For my Reference - Lots of Links!

eLearning Classic Texts & Reference Handbooks

If you aren't sure about what you are doing, check in this nerdy textbook (books have indices):

Clark, R. C., & Mayer, R. E. (2011).  E-learning and the science of instruction: Proven guidelines for consumers and designers of multimedia learning . John Wiley & Sons.

Kuhlmann, T. (2015).

Before You Begin...

at DevLearn!

Top 5 eLearning Acronyms (yeah, I know there are more but why start with Cognitive Overload (see below)?) 

10 eLearning Course Development Mistakes 

For the critical thinker: eLearning: Are we missing the point?

Best Practices

Storyline Best Practices

Learning Objectives and Best Practices

Tips to Give and Receive Feedback

When is Audio Narration Helpful?

Be Wary: Cognitive Overload 

What is Cognitive Overload?

Limiting or doing away with cognitive overload in your eLearning

Planning eLearning

Basic plan overview - this is a general article, but it has some good tips

Storyboards - lots of options

What is Storyboarding - We had a BrownBag Lunch about this?

There is a Lynda module about Storyboarding (ask Lisa IC for access) called Introduction to Storyboards

Storyboarding is a Total Waste of Time (Well, everyone is entitled to an opinion...)

Storyboard Templates - eLearning Heroes resource

Forum Discussion about Storyboards - eLearning Heroes resource

Agile and eLearning

Short definition here

Formalized versions of Agile for ID - works for eLearning and ILT

SAM - Successive ADDIE Model (ADDIE on speed) by Allen Interactions

LLAMA - Lot Like Agile Method Approach by Megan Torrance

Criticisms of Scrum

Graphic Design and Images for eLearning

eLearning Graphics - Seven Best Practices for Choosing Graphics (suggestion from the eLearning Industry Blog)

eLearning Images - Six things to think about before you select an image (e.g. photograph) for eLearning courses

Building your Own Graphics - Do I have to? Sometimes you do...

10 Tips to Improve your Visual Design

Elegant UI and Web Design Handbook

The Persona Problem - Everyone talks about it, but what are the critical concerns - cognitive economy and other generalizations..

 

 

 

PowerPoint - is there really a right way?

Until pretty recently, ID was a job that was mostly creating effective slides for presentations. To that end, there are many ID's who "know" PowerPoint. Heck, most business folks and professors know PowerPoint. Nowadays, kids learn how to use PowerPoint in junior high school. It is a somewhat ubiquitous tool.

However, it's come to my attention (not just now, but over the past few years) that PowerPoint is a largely underutilized tool. PowerPoint has developer tools (an Add-In). PowerPoint has numerous customization options. Because of this complexity, I started thinking about whether or not there are any standardized and accepted best practices out there for PowerPoint.

Guess what? 

There really doesn't seem to be anything really clear when I do a cursory web search (I'll keep looking). There are tons of tips and tricks. There are numerous "good" and "bad" examples. In fact, I really liked this webinar, which shows numerous slide "makeovers" based on basic visual design concepts. That could be one important element of designing a "best practice".

The next thing to consider is something that we've been grappling with at the office. Something that seems so obvious but is an error that has been repeated ad nauseum in corporations all over the world. It is that of the PowerPoint template. With changing versions of PowerPoint as well as employees rotating in and out of projects (employees with varying degrees of skill when it comes to PowerPoint), there is this phenomenon that I am going to call The Tempblend. It is what happens when lots of slides from different places come together in a single presentation. It's the melting pot of colors, graphics, typefaces and layouts. It is what you don't want when you have to go into a giant brand conversion or upgrade; I am willing to bet it happens EVERYWHERE.

While most corporate old-timers are probably aware of this issue, I personally had never been exposed to this level of detail when it came to PowerPoint. When you teach on your own at a college or in a classroom you have complete autonomy over your slides and your material. We are generally left to our own devices when it comes to slide management.

But, in a situation where there's turnover and varying degrees of skill and competency on a team, the Tempblend and other disasters are usually lying in wait. Is there a way to overcome these problems and improve slide management?

