Personal Diversions update

I realized this morning when I approved a comment on this blog that "my personal fundraising page" is not a link. That's just silly! Visit www.the3day.org/Arizona07/margi3day if you would like to donate and read more about my story.

And my fundraising total is now over $4,000! YAY!!!

eLearning by Design, day 2

Here is my summary of day 2 of the eLearning webinar I’m attending with Horton Consulting.

We began by recapping the ideas of story telling from the first session. Here are some of the questions and answers for that section:

• Does a story need to be in video?
• No, it doesn’t have to be, but it generally doesn’t hurt to have a video
• Is voice necessary or can a written story be as effective?
• Generally speaking, a voice is what makes a story work well. Bill said “we have stories learners can read. They’re called novels.”
• How long is an effective story?
• This boiled down to a process rather than a finite number of minutes kind of answer. Bill’s suggestion is to think about how long it takes to tell the story in a f2f class and cut it in half. If you’re having someone else tell the story, have your storyteller tell the story and record them. Then tell them you didn’t have the record button on or that the audio is fuzzy and ask them to tell it again. The story will get shorter. Do it one more time. By the third time, all the extra “fluff” of the story is gone, and your storyteller might even be a little flustered, so the story will have more emotion by this point anyway.
• What about having a transcript of the story available for learners?
• Yes. Have a transcript available. This helps folks who have a low bandwidth connection, folks who have English as a second language, and just folks who want/need to read something over and over again.
• Do we need to hire professional voice talent?
• For stories, generally no. It’s usually better to have the person who experienced the story and who has a connection to it tell it. For long voiceover narrations for an entire course, it might be better to hire professional talent.
• What are other characteristics of a good story?
• It needs to be relatively short. People will listen to books on CD in their cars, but podcasts need to be much shorter. Your narrator needs to have an animated voice – that is, a monotonous tone will bore learners to the point where they’ll leave the story before it’s finished. The story needs to have a moral, and the storyteller needs to say it to spell it out to the learner. Some people will draw the connection lines themselves; some won’t.
• Technical considerations when using audio
• When recording, be in the quietest environment possible. Irrelevant background noise is distracting.
• Also, consider using your audio recording program lower the speaker’s voice half an octave or so, especially if the storyteller needs to convey authority and a serious message.

From here, we discussed more absorb activities. One thing we forget is that readings are activities. Have your learners read something. But consider putting it online in PDF so the learner can change the zoom on the document or print it and read it away from the computer.

In fact, consider creating an online library, especially for readings that are used in multiple lessons or for multiple reasons. This way, your lesson can simply link to the appropriate document instead of having to embed it every time.

Also consider creating a listen-and-print version of the material. Be aware of any copyright issues if you’re using external documents for this. But some programs have a built in reader – that is a computer voice will actually read the document aloud to the learner. This is handy for folks with visual difficulty.

I immediately thought of multi-tasking situations. Like most people I know, I often have three or four things going on at the same time, so if someone can read me a document while I do some physical, mindless task (like laundry or the dishes), it helps me make the most of my time.

The class went on to discuss using standard references, built in web searches, and “exploitable” examples. Remember that there is a lot of information on the web and if you don’t have to recreate content, that’s very helpful. Especially when dealing with information that is very dynamic, such as regulations, laws, etc …

Bill mentioned some sources of online information:

• Gutenberg.org
• print.google.com
• scholar.google.com
• books24x7.com
• wikipedia.org
• earth.google.com

We then went on to talk about field trips, travel journals, and virtual museums. I immediately thought of Erin, who has worked in museum education for years. I thought she might find the idea of an online museum handy. Before I had a chance to post my summary, I saw she’d already posted a blog about this very idea.

Bill also said that eLearning courses should not consist of more than 50% absorb activities, and a percentage closer to 10-15 is more ideal.

Every piece of eLearning I’ve seen at work is at least 70% absorb. I need to find a way to incorporate more DO activities, which was the next topic for our class.

First, consider this question. Why does Bill suggest that courses include more DO activities?

• To build confidence. Users get more confident with a process the more they’re able to do it. This reminds me of our new hire training at work. Many times, people say they are terrified to actually answer the phone because they simply don’t know who will be on the other end. Our company got together with another company and created practice conversations. Learners click on a button to “answer the phone” and hear an audio file play over their headphones. On their screen, they also see a text representation of what the client is saying. The learner then clicks on a button to “begin speaking” and they actually speak into a microphone. The system records this file for use later. The conversation continues to move along and at the end, the learner is able to play the entire conversation from start to finish, and re-record sections, or the whole thing, to make the call go better. Having a real conversation with a “real” person helps improve their confidence in their ability to do their job. Another advantage to this is that the role play activities we do in our f2f class are often “too nice.” These recordings are upset clients. They are short in tone and are annoyed about something that happened. Instead of being able to smile at their fellow learner to get them to “be nicer,” this audio file just plays and they have to deal with it just like they will a real client.
• To make things more interesting. We cannot say enough about making a course more interesting and engaging than just reading text on a screen.

