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!