Did you know that every two seconds, someone needs blood? And one donation can save up to three lives?

2020 has been a challenging year. And on top of it, the news media seems to focus on all the discord and hardship. Where’s the good news? What can we do to make a difference in our little part of the universe?

How to be an E-Learning Hero

Every week we feature various e-learning challenges. The goal is to use the e-learning tools in different ways. Move past the compliance projects we do at work and do something different.

This helps us gain mastery over the e-learning tools, play around with various interactive prototypes, and get inspiration from seeing what others can do.

If you don’t participate, you should. At a minimum, you should check out the round up that David does every Thursday. There’s always some creative ideas that may inspire something for your next project.

Recently, we did a challenge to promote blood donations. Here’s a link to the round up with a bunch of nice examples.

Here are a few key thoughts:

• There’s more than one way to do things. What I love most about the challenge entries is that it shows there’s a lot of creative ways to do the same thing.
• Keep your design clean and focused. We tend to be info-centric and push a lot of content out. Try to minimize content on the screen and control when and how it’s exposed.
• Where’s the personality? Many of the challenges feature facts and various levels of interactivity. The ones that stood out to me are the ones wrapped around stories and people. What’s the story in your e-learning courses?
• There are a lot of nice examples, my favorite is this one by Przemyslaw Hubisz. I like the simple and clean design; and that the activity is contextually meaningful. It makes me consider the point of the information being presented to me.

Click here to view the e-learning example.

If you want to grow your skills using the e-learning software and building interactions, the challenges are a great way to do that. If you’re a beginner or more advanced, doesn’t matter. The challenges work for where you’re at and it’s not a competition. It’s all about you.

How to be a REAL Hero

Blood and platelets cannot be manufactured. They can only come from volunteer donors. And not everyone can donate, so everyone who can plays an important role.

Can you donate?

I’ll have to admit, it’s not always on my radar. But I was reading an article recently that reminded me how important it is. And while I can’t control a lot of what’s going on in the world today, I can control what I do and how I share what I have. Because of that, I’ve made a commitment to donate blood regularly.

Hopefully it’s something you can to do, too. Find out where you can donate blood today.

Join us in the e-learning challenges to grow your skills. Join us in donating blood to be a hero to someone who needs it.

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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.

In a previous post, we looked at how context helps frame the learning experience. It keeps us from just doing an information dump as we add clarity about our learners and the learning objectives.

One way to establish context is by learning what the user already knows. Test their assumptions. This does two things:

• Expose their current level of understanding. This helps them see what they do or don’t know about the subject.
• Demonstrate what level of knowledge/competence is required to meet the learning objectives.

How to Test the Learner’s Assumptions

Generally, you can do one of two things to test the learner’s understanding and assumptions around a given subject.

Create a Pre-Assessment

The easiest thing is to create a pre-assessment. Usually, pre-assessments are used to filter the learner. Pass the assessment, go to the end. Fail the assessment, start the course.

For procedural training, that is step-by-step, the filtering makes sense. You either know the procedures or not. For principle-based training, we want to expose the understanding (or assumptions for experienced people).

In this case, we use the pre-assessment to help them understand where they’re at. We’re not using it to filter them away from the course.

Create a Simple Scenario

I like to throw people in the pool and get them to make real world decisions as soon as possible. So, I recommend some sort of early decision-making interactions. They don’t need to be big elaborate scenarios: just a few interactions that test their understanding and help them see what they currently know about a given situation. And then from there, work through the content.

In most cases, the learners already have existing knowledge and probably a pretty good idea of what the course will teach. With that comes some bias and possibly incorrect understanding. By getting them to make decisions related to the content, you expose to them what they know or possibly don’t know.

The main point in all of this is to get them to think about what they know about the topic before going through the topic. People can easily figure out and compare what they thought versus what they’re presented. But your interaction gets them set up to do so.

In either case, get them to test what they know before giving them the content.

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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.

We can use the same words, yet they don’t always mean the same thing. They call that “complex equivalence.”

If we use the same words but don’t mean the same thing we’ll never have clear communication. This is very obvious in today’s culture, especially with our quick tweets and meme screaming where we pack so much inferred meaning into small bites of text. I suspect there’s a lot of miscommunication in between the grandstanding.

