There are so many creative examples in the e-learning community. Many of them you can see in the weekly e-learning challenges. If you don’t have it on your docket to review them every week, you should. You can checkout the recap every Thursday for some good inspiration and often fun examples.

Here’s an e-learning example from Sarah Hodge that wasn’t part of the e-learning challenges but is a great example. Some of the things I like about this demo:

Check out her example. And the next step is to try to figure out how it’s built. That’s a great way to learn to use your e-learning software.

• Creative use of animations throughout, starting with the opening transition
• Excellent use of simple graphics to create an engaging interaction
• Good self assessment…not everything needs to be graded; and this could be used in all sorts of contexts
• Reuses some items shared in the community
• Visual prompts for right/wrong; learner self assess and the colors dynamically change on drag
• Subtle (and appropriate sound effects); often we don’t use these

Sarah Hodge does great work and she has some other cool e-learning examples in the community. I love her How to Fight a Bear and Live demo (which I featured before) and this Mad Libs design, another fun assessment idea with a free download.

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Free E-Learning Resources

Want to learn more? Check out these articles and free resources in the community.	Here’s a great job board for e-learning, instructional design, and training jobs	Participate in the weekly e-learning challenges to sharpen your skills
Get your free PowerPoint templates and free graphics & stock images.	Lots of cool e-learning examples to check out and find inspiration.	Getting Started? This e-learning 101 series and the free e-books will help.

Many of you know I’m a big fan of the e-learning challenges posted each week in the community. The intent is to get you to think about different ways to see the tools, be inspired by other examples, and practice using the software to learn new production tips.

I am always impressed with the diverse ideas that are demonstrated each week by both experienced and novice developers. On occasion I like to feature specific participants because they do really nice work and offer some creative ideas.

Today, I’d like to feature Andrzej Jabłoński. He really comes up with some interesting ideas and he often shares the files so that you can learn how he created what he did. This is the spirit of community in action. Here are a few of his recent challenge entries.

E-Learning Example: Leadership Template

This is one of my favorite demos in all of the challenges. There’s an elegance to the template structure and playfulness with the subtle animations. And yet, because he started with an existing graphic, it’s relatively easy to build something similar, especially for the person with minimal graphic design skills who has to work with stock imagery.

• View demo
• Download file

E-Learning Example: Paper Cutout Effect

I love the visuals in this one and the depth created with the paper cutout look. He always does a nice job with the animations in his demo and this one features some moving next buttons and bring content in and out of the screen.

• View demo

E-Learning Example: Meet the Team Interaction

Great use of the flashcard effect with really nice animations. There are a lot of interesting production tips to glean from this demo.

• View demo
• Download file

E-Learning Example: Space Game Navigation

This mimics an older arcade style game. This is a great demo to deconstruct so you can learn more about working with keyboard-based navigation. And there’s an off/on audio toggle.

• View demo
• Download file [developer mode]

E-Learning Example: Miscellaneous

Scenario Ideas

• Office
• Slider conversation

Exploration Activities

These are great activities to build familiarity with content, especially imagery or terms. They’re simple game activities, but can be sued effectively in many e-learning course contexts.

• Word Search [download]
• Accordion interaction 
• Start a Fire
• Vertical infographic style

Andrzej is just one of the many talented e-learning developers who regularly participate in e-learning challenges. I’ll feature more in the future.

Hopefully, you’ll be inspired to participate and share some of your own ideas. If not, at least make it a point to check them out each week to see what people share. And take advantage of the free tips and downloads that you can use to learn and build your own courses.

Are there any recent challenge entries you’ve enjoyed?

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Free E-Learning Resources

Want to learn more? Check out these articles and free resources in the community.	Here’s a great job board for e-learning, instructional design, and training jobs	Participate in the weekly e-learning challenges to sharpen your skills
Get your free PowerPoint templates and free graphics & stock images.	Lots of cool e-learning examples to check out and find inspiration.	Getting Started? This e-learning 101 series and the free e-books will help.