I did find one article about scalability which basically says, "this is a problem and there is no good answer." At least there's acknowledgment.

The only takeaways for me about this common ID problem are:

1. Be as consistent as possible with PowerPoint templates. A good template

• Use only the master slide(s) you need
• Name your new template's layout slides
• Use whatever Layout slides you have 
• Do not copy and paste slides from other places indiscriminately. The Reuse Slides option in PowerPoint 2013 guards somewhat against this, but if you were careless in the past, then the problems of reusing slides may still appear.
• Check for artefacts from old masters (View -> Master Slide) and delete unwanted slides in the Master.
• After an import, verify that Layouts are applied to slides. 

2. Gain some skill in Visual Basic in order to automate fixes. 

3. Look around and find tools to help fix the problems you see. Sometimes you have to pay, sometimes not. I found one tool that will fix image issues when you switch from 4:3 to 16:9. 

Sound and text - is there a right answer?

This little debate came up at my current job a while ago. There was a real urge in our team to force a lot of text and narration, which I questioned. I didn't know exactly why I questioned it, except that the urges to include every multimedia type seemed uninformed to me. It was worth questioning.

Needless to say, as does happen in many organizations, nobody cared. The multimedia fiesta went on as planned, while my minimally developed (read: no narration) prototype went quietly into the pit of archives (I'm happy to say a few people did end up using it out in the field, so that's a quiet success). 

That incident started to make me wonder whether or not there is some concrete published information on what's appropriate in terms of multimedia use. Of course there is. I found one nice summary (Schüler, A.et al, 2013) that spends time reviewing something called "The Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning" (CTML), that Mayer (2005, 2009) introduced. CTML's central premise is that "that in order to benefit from multimedia instruction learners need to engage in active processing of [multimedia] materials.



What exactly does that mean?

Mayer framed two processing channels - auditory/verbal and visual/pictorial. The learner has to process these in some way. Mayer suggests that the order is auditory followed by verbal for the first and visual information, then pictorial for the second. And so on. The gist is that Mayer basically said, "don't overuse media in a way that results in cognitive overload."

But back to my question about narration and text. Is this cognitive overload? At DevLearn 2015 (previous post), one speaker in a session titled, "Going from ILT to eLearning" (Sean Putman) spent some time talking about narration and text. His opinion was that using text that matched narration was annoying and not very effective. A lot of professional training in the eLearning does this. They put the text and narration together. Some (Lynda for example) even highlight the text as it's being read. It's a script, essentially. The argument is that it is reference material

Mast (2015) asks the question (paraphrased), "How much multimedia is too much?". The question pertains largely to MOOC's and other more academic learning resources, rather than corporate training, but the Mast article also gives us a definition of eLearning as, "...any typeof learning that uses electronic instructional material delivered via the World Wide Web and an Internet connection." (with the proper citations, which honestly, I haven't looked up, so thank you Kimberly Mast for doing that research, and if anyone wants those primary sources, see the link to her article).

Again in Mast, a section discussing multimedia and learning theory provides a great deal of support from the Constructivist side of things (Constructivist learning is considered "the theory of the digital age" according to Mast). Constructivists define meaning in learning when new information fits into the student’s existing knowledge, as well as the student’s perception of the world around them.

As for cognitive overload and multimedia, Mayer & Moreno's article (2003) summarizes nicely 1) what demands multimedia learning puts on the learner and 2) what can be done to reduce excessive cognitive load. I think that Point #1 is interesting from an academic standpoint, but not practical enough for me to put in this blog entry. However, Point #2 is important because that's what I set out to discover through this wild goose chase. Mayer's main suggestions are:

1. Present text as narration along with visual material and not as text on the screen. This offloads visual information that may be extraneous and causing overload (text pertaining to narration - the exact thing Lynda does offer).

2. Sometimes, both visual and auditory channels are overloaded. In that case, the idea of segmentation may offer more time to learners to process information. Segmentation is essentially the chopping up of information into smaller pieces that are coherent and tightly organized. The time in between those segments could be managed by the learner.