Think of it like an iceberg where the bulk of the iceberg is underwater. What’s on top, doesn’t fully communicate how big it really is.

Think of a concept like “online training.” It means all sorts of things. Without clarifying how we use the word, we may be saying one thing but our audience hears something else. And what they hear, they frame in their understanding of that concept.

This is also true for the learning experience we seek to craft in our courses.

Context Comes from Understanding the Learners

People aren’t monolithic where they all think the same and understand the world around them the same way. There’s a lot that goes into crafting who we are and how we think such as age, experience, ethnicity, and cultures. And all of that helps us construct a mental model of the way things work. And we generally, we wrap our experiences and the things we learn in our model.

This needs to be a consideration as we teach online where we don’t have the same type of back and forth communication as we’d have in a classroom.

It’s important that we don’t assume that our learners understand what we mean. Understand your learners and then build context around the content.

Context Comes from Clear Objectives

An e-learning course needs to be more than a bunch of information. A first step in the process is to have clear objectives. This helps the person know what expectations exist and what they should learn. Where are we at today? Where will we be at the end of the course?

Courses also need context. Where does this training fit in relationship to other things?

In many of my past training programs, we’d focus on the upstream and downstream relationships and workflow so that the learners understood where their work came from and how it impacted the work of others.

Regardless of the content, there’s usually some way to position the content in context to other things and then from there build measurable objectives.

With context, you create clarity. And with clarity, you eliminate misunderstanding.

What are things you do in your course design to build a contextual framework for the content?

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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.

A lot of online training starts with pre-existing content, usually some policies, manuals, and PowerPoint presentations. The key is figuring out how to convert a lot of this content into an effective e-learning course. Most of it starts with the objectives of the course. Here are a few things to consider.

Effective Online Training Has Clear Objectives

You can’t build a good course without clear objectives. This seems obvious, but based on what I see, it isn’t. Many organizations confuse content with objectives. Content is just that: content. It may be valuable, but it’s a means to an end. The course objective is never to consume content. Otherwise you’re just wasting time.

Effective Online Training Has Actionable Objectives

At the end of the course, the learner will be able to do _______. That’s basically it.

The online training is a solution to meet an objective such as installing a new part, closing a sale, or inputting data. If the course is only focused on content, they may learn a lot of about something, but they may not know what they’re supposed to do with what they learned.

A course with actionable objectives is focused on what the person will do.

Effective Online Training Has Measurable Objectives

The two points above are obvious to most course developers. However, the reality is that a lot of training we’re asked to build isn’t actionable because the managers or customers tend to think that the issue is a lack of information. Which may be true on the surface. So when I build courses, I like to put them into one of two buckets: information or performance.

With an information-based course, the objective may be to present the information and the measure of that is tracking whether a course was completed or not. This is true for a lot of annual refresher training. This isn’t ideal, but some organizations have information they want to present, but they may not have fully formed ideas around what that information should produce.

A performance-based course is different. It’s tied to a desired action. And that action is measurable. For example, if the training is on how to install a product. I know you’re trained if I can observe you install the product correctly. Or if you’re a manager and you’re learning to give feedback, I can build training that puts you in a situation where you give the desired feedback. Those are things that I can observe or measure.

In an ideal world, training has clear actionable and measurable objectives. Without those, why are you building the course?

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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.

When I’ve completed PowerPoint presentations or e-learning courses, I like to save all of the media assets I used in the presentations and courses and put them in a single location. During production I have multiple versions of the files, which is fine. But when it’s all over, I like a single place for all the media assets. It makes it easy to locate and not have to dig through all of the versions and duplicate files.

In today’s post, I’m going to show you a few simple tips to manage the media assetsin your PowerPoint presentations and e-learning courses.

It does require a couple of free tools which you can download here:

• 7-Zip
• Microsoft PowerToys

Use Storyline’s Media Library to Locate and Export Media Assets

If you’re using Storyline 360, the easiest way to locate your assets is via the Media Library. From there, you can select the ones you want and export them. Media Library filters by images, characters, audio, and video.