Bill also reminded us that DO activities aren’t necessarily purely physical. Having learners sit back and actively think of examples that fit into a particular scenario is also a DO activity.

Types of DO activities:

• practice tasks
• guided analysis
• compare and contrast
• teamwork activities
• recreate a famous work (for example, rearrange the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle to reassemble the Mona Lisa for art and museum students.)

We moved on to specific examples of discovery activities, such as virtual laboratories, case studies, and role playing scenarios. We talked about games, such as quiz show, word puzzles, jigsaw puzzles, adventure games, and software, device, mathematical, and environmental simulations.

The bottom line, really, is that eLearning doesn’t have to be – and shouldn’t be – boring and just forcing learners to read a computer screen. I think I want to take some of the courses Horton Consulting has designed because they look like so much fun! There are examples on their webpage at http://www.horton.com/html/portfolio.aspx. I’m impressed!

I’m interested to hear your thoughts. In the meantime, back to work!

Personal Diversions

I have all kinds of things I want to post on my blog (which is funny when I recall how reluctant I was to start this process!), most of which are related to ID - both my job and my journey through grad school. However, I have reached a personal milestone today that I just have to share.

In July, I signed up to walk in Arizona's Breast Cancer 3-Day. As the name implies, it is a walk over the course of 3 days. How far can one walk in 3 days? Well, this journey is 60 miles. I will walk 60 miles November 2-4 to raise money and awareness to fund research and early detection programs for breast cancer. I believe a cure for any kind of cancer will lead to a cure for all cancers.

My milestone? Today, my fundraising total rose to $3,800. That's three thousand eight hundred dollars. For breast cancer research. I'm stunned. I'm impressed. I'm humbled. And I'm honored. People in my life have given me their support verbally, electronically, and emotionally. And they have given this cause their financial support.

When I signed up for the 3-Day this year, I set a personal goal to raise $3,000 by September 1. It seemed like a good, tough, stretching goal. On September 1, my fundraising total was over $3,100.

That day, I set my second fundraising goal. I want to raise a total of $5,000 by October 15. That's just under a month away. It's a good goal. It's a goal that stretches me and challenges me to come up with creative ideas on how to approach people when talking about my fundraising and my story. To read a little about my story and why I walk, visit my personal fundraising page.

That's my personal life milestone for today. My next personal life milestone will be walking 15 and 12 miles in Prescott, AZ the weekend of Sept 29. Wish me luck!

For now, back to work ...

eLearning by Design, day 1

I enrolled myself in a webinar titled eLearning by Design. It's a certificate course that will take up 4 hours of my day, 3 days a week, for the next two weeks. My first session was yesterday and here is what I learned.

Definitions
One of the biggest challenges we face in eLearning is defining it. Those outside the industry need to know what it is so those of us who are in the industry can talk about it. And those of us in the industry need to come up with some simplified definition so we can talk about it - both in our own circles and with those outside of our profession.

Case in point - I started grad school a year ago, pursuing a degree in Information and Learning Technology, with an emphasis on eLearning. A year later, my husband can almost explain to his family what I'm going to school for. :-) Mostly, he just says "training stuff."

I've also learned when I try to tell people what I do for a living, "I'm an instructional designer." I often find if I leave it at that, I'm greeted by that polite-deer-in-the-headlights-whatever-THAT-means look. And so, I tell people I'm in training. The follow up is usually, "Oh really? What do you train on?" or something less enthusiastic, "Oh, I had to go to this useless class for work last week. I hope you're not stuck doing boring stuff."

And so, we see a need to define what we do. What's interesting to me is that the day I started the webinar was also the day our first group assignment for class was due. Guess what the first part of the assignment was? You guessed it! "Define eLearning." Here's what my group came up with:

E-learning is the final outcome of knowledge integration by a student when
education has been delivered via computer or other technologies.

This is similar to William Horton's definition, which we quoted at the beginning of our report:

E-learning is the use of information and computer technologies to create
learning experiences.

I suppose we could have just used Horton's definition, but then again, the assignment was to come up with something on our own.

More than "just" a PowerPoint presentation
Back to the webinar, after defining eLearning, we went on to list forms of eLearning. We came up with a list of over a dozen things that qualify as eLearning, and interestingly enough, none of the forms we came up with was "PowerPoint presentations." I find that interesting.

I've sat through dry lectures accompanied by just-as-dry PowerPoint presentations. I've also been victim to those presentations where it's obvious the creator just took some sort of PowerPoint class and their presentation serves mostly to show what bells and whistles they learned about.

However, I've also been fortunate enough to attend meetings, seminars, classes, lectures, etc ... where PowerPoint was used very effectively. I'm curious to learn more about using PowerPoint effectively. I have the technology background; I know how PowerPoint works. But I don't have the design background, so I don't know how to implement design tips so my presentations don't scream "look what I just learned in my class!!"

Design
From here, we talked about what eLearning design is. eLearning design is the intersection - or sometimes, the collision and conflict - of 4 pieces: instructional design, software engineering, media design, and economics.