We all want to give proper credit to our sources when presenting content. Many of us learned to cite our sources when writing reports for school work or research papers. But does it work the same way for an e-learning course?

I had a great question from a blog reader last week:

I am a relatively new instructional designer, but I was an English teacher for nearly 20 years. When I started my new job, I found that other designers and trainers in my company were just quoting and copying resources without stating where the information came from and this really rubbed me the wrong way.

What are some best practices regarding how to cite sources for e-learning? Is there any guidance out there for something like this? It is a bit weird to stop in the middle of a scenario or game to state where the info originated, but attaching a bibliography in a resource tab seems a bit unclear.

I’d appreciate any thoughts you have. 

Credit for Free Assets

I wrote a blog post a while back that dealt with how to credit the source of free assets we find online. We covered a few different ways to give credit to the sources. I assume the mechanics of displaying content on the screen is similar. But that’s still different than citing sources of the content.

Click here to view the demo.

Citing Sources for Web Pages

There are a number of places that explain how to cite online sources and some even provide a way to create the citations. But again, a lot of that focuses on research and isn’t specific to an online course.

• Bibme.org has you covered for APA, MLA, and Chicago.
• Citation Machine also provides similar resources.

Big Question: Citation for E-Learning

Creating an e-learning course is different than writing a research paper. And an e-learning course is different than a web site. Is there a different way to do this? I’ll throw the question out to the community and see if we can glean some best practices.

What do YOU do (if anything) when citing sources in your e-learning courses?

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Want to learn more? Check out these articles and free resources in the community.	Here’s a great job board for e-learning, instructional design, and training jobs	Participate in the weekly e-learning challenges to sharpen your skills
Get your free PowerPoint templates and free graphics & stock images.	Lots of cool e-learning examples to check out and find inspiration.	Getting Started? This e-learning 101 series and the free e-books will help.

Many of us are challenged to convert our linear content into something more interactive and engaging. I was digging through some old workshop files and stumbled upon one I built a while back but never ended up sharing it outside of the workshop. In the workshop activity, the objective was to not build completely from scratch. We started with an existing template that was shared in the community, and then we explored a few ways we could add some gamified elements to create something that is a bit more effective and engaging.

Here’s a breakdown of some ideas from the workshop activity.

From Linear Content to a Gamified Experience

We started with a nice clean template designed to meet the team. It’s interactive, in the sense that you click to learn about each team member. This is great for an exploratory interaction where you need to collect information.

Original Template Example

See original template in action.

In our activity, we used the template as a mechanism to interview team members and collect information to make the right decisions. We also added some other elements to gamify it a bit.

Gamified Template Example

Click here to view the gamified example.

Gamified Learning Challenge

The assumption is that there is some sort of challenge and the learner has to determine what to do. But first they need to collect information. They do this by interviewing the team members.

• Each team member has something to say. Some of it is relevant, some not. That’s part of the learning experience. The learner will have to determine what’s what and whether the information is useful.

• Each team member is assigned a point value. Some are low points and some higher.
• You can only collect a specific number of points before you’re asked to stop. Thus, who you ask is important. You don’t want to waste time or opportunity. Another part of the learning experience.

• The information you collect is added to a notebook and you’ll be able to review it later to make a more informed decision. Thus, the more information you have the better.

Gamified Template Modifications

Here’s a video tutorial where I walk through some of what I did to modify the template to go from the original meet the team structure to the gamified interaction. I’ve also included a download with the original and modified files.

• There were ten possible interviews. We added a progress meter to track how many were interviewed. We used a number variable and added 1 for each interview.
• Created a disabled state for each character so you can interview only once.
• Collected information by clicking the star. This is tracked with a T/F variable that we use in the notebook to determine whether to display the interview content or not.
• Added a notebook that shows which answers are collected. The notes have hidden states and the T/F variable is used to show the information that is collected.
• Each character gets a point value. Too many points collected and you’re cut off. Used a number variable to track total points. Each interview adds X points to the variable. Once it exceeds 12 points, the interviews are stopped.

