Andrew Scivally and Shawn Scivally are the authors of the eLearning Brothers blog. Recently back from the eLearning Guild’s Learning Solutions Conference and Expo, they share their Top 10 Do’s to Create Awesome eLearning presentation. It’s a 55-page download with simple graphics to illustrate their points about text, style, images, graphics, and follow-up.
The primary take-away for me is that eLearning doesn’t have to be complex to be good. Enjoy and thanks guys.
Jakob Nielsen wrote in his newsletter about field testing:
I got a nice bag from Briggs & Riley for my upcoming trip to Europe. An enclosed brochure says that ‘If your luggage is ever damaged (even if it was caused by the airlines) we’ll fix it, free of charge. By examining every damaged piece, we see how to continuously improve and refine our bags.’ Studying why things go wrong is one of the best ways of making things go better in the future.
He went on to give an e-commerce example:
For example, an e-commerce site should research why customers return purchases. Often, you’ll discover that your product pages are at fault, for making users order the wrong stuff. Fixing the website will not only reduce costly returns processing, it will also increase your conversion rate, because most users won’t buy if they’re uncertain of what they will get.
Doesn’t what applies to abandoned shopping carts, returned purchases, and damaged luggage apply equally to online courses? If you lose students, they are gone. No feedback. No end-of-class evaluation. Yet their feedback might be the most helpful in knowing how to improve a course.
If your students struggle, then what can you do differently in the design, presentation of material, assignments, etc. to better support their education? Field testing and continuous improvement are far too often not included in schedules. Jakob’s story shows a very different attitude, one that we might all benefit from adopting.
On the 25th anniversary of the first .com registration, former President Bill Clinton said that his favorite Web sites include Politico, The Daily Beast, and Huffington Post, and he also looks at a few “right wing” sites to get both sides of the political debate.
Clinton’s favorite device is an iPhone and he also has a Blackberry. He does not use a Kindle, though.
Clinton said that, during his administration, they realized the Internet “was going to be the dominant mode of the communication in the 21st Century.” What about in education? I don’t think he’ll respond if I request an interview, but, if he did, my first question would be, “Have you ever taken an online course?”
If you teach, online or in the classroom, chances are you use stories. Have you ever fabricated a story because you didn’t have a real one that made your point?
I have long been interested in the power of storytelling in education; my article, Storytelling at a Distance, was the third article published in eLearn magazine when it started in 2001. Most of what I said I agree with today. It hasn’t been impacted by advancements in technology.
However, what has changed is my attitude toward fabrication. I was a purist at the time: I did not fabricate stories when teaching. I perhaps exaggerated occasionally (the fish was this big), but that was all.
I gave a number of talks on storytelling and remember vividly how appalled I was when someone I knew confessed that he fabricated stories all the time. He said he used real people in situations that illustrated his points.
I am taking an acting workshop and learned about authenticity, which as I understand it, is more about how you feel that what you say. I have come to realize that what this teacher did was fine since it was authentic for him and was also not meant to mislead anyone.
At the time I asked him if fabricated stories could violate the trust we all work so hard to build with our students and he said no. And he might be right about that, with the new insights I gained through acting – and isn’t teaching a form of acting?
I wrote about the use of stories in health Web sites, where they serve a somewhat different purpose than in education. My launching point was a Web site that was caught using employee-generated stories and fined. The parallel to education is not the stories teachers tell, but the Web sites that portray programs in a certain way and, just like some health stories, try to entice you to become a student. I’ve never heard of a school being fined for fabricated stories, just for deceptive practices, which is another story.
I am curious if others agree with my new stance, that fabricated stories can be authentic because of the intent and the underlying authenticity.
Since I teach about how to use social media, I look at the agendas of seminars on social media to see if I might learn any social media tricks du jour. I don’t often attend, more from lack of time than interest.
What struck me about this particular seminar, A Social Media Learning Conference Call, presented by Chris Brogan and Peter Shankman, was neither the content nor the presenters, but that it was billed as a conference call and offered by Conference Call University.
The word that jumped into my mind when I saw this was “pain”: too many years of conference calls without a headphone and the resulting aching shoulder(s) and ear(s). My next thought was that the word “university” is becoming increasingly diluted. And that “Conference Call” doesn’t have much panache as a name.
I looked around the site. They use a variety of technologies including text chat, streaming audio – wait, there aren’t any offered that way. As I looked around the site, there wasn’t much in most of the categories, either for delivery technologies or topics. There was little information about the university itself, other than an address in Sandy, Utah.
They are looking for presenters – or do they call them professors? The site asks, “Are you an author, speaker or expert? (No matter who you are, you can at least answer YES to ‘expert.’ EVERYONE is an expert in SOMETHING!)”
I haven’t decided if I will attend the seminar that originally brought me to the site. But if I do, I’m curious to see if and how “Conference Call University” is promoted.