Steps to export the media:

• Open the Media Library under the View tab.
• Filter media by type.
• Select the media files.
• Select export and the media files will be saved to a folder of your choosing.

Here’s a quick tutorial on exporting the media files from your Storyline projects using the Media Library.

Click here to watch the tutorial on YouTube.

Use 7-ZIP to Extract the Media Files from PowerPoint & Storyline

7-Zip is a free application to compress and extract files. Both PowerPoint (.pptx) and Storyline (.story) use compressed file formats. Use 7-Zip to extract the file, locate the media in it, and then copy the media to a temporary folder.

Steps to extract the media from PowerPoint or Storyline files:

• Locate your file.
• Right-click and select extract.
• This creates a new folder with the file name.
• Locate the media folder inside the extracted file folder. In PowerPoint it’s in the “ppt” folder and in Storyline it is in the “story” folder).
• Copy and paste the folder to your archive location.

Here’s a quick tutorial that shows how to use 7-Zip to locate the media files in both PowerPoint presentations and Storyline files.

Click here it view the tutorial on YouTube.

Use Microsoft PowerToys to Rename All of Your Files to a Single Project Name

Recently, I shared how to use PowerToys to preview SVG files. Today, we’ll review how to quickly rename all of those media files you just dug out of PowerPoint or Storyline.

The steps are pretty simple:

• Locate the folder with the assets.
• Select the files you want to rename.
• Right-click and select “PowerRename” and rename the files.

If the titles are something like image1 and you want to rename all instances of “image” to Safety101, that’s going to be real easy. However, the PowerToys renaming is pretty powerful and with a few simple variables, you can do all sorts of things.

Check out the tutorial below where I go through the basics of renaming and how to change the name when all of the text is a bunch of gibberish or not easily found and replaced (which is probably more common).

Click here to watch the tutorial on YouTube.

I’ll admit, I am not always consistent with how I manage my media assets. Sometimes I keep them in a big media folder and sometimes I keep them in project-specific folder. Ultimately it doesn’t matter. When everything is done, I can follow the tips above and quickly have all of my media assets in one folder that I can share or archive.

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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 ran across two articles recently that made me wonder about the state of today’s e-learning courses.

The first article was on how websites are all starting to look the same. They did a study to confirm it. In the second article, the author makes some good points on how a lot of this new design is sterile and lacks personality.

While the two articles dealt with website design, there are a lot of parallels to e-learning course design.

Why Does Everything Look the Same?

There are a number of reasons why things look the same.

• There’s a commonality to design because of trends, but they come and go. A few years ago everything had bevels, then glossy buttons, then reflections, then skeuomorphic, then anti-skeuomorphic, then neuomorphism, and on and on. People design based on trends to look fresh and modern.
• A lot of design follows a templated structure with layouts, grids, and common understanding of user interface (UX) design. There’s all sorts of new understanding and rules for UX design based on research and an evolving industry. In addition, courses have technical requirements and need to be designed to accommodate mobile and accessibility needs.
• The technology is changing. If you want a nice-looking website, you don’t need to be a programmer. Just sign up for Wix or Squarespace. Same thing with e-learning courses. Gone are the days of specialized course developers. I addressed that in this post on the next generation e-learning tools.  The tools like Rise 360 and Rise.com are becoming more prevalent. They offer easy, form-based construction. And with that is a consistent look and feel of the courses. You don’t need to know design, you assemble your learning content and pretty much plug and play.

Looking the Same Isn’t Bad Is It?

As noted above, there are a lot of legitimate reasons why things look the same. And those aren’t bad. And the reality is that things will evolve as the industry evolves and develops new norms. Plus, people will get tired of the way things look.

David Anderson shares a funny observation on how to be a consultant. If everything your client has is square, you tell them, what they need is a circle. And if all they have is circles, you tell them what they need is a square. There you go, consulting 101: if your design is skeuomorphic, you need flat. If your design is flat, try skeuomorphic.

Things change and what’s big today won’t be tomorrow.