Gamified Learning Opportunities

There are a number of ways to create gamified learning experiences. Of course, this mock up isn’t complete, but here are a few things that I added to the template to increase engagement:

• Put the content into a relevant context. Instead of just sharing information, frame everything around an event where the learner would use the information in real life.
• Challenge the learner to make a decision. For the demo, it’s assumed something happened and the person needs to make a decision. To do so, they need to have all of the information. The more information, the better…maybe. Some of it could be false or irrelevant.
• Create a means to explore and collect information. They can choose who to interview and what information is relevant and add it to the notebook for use later in the course.
• Add risk and pressure. Choosing the wrong people means they collect less information and may not be able to complete the task. This is all part of the learning process: knowing what’s important and what’s not, and where to get the resources or correct information. Again, the demo isn’t completely developed, but you can see how this is important to decision-making opportunities.
• The person gets to demonstrate their understanding of a given topic through the decision-making process and how they use resources. The decisions made produce consequences which create opportunities to add feedback and additional instruction.

I love doing this activity in the workshops. It forces us to work with the constraint of existing templates and find a few simple things we could do to make it a more meaningful and engaging learning experience.

Take the Gamified Template Challenge

Find a template (or a slide with content) that is mostly static or linear content. Convert that linear content into a decision-making interaction. What do you need to do? How do you do this at the speed of business where you don’t have the luxury of working from scratch or building the most complex gamified experience?

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Free E-Learning Resources

Want to learn more? Check out these articles and free resources in the community.	Here’s a great job board for e-learning, instructional design, and training jobs	Participate in the weekly e-learning challenges to sharpen your skills
Get your free PowerPoint templates and free graphics & stock images.	Lots of cool e-learning examples to check out and find inspiration.	Getting Started? This e-learning 101 series and the free e-books will help.

I’m asked to review courses all the time and one of the most frustrating things is to go through the course and find the developer has locked every slide. This requires that I have to click through every screen, interaction, and quiz before I can get to specific places for review.

For those asking for feedback in the community, it’s extra frustrating trying to troubleshoot a course and having to click through everything to get to a specific place in it.

An easy solution is to create a secret menu that lets you, as the developer, gain access to any place in the course.

Two Ways to Create Quick Access Points

Create a shortcut button. I usually put a button in one of the corners that gives me quick access to slides. Sometimes, the button just skips the slide. I may do that if it has longer narration or animations. Other times, I may add a link to a menu area where I have access to all of the slides.

• During production, I keep it visible so I remember it’s there or can easily direct reviewers to it.
• After production, I either delete it or hide it by making it transparent or use a hotspot. It is nice always having access to it once the course is live.
• Put the button on the master slide so it’s available on all the slides that use the layout.

Create a menu tab on the player. The benefit of a player tab is that the link to the shortcuts is available regardless of the slide and layouts. It’s ever present. And then when you’re ready to publish, just disable the player tab.

• Create a slide with menu links. I usually create a separate scene and make sure it’s not visible in the player menu.
• Insert a custom player tab and link to the secret menu slide.
• Hide the player tab when the course is published.

One of the benefits of this over the slide master is that the slide master sits on the bottom. It’s possible that the slide content is on top of the button and not available on a given slide.

Click here to view demo course.

Above is a demo course where you can see both options in action. I locked the sidebar navigation and each slide is locked for five seconds. The first three slides don’t have access to the onscreen shortcut button.

Create Quick Access to Variables

In a recent post, I showed how to do something similar with variables. Instead of going through an entire interaction (or course) to see if the variables are working properly, create access to a variables dashboard. There you can assign custom values to the variables for testing and to see if everything is working as it should.

Click here to view variables demo.

Having quick access to specific slides or be able to jump to certain places in the course is a big time-saver when reviewing the course.

I’m curious how many course designers do something similar and what you do to create shortcuts.

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Free E-Learning Resources

Want to learn more? Check out these articles and free resources in the community.	Here’s a great job board for e-learning, instructional design, and training jobs	Participate in the weekly e-learning challenges to sharpen your skills
Get your free PowerPoint templates and free graphics & stock images.	Lots of cool e-learning examples to check out and find inspiration.	Getting Started? This e-learning 101 series and the free e-books will help.

