“No one reads the objectives.” If that’s true, maybe it’s because we tend to write objectives in TrainerSpeak. In this makeover we’ll turn some conventional objectives into goals that learners care about.

Let’s say that the following objectives appear at the beginning of a course for customer service representatives (CSRs). You’re a CSR. How do these objectives make you feel?

This course is designed to enable the learner to:

• Describe how vocal tone affects customer rapport
• Understand the importance of positively impacting customer impressions
• Describe the 5 steps of the Dissatisfied-to-Satisfied Customer Transformation Model
• State which psychological techniques can be used to increase customer acceptance of negative information

(more…)

Let’s imagine for a moment that you have a kidney stone (sorry!). After the drama of the emergency clinic is over and you’re comfortably drugged, you want to know why the stone formed and how you can avoid another one. What do you do?

Web sites: quick

If you’re like many people, you go to Google, which gives you several sites like this plain English site from the US government and this more advanced one from the Mayo Clinic. Thanks to the concise menus and clear headings on these sites, you quickly learn what you want to know.

Online course: slow

Google also shows you this online course at Medline. But it’s a lot harder to get information from the course, due to the slow narration and the tiny amount of information on each screen.

Even in your narcotic bliss you get impatient. “Courses are no good,” you think. “It’s a lot easier to learn things from a web site.”

Fair? (more…)

Want to develop your ability to show abstract ideas? Find inspiration at these unusual sites.

Le Grand Content: PowerPoint, death, and hamsters

This short video takes typical PowerPoint visuals into quirky philosophical territory. According to the artist, Clemens Kogler, “Intersections and diagrams are assembled to form a grand ‘association-chain-massacre’ which challenges itself to answer all questions of the universe and some more. Of course, it totally fails this assignment, but in its failure it still manages to produce some magical nuance and shades between the great topics death, cable tv, emotions and hamsters.”

What are some ways you could use similar “absurd” visuals in your next elearning project?

Indexed: life condensed onto a notecard (more…)

Patient: It seemed perfectly normal at first. HR wrote a new policy about computer use, and we could have just sent everyone an email about it. But…but…

Doctor: Yes?

Patient: But then I thought, what if people don’t read the email? Or maybe they won’t understand it! So I decided to do a course. Just a little one.

Doctor: Go on.

Patient: So I put together all the screens and set up a menu. And then I thought…what if they skip a screen? So I took away the menu and just gave them a Next button. And then I thought…

Doctor: Yes?

Patient: What if they don’t read every word? So I added narration and didn’t let them click the Next button until the narrator had read everything on the screen.

Doctor: And how did that make you feel? (more…)