3. Another way to reduce overload is to flip learning (flipped classroom) where students add knowledge prior to entering the learning environment. That is, they gain background knowledge through reading or some other modality, then enter a classroom for practical exercise or application.

4. Finally, weeding is the process of eliminating interesting but irrelevant information that is central to the learning goal. If weeding is not an option, then signaling is a way to give learners clues about what material is important and what material is not important. This might be using bold text, arrows, or different colors to help learners see what parts of a multimedia presentation really matter.

These are Mayer's findings, and they are pretty good ones.

Calandra et al (2008) also did an even more interesting, and arguably relevant study whereby they examined various instructional materials from corporate entities and surveyed the instructional designers about audio. Not surprisingly (to me, at least), they found that "In fact, intuitive rationale was reported as significantly more important than theoretical guidelines when making choices about audio use." The respondents reported using partial text in combination with full audio commonly (in line with offloading material to mitigate overload issues). Another interesting finding was that more than half the respondents kept their audio segments to one minute or less. That is very short, but in agreement with a previous study they had done. 

The conclusion I draw here, which concurs with practice, is that excessive text and narration for the purposes of instruction is overkill. The text may be an added dimension but not something that should be simultaneous with visuals in copious amounts. Narration via auditory channel along with a rich visual channel is the best approach for complex topics and more effective at building mental images. The short text bursts may speak more to resources (speaking practically) than anything else, but too much "talking" certainly runs the risk of zoning out. I am guilty of this with my college lecture development and I should probably change my approach when it comes to recording lectures alongside slides. Too much narration without dynamic visuals is static and relies too heavily on the auditory channel with no real supplement. As for corporate style training, nobody likes shortness more than a stressed out manager or programmer, and so one minute or less probably helps them get to the point faster, especially if the topic is tightly presented.

Practical link here: When is Audio Narration Helpful?

Articulate Storyline Tips on Audio and Narration

References

Calandra, B., Barron, A. E., & Thompson-Sellers, I. (2008). Audio use in e-learning: What, why, when, and how? International Journal on E-Learning, 7(4), 589-601.

Mayer, R. E. (Ed.). (2005). The Cambridge handbook of multimedia learning. Cambridge University 
Press.


Mast, K. (2015). Multimedia in E-Learning.

Mayer, R. E. (2009). Multimedia learning (2nd ed.). Cambridge: University Press.

Mayer, R. E., & Moreno, R. (2003). Nine ways to reduce cognitive load in multimedia learning.Educational Psychologist, 38(1), 43-52.

Schüler, A., Scheiter, K., & Gerjets, P. (2013). Is spoken text always better? Investigating the modality and redundancy effect with longer text presentation.Computers in Human Behavior, 29(4), 1590-1601.

User Personas and Cultural Sensitivity

The Persona Problem
Well, where would I start? Most of the persona research is based more in UI design and user-centered design (UCD). this is more along the lines of "we are designing "such-and-such software" for so-and-so" (which is probably a lot of market demographic analysis). It is maybe more of a UI issue than an instructional design concern, at least in the formal literature. However, the idea of UCD could possibly link to instructional design, whereby the user on whom the design focuses becomes the learner persona. A product whose user is very specific will tend toward a more biased (?), or focused learner. But why is this necessary? What do you gain from this level of focus and attention on the person during training? Marketing a product and showing someone how to use the product certainly might be different in terms of defining audience (or is it?). Should it be? Those are the questions I'm looking to answer.

Concerns with the persona 
The Massanari article contains an excellent review of the concept of personas with both a critical lens and designers point of view. To summarize, the ideal user persona is developed, "defined with significant rigor and precision’ despite being imaginary." (Reimann & Cooper, 2003). If this is not done, then there is evidence (significant evidence) that the selection of a user ends up being somewhat arbitrary, and inevitably, based on on the designer's (or instructional designer's) inherent biases (all citations go here, but among them, Blomquist and Arvola, 2002). 

