How to convert the toughest SME

30 March 2010 By 13 Comments

You want to create an action-packed online experience that revolutionizes learners’ behavior. Your subject matter expert wants you to faithfully reproduce every lovingly polished bullet of their 217-slide PowerPoint presentation. Is there any hope for your relationship?

Everyone knows that in any relationship, it’s the other person who needs to change. So let’s change your SME.

1. Read what they gave you.

Before you do anything else, read all 217 slides. Respect the effort that the SME has put into their work and try to understand what they wrote. And make a note for future projects: Don’t let SMEs create PowerPoints. Ask them for an informal brain dump instead, or an interview, or any other format that they won’t put so much work into.

2. Involve them from the beginning

If you use Action Mapping, include the SME in the very first discussions with your client, when you identify the goal. Ask the SME to help answer these questions: [Read more...]

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How the IRS learned to find you online

22 March 2010 By 5 Comments

When employees of the US Internal Revenue Service need to find out what taxpayers are doing, they look online. How would you train them to dig deep into the web without violating privacy laws?

David Anderson has linked to the script of an online course that the IRS uses to train its employees. It was released during a Freedom of Information Act case and posted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). As David points out, the script uses the common tell-then-test approach.

What could they have done differently?

Here’s the script, thanks to the EFF. You’ll see that it’s clearly written and organized, which is great.

Like most elearning, it presents a lot of information and then quickly tests our understanding of that info. It also uses some interesting examples from real life.

The course is a perfectly capable information presentation. But since my tax dollars helped pay for it, I can’t help wishing they had done it differently. So let’s give the IRS some friendly suggestions.

What would happen if we changed the objectives?

The IRS course has these objectives: [Read more...]

Filed Under: Elearning examples, Instructional design Tagged With: , , ,

Prove it with a prototype

8 March 2010 By 6 Comments

Are you dreaming of an immersive simulation while your team members plan yet another Jeopardy game? If you want stakeholders to expand their horizons, a working prototype is your best friend.

A working prototype has simple placeholder graphics, but the clicking and dragging work as they will in the final activity. Build a quick-and-dirty version of the activity of your dreams, and use it to convert everyone on your team.

Here’s a two-part video that shows what I mean. Leif Cederblom of SmartBuilder compares two prototypes of the same activity and highlights the goals and benefits of prototyping.

Part 1: The conventional drag-and-drop: busywork that’s easy to forget

Part 2: A more realistic activity that’s more likely to change behavior

Try both prototypes yourself and see how the contrast between the two underscores the power of the more realistic activity. No amount of polish would make the drag-and-drop more than a rote activity, while the “leave the lab” prototype is effective even in its raw, prototype form.

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Why you want to use scenarios in your elearning

24 November 2009 By 40 Comments

Imagine that you’re in a competition to overhaul an information-heavy course so it creates a real change in the world. What changes would you make? Check out this story-based presentation to see what one fictional company did.

How to save the world with elearning scenarios
View more presentations from Cathy Moore

If some type is too small, click the “full” icon in the player and you’ll get the big-screen version.

The presentation is an adaptation of a talk I’ve been giving at the Australian Flexible Learning Framework conferences. It’s designed to help people break free of the traditional information-first approach to instructional design.

One of the challenges with using the approach described in the presentation is that it usually requires more design time. Since many clients don’t actually measure the effectiveness of their materials and just want information put online quickly, it can be hard to argue for immersive scenarios. Have you successfully used scenarios? Did you have to convince stakeholders to let you use them?

Filed Under: Featured scenarios, Instructional design, Scenario design Tagged With: , , , , ,

How to steer your client away from an information dump

13 October 2009 By 18 Comments

For a quick overview of the Action Mapping process described in this interaction, see Be an elearning action hero. For in-depth help with applying this process to your own materials, check out the Elearning Blueprint.

How I designed and built the scenario

Some people avoid creating branching scenarios because they seem too complex. In case it’s helpful, here’s the approach I took. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Elearning examples, Instructional design, Scenario design Tagged With: , , , , ,

Why you want to focus on actions, not learning objectives

4 August 2009 By 60 Comments

Two fire fighters look at a fire
Pop quiz!

