Economics: Cheaper always has a price

I was driving through our neighborhood recently  with my son on the way back from soccer practice.  It was one of the first really warm days of Spring, so many of the local shopkeepers were busy outside their stores cleaning windows, sweeping sidewalks and putting out colourful chalkboard signs that promised great deals and upcoming sales.  It was one of these signs that caught my son’s eye, outside the local Pet store.  The sign’s proclamation was simple, if not devastating.  Printed in a bold black font,

“Going out of Business Sale”

Reading the sign took only a second, but I knew the impact would last far longer.  Ask most parents in our neighbourhood (any neighbourhood I suppose) and they will say the same thing. The local pet store is more than just a place to buy food for their cherished family member…. it’s a mini zoo, where they can spend an hour on a Sunday afternoon… a place that in their children’s eyes, is filled with wondrous creatures great and small.

As a proud Canadian business owner myself, I am always saddened to see a local business fail, but this particular closing was especially troubling.

My son knows all too well, the sacrifices a family endures when they own their own business…. the weekends spent working…. the late nights… the endless “give me second” references, signalling that he should come back to talk to me later.  These are all too familiar, but made worthwhile when we succeed, which thankfully my company has been able to do.  But I do not think until that very moment, he had realized that sometimes a business can fail, even one as wonderful and joyous as our local pet store.

Naturally he asked ‘why’?

“Could be any number of reasons,” I said. “But, most likely, it’s because they couldn’t compete with the bigger pet stores”.

“What do you mean, they couldn’t compete; because they are small?” “Does that mean your company will go out of business too?”

“No, we’re just fine. What I mean by ‘compete’, is that some companies (large companies) can buy the things they sell to customers much cheaper than smaller stores can, because they paid less to get them. So their customers are happy, because they save money when they shop there.”

“Yes,” he said jumping in… “but the people working in the small companies aren’t happy, because now they don’t have a job.”

“Yah,” I sighed. “That’s economics; cheaper, always has a price.”

Naturally this conversation, got me thinking about my business. Pathways is a learning technology company. We are by all accounts successful. Growing, employing Canadians. But we don’t sell widgets. We sell services that become products. eLearning, gaming, animations, simulations etc. Our cheaper options would come in the form of people. We could outsource. Many in our industry do. It’s easy. In most cases, no one has to be the any the wiser. We could pass the savings on to our customers. Then everybody wins, right?

I know that ‘cheaper always has a price’. I know that local talent must be fostered and supported for our customers to really enjoy what we’re selling. I also know that you can outsource yourself right out of a job. It all comes around eventually.

Before writing this entry, I asked one of my colleagues what he believed our competitive advantage was. He paused for a moment and said, “We care. All of us. We all care. We may not always be perfect, but we care about what we do – because we see the direct impact of our work on our clients. If you don’t know your customers, how can you care about them?

He was right.

Small business owners know how much each and every client matters. They have to, because their livelihoods depend upon each and every one of them. People often talk about small business being the life-blood of our economy, but the real measure of those words comes when we make choices to buy our pet food somewhere cheaper.

3 Tips for Creating Effective eLearning

eLearning can be a very successful training medium if executed well. The rollout of eLearning programs can save organizations on training costs, with the added benefit of faster delivery and the reach of a wider scope of employees.  Creating eLearning that is both effective and engaging however, can sometimes be challenging.

Here are three tips that are useful when working on eLearning projects.

 Learning Objectives

Having a clear idea of what your learning objectives are helps to shape the content of your course.  When writing objectives, be specific and focus on connecting these goals with what you want learners to take away at the end of the learning. By making objectives clear and concise, I find that I am better able to focus in on creating targeted evaluation pieces.

 The importance of great images

Images can truly help bring life to learning. That being said, not all images are created equal. When selecting images, try to include those which help to connect content to the real world. Learners tend to grasp information more easily when presented with a quality visual.

Also be mindful of including the right image size and provide the correct placement to match the content being presented.  Choosing images that really connect to the subject matter can help make concepts more relatable to learners.

 Create engaging learning

Because eLearning cannot necessarily cater to learners in the same manner as classroom training would, it is important to incorporate activities that are engaging and can keep learners interested in the subject matter. Since adults learn by doing and are most engaged when all senses are utilized, creating activities that appeal to multiple senses can be highly effective.

An example that uses a learner’s visual, auditory and kinaesthetic senses for instance can be a game. If done well, games can serve to positively affect the learner’s ability to understand and retain complex material. The advantage of activities such as these is that the content can seem less daunting and more fun, as learners are rewarded for their participation.

