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Do I Have To Learn Everything Right This Second?

July 24, 2014 By Jackie Van Nice 14 Comments

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This week’s Articulate challenge is to create an interactive organizational chart or a “meet the team” sort of thing. Org charts and the like bore the heck out of me, but I like the idea of introducing someone to their new team or job, so I went with that.

How Did We End Up On Vacation?

When you start a new job, you’re a stranger in a strange land. All I did was apply that situation to visiting a new place rather than starting a new job. In either situation, you need to get your bearings and figure out what’s going on very quickly.

Chunking By Importance

In this case I sorted the information by relative importance, but in a work environment it could be sorted by task or department or time increment or anything else. The idea is to break it into chunks that have more meaning and don’t have to be accessed all at once, since information overload is as good as no information at all.

The Interaction

I had planned on (and spent way too much time on) fleshing out the detail at the end. As time ran out I trashed all of that and fleshed out the front end instead. It was the right thing to do and it ended up being a good demo of how to present information like this – including how to present it in context and at the point of need. I like it.

Ready to Navigate Your Vacation?

If so, feel free to take this demo out for a spin!

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The Downside of Leaving the House: A Video Diary

July 17, 2014 By Jackie Van Nice 28 Comments

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This week’s Articulate challenge is to create a training video with your smart phone. In my defense, I’ll point out that only the phone was required to be smart.

What Happened

I had the innocent idea of showing how people like me who spend all their time in home offices breathing in more highlighter fumes than fresh air – (which may explain a lot, now that I think about it) – can bust out. I planned to shoot on nearby Hilton Head Island.

When I mentioned this to Dan, in the interest of getting his help filming the drive, he immediately said “and it’s the perfect chance to use this guy!” What happened after that is kind of a blur.

Video Lessons Learned

I used my iPhone with no additional apps and made edits on the desktop in Pinnacle Studio 17 before popping it into Storyline. I learned:

Lighting is never easy.
Shooting in direct sunlight makes seeing the viewfinder nearly impossible.
Shooting in gale-force winds while sand is being whipped at the device will lead to unusable audio, among other things.

The Storyline Piece

Framing the story felt much harder than framing the heinous video for some reason. I ended up liking the time-lapse drive to the island and the layout I designed to view the different video clips. I’d like to use those ideas in other projects.

My favorite part might be the souvenir photo at the end since it sums up the absurdity quite nicely.

If You Must

If you really want to see this, you can check it out right here.

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Help! Someone Abducted My Digital Tools!

July 6, 2014 By Jackie Van Nice 16 Comments

This week’s Articulate challenge is to create emergency-response instructions using non-digital means. This one nearly did me in. Where are the emergency instructions for when you’re caught in the middle of an Articulate challenge?

The Idea

I started by working on hurricane response instructions since we like that sort of thing in the Southeastern US. But once I got to pondering non-digital font equivalents I thought of non-digital scissor-and-magazine font creation, which made me think of ransom notes, which took me to kidnapping, which led me to wikiHow where they’re apparently well versed in that sort of thing. An abduction it would be!

The Design

I kept it simple with a main menu and corresponding detail pages. If it hadn’t been my second version in two days, I would have included more detail.

This design had to make the most of the cut-out letters, and that’s what I hated so much about the first version: I’d done an elaborate and detailed job on it, but the impact of the ransom-note effect was completely lost. I hated, hated, hated it.

I walked away thinking I’d start over again in a couple of days, when I glimpsed a cardboard box and flashed on the idea of just ripping it up, using black markers, and sticking paperclips in it to make bullets. Seemed like the perfect primitive treatment to make the most of the colors and shapes of the letters, as well as the ransom-note effect.

The Result

Here’s the result in all of its ransom-riffic simplicity. Hope you like it! You can click on each image to see it larger.

Can You Motivate This Monster?

June 29, 2014 By Jackie Van Nice 4 Comments

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This week’s Articulate challenge is to create a quiz about an instructional design concept. I decided to create a quiz about Dr. John Keller’s ARCS motivational design model.

The Idea

As I brainstormed (heh-heh) how the heck to do it, I thought of the most basic concept of motivation, which is to spur the learner on: Provide him with a jolt of electricity, if you will.

The next thing I knew, Boris Karloff was staring at me as I carefully wired him up to car batteries. You just never know where a challenge will take you.

The Interaction

The idea is that you choose an appropriate design option for each of the four areas: Attention, Relevance, Confidence, and Satisfaction. I made them appropriate to this learner, pulling more from Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein than Mary Shelley’s classic novel, but it’s all about keeping me entertained.

Feedback Screen

You get feedback whether your answers are correct (motivated monster), or incorrect (unmotivated monster). I included some quick tips in the player with a mini outline of the ARCS model to help explain and/or lead you to the correct answers, too.

So Much More

I’d love to go over the many other scenes and ideas I had for this one, but at some point I have to call it a quick demo and stop.

I’ll also mention that my AA battery > car battery > single battery cable > neck bolt electrical circuit entertains me no end. I think that’s part of what makes these challenges so fun. You do a quick mock-up and it leads to the funniest improvisations.

Try It!

If you’d like to try using the ARCS model to motivate Frank, the interaction is right here.

Podcast: A One-Sided E-Learning Interview

June 24, 2014 By Jackie Van Nice 13 Comments

Image Credit: David Anderson

This week, Articulate’s intrepid David Anderson came up with yet another remarkable e-learning challenge: Create your own podcast. He supplied the questions and we got to make it happen. Here’s mine, and I explain how I did it at the end of this post. If you’d rather autoplay all tracks (rather than click on each one) you can listen to them here.

1. Tell us a little about yourself and the types of e-learning projects you most enjoy.

2. How did you become an e-learning or instructional designer?

3. What are the essentials of good e-learning design?

4. Tell me about your most successful e-learning project.

5. What are the most important criteria in evaluating e-learning?

6. What are some common mistakes new course designers make and how can they avoid them?

7. How is designing mobile learning different than designing for the desktop?

8. How do you evaluate whether your course was effective?

9. How do you keep up your skills and stay current in the industry?

10. What is the future of e-learning?

The Process

There are countless ways to do this, but this is what I did:

Jotted down my first response to each question, treating it as though someone had asked me in conversation. The upside is it’s how I’d really answer a first question. The downside is there are no normal conversational follow-up questions, so I don’t get into any detail.
Used my trusty Audio-Technica AT2020 desktop USB mic to record in Garage Band on iMac (just for fun), referring to my jotted-down answers as a guide. How many takes? Probably a couple for each one. If you’d like to see a photo of my setup, along with some of my favorite recording tips, they’re right here.
Exported individual tracks as mp3s, then imported them into Audacity on PC to edit. Used the noise removal effect to get rid of background hum.
Headed over to SoundCloud where I started a free account.and uploaded the mp3s. Thanks to Tim Slade for thinking of SoundCloud!
Headed here to my WordPress blog to write this up. To embed these tracks I referred to SoundCloud’s instructions which worked quite nicely; though rather than doing a link-type post I simply pasted each of the track links into the body of a standard post.

Update!

David has collected everyone’s podcasts in one place for easy browsing and enjoying. Well worth a listen. (Great job, David!)