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:
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
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.
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