Here’s an issue I run into quite a bit: I need a map for my e-learning courses; but I don’t need a detailed map.

Stock image sites are fine for generic illustrated maps but they’re usually too generic. The other option is to do a screen grab of an online map, but then that’s often too detailed.

Recently, I was working on a map demo where I needed a specific map, but I didn’t want a real map screen shot because it was too busy and I knew the stock sites couldn’t provide what I needed because it was too specific. Fortunately, I found this site, Snazzy Maps, that makes it easy to customize Google’s online maps.

Examples of Custom Maps for E-Learning

Here’s why this comes in handy.

Most maps have too much visual information. For example, if I built a labeled graphic map of some historic sites in Washington, D.C. I need a simple map for reference, but I don’t need all of the street names and colors that may distract from my labels. Instead I want a map that gives me some context, but allows the label to be the star of the show.

In the example above, the real online map has way too much visual info. It’s hard to know where to look first. In fact, it’s difficult to see the markers because of all of the colors, text, and roads. I’m not using this map to drive an Uber so I probably don’t need all of the detail and distracting visual information.

This next example above is the complete opposite. All of the colors are turned off as well as many of the roads. A gray scale map like this allows the accent colors from the labels to really pop. In fact, one of the best simple tips for course design is to get rid of competing visual information like colors and then only use color to accent or highlight content. In this example, the marker colors are much more distinct.

For this particular interaction, I like having a little color to show the park and monuments in relationship to the city and water. I turned off the titles and some of the roads. You can still recognize it as a map, yet it’s not quite as busy.

Customizing the Maps

To be honest, I don’t have the patience to learn how to use the Snazzy Map site. So I started with one of the maps someone with more patience created. And from there it was just a lot of clicking around to see what I can edit. Most of it makes sense and with a little practice you can get almost any look you need.

If you need a custom map for your e-learning courses, check out the site. It may come in handy.

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Free E-Learning Resources

Want to learn more? Check out these articles and free resources in the community.	Here’s a great job board for e-learning, instructional design, and training jobs	Participate in the weekly e-learning challenges to sharpen your skills
Get your free PowerPoint templates and free graphics & stock images.	Lots of cool e-learning examples to check out and find inspiration.	Getting Started? This e-learning 101 series and the free e-books will help.

We all like to see good e-learning examples. That’s one reason I really enjoy the e-learning challenges. They’re little nuggets of creativity. They’re usually not full-fledged courses, but they often have some interesting elements.

In a recent challenge on course starter templates for leadership training, community member, Andrzej Jabłoński, shared a really nice example. Check it out below.

Click here to view the demo.

Here’s what stood out:

• The visual design is fun and clean. I think often our e-learning courses look too formal or corporatey (if that’s a word). We think because it’s a serious topic that the visuals need to look serious. Maybe they do, maybe they don’t. I like this design because it doesn’t look like a typical corporate course. Yet it’s professional and engaging.

• The subtle animations work well. They get your attention, but they’re not gratuitous. Break down the course and look at how he used the animations.
• Leverages existing illustrations. He used an image from freepik to create the visual elements for his demo. As he says, “I mainly work on redesigning and adjusting images for my projects. It’s also a good way to learn how to design when you have to work on ready-made elements. I often try to add something more from myself to develop graphic skills.”
• Andrzej also shared the source file so you can open it up to see how he created the animated effects and other slides. You can find it in the recap post.

Look at what he did, find an image, and see what you can do to apply similar effects for your own template design.

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Free E-Learning Resources

Want to learn more? Check out these articles and free resources in the community.	Here’s a great job board for e-learning, instructional design, and training jobs	Participate in the weekly e-learning challenges to sharpen your skills
Get your free PowerPoint templates and free graphics & stock images.	Lots of cool e-learning examples to check out and find inspiration.	Getting Started? This e-learning 101 series and the free e-books will help.

