industry might fail to adapt to the continually shifting sands is to keep a dogmatic differentiation in their minds between various media - separating FILM and TV and MINI-SERIES and WEBISODES and however else you might want to label narrative formats.

    It's like when I'm working in front of a camera…that camera doesn't know if it's a film camera or a TV camera or a streaming camera. It's just a camera. I predict that in the next decade or two, any differentiation between these formats - these platforms - will fall away".

    In the early 1990s, I remember reading Nicholas Negroponte's The Media Lab. At the time, it was revolutionary stuff. Most of what he was predicting back then felt like science fiction - most of it has now come true, of course. But his big idea was convergence. This was the idea that separate technologies like TV, radio and computers would all eventually blur together into a massive multi-media whole.

    Negreponte saw it all happening within a 10 year timespan. That was a bit optimistic. It's still a work in progress and as Spacey suggests, will probably take another decade of two. But coming it is.

    So what would convergence mean for e-learning in particular and learning and development in general. Well, the death of silo thinking, I suspect. As the distinctions between the technology and devices we use to create and access learning become more and more blurred, I think the labels we currently use will become less and less significant or meaningful.

    This will be a painful shift. Plenty of people who have made plenty of money from the old ways of thinking will almost certainly resist convergence for as long as they can. People who use the old-style technologies will be equally reluctant to take on board a whole new way of doing things.

    And it won't be straightforward, either. As far as I can see, convergence in the media world will be a lot easier to achieve than in learning and development. Thinking about the learner experience in a world of convergence will be complex.

    But in the end, I suspect, it will be the learners themselves who will demand this change. As convergence becomes more and more normal in many other aspects of their lives, they simply won't put up with learning that is still packaged into silos.

    Towards the end of his speech, Spacey makes the following observation (the bold text is mine, the block capitals are Spacey's):

    "Is 13 hours watched as one cinematic whole really different than a FILM? Do we define film by being something two hours or less? Surely it goes deeper than that. If you are watching a film on your television, is it no longer a film because you're not watching it in the theatre? If you watch a TV show on your iPad is it no longer a TV show? The device and length are irrelevant. The labels are useless - except perhaps to agents and managers and lawyers who use these labels to conduct business deals. For kids growing up now there's no difference watching Avatar on an iPad or watching YouTube on a TV and watching Game of Thrones on their computer. It's all CONTENT".

    I couldn't agree more. For all of us in learning and development, in the end, it's all LEARNING.
    Topics: e-learning
    3 min read

    The 80/20 Principle and UK Articulate Storyline Training

    By Pacific Blue on Tue, Sep 10,2013

    What is the 80/20 Principle exactly? Well the concept of 80/20 is based on the work of Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto done in the late 1890s. It was popularised in the 80s by author Richard Koch with his book The 80/20 Principle.

    80/20 is about almost invisible divisions or patterns that exist in most things. It's based on the idea that 80 per cent of results flow from just 20 percent of causes. If you start to identify these patterns and their significance, 80/20 can help you to focus in on what's really important and not worry so much about the rest.

    So how does it work, practically? Let's take the example of learning a piece of software - specifically learning an e-learning authoring tool like Articulate Storyline. Typically, when we're faced with the prospect of using a new piece of software like this, we can feel rather daunted. So much to learn, so little time to learn it, as the saying goes.

    In other words, we tend to look at the whole and convince ourselves we will only be truly competent when we know everything there is to know about the software.  And a good many people will beat themselves up about not knowing all the features well enough.

    Equally, many managers and supervisors love to peddle this thinking and terrorise people over their inability to be good at absolutely everything in the software. Only when you reach perfection, their thinking seems to go, will you be considered a worthy employee.

    80/20 thinking, by contrast, is much more pragmatic and quite counter-intuitive. It's starting point is that aiming for the 100% is a terrible waste of your time and energy. You'll definitely burn yourself out in the quest for perfection. And you almost certainly won't get the best result approaching things this way.

