I read a great post yesterday from the eLearning Coach, Connie Melamed, that reminded me just how important storytelling is to learning. Not only is it one of the oldest forms of education but it can be found across all cultures, transcending spoken language. There’s something about a story’s unique ability to touch the audience emotionally – be it through excitement, anticipation, plot progression, or the world it whisks you away to – that makes the content so much more memorable.

Anyway, here is the post that got me thinking - Why You Need To Use Storytelling in Learning – it’s definitely worth the read.

@Schnicker

This is the 2nd post in my “Online Course Design Tips” series and today’s expert advice has been very kindly contributed by Instructional Designer Jason Willensky:

1. Old news: Make sure your learning objectives are clear and measurable, then make sure that your content and assessment align with your objectives. The current crop of eLearning tools are sensational and feature-laden, but don’t lose sight of what’s essential to a powerful training experience.

2. Forget that you ever saw a PowerPoint presentation. Use text judiciously. Use graphics, video, and animation where possible to make your point. Use text to enhance or reinforce.
3. Liberate your voice-overs from identical messages in text or graphics. Script in a way that allows the narrator to target what’s important about the visual elements on the screen. Your learners don’t want to hear a voice reading bullet points.
4. Use white space. Don’t pack too much into one frame. Same goes for voice; introduce narration after the learner soaks up visual information for a short span of time. Experiment — not everything has to be simultaneous.
5. Keep the learner’s mouse moving. Even a pop true-or-false question can be an oasis in a desert of one-way information. If you’re stuck with dry material, mix it up — a basic interaction is better than none.
6. The learner doesn’t care about your tools. Think about creating a learning experience that’s completely usable, transparent, and effortless for the learner. Get feedback on your efforts, and make adjustments.

Jason is an Instructional Designer and eLearning developer in Phoenix, AZ. He creates ILT, eLearning, and blended solutions for corporate and institutional clients throughout the US.
You can follow his tweets here: @jwillensky

We talk a lot about Instructional Designers, Trainers, Teachers and SMEs. While each claims to have what it takes to design effective online training courses, I had yet to run in to an Interaction Designer (IxD) making these claims. A recent encounter on Twitter has shown me how they flip perspective around by placing the product or technology at the center to focus on how it is designed to interact with the person (not person to learning content). It’s more along the lines of our purpose as an effective training platform; we design our system to be as easy as possible to interact with for both learner and teacher.

Interaction Design (IxD) is the “discipline of defining the behavior of products and systems that a user can interact with. The practice typically centers around complex technology systems such as software and defines the behavior (the “interaction”) of an artifact or system in response to its users. Certain basic principles of cognitive psychology provide grounding for interaction design methods”- FYI those same ‘cognitive psychology principles’ govern the roots of Instructional Design too.

I asked the aforementioned Interaction Designer, Nathaniel Flick to share his Top 5 design tips and here they are:

1. Use video examples of real live users in training scenarios

2. Create training vids with creators of the training or subject originators – more connection to info
3. I find you can explain more with a mixture of pictures and text, and the presenter can make a huge impact
4. Of course, as an IxD I love flow diagrams and mock ups. Add interactivity by having students recreate these diagrams/info
5. Interaction Designers learn from personal interviews, but also from writing user stories. Writing = learning.

Nathaniel is an Interaction Designer with over 15 years experience in print design, web design and web development. He now lives in Auckland, New Zealand but originally hails from the U.S.
You can follow his tweets here: @natobasso

Instructional Design combines the design of effective educational content with a well though-out course structure, while keeping the target audience’s specific learning needs in mind. The roots of which are in cognitive and behavioural psychology. I know it’s not that simple, but that’s the general idea.

So, you can see why Instructional Designers (IDs) might not like the idea of online learning systems which allow courses to be built by teachers, trainers and Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) and offered out to a general audience, quickly, for an affordable price.

There’s heated debate around whether ID’s are facing extinction (or in fact are already dead) due to the steady increase in popularity of eLearning and online training systems. While the psychology of learning is changing along with the confines, perhaps it’s time for IDs to re-vamp their image.

The essence of what IDs do is very valuable and as Vaughan Waller says “Instructional design is a crucial component of a successful programme of instruction and I think it always will be.” Courses should always be designed to actively engage with the student and aim toward the goals both trainer and student want to achieve.

