Course Architecture

When I was an adjunct lecturer, I spent a lot of time compiling details about my particular topic (Geography). It was, in my view, storytelling. The only way students, who were mostly adults or adult-like, would listen is if I was telling them a story.

One of my favorite stories was the story of the Salton Sea. I started with deep history, going back to the tectonic movement of plates, to glacial times and included the Colorado River's formation and beyond. It is a truly compelling history when you analyze it. The Salton Sea's present state owes little to that deep history, but when you know that extra information, there's a sense of continuity that makes it possibly a little more interesting. 

After working in the corporate world for a while, it has become clear to me that management professionals tell stories. They tell stories that need to be bought by peers, by reports, or by upper management (their bosses). The stories might be missing parts and they might be exaggerations. What these people are all doing is architecting. They are architecting their personal stories in a way that gets them what they want. With Ivy League educations, the stories end up being pretty articulate and we often are impressed. But they remain stories, at heart. 

Course design and architecture are not a whole lot different, and fortunately, the constraints are far more limiting. Course objectives limit your scope, for example. Exam or certification objectives provide guidance for content development. 

What might be a good way to really achieve course architecture though? In my experience it has been one of the following:

1. An outline

2. A design document

3. A list of random topics

4. A mind map (oooh, what's that?)

Of these, which really helps you write a story? Surprisingly, 3 and 4. Yet, the first two are more common in the corporate world, but the last two really focus on the creative nature of the human mind. I say that with no scientific citation, but it's probably true (I think that's a worthy lit search, but not at this hour). 

Architecting a course using a mindmap is going to be my next post. 

DevLearn 2016

Here I am again - DevLearn 2016. It's been great so far. 

Day 1: A day-long workshop focusing on interactive video. What does this mean? Interactive video means making a video more interesting than it already is. It might mean putting in a hotspot, or adding text to emphasize a point. It might mean a pause to allow for a question. 

The workshop covered a tool, HiHaHo, which sort of fast-tracks your interactive elements ("enriches" in HiHaHo language) by providing a web interface for you to add the components of interaction.

Pros: Quick and dirty results for interaction, easy to use, ideal for microlearning and informal learning.

Cons: Not suitable for high quality results, video must be edited to a high standard in order to use the product. It's more like you are "dressing up" your existing video (which should be awesome). Delivery method is unclear. Requires subscription to view. 
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Bottom line: A good use of time, although I would not use this platform to create production content. I think it's a good storyboarding tool. 

Day 2: 

AM
Attended half of the keynote, which was given by Penn of Penn & Teller. He talked about storytelling. Penn thinks PowerPoint is sort of lame and prevents human sharing. Ok. 

Next, headed over to the Expo to try and hear about Articulate 360. Too noisy in room. Could not hear. Headed over to get a cup of tea. Ended up talking to an Articulate trainer who did our training last year

After the trip to the Expo, returned to the main hall, where I hit a Camtasia session entitled, "Eight Things I Hate About your Screencast", which was based on (I assume), this article.  Since I'll be doing video soon, I wanted to see what Mark Lassoff had to say about Camtasia. That was a good use of time. He's also a good speaker. 
Takeaway not in article: Upgrade to Camtasia 9.0, it's worth it. 

PM
After Camtasia, I headed over to get some lunch. I landed myself on a chair in a random session about LRS'. Hmmm. Ok. Learning Record Store. I don't know. I was involved with my sandwich, and couldn't get a lock on this one, but maybe returning to the description and the slides or content (if made available) will jog my memory. 

I hopped over to a talk about PowerPoint. Wow. This was like a tour-de-force of everything PowerPoint can do. It was called "Eighteen Awesome PowerPoint Tricks for Effective Presentations". This guy, Richard Goring, is a great presenter and he's like some kind of PowerPoint savant. We got a nice little booklet with some of the tips, and also a good website to search on videos with more tips! Yay! 

Day 3: 

Made it over to a couple today before catching the plane. First, I went to another loud and inaudible talk at the Expo. It was about how to make your eLearning more efficient. Not much gained, unfortunately, since it was so difficult to hear. 

The next one was extremely useful - this was a discussion about how to make your videos more interactive. The focus was really on having good videos with some kind of easy to understand structure (e.g. branching, messaging). Engagement here was really focused more on making a good video, then adding into it simple elements like hotspots. This really focused largely on marketing education videos, but still, some great ideas. Link here for examples we saw in the talk. 

Thanks DevLearn! Love this conference!

eLearning Challenge #140 + eLearning Diwali Trivia Game

Well, finally got another one in. This one was a cooking analogy. I'm like 10 behind on these, but something is better than nothing.

eLearning Challenge #140 : An ADDIQuTE Kitchen

I also did something for the work Diwali party which worked out when used in a large group - teams of four. eLearning Diwali Triva Game : The Diaspora Game

ADDIQutE - is it good enough to fly?

Before I started doing instructional design work, I taught a lot. Specifically, I taught human geography, physical geography and GIS topics occasionally. The reason someone like me can shift into "just instructional design" is because I'm already used to organizing information.

But instructional design isn't quite the same as teaching at all. Correction - it has nothing to do with teaching. It has a lot to do with training and being very specific about what you want the learner to know. That's the opposite of what some professors (yes, I was and continue to occasionally be called "professor", when I teach online) do. Professors often go on about something. They get off track, lose focus and sometimes miss their own point (not the good ones). They also often have job security. 

I digress. See? I still have it. The professor thing.

But back to instructional design. 