    Much better to identify the significant 20% and focus more of your effort on that. By definition, this significant 20% ensures you will get a better return on your efforts. And by the way, the division doesn't have to be exactly 80/20. It'll depend very much on what you are looking at. Your 80/20 could be as much as 60/40 at one end of the scale or as little as 95/5 at the other end.

    And in case you're wondering, this is not an excuse for sloppiness. It's about the smart allocation of time and resources. When you focus on the significant 20%, you do it to the absolute best of your ability and give it your all - in recognition of the fact that this is where your time and energy is best directed.

    So back to learning Storyline. Where does this leave us? Well it means that the way we conventionally think about learning software is guaranteed to lead to heartache and strife. Typically, we think we should start at the beginning and work our way through from beginner to advanced.

    Applying 80/20 thinking, however, paints a very different picture. It highlights the fact that we only use about 20% of the authoring tool's features to produce about 80% of the results. In other words we only need to be really proficient in a relatively small number of key features that we use over and over again to get most of the results

    For the remaining 80% of the features (that only bring us 20% of the results), we should take a much more pragmatic approach. Because we use those features infrequently, we should be prepared to use a 'just in time', performance support-style approach to using them.

    So, in fact, you don't need to spend 5 days of training, learning every last detail of your new authoring tool. You will have forgotten all those cool, obscure features by the time you come to use them, anyway.

    Much better to get really proficient at the 20% you'll use over and over and worry about the rest as and when you need it. By the way, for an authoring tool like Storyline, I'd estimate it's more like a 70/30 division - but as I mentioned earlier, the principle remains true regardless of the actual percentages.

    And doesn't that feel good? No need to beat yourself up about all the things you can't do. Instead revel in the fact that you are now highly productive, because you have become super-efficient and effective at using those features that really deliver the most bang for your buck.

    If you've got a bit of time of the next few weeks, I can't recommend Koch's book highly enough. And of course you can apply 80/20 to reading it, - Koch encourages you to do this, by the way.

    No need to read the book from cover-to-cover. Identify the chapters or parts of chapters that you think will deliver you the most benefit and focus in on those.

    In times gone by I have heard some people wax lyrical about 80/20 and others rant about how stupid it is - hence my Marmite nickname for it. In my experience it rings true and provides an elegantly simple solution to how best to allocate your time and effort. And although it divides opinion, I've heard far more people praise it that damn it. So I guess the 80/20 principle applies to the division of opinions about it too.


    If you want some Articulate Storyline training and you can see the benefits of applying 80/20 to that task, check out our in-house Storyline modules. We guarantee not to teach you every last detail of Storyline!
    Topics: e-learning e-learning software
    3 min read

    E Learning Design: Lessons from Breaking Bad

    By Pacific Blue on Tue, Sep 3,2013

    Great excitement and anticipation recently, as Netflix started to show the last 8 episodes of the US TV drama series Breaking Bad.

    If you're a fan of this award-winning series, you'll have followed Walter White's epic journey from high school chemistry teacher to creepy drug kingpin who 'cooks' the best crystal meth known to mankind.  The creator of the series Vince Gilligan describes this as a journey from 'Mr Chips to Scarface'.

    I've been a fan from the very first episode. And I'm sure, fellow fanatics reading this, can't wait to discover how the series finally twists and turns to its conclusion.

    If you've never even heard of Breaking Bad and you enjoy quality TV drama, then I'd encourage you to check it out. I'm pretty sure you won't be disappointed.

    And if you are already wondering what on earth any of this has to do with e-learning and instructional design, then let me explain.

    Like any good Breaking Bad fan, while I was watching the last batch of episodes on DVD, I just had to look at all the special features, too. The first one that caught my eye was called The Writer's Room.

    And how interesting it turned out to be. Apparently, on average, it takes a team of writers around three weeks to hatch an episode of this series.

    I'll just repeat that, in case it didn't sink it the first time. It takes approximately 8 people, 3 weeks to come up with just the outline for 45-50 minutes of television drama.

    The actual writing of that episode takes another 7 days or so. And the filming of the episode takes about 15 days.

    I have no idea how this compares to other TV series, but it  really highlights how  creating a quality product is a major task.

