In a previous post, we discussed visual thinking concepts and where they fit with e-learning design. Now, let’s look at ways to practice sketching your ideas so that you’re able to move past understanding the concepts and actually applying them to your course.

How to Practice Your Visual Thinking Skills

The first step is to get a handle on the basics:

• Learn to capture concepts using Roam’s visual grammar or Gray’s approach to visualizing ideas.
• Become fluent with your visual alphabet and the basic shapes used as building blocks. This helps you see the basic shapes in the objects you want to create.

• Practice using the basic shapes to create specific objects. The more you practice the better you’ll become at seeing the shapes and sketching something that looks like what it’s supposed to be.

Practice Activities for Visual Thinking Skills

Some people have innate skills and sketching isn’t too hard to start. But many don’t have those skills and feel like they can’t do it. But they can. A key point is to feel comfortable sketching.

Remember, this isn’t about becoming a graphics design professional. You want to get a feel for the flow of drawing with your pen, especially if you’re using a computer or tablet. Then develop some fluency and clarity. And that will take a little practice.

Here are some practice activities.

Activity 1: Create basic shapes over and over again.

Work on getting lines straight and completing the desired shape in less strokes. Can you create the shape in one movement and still have it look like it’s supposed to? For example, I notice that if I create a triangle really fast, then the sides start to bow in. However, if I am more deliberate my lines remain straight. The goal is to get straighter lines at a faster speed. A circle should like a circle and not a blob.

Activity 2: Creating common objects.

Look around your office and identify 10 random objects. Break them down by the basic shapes and then create them a few times. For example, here’s a quick sketch of my desk. It’s mostly rectangles and a few circles.

Another thing is to recognize what makes the shape unique and identifiable. For example, an elephant stands out because of the trunk and large ears. By focusing on the essential shapes you can convey the idea of an elephant without having to create the entire thing.

Activity 3: Convey concepts with your objects.

Start to practice sketching whole ideas. Identify three TED videos and capture the core concepts as sketches. It may be easier to just start with three main ideas from each video. Or if that is too much, just focus on a single point. The good thing about video is that you can pause it and rewind. Here are three to help you get started:

• How to Save the World from Bad Meetings
• What We’re Learning About Online Education
• Simple Power of Handwashing

Activity 4: Improve your penmanship.

Sunni Brown has some good advice in her book Doodle Revolution where she says to trace over letters. Find a font type you like and type out the ABCs and save as an image. Then load the image into your drawing app and practice tracing over the letters. Eventually you’ll develop the muscle memory to create nice legible handwriting for your sketches.

When I was a Finance Specialist in the Army we were taught to use block letters so that our writing was more legible. To this day, I still do a lot of printing with block letters and it helps when I write, especially smaller text.

Examples of Visual Thinking Skills in E-Learning

Here are a three examples of people who do a great job sketching their ideas and are part of our industry. They also offer tips via twitter and their blogs.

• Kevin Thorn of NuggetHead Studioz. I ran into Kevin at a Devlearn conference. He showed me his sketch note of the Neil deGrasse Tyson keynote. Obviously we don’t all have Kevin’s innate drawing skills, but if you look past the drawings it’s mostly print and a few basic shapes.

• Blair Rorani of Ever Learning. At a workshop I did in in Australia, Blair live sketched my presentation which I noted in this post on instructional design challenges.

• John Curran of Designed for Learning. I love John’s sketches. Again, they’re not overly complicated to create,
  but they convey good information and the hand drawn style creates enough contrast to engage people visually.

The key in all of this isn’t to become a pro graphic designer. Instead it’s learning to think visually. E-learning is a mostly visual medium and anything we can do to better communicate our ideas will only serve to make the courses we create better.

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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 want to become an e-learning pro. What do I have to do to get better?”

This is one of the most common questions I’m asked. I’ve addressed it a few times in the blog by sharing some tips, free e-book recommendations, and a ton of tutorials. But it’s still a common question and worth reviewing from a slightly different perspective.

We’ll look at three key steps in the process of becoming an e-learning pro.

Become an E-learning Pro by Learning More

There are many ways to learn what you need to know to become an e-learning pro. Here are a few options:

• Get a formal college degree. There are many good degree programs out there. Here’s a list of instructional design degrees started by someone in the community. There is some debate about whether or not you need an instructional design degree. I think a degree serves you two ways: some organizations won’t hire you without one and a degree program often exposes you to information and conversation you may not approach in the daily grind of course development.
• Complete a certificate program. A lot of schools offer e-learning certification programs. You can see some in the list above. They cost less, take less time, and many of them offer a good blend of concepts with practical application.
• Manage your informal learning. There are many ways to learn without getting a degree. Sites like Lynda.com offer formal structure with the freedom to mix and match what you want to learn. Or you can go the Youtube route and watch the hundreds of free videos and tutorials. On top of that, the e-learning community has all sorts of e-learning tutorials and content to help you get started. The only thing required is curiosity and the discipline to learn.