The persona as a concept, I'd argue, is pretty important because if it is not considered thoughtfully, it leads to a superficial result. Turner & Turner (2011) arrived at a similar conclusion, stating that, "The very cognitive economy associated with the use of personas impliesa lack of engagement with the characteristics of the people for whom they are designing." They go on further to dispute everybody's favorite citation, Pruitt & Grudin (2003), which suggested that the use of users personas increased engagement.

Unfortunately, much of the work done in "professional" settings is in fact done using only cognitive economy*. However, the question remains, is it important to have a persona rather than a defined "user" perspective in training materials? I think to answer that, we'd have to look at any evidence regarding effectiveness of user personas in learning. In their defense, however, they do mention, "Ethnographic data may help the most in developing realistic Personas, when available in sufficient depth" (Pruitt & Grudin 2003).

For practitioners of design and instructional material, I think Matthews et al (2012) provides the most informative study, in which several designers and UI experts shared their experiences and opinions of user personas. One designer rightly (in my opinion) points out one of the biggest weaknesses of user personas (from Matthews et al 2012):

"What I don't like is how distilling something into a persona, so for example if I'm making an e-commerce app and I can take all 40-something women shoppers in the Mid-West and turn that into 'Katie' my persona, I feel like the generalization that is being made at that point, makes me feel slightly uncomfortable, rather than just having the body of research to start with."

This designer was concerned with abstraction in persona use. Other key concerns other designers had were the misleading nature of personas, distraction in details and the overal impersonal nature of personas, Also from Matthews et al (2012). 

"I think there are a lot of subtlety or details, things that cannot be conveyed from the description... I don't think you can really think or act like [the persona]... To be frank I always have doubts about the persona and how they are going to be used… I feel like it's more of a communication tool."

Is learning really enhanced through personas? 
The literature is very empty here. I don't know if using a persona is effective in eLearning. How would you measure effectiveness anyway? You could conduct usability tests, or ask users if it made a difference to their perception during the learning process. It would be a great paper, or study, or something. Too bad my PhD isn't actually an EdD. But anyone who ever earned a PhD had to learn something about teaching and education, so I feel sort of ok about doing these lit searches and figuring it out on my own. I did find one PhD dissertation ( about eLearning and the user experience (Draper, 2015). The work there largely focuses around interviews with instructional designers and UX knowledge. Surprise surprise - it seems the instructional designers were largely ignorant about UX issues. Well my my my, it looks like there's a gap. There is a need for user interface awareness. If only UX were important in software. UX and ID are both kind of "soft" topics that many software engineers (excluding Steve Jobs, RIP) don't care too much about until they build the guts of everything. Maybe things have changed. I don't know. I kind of doubt it. 

I'm still digging through the literature on this one though, to be honest. In some ways, the general criticisms of the persona point to the shortcomings: it may stereotype, it may limit your audience, and it may be (as it is for me, personally) unneeded detail that is distracting from the learning objectives. 

Would I use a user persona?

Well, having had to go through the debate at work, I'm pretty comfortable saying that 1) I don't like detailed user personas (as predicted by Matthews et al) because they are distracting, and 2) I prefer a silhouetted persona as a symbol for a user, or learner. That's my personal take on it. That's what I thought before I wrote this, and I'm afraid that this giant lit search hasn't changed my mind. If anything, it's strengthened my position that user personas are gimmicky, distracting, but not entirely useless because I do find some value in silhouettes and representations of people. It helps me visualize a process or a scenario (oooh, scenario-based training is more my scene! Maybe another entry!?) 
* Definition of cognitive economy here.

Draper, C. D. (2015). Ships Passing in the Night? E-Learning Designers' Experiences with User Experience.

Elkina, M., & Pursian, A. (2012). Utilizing the Personas Concept as a Basis for Modeling Use Cases of a Learning Analytic Application.International Journal for Cross-Disciplinary Subjects İn Education (IJCDSE), 2, 935-942.

Maier, R., & Thalmann, S. (2010). Using personas for designing knowledge and learning services: results of an ethnographically informed study. International Journal of Technology Enhanced Learning, 2(1-2), 58-74.