 

This list is not everything that is needed but provides a few key guidelines to consider when conceptualizing and designing eLearning. To learn more about the work that we do at Pathways please visit our website athttp://www.pathwaystrainingandelearning.ca/.

eLearning Trends 2016 – Cloud-Based eLearning Solutions

There are quite a few concerns about surrounding cloud-based elearning solutions such as a lack of IT support resources, data security or unreliable access. While these are all valid, great strides have been made to resolve those issues and provide a solution that has a great many benefits.

Firstly, cloud solutions are easy to use and support. You don’t need to install software on each computer and you don’t need specialized IT staff to maintain the system; this is all done by your solution provider. Another benefit is probably the most important to most organizations – cost. You can customize your solution so that you don’t have to pay for features that you don’t need. Another advantage is the cloud can be accessed anywhere by different devices so geography doesn’t play in as a factor.

Lastly, for those who are losing sleep over data security, there are a variety of safety measures that can be used such as data encryption and SSL. You can also password protect your platform to allow certain individuals access to certain areas of the training.

Contact me at matttklinger@pathwaysinc.ca to learn more about how we can help you with your elearning needs.

2016 eLearning Trend to Watch – Big Data

You don’t need to be an IT expert to have heard the expression “big data”. This refers to large quantities of data that are gathered and analyzed to expose different patterns, tendencies, and associations. This can be a very useful tool when considering your elearning objectives and how big data stats can help fine tune your training based on concrete stats. Most elearning solutions require a custom approach so why not take advantage of big data analytics to help custom tailor your learning activities?

Making sure that your learning solutions have effective reporting tools and user feedback will only help as you move forward with whatever training projects you have. Let the big data you have access to help you focus on key areas of your elearning course design and research!

Why (and how) you should incorporate badging into your eLearning strategy

Remember the participation badge you got for showing up to your grade 9 track and field competition? This isn’t that.

I’m talking about acknowledging the mastery of knowledge and skill sets to encourage iterative and deep learning. Done properly, badging can recognize the internally motivated among us.

But I don’t want to dismiss my (and your potential) initial resistance to badging because I believe it helps us better focus on the success criteria for valuable badges. Badging meets resistance because those of us who got participation badges considered them utterly worthless and we did so precisely because they were issued to anyone who managed to just show up for the race. To participants who trained for the day and genuinely competed, the badge was insulting and demotivating. Done hastily or half-heartedly, badges can discourage learning. To be effective, badges must:

• Be issued selectively, probably on the basis of some pre-established criteria,
• Be issued by a credible person or institution and
• Be publishable (or displayable) in a place that is meaningful to the recipient.

Effective badging requires planning and preparation in both the design and build (development) phases of your eLearning project.

Designing badges

As any member of the scouting movement will tell you, participants are required to complete a tasks and then present evidence before being they are awarded merit badges. Badges in eLearning should mirror this structure. If you have established performance outcomes and rubrics (your learner success criteria), you’re on the road to badging.

However, if you only have a fuzzy idea of what the performance outcomes should be, then you need to invest more time in the planning and design phases of your project to establish these criteria before you are ready to leap into the world of badges. An eLearning vendor can help you identify performance outcomes and map them to a learning strategy so that your badges are relevant. Already have those success criteria defined? Beware of badging overkill. Don’t apply badging for mandatory content as it defeats the motivational purpose of badging and rapidly diminishes their stock.

For badges to be valuable to learners, they must have a compounding effect. A single badge tells something of a learner’s interests and skills, but an amalgam of badges tells a fuller, interwoven and altogether more interesting story about their interests and abilities. Its this prospect of telling the fuller story that motivates learners to seek out, accumulate and display badges for professional development. (More on displaying badges in the section below.) Done properly, badging should be integrated into your eLearning strategy.

Building badges

At their heart, badges are images with metadata; metadata are what distinguish a meaningless participation badge from a sought-after badge for professional development. Badge metadata contains information on the evidence of a learner’s concept mastery, the validity of the issuer, the duration of the badge’s validity and any other vital information the issuer wishes to communicate.

On the subject of the duration of a badge’s validity, setting time limits (or expiry dates) on badges makes perfect sense as most knowledge and skill sets require maintenance to remain current. Once expired, badges shouldn’t disappear. After all, the currency your skill and knowledge set is not the same as not having that skill or knowledge set. Your badge’s metadata will determine its credibility, so consider this issue with care.

Because badges need to be published in a place that is valuable to the learner, they must be platform agnostic. In other words, just as learners have the freedom to accumulate (or to elect to not accumulate) whatever badges they want in whichever order they choose, so too should they have the freedom to decide where and when to make those badges visible. If you’re delivering your learning via LMS, find out if your LMS supports badges and if they can be exported from your LMS to be published on other platforms such as LinkedIn.