• Read some good books. There are a bunch of good books that will help you learn more about e-learning and course design. Here’s a link to some books I’ve recommended in the past and some from the community. A couple of new additions which may interest you: Visual Design Solutions and 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People.

Become an E-learning Pro by Applying What You Learn

Taking courses, reading books, and regularly reviewing content is great. And you’ll learn a lot. However, somewhere in the process has to be an active commitment to apply what you’re learning. If not, then eventually all of that good information just fades away.

Here are a few ideas to help you apply what you’re learning:

• Create prototyping sessions. Many of the teams I’ve worked with regularly took time to play around with e-learning design ideas and then build quick proof-of-concept prototypes.  We’d commit one Friday a month where each person had to share one idea that we could apply to a course. Sometimes we worked on novel animations or new ways to navigate. Other times we’d discuss different ways to interact with the content. The point is that we set aside time to try new things. If you don’t do something similar, then you may get stuck building the same course over and over again.

• Participate in the weekly e-learning challenges. The weekly e-learning challenges are one of my favorite parts of the e-learning community. They’re designed to be simple practice activities where you can commit whatever time you want to them. Some people do more and some do less. I like seeing some of the novel ideas and how people approach the same challenge from different perspectives. For you, the challenge is a great way to prototype and practice. And if I managed a team, I’d regularly take up a challenge (maybe quarterly) and make it part of the team’s development. In either case, at least make it a point to see what people are doing; you’ll get all sorts of good ideas.

Become an E-learning Pro by Sharing What You Know

The two steps above are key for building your skills. This next one is all about connecting with others, building your reputation, and demonstrating your expertise.

• Create a blog to share what you know. You don’t need to get into the SEO rat race trying to find all the right keywords, headlines, and all of that. Instead, see the blog as something a bit more personal. See it as a way to document what you know and what you’re learning. Ditch the generic content and focus on the practical application. That’s where people will see your expertise. I love the way some of the people who participate in the weekly challenges do write ups of what they did and why. Often they share free downloads. Here are links to a couple of them (with apologies to all those not mentioned): Jackie Van Nice and Joanna Kurpiewska.
• Show your work. I’m going to let you in on an industry secret. There are a lot of people in our industry who write about e-learning but never show their work. When I ask them about it, they always have some lame excuse about proprietary courses. You’re telling me that in 20 years you’ve not created a single course you can show publicly? It’s a lot easier to be a critic on the sideline than it is to risk criticism for the work done. You can be a step ahead of many of our industry’s experts if you show what you’re doing. Just like the weekly challenges, they don’t need to be big productions. Show what you did and explain why you did it that way. To those just learning, YOU are the expert.

• Present at workshops and conferences. A great way to build your reputation is to present at industry conferences and workshops. If you want to gain some experience, then present at local chapters or special interest groups. In fact, I facilitate community e-learning workshops. Those are great opportunities to present since they’re informal and focused on practical tips and tricks.

Becoming an e-learning pro takes time. It’s a process of learning, applying, and sharing what you know. However, if you follow the steps above you’ll be on your way to success.

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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 are three time-saving tips to consider before building your e-learning course.

Determine the Story Size

Many e-learning courses are 4:3 aspect ratio. The other common aspect ratio is 16:9. However, you’re not confined to either one of those aspect ratios. What if you want something more like a book? Or perhaps square?

Determine the story size and resolution before you start working on the course.

What we often see is that someone opens the e-learning software and starts working on the course using the default settings. And then somewhere in the process wants to change the size and resolution of the course. This can be problematic because when you modify the aspect ratio of the slide, it means the existing content may get skewed or require a bunch of tweaking to get it re-aligned. Thus you want to determine the course’s aspect ratio before adding content to the slides.

Choose a Template Before Building the Course

Another common process is that the course author starts to build content and then later wants to apply a template. However, templates are made up of specific layouts and theme elements. If the content the author builds doesn’t start mapped to a layout and the theme features, applying a new template to it somewhere in the process can cause issues and require a lot of extra work.

The point of a template is to guide the design and speed up production.

Before you start working on the course, curate your content and then pick a template appropriate to the context of your course and the type of content it has. From there, add your content to the template and then make some simple modifications to the theme colors and fonts. Choosing the template first will definitely save time.