Here’s some content that spans the past decade or so of rapid e-learning. Originally, the interactive scenario started as a PowerPoint file that was published with Articulate Studio to demonstrate how to create simple branched scenarios in PowerPoint.

Interactive Scenario: PowerPoint

Click to view the interactive scenario create with PowerPoint

Since PowerPoint is linear and doesn’t offer tracking logic, it requires a lot of slides to create the illusion of movement and branching complexity. The slide number increases exponentially with each additional choice and gets to a point where it’s not manageable.

In those cases, PowerPoint isn’t the best solution for interactive courses.

Interactive Scenario: Storyline

The same content goes from 154 slides in PowerPoint to just 18 slides in Storyline. That’s a dramatic decrease in slides and the production time required to create an interactive scenario. It really shows off the power of Storyline and why it’s so well received as a preferred authoring tool.

Interactive Scenario: Rise 360 Content Blocks

When we launched the Rise 360, I wrote about the new approach to rapid e-learning. Rise 360 is form-based so the authoring process is different than PowerPoint or Storyline.

I played around with how to convert the PowerPoint scenario into Rise 360, a completely different type of tool. Here’s the first attempt using content blocks.

Click here to view the interactive scenario using content blocks in Rise 360.

Interactive Scenario: Rise 360 Scenario Block

The content block scenario works, but with the scenario block in Rise, I am able to create something that is visually more in line with what I want and it’s a lot easier to build. Here’s an example of the same content in the Rise 360 scenario block.

Click here to view the interactive scenario using the scenario block in Rise 360.

Interactive Scenario Resources

• In a previous post, I showed how I created the menu design for the interactive scenario using PowerPoint.
• Here’s a tutorial to learn more about the scenario block where I used some of this scenario for the demo.
• I am doing a free webinar on May 21, if you want to learn more about the scenario block. If you can’t make it, register and you’ll get a link to the recording to watch at your leisure.

It really is interesting to see the evolution of rapid e-learning through this scenario content. It started with PowerPoint, passed through Storyline, and now it’s part of Rise 360.

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Free E-Learning Resources

Want to learn more? Check out these articles and free resources in the community.	Here’s a great job board for e-learning, instructional design, and training jobs	Participate in the weekly e-learning challenges to sharpen your skills
Get your free PowerPoint templates and free graphics & stock images.	Lots of cool e-learning examples to check out and find inspiration.	Getting Started? This e-learning 101 series and the free e-books will help.

Animated .gifs are great for e-learning. Often, I like to use them instead of videos for e-learning interactions, especially process interactions that go through a sequence of steps.

Here are a few previous posts on animated .gifs with some free resources:

• 3 Reasons to Use Animated GIFs in E-learning
• How to Make Animated Gifs from Video
• Here Are Some Free Animated Gifs
• How to Create Animated .GIFs for Free

Today I’ll show a simple way to convert a video of a process into smaller animated .gifs that you can insert into a slide, article, or process interaction.

Demo of the Animated Gifs in a Process Interaction

Here’s a demo I created using Rise and the Process Interaction.

Click here to view the example.

Animated Gifs Tutorials

Below are a couple of tutorials that go into it in more detail:

• How to cut the video into smaller parts using the free video editor in Windows 10.
• How to import and convert the video into an animated .gif.

Animated Gifs: Create a Procedural Video

Record a video of the process. Don’t worry about the audio as it will be removed. To keep the edits to a minimum, make sure to be clear on the steps and to not waste a lot of movement. Get to the point quickly.

At our workshop in Milan, David and I quickly recorded the process to make an espresso with the machine in the back of the room. While we pretended to be working, it was really a way for us to sneak in a few more shots of espresso.

Here’s the original video.

Click to play the video on YouTube.

Animated Gifs: Convert the Video to Gif

There are a number of ways to convert video to animated .gifs. I like to use ScreenToGif because it’s free (which is always good) and it is really easy to use.

The conversion process is simple: import the video and convert it. However, there are some key considerations.