Legitimate Concerns

“We are emotional and sentimental beings; we survive on self-expression.” – Tobias Van Schneider

I’ve met plenty of clients or “experts” on user experience design who follow a bunch of rules and won’t budge from them. Or marketing people with some ridiculous branding requirements for their courses. What happens is that the objective of learning is lost in the rules and requirements dictated by other objectives from people not concerned about teaching. Because of this, courses become boring and sterile. They lack life and are not very engaging for the learner. And it’s just as bad for the person tasked to build them.

An e-learning course is about teaching PEOPLE (at least in an ideal world). Regardless of current design trends, we should build learning experiences that are relevant and human. And for the course author, we yearn to be creative and want jobs that are more than just copying and pasting content from one medium to the next.

We have to work within the context of what we have. The person who possesses custom programming skills, has more options. But that’s not where most of us are at. However,  just because we have constraints doesn’t mean we can’t be creative. In fact, I often find that constraints force more creativity than having none.

My big question for e-learning today: what is the Art Deco of e-learning design? Or better yet, what can we do to get away from sterile courses and make them more human-centered? How can we can exercise our creative skills and build courses that are both engaging and successful? Interested in your thoughts.

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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.

Recently I shared some free animated gif resources: animated icons and backgrounds. If you’re using Rise or Rise.com it’s as simple as inserting an image. They’re great for novel attention-getters or simple instructional procedures.

If you’re using Storyline 360, with triggers and state changes you can do a bit more to control how the animated gifs work in your course.

Animated gifs are great, but they do loop. Thus, when you insert them in the slide they just continue without end.

To make it more interactive, I like to insert a static image and then interact with the image to activate the animated gif.

Click to view the example.

The demo above shows a few ideas:

• Selected state is like an on/off toggle. Press on the image to toggle between the static version and animated gif.
• Hover state allows you to mouse over the static image to reveal the animated gif and mouse away when you want to leave.
• Down state is like the mouseover, but works by pressing down on the image to activate the gif, and releasing the mouse, stops it. I like this option the best.

Bonus idea: do the opposite and start with the looping animation and create an interaction where the animation stops when clicked.

• Visited state indicates when an object has been clicked. Use the animated icons as markers and then insert the static image in the visited state. This provides a nice visual indication of what’s already been viewed.

View the tutorial on YouTube.

What’s cool about all of the choices above is that they’re super easy to build and don’t require any triggers. Sometimes the looping can be a bit distracting to start, so having an interactive option is nice. I like them because instead of a looping animation it allows the image to become interactive where the user can click to view it and activate the animation.

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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.

Who doesn’t like free and animated .gifs? They’re great for e-learning courses. Use them to create novel attention-getting images, add some humor, or show instructional procedures.

Recently, the AppSumo site gave away free animated .gifs via Lordicon. The offer no longer exists, but the Lordicon site still has a pack for 50 free animated gifs. It’s actually 100 images because you get outline and solid options.

These are great to use in your Rise 360 and Rise.com courses. Here’s an example course from one of our training webinars on how to create compliance training.

Use Free Animated Gifs As Header Graphics

Use Free Animated Gifs As Bullet Point Alternatives

Use Free Animated Gifs with E-Learning Interactions

Bonus Idea

I sign up for sites like AppSumo (there are others, too) because often they have media-related offers that can be used in online course development. This Lordicon offer was free and they gave away 1000 animated gifs. They also recently had an offer for Depositphotos images at $.39 each. That’s a great deal. That’s one that seems to come around every few months.

Most of the offers on those sites are not relevant so I ignore them; but I do like it when I come across one of the low cost (or free) multimedia deals that I can use for my courses. It’s worth checking out.

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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.

SVG is an image format that is becoming more common. The challenge is that it’s not always easy to preview the SVG images you have on your computer.

What is an SVG?

SVG stands for scalable vector graphics, which means that it doesn’t have a defined resolution. Instead it’s made up of data in an XML file. So it can be sized up or down without image degradation which keeps the images are crisp.

On the other hand, most images used in e-learning courses are bitmaps. They’re essentially a grid of pixels. For example, an image that is 500×500 is 500 pixels wide and 500 pixels high. When the images is scaled up the pixels increase in size which degrades the image as you see the pixel blocks. With an SVG image you won’t have that type of degradation which is why they’re popular.