If IDs are truly passionate about what they bring to the table, then they must accept that learning takes place in many more diverse environments than ever before – online courses, Twitter, Social Networks, blogs, Wikis and collaborative learning websites. In accepting that fact, they can perhaps adapt their own services to complement the tech offerings. Thus, experiencing not a ‘death’, but in fact a re-birth.

Maybe, the answer lies in an online ‘dating’ service of sorts that pairs up IDs and Trainers/SMEs so they can collaborate on building and delivering the most effective online courses possible and split the profits?

We’re all very familiar with PowerPoint for building presentations. But what happens when you find yourself on a computer without access to PowerPoint and you need to create, edit or view an important presentation? For many people this could be a real disaster.

www.280slides.com is a brilliant product that in some ways is much easier to use than PowerPoint and because it is an online service, it helps solve this potentially huge problem.

From their website:

‘Create beautiful presentations, access them from anywhere, and share them with the world. With 280 Slides, there’s no software to download and nothing to pay for – and when you’re done building your presentation you can share it any way you like.’

What I like about these guys is they know what you want when it comes to delivery. In a few seconds you can convert your presentation to Powerpoint 2007 format, link to and embed your presentation anywhere you like or publish straight to Slideshare – what more could you want?

So for those of you who struggle using PowerPoint or find yourself in a place where you don’t have access to it, use 280Slides.com to build your presentations, convert to .ppt format and upload straight in to the Litmos training system.

Also worth a mention is that 280slides.com made it in to The Guardian newspaper’s Top 100 sites for the year ahead list which came out December 18th – congratulations!

We’ve done a few posts like this before, but I don’t really think it gets old. Especially seeing as time keeps truckin’ on and we inevitably have to keep coming up with new ways to make our presentations inspire. PowerPoints can be awesome, but they can also go very, very wrong. There is a time and a place for using them and sometimes we all forget exactly when and where that is.

Avoiding Death by PowerPoint by Shalu Wasu delves in to the most effective way to use Powerpoint to your advantage and brings up the likes of Seth Godin, Guy Kawasaki and Lawrence Lessig as examples of people that make it work for them through various different techniques.

Give it a read. With an opening statement like: “I have had numerous near-death experiences sitting through presentations that I could not avoid.” – how can you not??

From the ebook Learning Spaces this quote is from Chapter 9: Trends in Learning Space Design by Malcolm Brown, Director of Academic Computing at Dartmouth College, and Phillip D. Long, Senior Strategist for the academic computing enterprise at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Director of Learning Outreach for MIT iCampus.

“Digital technology continues to advance at a frenetic pace, offering greater capability while simultaneously becoming more mobile and more affordable. Five years ago, most students purchased desktop computers; two years later, most purchased laptops. The implications are significant: more affordable and mobile technology facilitates greater access to content and resources. This enhanced access, in turn, has made it possible to implement a learning paradigm that emphasizes active learning, formative assessment, social engagement, mobility, and multiple paths through content. Although specific technologies may come and go, the enduring trend is technology becoming more capable, affordable, and mobile.”

Every generation responds to different stimuli and when you’re talking about a tech saavy group of people who have grown up with the internet, you know expectations are higher & traditional methods will not work.

So what does work?

Gen Y’ers were born between 1981 – 1995 so they are right in the thick of our workforce right now, fast working their way up the ranks. To engage their attention & build effective training, we have to understand what makes them tick.

Growing up with information at their finger tips has meant a shorter attention span; they want things done and they expect it to happen right away, anything else is boring! Oh and nothing is impossible to a Gen Y’er so don’t ever say something can’t be done.

Here are 5 things to consider about Gen Y before you choose an online training system or build your online training courses. Because let’s face it – it HAS to be online!!

1. Keep training short & to the point.

2. Good communication tools within the training system are a must. Messaging at a minimum!
3. Community is important. Build forums & discussion groups around topics.

4. No one likes to be told what to do, especially Gen Y. Make sure your training ‘guides’ thinking rather than telling them how it is.
5. Incorporate the big picture. Generation Y are very interested in their part in it, and more importantly how they can change it!