Set the Theme Colors and Fonts

Generally, most e-learning courses have two core fonts: headers and body. You really don’t need 8 million fonts in your course, two is usually fine. On top of that, many fonts are part of a font family with different variations so you could get by with one font family. Then just determine which font is used and when.

After choosing your fonts, set one as the header font in your theme and one as the body. This way if you want to apply a different theme you can do that easily. If you don’t use the theme fonts it requires slide-by-slide editing to make changes.

The same thing can be said about theme colors. Determine the colors you want to use in your course and then set those colors in your theme. This way every object you insert will have the same theme colors. And like the fonts, can be swapped instantly.

When you create theme colors, remain consistent in how you use them, You get six accent colors. There’s no rhyme or reason to how they should be used. They’re just six color options. However, I like to use accent 1 as my main color. And I use accent 2 (and sometimes accent 3) as complimentary colors. I don’t use all six colors so I don’t worry about coming up with six colors to fill out the accent color options.

The main point is that regardless of how you use accent colors options, be consistent in how they’re used. This makes it easy to swap the theme colors.

Do those three things above before you invest time building out the content. It will save you a lot of production time. And it forces you to be a bit more intentional in how you are building your courses.

Do you have any other quick production tips before starting the course construction?

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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.

Technically converting a PowerPoint file to an “e-learning course” is fairly easy. You can import the slides into Storyline or just publish them from inside of PowerPoint with Articulate Studio 360.

But is that really a course? Maybe, but probably not because it’s not about just putting content in front of learners.

Here are three things to consider when converting a PowerPoint file into an e-learning course.

Presentation content isn’t the same as an e-learning course. Sure, presenting content in your course is part of the process, but it’s a passive form of learning. The solution is to find a way to make delivery of the content more active.

PowerPoint presentations used in face-to-face training tend to have a PowerPointy look. An e-learning course doesn’t need to look like a PowerPoint slideshow. Use some of the Content Library templates to get away from the presentation look. You can even customize them to fit your organizational brand.

However, there is a look that fits the content and objectives of your course, and that’s where you want to put your energy.

Convert bullet points to interactive content. Instead of showing screen after screen of bullet points, why not convert them to micro interactions? For example, three bullet points could be three interactive tabs.

Those are three real quick tips when converting PowerPoint to an e-learning course. Of course, there’s more to 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.

It’s easy to make a list of things one needs to know and create courses focused on that information. That’s why we have a lot of click and read content.

However, knowing information and understanding the information are two different things.

Most e-learning is designed to present information through a series of screens. Then the course ends with a simple quiz to confirm a rote understanding of the content. However, a good course develops understanding rather than merely present information.

Here are 4 ways to move past information sharing and create courses that present a deeper level of learning and understanding.

Present Clear Learning Objectives

What is the expected outcome of the learning? This seems so obvious, but most courses I see are a little weak on clear objectives. And with fuzzy objectives there’s no clear path for learning and then no way to measure success or prove understanding.

Learn to build meaningful objectives.

Prove Understanding

With clear objectives, the course can establish how to know they’ve been met. What evidence can the learner present that demonstrates how well they understand the content?

Create objectives that are measurable and prove understanding.

Provide Information within a Learning Experience

Build the course to provide content AND create a learning experience. Courses start with content. But learning and understanding is demonstrated not by consuming but by using the content. I like to craft the course around real-life activities. This allows the person to see the content in a real-world context and then demonstrate their understanding by using the content in that context.

How to build real-world interactions.

It’s All About E-Learning Emancipation

Every day I get questions on how to lock course navigation. I get why it’s a question. That’s what the client wants. But it still makes me cringe, because it has little to do with learning and more about controlling the experience.

Free up the course design and let the person navigate the content the way they choose. If you need to lock it, lock it at a point of decision where they need to demonstrate understanding before they advance. Don’t lock it thinking that’s how they’ll learn.

Find ways to move past the locked navigation.

Click and read content exists because we tend to focus on pushing information out. A good learning experience focuses on using the information to craft a desired level of understanding.

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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 a simple tip that I use all the time. In fact, I use it multiple times a day. It’s fast and efficient.

Create a blank text file on your desktop for quick access.

That’s it?

Simple. Right?

Here are three reasons why this is a good tip.

Create a Temporary Holding Area

The text doc isn’t bloated or media rich, so it opens really fast. I have a blank text file on my desktop. I click on it all the time. I jot down some quick ideas, take a note, or use it to temporarily hold some text on my clipboard.

I’ve tried other ideas and apps over the years, but I find the text doc has always remained faithful because of its simplicity and how fast it is to use.

