The “Dump the Drone” slideshow presents quick ideas that can perk up your elearning. Some of you have seen the show on my main site, but now I’ve posted it on Slideshare. This means you can easily embed the slideshow in your own site like I’ve done here or download it as a colorful PDF.

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Topics:

• What makes online courses boring
• How to create compelling characters and stories
• Ideas for adding “safe” humor
• How to tighten flabby text
• The best uses for readability analysis

You’re free to use the slideshow in your internal training as long as the attribution page (last slide) is included. The slideshow isn’t available for commercial use (for example, don’t charge for it) and it can’t be used to demonstrate vendors’ products. (more…)

“We have a two-day workshop and need you to turn it into a 30-minute online course,” your client says. “Here are 227 PowerPoint slides and 16 conflicting Word documents. Can you have it done by Thursday?”

What do you do?

Sign up for the eLearning Guild’s next online forum, “Converting Existing Course Content to e-Learning.” Ten sessions on Feb. 7 and 8 will offer useful ideas about tools and design.

On Friday morning, I’ll lead a hands-on workshop in which we’ll use a 4-step process that quickly chops through the jungle of existing content to find the online course within. We’re calling it “reverse instructional design.” Here’s a snippet of the session description: (more…)

No budget. No time. No powerful tools. You’re under constraints, and it’s a pain. But are constraints always bad for creativity?

Imagine you had all the options and time in the world. This river has all the room it needs to spread out. Peaceful, isn’t it?

The next river has some serious constraints. What have the constraints done?

Constraints focus our energy. They concentrate our creativity and make us think in new, more exciting ways. Let’s look at an example. (more…)

Happy New Year to all of you! And thank you for your contributions to this blog and to my growth as an elearning designer and writer.

As I write this, there are 30 posts in the blog and 239 comments. Many conversations continue long after a post appears.

Below are four of the posts with the most in-depth discussions. If you haven’t seen them recently, check them out, and please add your own ideas. It’s never too late to contribute.

Addicted to audio? and Should we narrate on-screen text? 31 comments

• How can we provide information in multiple ways without being redundant or spending too much money?
• Does narrating on-screen text help or hurt accessibility?
• Will learners get confused if some parts of the course have audio and others don’t?
• Is text-to-speech software an effective replacement for human voices? (more…)