    But most striking of all? The three weeks it takes to work out what is going to happen in the episode. And this is just working out the plot. Satisfying yourself that you are creating credible actions and reactions for the various characters involved.

    Of course, I couldn't help but draw some comparisons with how people typically go about creating a piece of e-learning.

    For a single episode of Breaking Bad, in very rough percentage terms, that three weeks of creating the plot ( effectively the instructional design equivalent of analysis and design)  accounts for about 45% of the total development time. That's pretty astonishing.

    Try selling that percentage of analysis and design time to an e-learning client, internal or external. Chances are you'll be laughed out of the room.

    Very few people would be happy to accept that percentage of a project's time devoted to analysis and design.

    Of course, plotting out a TV series is not the same as doing the analysis and design for a piece of e-learning. For e-learning, you probably don't need 45% of the time devoted to these activities. But you could comfortably spend quite  a bit more time on this stage, percentage-wise, than most people usually do.

    So often, skipping over the analysis and design is the norm. Everyone would much rather skip over that and go straight to development.

    Which is strange. Because as consumers of TV drama, we all know a poorly plotted film with a crumby script that rushes to production is a disaster.  Yet we are quite happy to live with a poorly designed, badly scripted piece of e-learning that gets rushed to development. With predictable results.

    As I wrote last week, as long as we allow authoring tools to frame the e-learning development conversation (and process) we are in trouble. With this approach and mindset, we will be turning out the e-learning equivalent of B-movies or a TV series destined for the afternoon schedules. And we know how embarrassingly bad most of those end-products are.

    For the minority, who are willing to get deadly serious about the analysis and design of their e-learning, popular, performance-improving courses are the gratifying end result.

    With just a small shift in thinking and approach, more Breaking Bad quality e-learning is perfectly achievable for a lot more people.


    If creating great e-learning is currently top of mind for you and you'd like to get a sense of how your e-learning stacks up against some best practices, then take a couple of minutes to complete our Discover Your E-Learning Impact scorecard to find out how you are doing.
    Topics: Instructional Design e-learning e-learning software
    2 min read

    ELearning Design: Analogue Instructional Design in a Digital World

    By Andrew Jackson on Tue, Aug 27,2013

    Recently, I spent some time working with an e-learning development team, who by their own admission, had spent years producing nice-looking, but very boring, page-turning e-learning.

    I don't want to knock these guys. They knew they were missing a trick and they were keen and eager to do something about it. And there's no question that after working with them for just a couple of days, they are now much better equipped to produce actual learning - that will have the added bonus of looking good.

    But it struck me. Here are people who are totally at home in the digital world, yet their instructional design skills (such as they were) were very definitely of the analogue variety.

    This is an extreme version of a scenario, I come across all too often. People acquiring and enhancing their digital skills exponentially, but leaving their instructional design skills (if any) trailing far behind.

    Several decades into a brave new world of everything becoming digital, we still seem to be remarkably naive (or hopeful) about software's ability to solve all our learning problems. It's almost as if when we're presented with a piece of software for developing or managing learning, the common sense part of our brain disconnects and we go all gaga.

    No need to think. Just follow the steps of the software procedure and all will be well, we seem to think. If only we can get good at using the software, we all delude ourselves, all will be well.

    Nowhere is this disconnect more apparent than in the world of e-learning. Yes, you can become a Storyline or Captivate super hero. Yes, you might have mastered variables, layers and states. Yes, you might have found a work around to an obscure software glitch that the developers haven't yet fixed.

    But all this blue-caped super-hero-ness comes to nothing if all you are doing is producing sophisticated but vacuous pieces of digital output that your learners would rather not be wasting their time ploughing through.

    And I wonder why we are still seduced by the promise of the software. No-one would be daft  enough to believe that being really proficient with a saw, hammer, chisel and screw-driver would be enough to turn you into a master furniture-maker.

    Proficiency in using these tools and nothing else, would probably enable you to cobble together some very rudimentary pieces of furniture.