Isn't our focus as eLearning developers to create instructional materials that engage our learners? And isn't our focus usually on finding multimedia ways to engage our learners? We do live in an "infotainment" age (a classmate of mine, Sheila, used this term once, though I don't know if it's hers or if she got in from somewhere else) where people are more likely to be interested in information that is also entertaining. Well, duh. That's always been the case, but it seems to be even more important now.

Today's young adults and teenagers spend hours on sites like YouTube, watching videos from other people on a variety of topics. I keep hearing about Photoshop TV and feel like maybe I need to check this out so I'm not missing out!

Why eLearning?
It is interesting to see how many people are interested in eLearning and why, yet the predominant focus for education is still the traditional model of a teacher or instructor lecturing at the front of a room full of 15-30 people furiously scribbling or typing notes.

People are interested in eLearning for a variety of reasons and here are some that we came up with during class:

• It's available 24 x 7. Participants can go through the material at a time that works for them and their schedule.
• It's self-paced. This means that those who are most successful with eLearning are those who are pretty driven and self-motivated.
• It's reviewable. The material is available to review and reread and review until the learner feels satisfied with the content. Often times, taking notes is a hinderance to the class. No one ever gets everything the presenter says, so tape recording lectures became popular years ago. People played the recordings over and over again until things made sense - or until their notes were complete.
• It's easy to link to outside sources. Rather than dealing with a binder full of printed handouts that inevitably get lost or crumpled or left on the bus, the material is all online and external sources are linked. We can click on a link and it will take us to another source for similar information. This can both save and cost time for the learner.
• There is no travel required. An interesting point brought up by our presenter in class was that this has changed from years ago. People used to jump at the chance to travel for training, but people are more interested now in spending time with their families at home. I propose that one of the reasons people are less interested in traveling for work now than they used to be is that travel for personal reasons is more accessible. People travel more often for their vacations than they used to, so travel for work is less appealing that it used to be. There is no looking forward to having the company foot the bill on airfare somewhere if I can find a cheap flight on a travel website to a hot destination for a weekend getaway, especially considering that traveling for work doesn't usually leave much time for play.

I find it interesting to learn about eLearning in an eLearning environment. I'm using the thing that I'm learning about to learn about the thing. I think it's a great opportunity to learn firsthand what works and what doesn't, as long as we keep in mind that different people still learn and synthesize informaiton in different ways.

Learning Activities
Next, the first session of our webinar discussed different kinds of learning activities. I'm sure many people have experienced that training activity that seemed like it was only in the class to have an activity. Those kinds of activities are worse than none at all.

The three types of learning activities we talked about were:

• Absorb activities. These ask the learner to watch, read, and listen. It's just observation.
• Do activities. This is where the learner actually explores, practices, or discovers something.
• Connect activities. This is where the learner is able to synthesize the information to come up with their own "original experience" with the material. This is where parallels are drawn between past and present experiences and knowledge.

What's even more interesting to me is that these types of activities weren't presented in a "good, better, best" way. Each type of activity has its place in learning.

Technology
Finally, we inadvertantly learned the value of having a backup plan for technology. Our webinar was being hosted on a server and site that went down about halfway through our session. Tech support said that those participants who could still see the screen needed to just stay where they were. Because once someone got bumped, there would be no getting back in, at least not that day.

Our next session is Wednesday, but I'll have to attend it via a recording due to a schedule conflict. I'm looking forward to it, though I'll miss the live interaction and ability to contribute to the overall class. I'll attend live again on Friday.

Blog newbie

I have struggled with the idea this semester that I'm supposed to go find things to read and then blog about them. I don't have time to blog. Like most people in my class and life, I'm busy. I have a full time job, am going to school full time, and have other personal commitments that I signed myself up for. My brain keeps saying, though "at least you don't have children." People with kids are INFINITELY busier than I am, so if Michelle can find time put up her thoughts, then I certainly can. Of course, I'm much more relaxed reading someone else's blog than take the chance of writing my own, but that's my own issue I'll get figured out eventually!

So today, I took a chance and went to Brent's blogsite to read a little bit. I read his posting about Finding Your Voice and thought - hey, that sounds like me. I don't have any issues with the technical aspects of blogging. I'm just not sure that I have anything all that interesting to say. I followed a few links and found Wendy's blog In the Middle of the Curve: Fear of Blogging and it settled my anxiety a little bit. Now I just need to schedule the time to read things and blog about them!

Schedules!

I'm learning again that I need to schedule my time better. It seems I encounter this challenge at the beginning of every semester and that doesn't make any sense to me because it's not like I've had long amounts of time between semesters!

I'm caught up in one of my classes and getting close in the other one. I'm mostly caught up at work and I've been fundraising my little heart out. The last time I checked, my fundraising total was $3625, which I'm pretty doggone excited about. If you're interested in reading about that, you can visit my page at www.the3day.org/Arizona07/margi3day and that page will link you to my MSN space where I've gotten pretty good at blogging, but only for personal stuff.

Next entry - more along the lines of school, I promise!