As I get more engrossed in this job, the more I like it in some ways. The only thing I hate about this job is the tight deadlines. I think it produces low quality sometimes and oversimplifies things that often require deep thought. So I ask myself, where can I catch that problem? Do I catch it in Analysis? Sometimes. Do you have a good SME, because that's when you can make sure you include the RIGHT information in the BEST way possible? If you do not have good SME support, you might have to figure out the problem during Design and Development.

After Development, many instructional folks let go and let the trainers handle the Implementation. Evaluation (largely) is ignored or swept under the rug. Managing the results of an evaluation is a type of going backward that management may find a waste of time. It takes work. It's old news. Moving on! Our backlog is too high, so let's "table" that until later...and it goes to the attic. 

So I started thinking, where or when (or both) can I make sure that my content has a chance to get a QUALITY check and get TRIED out? Well, you could put it after things are put into place (this is the way Implementation is defined at my organization), and call it QuT - Quality checked and Tried. Get someone to just try out the material, before it's delivered.

If your organization is more along the lines of "implementation" being the actual delivery, then the order may look like ADDQuTE where QuT replace Implementation. ADDIE works in different ways at different places.

My new addition to ADDIE makes your material ADDIQuTE (adequate). Sometimes that's the best you can do. 

Analysis

Design

Development

Implementation

Quality check

Try

Evaluation

eLearning Challenges: #139

After my relaxing work-cation trip to Seattle for the Articulate Roadshow (Bellevue, WA), I felt all refreshed to work on eLearning Heroes Challenges. That was three weeks ago. Finally, I got around to doing one of the challenges, which was really fun. Those challenges are great way to keep your hands on the software and come up with new ideas and resources. I think it took me about 2 hours in total, including the design idea and finding appropriate resources. I really want to keep at it - perhaps after the next deadline I can take a few hours each week to do one.

The challenge I chose this time was to Give These Top Templates a Makeover. Naturally I did not have time to do all the templates, but I chose one to try and play around with - and attempt a conversion to flat design. 

While that challenge sounds pretty simple, there are some key points to consider. For me, they were:

• Finding the right color palette (free)
• Finding some flat design avatars (free)
• Finding a sound clip (free)
• Figuring out the overall look and feel (brain time)

These weren't hard to find (all references in the final Storyline file), but incorporating and editing them did take some time.  

BEFORE

MY MAKEOVER

The final result is available at this link.

Demos (Screencasts)

As my team has been doing more eLearning lately, we've been trying to get more clear about standards to follow. I held a brown bag in hopes of getting folks to share information, which some did willingly. Sometimes it's like pulling teeth, but if you can get someone to talk about their work, that is ideal because it is uninhibited. 

Camtasia is the tool of choice, although some of these concepts apply to tools universally. 

Best practice tips

Visual 

Zoom

Consistent Zoom - recommend 115%

Maximum Zoom - 150% (do not exceed)

Aspect Ratio (Camtasia) - Capture Size

desktopwidth:i:1500

desktopheight:i:684

Frames Per Second

Lower fps means smaller file size. The default file size is 30 fps (Camtasia). 

Recommendation: 15 fps for screencast

More information https://wistia.com/community/posts/t8l/frame-rates-for-screencasts. 

Audio

Tool: Audacity (free, and that link will take you to the download page)

Record in Mono

Align recording device to recording software preferences (Sound input)

Align settings to device.

Your recording preferences would be set for  44.1 kHz 16 bit  because that is what is supported by the device. 

Save as WAV signed at 16-bit PCM, no encoding (to prevent distortion)

Other tips:

• Talk through the screencast as you move around the screen so you don't lose the flow.
• Pay close attention to sequencing steps for the learner
• Recording in small bursts is better for editing and reorganizing - particularly because it is easier to move around in Camtasia and Storyline
• Be sure you have a quiet space (no fans, phones, other distractions)
• If possible, set up a recording space in your home to do the narrations
• Speak slowly and pause appropriately

Resources

Create Software Simulations (Articulate)

Screencasts Presentation (2/9/2016 Brown Bag Lunch), Presentation has a lot of links to reliable blogs and tutorials

Tips to Creating an Engaging Screencast (PDF) - Camtasia reference

Lynda provides a Screencasting tutorial and includes overviews for Camtasia and other tools

When your negative thought becomes positive...

Recently I had a really positive experience taking an online course. The irony was (well, there were two). The first irony was that I thought it would be a slog, you know. Group projects, absent instructors, etc. But this wasn't the case at all. In fact, this was a very positive experience (and continues to be - there are two weeks left). 

The second irony (maybe more of a silliness than an irony) is, more obviously, that it was an online course about eLearning offered through Canvas by instructors at the University of Brussels. On top of that, the group project assignment had a group with four members scattered across the world, literally. So let's just map that out for a moment. 




Prezi is a cool tool.

I was pretty sure that the group project would be a disaster, but it was 100% complete in a week, on time. Everyone did their part, and we all learned new tools. I did not know how well Microsoft Office Mix would work, but it was a breeze. Now, the project itself was not perfect and it definitely would benefit from some serious editing, but it was amazing to me that everyone stuck with it and came up with something that everyone was comfortable sharing with the class (everyone in the class is a working professional).

I'm looking forward to doing a cool final project for the class too.

This brings me to the point of my thought. Taking an online course is an exceptionally good use of time for a learning designer. You pay attention to how things are presented and designed, but you are also trying to learn a new skill/concept, so you are really immersed both in your craft and your learning motive. This experience has informed me and, suprisingly, inspired me.