    But you would only start creating highly functional and attractive furniture after you had mastered some very different (but nevertheless complementary) design skills.

    Creating e-learning is no different. Master your chosen authoring tool all you like. It won't turn you into a designer of truly effective e-learning. It will simply make you a highly-proficient software user.

    Master the software and apply some digital-world instructional design skills? Well, then there's potential genius in the making.

    As long as software development tools are driving the e-learning conversation, there'll be many a page-turner churned out - to the dismay of your learners.

    To finally deliver on the promise of e-learning, means re-aligning and upgrading your instructional design thinking from analogue to the digital.


    Using Storyline for your e-learning development? Find out about enhancing your Storyline skills with some instructional design magic.
    Topics: Instructional Design e-learning
    2 min read

    Multimedia E-Learning: Cut That CEO Video Right Now

    By Pacific Blue on Tue, Jun 18,2013

     I recently listened to a great interview with Jonathan Hall. Jonathan spent years working in TV, starting life at Australia's ABC. Later in life he also worked as a learning executive at the BBC.

    These days, one of the many things he does is to teach and advise people in learning and development about how to make great videos for use in training.

    If you've ever been involved with using multimedia in e-learning, at some point in your career you will almost certainly have come across the senior person in the organisation who is determined to get his or her face onto the start of an e-learning package.

    You know the kind of thing. One of those 'inspirational' pep talks that is supposed to motivate the learners to work their way through the deathly boring e-learning that's about to follow.

    Now, we all know, most leaders are absolutely c**p at these kinds of videos. Cheesy doesn't even come close to describing how embarrassingly bad most of these efforts are.

    But because the person in question is the leader, no- one can tell them the awful truth. Or worse still, deep down, they know they are c**p, but the bevy of obsequious lackeys who make up their inner circle just egg them on to do the deed.

    Jonathan had some very clear advice for anyone thinking about doing one of these introductory videos: don't. Unless you are an absolutely gifted speaker or your message is so utterly compelling and relevant that people are desperate to hear it, you are wasting everyone's time.

    And the reason for this? These videos are plain boring. Most people will lose interest within about 8 -12 seconds. As Jonathan explained, there is no way you can make these videos interesting - only moderately less boring.

    Another reason for not using a talking head -  people quickly forget what has been said. Jonathan cited the example of a weather forecast. Apparently people do remember the maps and the graphics they see during the forecast, but most can remember very little of what the forecaster actually said.

    This is because, surprise, surprise, video is about showing things happening. And with a talking head, nothing much is happening. People don't watch a video to see nothing happening. Hence the low retention and rapid turn off of interest.

    And TV people know this very well. Mostly, when a talking head is used in a TV programme, either, the shots will be very short; or, you'll hear the voice of the person, but see shots that illustrate what they are saying.

    So next time you are faced with the prospect of including a talking head video in your e-learning, try using Jonathan's advice as an argument for not going that route.

    And if you are absolutely forced to include it, here are a couple of tips. Make sure you shoot with two cameras - one with a long shot and the other with a close up. That way you can at least cut between the two shots to provide some kind of movement and interest for the poor old viewer. See if you can shoot some interesting footage that illustrates what is being said, so you can cut to these shots at various points during the video.


    Need help with multimedia or any other aspect of developing your e-learning? Check out our popular e-instructional design modules.
    Topics: Instructional Design e-learning
    2 min read

    Scenario-based E Learning Design: Participant or Observer?

    By Andrew Jackson on Tue, Jun 11,2013

    It's mid afternoon on the second day of an in-house instructional design course. We've been focused on e-learning for the whole two days.

    One big problem this client of ours is grappling with: how to make product information effective and memorable. They are from a graphic design background and sort of fell into creating e-learning a few years ago when a major client asked them if they could.

    They are in an industry where glossy, sexy and downright over-the-top and in your face is the order of the day. They would be the first to admit that up until now their e-learning has been shed loads of style over not very much substance.

    To help them move away from glossy, attractive page-turners full of click to reveal and drag and drop, I've asked them to flip their thinking. We've spent the last hour thinking about how their learners might actually use this factual product information, rather than about how to make its presentation "engaging" (their usual focus).