1. What do these people need to do?

A. Put out the fire

B. Describe the techniques used to extinguish a fire

 

 

 
Woman working at flower shop

2. What does this woman need to do to stay in business?

A. Sell flowers

B. Explain the principles of the flower-selling process

 

 

 

volunteer
3. This young man wants you to give him money. Which objective are you more likely to fund?

A. Build a home for a displaced family in Sudan

B. Describe how to build a home for a displaced family in Sudan

 

 

Learning objectives are wimpy

A typical learning objective focuses on what each person supposedly needs to know, ignoring whether this knowledge will actually lead to useful action.

Instead, to create elearning that changes real-world behavior, we have to first identify what people need to do, and only then decide if there’s anything that they need to know.

Identify the action, then the knowledge

Many people start their design by writing learning objectives. Instead, it’s helpful to first choose a business goal for your project and then identify each “action” needed to reach that goal. (See action mapping and the Elearning Blueprint for lots more on this.)

What’s an action?

An action: [Read more...]

Filed Under: Instructional design Tagged With: , ,

No time for design?

23 June 2009 By 26 Comments

Do we still care about instructional design? This graph from Google Trends compares searches for “elearning” with searches for “instructional design.”

Line graph comparing Google searches for elearning and instructional design

At first, “elearning” followed “instructional design” in a sad slope downward. But in the last couple of years, “elearning” has perked up again, while its friend “instructional design” continues its descent into obscurity.

Maybe fewer people are searching for “instructional design” because it’s no longer a new concept (“usability” suffered a similar decline). Or, possibly, fewer people are searching for “instructional design” because fewer people care about it.

Did “rapid” kill ADDIE? [Read more...]

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Could animations hurt learning?

15 June 2009 By 35 Comments

A recent study suggests that the common habit of “building” information on a slide can interfere with learning.

The researchers used Camtasia Studio to create two presentations on information security. The audio narration was the same in both presentations. The visuals were the same, too, except one presentation used an average of 3.4 animations per slide to make bullet points, words, or images enter at different times. The other animation had static slides—the information was simply there.

After viewing the presentation, students answered a multiple-choice quiz. Students who saw the flying-bullet-points presentation scored 71.43%, while students who saw the more static version scored 81.98%, a statistically significant difference.

Bar graph

What does this mean? [Read more...]

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Four ways to move your learners from clueless to confident

13 May 2009 By 19 Comments

I climbed onto the tram, folded my ticket, and with some trepidation stuck it into an unmarked metal box. A happy ding announced my success. I did it! I correctly rode a tram in Amsterdam!

Small victories like these make me love to travel. Every day I move from clueless to confident as I tackle questions like, “How do I peel and eat this hardboiled egg using only this tiny spoon?”

I find the answers through experimentation and observation—there’s no one telling me what to do at every step. And as a result I love the learning I’ve done and want to learn more.

How can we help our learners feel the same sense of achievement?

1. Let them figure some of it out [Read more...]

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Mac users: Avoid Keynote 09 for Flash

11 May 2009 By 21 Comments

Some questions from blog readers have alerted me to the fact that when Apple “upgraded” Keynote 08 to create Keynote 09, they removed the ability to export slideshows as interactive Flash files. I’ve written a bit on this blog about how great it is that you can export from Keynote to Flash but…now you can’t! So:

  • If you currently have Keynote 08, don’t upgrade.
  • If you’re new to the Mac, you’ll get iWork 09 by default, which contains the unfortunate Keynote 09. You could buy iWork 08 through eBay or a similar outlet. Current prices appear to be $16-55.

Some posts in discussion forums suggest that you can export Keynote 09 slideshows as QuickTime files and then save those as Flash, but apparently you lose all interactivity, so there’s no point.

Shame on Apple for again removing useful features during an “upgrade.” iMovie recently suffered a similar fate. I don’t understand Apple’s reasoning at all.

Some more complex alternatives could be Adobe Captivate for Mac, which is looking for beta testers, and Techsmith’s Camtasia Studio for Mac, which is scheduled to be released in mid-2009.

Filed Under: Instructional design
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