The original .MP4 video is 159 MB at 1920 x 1080 resolution. Animated .gifs can be large, really large.  Without any significant edits, the 159 MB video becomes a 470 MB animated .gif. That’s just not manageable.

There are a few things you can do to decrease the file size of the animated .gifs:

• Scale the video down from it’s original resolution. There’s no need for an HD quality .gif. In this case 1920 x 1080 will be sized down to 500 x 281.
• Crop the video to just the critical pieces of info. The fewer frames the smaller the file size. You can always duplicate frames to keep something on screen longer with minimal impact to size.
• The less difference there is with the pixels from one frame to the next, the smaller the file will be. Unfortunately, video isn’t static and those millions of pixels are changing from frame to frame. You could try to shoot against a solid background and with a tripod. That may help, depending on your subject.
• Video runs at about 30 frames per second (FPS). When you convert the video to .gif, you can modify the frame rate to something like 10 to 15. It just depends on how much motion is in the video. The less motion, the more you can lower the frame rate.

Animated Gifs: Edit to Individual Steps

Unless the steps are very short and can be shown in one file, it makes sense to break the steps up to individual parts. That helps reduce the file size and keeps the focus on very specific parts of the process.

• You can import the entire video and then cut it down. Or cut the video into smaller videos first and work with them individually. It’s probably easier to edit the videos first and then import the smaller videos. This is more manageable and less strain on your system.
• Get rid of what you don’t need, cut out extra frames.
• The animated .gifs loop, so it may make sense to add a little buffer at the front or back end to let the user orient to the start and end of the process.

The original video was 1 minute long. Converted to an animated .gif without edits, it was 470 MB. After cutting it into pieces and creating four smaller gifs, the total ended up being about 15 MB. That’s a pretty significant difference and the output works well for the demo.

That’s basically it, shoot a video and then convert it to animated gif.

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Free E-Learning Resources

Want to learn more? Check out these articles and free resources in the community.	Here’s a great job board for e-learning, instructional design, and training jobs	Participate in the weekly e-learning challenges to sharpen your skills
Get your free PowerPoint templates and free graphics & stock images.	Lots of cool e-learning examples to check out and find inspiration.	Getting Started? This e-learning 101 series and the free e-books will help.

Building e-learning courses is usually a matter of pulling together the appropriate content, visuals, and some level of interactivity. Most courses I see are linear with some simple interactions like tabs and labeled graphics.

However, there’s a way to make e-learning content and the learning experience more dynamic when using variables. Variables help create custom user experiences such as personalized visuals, conditional navigation, and adaptive learning paths.

The challenge for many e-learning developers (who aren’t experienced programmers) is learning more about variables and how to use them.

Today’s post is a recap of some previous getting started content that introduces the basics of working with variables, a few practice activities, and additional resources.

Also, be sure to check out our upcoming e-learning workshops below. I just added a bunch of new sessions.

Learn About Variables for E-Learning

Here are some previous blog posts that go through the basics of variables and how to use them.

• The Case for Variables in E-Learning: what are variables and why use them?
• Simplifying Variables for Better E-Learning: understand the types of variables and common use cases.
• Consistency in Production: Naming Variables for E-Learning: learn how to name variables for easier management.
• How to Save Time When Using Variables in Your E-learning: time-saving tip using variable references to verify that the variable is tracking properly.
• The Answer to the Community’s Number 1 E-Learning Question: every day some sort of derivative of this question is asked in the community. Get your answer here.
• Here’s an Easy Way to Troubleshoot Courses with Variables: build a way to quickly access and manage variable values during the course production and testing process.

Practice Activities to Learn About Variables for E-Learning

Here are some resources from previous workshops where we learn to use variables in a simple gamified context. There’s a published version with practice files and a series of tutorials that go through each slide individually. If you want to practice using variables and need some resources, this is a good place to start. You’ll only learn to use them when you use them.

See a published example.

• Download the practice file here.