    This has been extremely hard for them. They are several steps removed from the learners. It's never occurred to them to try to get closer. This alone has been a major 'light-bulb moment'.

    We've been slogging away, getting ideas on the flip chart. As they are several steps removed from the learners, some of this is just guess work. So a major post-training activity is to validate these ideas. Find out what the learners actually do with all the product info that currently just gets stuffed into a page-turning course. But overall, they are doing well.

    As we are going through this brainstorming process, I've been slipping in examples from pieces of e-learning that show product information 'in action' rather than as page-turning, factual content.

    After seeing several of these examples, Geoff, one of the course participants, came up with an interesting question. If you're creating scenarios that reflect how the learners actually use the product information, do you make the learner one of the active participants in the scenario or do you 'show' them a scenario and get them to evaluate it.

    We stop to consider this for several minutes. Putting the learner fair and square in the middle of the scenario makes the learning highly relevant and authentic. Unlikely your learner would fail to see its relevance. Great, also, for learners who can't wait to roll up their sleeves and have a go.

    On the other hand, some learners might be all too well aware of the hands-on from their day-to-day experience. They might actually value the opportunity to take a step back to consider what they do.  From this more reflective perspective, they would probably prefer to watch the scenario unfold and evaluate what's going on, as it happens.

    The only way you'll truly get to a decent answer to this question is with a good sense of how the majority of your target learners are likely to respond. If you work inside an organisation, you have a fair chance of really getting to know your learners.

    If you are a supplier, you may simply be blocked from doing this every step of the way. In which case you'll have to make some intelligent, educated guesses or build both approaches into your course.

    Knowing your learners can end up sounding like such an old cliche. But as this story shows, it's always a key element in creating authentic, effective e-learning.


    If you are grappling with making dry, factual information authentic and relevant for your learners, take a look at our free Effective E-Learning Toolkit:

    Topics: Instructional Design e-learning
    3 min read

    Why So Much E-Learning Feedback is Just Pointless Rubbish

    By Pacific Blue on Thu, Mar 7,2013

    One of my pet hates about e-learning authoring tools is how hard they make it to create meaningful feedback. For years now, we have been stuck in a world where 'Correct' or 'Incorrect' are the default options.

    Learners would (quite rightly) soon have something to say if a trainer stood at the from of the room and offered only these two responses. So why is it okay for these to be the almost universally accepted standard for creating feedback in e-learning?

    The good news? There are lots of ways to create effective, meaningful feedback for your learners in an e-learning package. The bad news, you might have to work a bit harder to get the responses in place. And you might have to avoid (or adapt) some of the ready-made interaction templates to get a better result.

    But in my view, if you think 'Correct' and 'Incorrect' are perfectly fine and that's all the feedback you are prepared to provide for your learners, maybe it's time to re-think your career?

    If you are up for the challenge of more effective feedback, what can you do?

    As an alternative, there is intrinsic feedback. This is something we are all familiar with. Insult your boss, swear at his wife, kick his dog across the car park and you'll get some pretty harsh intrinsic feedback. In this example, it will almost certainly be: the sack.

    Cross a busy road without checking the traffic first. You may get lucky and receive no feedback at all. But chances are your intrinsic feedback will range from a a few bruises, to broken bones, to serious injury or even sudden death. Ouch. There's some serious intrinsic feedback for you.

    Okay, some extreme examples here, but you get the idea. And think about it for a minute. Almost any action we take in life will have some form of intrinsic feedback. For instructional designers there's an important lesson. This kind of feedback is highly effective (unless it kills us, that is). We usually remember it. And in its more extreme varieties, it instantly changes our behaviour or thinking forever.

    In e-learning, if you put your learners in a realistic context or scenario, then you definitely need to be think about the related actions or decisions they could take and the intrinsic feedback you could provide based on what they do.

    So intrinsic feedback is a great alternative to just correct/incorrect, but it isn't always enough. This is where instructional feedback comes into play.

