I’ve written about the Microsoft PowerToys in the past. They come with some handy applications. There’s an application that allows you to preview .SVG files. This is more important today than it was even a year ago as more and more courses are using .SVG. There’s also a feature to rename your files. This comes in handy if you want to convert a folder of images to match a project’s title.
I was looking at the updated PowerToys and thought I’d highlight the new color picker and how it has real practical value.
Color Picker for E-Learning
I use a color picker multiple times during the day. Many apps like Storyline and PowerPoint have color picking tools. However, they tend to be confined to working in the application. There are browser extensions for color picking websites. I use them sometimes when I work in Rise 360. I also use Color Cop (another free app).
However…
I think I’ve been able to consolidate all of my color picking needs in a single tool via the Color Picker in PowerToys. Three things I really like:
It’s simple and elegant.
I can pick colors from anywhere on my computer without being constrained by an app or browser.
I can edit the colors or get quick derivatives. For example, I could pick a fill color and use one of the derivatives for a border.
Select Windows+Shift+C and it opens the color picker. From there you can pick any color. Using your mouse wheel to zoom in. And once you’re in the editor, you get the hex code and a range of tones within the color as an easy way to create a secondary color derivative.
Here’s a quick tutorial to show a little more detail.
Visually branding your e-learning courses is a common requirement. A great way to figure out how to brand the course is by mimicking what’s available publicly from the organization’s website (and intranet).
These sites tend to have all sorts of media assets that are already vetted to fit the organization’s brand and often work well for e-learning content. The challenge is how to get access to those assets.
Connect with the Marketing Team
Before you spend time scraping your sites for images, connect with the marketing (or web) team. In the past, I’ve found that the marketing team usually had access to more media assets than other teams. Connect with that team (or the team that manages the website) and share what you want to do. Often, they can provide some guidance and give you access to the resources available to them.
Be prepared to dialogue about compliance to the company’s branding requirements. 🙂
Download Images from the Website
One option is to locate an image on the website, right-click and save to a folder.
That’s an easy and effective way. However, it’s also a bit cumbersome. And sometimes the sites are set up to not allow this.
Download Images via the Browser’s Site Inspection
Another way to access the images on your site is via the browser’s ability to inspect the site.
I’m not sure what the number is, but my guess is that compliance/regulatory training makes up a large majority of the e-learning that gets created.
Most compliance training isn’t training to change performance. The focus is awareness and certifying that the learner understands and accepts those expectations. Or perhaps it’s some sort of annual refresher.
I used to work with a community healthcare group and the nursing staff did a week of annual training. They already knew the content. However, they had to review the content each year and be certified. But they weren’t really learning a lot of new things.
Another common example is ethics training. We don’t have organizations full of unethical people and then do training to make them ethical. Instead, we do the ethics training to state the organization’s position and expectations.
That doesn’t mean there’s no performance expectation. For example, a performance requirement may be to identify unethical behavior. Or perhaps, it’s knowing what to do when it’s witnessed.
In fact, one of the downfalls of compliance training is that the focus is usually only on the content and end-of-year certification. But what about how to apply the expectations in the real world:Â learn how to identify unethical behavior and then what to do?
Because compliance training is usually only focused on disseminating content, the measure of understanding is usually a few simple multiple choice quiz questions and certificate of completion.
However, if the compliance training focused on how the organization’s expectations play out in a real-world environment, the course designer could use decision-making scenarios that mimic the real-world. This is a better way to assess the learner’s understanding of ethics and how they apply the training in a context that’s meaningful to themselves.
I get asked a lot about compliance training and here is my core advice:
If it’s merely to certify exposure to the content, create a simple course with a simple quiz so that people can get in and out of the course and back to productive work quickly.
If you want to build engaging and meaningful training, identify the performance angle and create decision-making opportunities so they can process the content in a relevant context.
What do you find to be the biggest challenges with compliance training?
If you’re not using Rise.com or a learning management system to manage your e-learning courses, then you’ll need another way to upload courses to a web server to share. This is especially true if you’re maintaining a professional portfolio in one of those simple website builders like Wix where you can’t upload your published course files.
With Google Cloud, you create an account and add a project.
From there you create a bucket to hold the content folder.
You upload files and folders (or published e-learning courses).
Then you add permission to access them. This generates the URL you can share with others.
Google gives you 5 GB free, and odds are you will never have to pay for the service unless you have a lot of content. And even then, it’ll only cost a few dollars a year at most.
Share Courses Tutorial
Here’s a quick tutorial that walks through how to create the Google Cloud account and get it all set up to share courses. If you have questions or need help with this, the Google Cloud site has lots of handy tutorials to help.
Ideally you have an LMS or using a product like Rise.com to share your e-learning courses. However, there are many times you don’t need a formal management system. For example, you may maintain a professional portfolio where you share courses and work samples.
Amazon S3 is an easy way to do this. And it’s relatively simple : create the account, upload your files, create a URL, and let people access the content. The cost is nominal. Odds are you won’t pay anything and if you do, it’s only a few dollars a year.
Share Courses with Amazon S3 Tutorial
Here’s a quick tutorial that walks through how to create the account and get it all set up. I also show how to use Cloudberry Explorer (another free product) to manage uploading and creating the URL.
I’m not sure what the number is, but my guess is that compliance/regulatory training makes up a large majority of the e-learning that gets created.