Getting started

Properly planned for, designed and delivered, badging can support learning in the modern world by providing relevant, flexible, interesting and valuable methods of credentialing. So how do you get started? I firmly believe that experience is the key to relevant instructional design and development. You can’t design and build badges without first experimenting with them as a learner. Go out and earn some badges!

Time-Saving Storyline Tips and Tricks

Here’s a few of my favourite tips and tricks. Keep these in mind when you’re designing your next eLearning module, and they’ll definitely enhance your productivity!

Transitions

The Transitions panel at the top of the Storyline can be used to adjust the transition between any two screens. This obviously includes between slides, but it can also be used to transition between layers! This can be a great time-saver, if for example you’re using layers to overlay text or images on the base layer. Instead of applying an animation to each element in each layer, you can simply add a single transition to the entire layer. You can select “Apply to All” in the same panel to apply your transition to all layers in your slide.

“Format” dialog shortcut

This one is a beauty, and a real must-know for Storyline users. Select any object on your slide and hit Ctrl+Enter to bring up the Format dialog. This saves a ton of right-clicking!

“Size and Position” dialog shortcut

Hit Ctrl+Shift+Enter to bring up the “Size and Position” dialog. Another neat tip here is that Storyline will remember the last edited parameter, and will automatically bring the focus to the same spot when you re-open the dialog, which saves you even more clicking if you use this to your advantage.

New Textbox shortcut

Everyone knows that Ctrl+T gives you a new textbox, but did you know that you can set the textbox’s position on your slide before you create it? Simply left click on the slide where you want your textbox to be created, then hit Ctrl+T. The top-left of the textbox will be at the click point.

Take advantage of trigger order

This tip takes a little practice to get used to, and it varies for each situation, but it is generally more efficient to let your slide triggers work together, if possible, rather than duplicating functionality (and complexity) between them. For example I recently wanted to show a warning layer if the user tried to advance to the next slide without visiting all the required links. To do this, I let triggers fall through each other, so that I only had to actually program one of them. Here’s what my two triggers looked like:

• Jump to next slide when use clicks Next if … (all links visited)
• Show warning layer when user clicks Next

The second trigger doesn’t need any conditions; since Storyline triggers are executed in order, it will only be reached if the first trigger isn’t activated. If all the links have been visited, the slide will change as soon as the first trigger evaluates to true, and the second trigger will never be evaluated.

For more Storyline tips and tricks, visit our website at: http://pathwaystrainingandelearning.com/.

PROGRAMMING PRINCIPLES FOR STORYLINE DEVELOPMENT – PART I

The rise of graphical user interface-based programming software such as Storyline has simplified the creation of software and web content. No longer purely the domain of geeks, it is now possible to create a web application, for example, with no formal training, and no knowledge of a programming language.

This democratization of technology has led to a flood of creativity, as anyone with an idea and a little patience can turn it into a mobile or web-based application. Unfortunately, the focus on GUI-based WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors has led to a loss of focus on the fundamental guiding principles of programming, which is in reality what we’re doing, whether it’s creating a Storyline eLearning program, or writing a Java-based Android app. I’d like to try to connect a few of the guiding principles of software development with some development patterns that you can follow when developing your own eLearning content. Today, we’ll discuss the DRY principle.

Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY)

DRY is one of the fundamental principles of object-oriented programming. Even if you don’t have any idea what ‘objects’ are or why everyone’s so oriented on them, this is still a useful principle for your development. In a nutshell, DRY says that you should strive to develop so that if you need to change something down the road, you can change it in one spot, even if it is something that appears repeatedly in your program/eLearning module.

In Storyline terms, a good example of this would be using Slide Masters and Feedback Masters as much as possible. This usage can extend far beyond simply setting a background and header (although that’s not a bad start, if you aren’t doing this already). In another blog, I’ll write about how you can add repetitive elements like closed captioning and navigation controls in a Slide Master.

Another way you can reduce repetition in your eLearning module is to make triggers dependent on actual objects, whenever possible, rather than on timeline cues. For example, you want to sync an image’s motion path with the end of an audio clip. You could certainly set a cue point onto the timeline at the end of the audio clip, and then trigger the motion path based on that cue point… But what if you want to move the audio clip? You’ll not only have to adjust the clip, but also any cues that are positioned relative to it.

If you had simply triggered the motion path to begin when the timeline of the audio clip ended (or on ‘media complete’), you could move the audio clip as much as you like without breaking the timing of the motion path. Another way to put it is that your dependencies should be as limited as possible. In the original example, the path to starting your motion path went from Audio Finishes → Cue Point → Motion Path Triggered. When it’s spelled out like this, the cue point is clearly extraneous.