Tutorials

• Set up and overview (6:50)
• Slide 1.2: create a personalized badge (18:18)
• Slide 1.3: create conditional menu navigation (16:16)
• Slide 2.2: include progress indicators (17:26)
• Slide 3.2: add a timer (20:38)
• Slide 4.2: create risk and reward (17:09)
• Slide 5.1: ways to manage and test variables (24:16)
• Slide 7.1: how to set variables for testing (15:36)

E-Learning Community Activities to Practice Using Variables

Here some recent challenges to practice using variables in real-world contexts. Even if you can’t participate, look at some of the examples shared by community members.

• Using Text Variables to Capture and Display Learner’s Name #222 

• Using Random Number Variables to Create Dynamic E-Learning #188

• Share Your Tips for Getting Started with Storyline’s Variables #2

Tutorials to Learn About Variables for E-Learning

• Here are some community tutorials that show how to use variables in Storyline 3 & 360.
• Articulate 360 subscribers can always sign up for the 4-part webinar series. Our next series starts April 22. We go through the basics and answer your questions.

If you haven’t used variables before, now’s a good time to get started. If you do use variables, what do you find to be the most common use cases in your projects?

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Free E-Learning Resources

Want to learn more? Check out these articles and free resources in the community.	Here’s a great job board for e-learning, instructional design, and training jobs	Participate in the weekly e-learning challenges to sharpen your skills
Get your free PowerPoint templates and free graphics & stock images.	Lots of cool e-learning examples to check out and find inspiration.	Getting Started? This e-learning 101 series and the free e-books will help.

Between the blog posts, community interactions, workshops, and webinars one of the most frequently asked questions is how to get started with e-learning or become a better e-learning developer.

I’ve written about this in several previous posts that cover how to build your skills, create your personal brand, and maintain a portfolio. You can find previous posts and a really cool interaction below.

How to Build Your Skills

Here’s a list of some of the posts on personal development.

• How to Improve Your E-Learning Course Design Skills
• Do You Need to be a Programmer to Build E-Learning Courses?
• 5 Ways to Kickstart Your E-learning Career
• How to be Successful in the E-Learning Industry
• How to Hire an E-Learning Developer or Get an E-Learning Job
• The Role of Today’s Trainer
• Here’s How an E-Learning Portfolio Builds Your Skills
• Why You Need a Professional Portfolio
• Here’s What Needs to be in Your E-Learning Portfolio
• How to Create an E-Learning Portfolio
• 4 Ways to Build Your E-learning Skills This Summer
• 3 Ways to Save Your Training Job

Just Getting Started?

You know what’s better than reading a bunch of articles? Seeing it all in an e-learning module.

Sarah Hodge of SlideSugar recently shared a really great example of how to get started with e-learning. Not only is the content valuable, but it’s a demo worth deconstructing to glean ideas for your next e-learning course.

See e-learning example here.

Be sure to check out the articles and Sarah’s e-learning example above.

What tips would you give to those who are just getting started or want to improve their e-learning design skills?

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Free E-Learning Resources

Want to learn more? Check out these articles and free resources in the community.	Here’s a great job board for e-learning, instructional design, and training jobs	Participate in the weekly e-learning challenges to sharpen your skills
Get your free PowerPoint templates and free graphics & stock images.	Lots of cool e-learning examples to check out and find inspiration.	Getting Started? This e-learning 101 series and the free e-books will help.

I built a simple sorting interaction to show how to work with sliders and variables for a workshop. It’s a fun and simple interaction so I cleaned out the data and made it so it can work as a template. It’s yours to use as you wish.

Click here to view the demo.

• Download the template here.

Tutorial: Interactive Sort Activity

Here’s a YouTube tutorial that walks through the template and explains how to customize it.

A few things you’ll learn:

• Customizing the slider
• Animation-based triggers
• How to customize the sorting activity

Events

Free E-Learning Resources

Want to learn more? Check out these articles and free resources in the community.	Here’s a great job board for e-learning, instructional design, and training jobs	Participate in the weekly e-learning challenges to sharpen your skills
Get your free PowerPoint templates and free graphics & stock images.	Lots of cool e-learning examples to check out and find inspiration.	Getting Started? This e-learning 101 series and the free e-books will help.