Massanari, A. L. (2010). Designing for imaginary friends: information architecture, personas and the politics of user-centered design. New Media & Society, 12(3), 401-416.

Matthews, T., Judge, T., & Whittaker, S. (2012, May). How do designers and user experience professionals actually perceive and use personas?. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1219-1228). ACM.

Pruitt, J., & Grudin, J. (2003, June). Personas: practice and theory. In Proceedings of the 2003 conference on Designing for user experiences (pp. 1-15). ACM.

Reimann, R., & Cooper, A. (2003). About Face 2.0: The Essentials of Interaction Design. Editorial Wiley.

Turner, P., & Turner, S. (2011). Is stereotyping inevitable when designing with personas?. Design Studies, 32(1), 30-44.

DevLearn 2015 - eLearning Conference Las Vegas, NV

This eLearningGuild conference was great! Lots of excellent takeaways, and inspiration! Thanks to my company for seeing this as an important opportunity for our team. 

Day 1 (I skipped Monday, so Tuesday, Sept 29)

Session: Attended all-day pre-conference event titled, "Agile Project Management for eLearning"

Theme: Lot Like Agile Management Approach (LLAMA)

Presented by: Megan Torrance/TorranceLearning

Important key points: User Persona Development, collaboration in favor of negotiation,  responding to change over a detailed plan (general plans are ok), working solutions over documentation, interactions over processes. 

This session was great, because it went alongside the Agile training I did back in April. I really believe in Agile as an idea, and enjoy the collaboration with colleagues, as well as getting ideas from PM's, SME's and instructors (and anyone else who is involved in the product development). I think you can learn more and develop more efficient and useful material. Megan Torrance talked a lot about user personas, and how to develop them, including what questions to ask (gender, age, interests, motivations). This is a reasonable question to instructors or better yet, something I could answer if I attended a training in person. 

We did several practical exercises in small groups (similar to the Agile training at Guidewire). We had to create a user persona for a fictitious business training, then we had to design the training for it using action mapping. This was a great exercise to help focus on some key parts of eLearning: Desired behavior, needed practice (interactivity, exercises) and knowledge (what the learner needs to know to do the exercise). It was all very logical and rational and most importantly, applicable. 

After completing the action map, we broke a given practice or knowledge entity into tasks. The smaller the tasks, the better. After that, we had to assign estimates ranging from 1 hour to 4 hours (not days, not weeks, but hours - so the tasks are small and thought out). This was very very very rational. I LOVE THIS. I will be doing this for myself. It is something that really applies to curriculum development that I will implement for my work. 

Finally, we did a little problem solving game centered on issues that come up during projects. Priorities were one of three: budget, scope/quantity and time. We threw a dice to determine which was the most important, then took a card that described the problem (e.g. funding elimiated on the project). The "game" was to figure out how to solve the problem - what would I do? It was interesting to hear how people would handle this. I still have my worksheet in case anyone is interested....

Will this work at at my company? I can't speak for everyone in my group, but I'm going to really apply some of this to my upcoming courses. 

Useful/Relevant links: DevLearn Description, Torrance Learning LLAMA approach, User Persona Article (not from conference, but relevant), at my desk, "A Quick Guide to LLAMA"

---

Day 2 (Wednesday, Sept 30):

Session Title: Make it your Own: Transforming Free Templates with Storyline

Theme: Using existing templates to speed up development with Storyline

Presented by: Trina Rimmer (Community Manager at Articulate)

Important key points: You can use existing templates and edit them in Storyline. Mostly referred to eLearning Heroes.

Trina imported existing templates - everyone is very fond of SLIDERS lately at Articulate (see my other Wed session). That's what everyone wants to talk about. Sliders. Trina brought in an already built template (with a slider! surprise!), and shows us how ot modify it to use in a different context. This was deemed an excellent way to shorten development time. 

Session Title: Learning Research Quiz: Critical Scientific Findings for eLearning

Theme: Reducing b*#&^#^^ among education professionals and their output materials.

Presented by: Will Thalheimer, PhD (researcher and consultant)

Important key points: Just because it's a buzzword or something someone you like personally doesn't mean it's true. Not everything you think is true is true.