If you keep the DRY principle in mind when developing your eLearning content, you will save yourself all sorts of pain when it comes time to review and modify it. For more tips on developing eLearning content, or to see samples of our work, visit us at http://pathwaystrainingandelearning.com/.

TIPS TO SUCCESSFULLY PARTNER WITH AN eLEARNING VENDOR……..FROM AN eLEARNING VENDOR

1. Share your priorities – make them aware of what your strategic priorities are at the time and if they can help they will. If they can’t help, then let them know what the bigger picture is and maybe they can help down the road.
2. Let them help you build your internal business case – it’s very common in elearning that the learning and development team will have to “sell” the idea internally in order to get approval for projects so let the vendor help you! It’s only in their best interests.
3. Act as collaborative partners – once you’ve reached a deal and have that contract signed, work as a team to achieve long-term goals and expectations. This will only pay-off in the long run and if things go awry, you’ve got a partner at the table to support each other.
4. Be transparent with each other – being able to trust each other will only increase the ease at which the project advances, as well as the overall success. Everyone should understand that the speed of business changes, so as long as everyone is on the same page there shouldn’t be a problem.

KNOW YOUR LEARNER

If you’re unable to differentiate your learners from the crowd, you’re disconnected from them.

You have the performance objectives, you have a plan, you even have the content, but what do you actually know about your learner? What are you assuming you know? The clearer your view of the learner, the more relevant your learning solution will be and the more proactive you can be at anticipating learner needs and removing obstacles.

Here are some questions to help you get a handle on who your learner really is:

• What is their motivation for learning? With compliance training, for example, learners are required to sit through learning. This yields expected results. Knowing what compels learners to take training will help sharpen the focus of that training and may point to obstacles to motivation which you can investigate and address.
• What is their experience with learning? If your learners have been subject to hours of painfully boring eLearning, odds are they will avoid your course, no matter how masterfully designed. Similarly, if learners have had to sit through hours of disorganized in-class training, they’re unlikely to be eagerly awaiting your session, despite your ability to engage and inspire. Badly designed and executed learning is a reality that all learning professionals have to overcome. Our challenge is to find ways to secure and build on our learner’s trust.
• Are they supported? On-the-job knowledge and skills transfer doesn’t magically happen; OTJ transfer must be designed, monitored and maintained. To change a workplace through learning, you must have a firm understanding of the OTJ transfer plan and how your solution fits within that plan.

What do I do with this information now?

If you are unable to differentiate your learner from the crowd, you are disconnected from them. As a result, you can only guess at their needs, motivations and the barriers they may be facing. This produces learning solutions that alienate learners and fail to meet organizational objectives. More than designing and delivering targeted and engaging learning solutions, we must identify barriers to learning and remove them when we can.

A great needs analysis needs great people

Customer needs analysis concept. Businessman analyze customers needs.

I am sure we all have experienced bad training at some point in our professional lives, and I am equally sure that the people that spent their days, weeks and months planning that training were left wondering where did they go wrong?  Was there a flaw in their needs analysis?

There is not much more anyone can write about developing a training needs analysis that has not already been said.   Go ahead…do an Internet search for “creating a needs analysis “and I promise you will get all the helpful tips, tricks and suggestions you want…a virtual smorgasbord of page after page of free information that provides every step in the needs analysis process in intricate detail.    In some instances, there are even video instructions or web based courses you can take on the subject. So   understanding this, one would think all training development projects, be they eLearning, instructor led, blended learning etc., would all be set up for success from the start.    Follow the list and you are Golden., simple!   But in reviewing these hundreds of articles on the subject I did notice one item that was consistently absent, and it is an important one.   The missing point is this… If you do not have the right people putting pen to paper, then all of your planning was a colossal waste of time.

There is no doubt that a needs analysis is a crucial and integral part of any training development project, but if you use sub-par eLearning programmers and developers, if your Instructional designers have poor writing skills or if your facilitator is not a good communicator…well your chance of a successful outcome is slim to none.

Here is the truth.  Not everyone has the technical ability, creativity and imagination to create an effective whiteboard animation.  Just because someone’s title is “facilitator” does not necessarily mean they are comfortable standing in front of a room full of executives who were “forced” to take a customer service course.  A person can call themselves an instructional designer, but does that always mean they have above average writing skills?   Simply put, no.   How these folks got the roles they are in is a discussion for another day, but my point is this.   When you spend a considerable amount of time, energy and resources creating a needs analysis, make damn sure you have the right people, the professionals needed to execute your vision.

To learn more about finding the right people for your training and eLearning needs, please visit us on our website at http://www.pathwaystrainingandelearning.ca/