    First you get the authentic, contextualised intrinsic feedback which demonstrates the consequences of your decisions or actions. Then you get some more detailed guidance on why or how your decisions or actions where good or bad.

    In the case of the good, you provide some positive reinforcement. For the bad, you can highlight what to avoid in future and what to do instead. Here's a simple example:

    Situation: you have a sales prospect who fills in an enquiry form on your website about one of your services.
    Action:  The learner contacts the prospect 6 days after they have  filled in the form
    Intrinsic feedback: The sale is lost. The prospect has already signed up for a competitor's service
    Instructional feedback: When people are searching for a product or service online, it usually means they are in serious buying mode. The stats bear this out. There is a direct link between the speed of responding to a website enquiry and the likelihood of the enquirer becoming a customer. So when an enquiry comes in, deal with it fast. Or you will quite likely lose the sale to a competitor.

    Combine intrinsic and instructional feedback to help your learners really understand why their actions and decisions are correct or incorrect.
     
    Want to find out how your e-learning feedback (and more) stacks up against some best practices we cover in our impact and instructional design programme? Take our Discover Your E-Learning Impact scorecard to find out. It's completely free, only takes a couple of minutes to complete and you get personalised results almost instantly.
    Topics: Instructional Design e-learning
    2 min read

    What Reality TV Can Teach Us About E-Learning

    By Pacific Blue on Wed, Mar 6,2013

    If there's one thing we've been bombarded with over the last decade or so, it's reality TV. Love it or loathe it, you can't escape it. Or it's popularity.

    Of course, you might argue it should actually be called UNreality TV, given that many of the situations participants find themselves in are completely contrived. But there's no escaping the reality of the raw emotions  and reactions the participants exhibit as they work through the situations they've been placed in.

    So could we learn a thing or two from reality TV when we are designing e-learning? This might seem a bit of a stretch to some of you, but I think the answer is 'yes'.

    Why do I say that? Well first off, there's the big problem with e-learning: too much focus on knowledge of content, not enough focus on its real world application. And we all know the result. Deathly dull screens of content and a few predictable interactions, all guaranteed to bore your learners to death.

    While learning isn't always about doing, in a workplace setting, it's pretty rare for you not to have to do something with the knowledge or expertise you learn.

    So this is where the parallel with reality TV comes in. Reality TV is all about situations and how people respond to them.

    While we probably don't want our learners sobbing at their computer screens or plotting to do down their fellow learners, putting them in some reasonably authentic settings and scenarios and challenging them to respond to those situations, is a reality TV method we should most definitely think about adapting for our own e-learning purposes.

    And, by the way, this is not about creating expensive simulations or virtual reality worlds. With a bit of thought and imagination you can easily turn potentially dry content into interesting, realistic activity.

    As an example, last year I was working with some consultants in the retail sector. They wanted to create some e-learning to teach their learners how to carry out a process to analyse if potential clients were actually worth approaching.

    Their assumption at the start of the development was that the most we could do was tell learners  about the process and then test them on their knowledge of it.

    Instead I had them focus on what the learners actually needed to do at each stage in the process. No surprises, this turned out to be a handful of tasks each time. Then we worked out how to best re-create each of those tasks in an e-learning environment.

    In some cases it didn't take long to come up with an easy-to-create solution. In other cases, there was a bit of head scratching while we worked out how to simplify and adapt things within the constraints of e-learning.

    But the result? A very different package from the content-centric one they had initially envisaged. Not only did the learners  find out about the process, they also had chance to practice it. Just like they would have to back in the workplace.

    So a bit of reality e-learning provided relevant practice (not just testing of knowledge). It enabled learners to try out their newly acquired knowledge in a supportive, structured environment. And it meant learners went back into the workplace far better prepared than if they had just been told lots of stuff  and then tested on their knowledge of it.

    Like to discover more about making your e-learning authentic, relevant and applicable to your learners? Check out our on-demand webinar on this very topic: Re-Frame Your E-Learning to Increase Impact and Workplace Performance.
    Topics: Instructional Design e-learning
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