This was my favorite presentation at this conference. Why? I loved this one because this guy could back up every claim he made about learning, education and eLearning with a citation or study, which I fully support as a means of due diligence if there is no answer to a question (about anything). He's not annoying, he's just very focused on the truth and he's not self-centered in his delivery. There's nothing that is more confusing and unclear than someone sharing his or her opinion about a topic with no evidence to support it (unless that person is drunk or in a social setting because then, I kind of enjoy it). But in a professional setting, I really enjoy rational presentation of facts with figures whenever possible. Dr Smarty Pants has a website with many of the ideas he presented in the discussion (which, by the way, was engaging and well-delivered). Many of his publications are really important even at the real-life level:

Linguisitically, culturally and situationally appropriate learning

eLearning mantifesto

How much do people forget?

Job Aid development (he had a lot of this - see the middle of the page)

He wrote a book about smile sheets and how ridiculous they are in terms of proper course evaluation

Interesting fact: Brain science is in its infancy and not applicable to learning yet so if anyone says brain science, it is fraud at this point to claim that a learning method is based on "neuroscience". 

Session Title: How to Succeed Using Storyline 2 Without Even Trying 

Theme: How to use Storyline 2

Presented by: Stephanie Lawless (Yukon Learning)

Important key points: Sliders and Motion Paths

This was basically a BYOL where we could do some playing around with sliders and motion paths. If you have done the Lynda training (esp the Advanced Storyline training), this was a really good use of time. I've done the training so it was in fact, a good use of my time. Thank you Stephanie Lawless!

Session Title: Your ID Toolbox: Templates for Speedy Online Course Development

Theme: Lots and lots of PDF forms 

Presented by: Jennifer Hendryx (University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh)

Important key points: Organizing your work

So this is really not that applicable to Guidewire, but it is very relevant to my teaching gigs at SJSU and Foothill. I have to thank Seth for mentioning this one to me. Thie gist: Universities (and some non-profits) have a hard time dealing with PhD types and so they hire ID's in order to help the PhD types stay under control. Being able to see both sides of the coin here was immensely helpful to me. I often wonder what I could do to better organize my Geography courses and this woman is a godsend that way. She gave us a link to all these templates she created and basically said we could use them. This session also gave me a chance to defend PhD's because man, they were going down a real anti-academic path. They should have seen Will T's talk. They would have shut it (la boca). 

---

Day 3 (Thursday, Oct 1):

Session Title: Moving from ILT to eLearning

Theme: Self-explanatory in title

Presented by: Sean Putnam

Important key points: Modularize, prototype, fail early and often

The presentation style in this one was incredibly calming, almost like a yoga class. That's not to say it was boring. The speaker just has a really calm delivery, which I fully appreciated. Dynamism can only take you so far. In fact, the information in this session was quite relevant to my current situation at work which is why I thought it prudent to attend. The key points I listed are really the main things to remember. One important point Sean Putman brought up was narration and text. He was, like me, more into the design rather than the multimedia overload, so he advised narration text not be included alongside sound. He felt sound could be very distracting, not to mention expensive. His opinion (now, it WAS his opinion, and he did not do a research citation, so I would have to check myself) was that sound should be used sparingly. A good talk overall. 

Session Title: Ukelele Learning: Exploring the Relationships Between Music and Learning

Theme: How music enhances memory and how the brain receives music

Presented by: Ellen Wagner, Jane Bozarth, Shawn Rosler

Important key points: Music activates the brain, playing the ukelele is fun

I attended this session because it was the last one before I had to go to the airport and I wanted to do something fun. I am, also for those who do not know, a longtime musically inclined person who studied piano and now studies voice. My father was also a talented self-taught musician and also really good at mathematics and language. So you see, I had a personal interest in this one on many levels and wanted to attend. Both my kids have ukeleles so I wanted to pick up a few chords, which I now know. This was fun, and had a few interesting facts about music and memory. If you aren't a musician, you should become one because it's good for your brain and your health and your soul.