How to Preview an SVG File

The problem is that you can’t easily preview an SVG (as noted in the image above).

For example, when I download an SVG icon to my desktop, it looks like a web link. I can’t preview image without opening it in the browser. That doesn’t help if I have to click onto every link to preview the SVG files when I look for something specific.

Welcome Microsoft PowerToys! Install it and you’ll get an SVG previewer in the newly empowered File Explorer.

• Download Microsoft PowerToys.
• Open File Explorer and go to the View tab to enable the preview pane.
• Select an SVG file and you’ll see a preview of the image.

Now you can preview SVG files to your heart’s content.

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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 are currently creating new health and safety training focused on the Coronavirus (COVID-19). It’s not always easy to find the images you need. Here are some free images and resources to help with your training programs. And here’s a link for different ways to give credit and attribution for the free resources.

Free Coronavirus Stock Photos

These stock photos are provided courtesy of Icons8. They’re free to use. However, you may need to offer some attribution.

• Coronavirus stock photos

Free Coronavirus Icons

Here are a bunch of icons to use in your presentations and online safety training.

• Iconfinder
• Flaticon

Free Coronavirus Course

Cut through the confusion surrounding the new coronavirus with this free course that aims to dispel misinformation about COVID-19 (courtesy of Articulate).

If you want to use the course in your own organization, you can send a copy to your account and make the edits you need and publish it. If you don’t have access to Rise 360, sign up for a free, 60-day trial of Articulate 360.

Here’s another free course shared via John Hopkins created with Rise 360.

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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 you probably do lots of writing using online applications. This is especially true as many of us are spending a lot more time working remotely. If you do a lot of writing, odds are you can use one of those handy browser extensions to help with spelling and grammar.

I’ve used Grammarly, in the past. It’s a really good extension and works well. In fact, I used it for a quite some time. However, I’m always open to new browser apps and extensions, especially if they’re not too intrusive to what I’m working on. Personally, I had to quit using Grammarly because it slowed down my work and often the feature interfered with what I was doing, so I found myself turning it off more than on.

Microsoft recently introduced their grammar/spelling browser extension, Microsoft Editor. The app is available to anyone, but with a Microsoft account, you have access to more features and multiple languages. I’ve been using it for about a week now. I find it to be light and responsive.

If you do your course editing in your e-learning authoring tool like Rise 360, then Microsoft Editor is a tool that comes in handy.

Below is a quick overview of the Microsoft Editor app and how I use it in Rise 360 when building online training programs.

There are a few good grammar and spell checker tools out there. This is one I like.

What are your thoughts?

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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 e-learning developers are usually on a small team. But most I know, are a team of one. This means lots of projects, many hats to wear in the process, no budget, and almost no time.

Here are three production tips and shortcuts from previous posts to help save time (and sanity) when building e-learning courses and online training.

A Simple Way to Build E-learning Templates

First, if you’re using Storyline 360, then you have a ton of templates and slides to use for your e-learning courses. And they’re easy enough to modify to meet your needs.

However, if you want to create some simple templates and e-learning screens, then here are 3 Super Easy Ways to Build E-Learning Templates.

Save Time Managing Your Project Emails

Generally when building online training courses, we send emails back and forth, which can be a pain to manage and cause a lot of extra work and confusion trying to clarify what’s being communicated.

With Review 360, most of that is resolved because you can manage the course review process in one place, eliminating all of those back and forth emails.

However, we still send emails. Here are some good production tips on managing the process so that when emailing others, the message is clear, and all action items are identified.

Build Courses Around Real Learning Objectives to Save Time & Money

There are many reasons why we build e-learning courses. Generally, they fall into one of two buckets: information or performance. An effective course is focused on performance-centered (and tangible) objectives.

If you don’t build courses around real learning objectives, you’ll waste time; and odds are no one will be happy with the course. Check out this blog post to get production tip on setting learning objectives for your e-learning courses.

Hopefully, these quick tips help you build the courses you need. Feel free to add some of your own in the comments.

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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.