Get Rid of Text Formatting

Often I copy and paste text from one thing to another. It may be a PowerPoint slide, Word document, or web page. Often it’s a PDF, where this tip really make a lot of sense.

Often the text I copy has some sort of formatting. And I don’t want the formatting of the text to make it’s way into other documents. You may have run into issues in the past where you copy and paste text and then the text doesn’t look right or align properly. And it can be a hassle to try and fix it.

Pasting into a text file (and then copying from there) gets rid of those formatting issues.

Quick Access to Code Snippets

There are many times where I need some code while I’m working with my courses. One of the most common is when I use an iframe in Rise. In those cases, I duplicate my iframe code, paste the URL, and the copy and paste into the embed block in Rise.

Or perhaps I need a local web object, so I need to create a simple web page. Easy enough. Open my placeholder text file and create a quick web page that I name index.html and can then insert as a web object. I also have a lot of little HTML code snippets I use for the blog.

In either case, I access the text file, locate my code, and paste it where it needs to go.

I usually keep three text files on my desktop. One is for blog stuff, another for code snippets, and the other is just an empty file I can open quickly for pasting text.

This is a simple tip, but it is one that I use all the time when building e-learning courses.

What simple tips do you have that help in your day-to-day production?

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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.

Emojis are the today’s hieroglyphics. I can imagine thousands of years from now as archaeologists try to reconstruct our culture. They’ll spend years collecting emoji messages and then additional years to decipher them. And after all of that time, they’ll come to learn that we worshiped the goddesses known as Kardashians.

It’s a frightening thought indeed, but one we can counteract in how we use emojis in our training programs.

What Are Emojis? 😕

The first emojis started in Japan. It literally stands for picture character. They’re often used to add emotional context to messages. Although, often they’re combined to communicate more than quick emotional cues. There’s even an emoji version of Moby Dick.

You can learn more about emojis here:

• Emojipedia
• Wikipedia: Emoji

Emojis for E-Learning Require Context to Communicate 💬

The emoji is a tiny graphic that can be used to reinforce a point, add some emotional context, or a visual bookmark. Be careful when using them to communicate ideas because you may not communicate what you really intend.

Emojis are ambiguous and open to all sorts of misunderstanding and the emojis will appear different based on the device.

If you follow any of the heated discussions around emojis you’ll notice that they comfortably sit in a nest of political correctness. This is something to keep in mind when you deal with gender, skin tones, and cultural differences. You don’t want the emoji to distract from your message.

Emoji for E-Learning Examples 💻

Here are a couple of examples of how I used emojis in a recent Rise training session. In the image below, I used the emoji as a visual cue to add some context to the title. It also makes scanning the screen easier because the emojis do add contrast. It’s a simple use where the emojis adds something to the screen but doesn’t conflict with the content and is less open to misinterpretation.

One challenge, though, is that there may not be an emoji that works for the topic at hand. Then you have to get creative. Which goes back to the warning about miscommunication and ensuring that your creative use of the emoji still communicates what you intend.

In the “Health Supplies” title, I couldn’t find a first aid kit emoji so I used the hospital. It’s not perfect but does work.

In the next example below, I used the emojis as bullet points. I like this as it adds a bit more visual interest and shows each point as distinct. But again, the same issue exists when it comes to finding the emojis that work with your content.

There was no emoji for soap or toothbrush. So I went with shower and smiley face with nice teeth (and I assume healthy gums). And there’s not a lot of options for baby wipes thus I selected the baby.

As you can see, given the right content and some thought, emojis can play a role in your e-learning course. I’m curious if you’ve used emojis in any of your courses. If so, how? And also, how was it received? Feel free to share 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.

Here’s a list of all of the free resources shared in this blog and a few bonuses. I hope you enjoy them and can use them in the upcoming year.

Free Bonus

Here are a few bonus items not included in previous posts:

• Free e-book: The Definitive Guide to Multi-Device E-Learning
• Free image editor: Pixlr
• Free Style Guide template: this offers double bonus content. Not only does Trina share a free template, but within the template she links to great resources on elearning style guides.

Free Applications

• Two Free Multimedia Applications to Help Build Courses
• Here are Three Free Apps that May Come in Handy
• How to Share E-Learning Courses Using Amazon S3
• Find Color Schemes for Your E-Learning Courses
• How to Create Animated .GIFs for Free

Free Multimedia

• Free Audio Sound Effects for E-Learning
• Free Audio Files for E-Learning
• A Dozen Free Stock Video Sites for E-Learning
• Microsoft Brings Back Free Clip Art…Sort Of
• How to Find Multimedia for E-Learning
• Free E-Learning Scenario Images
• Hundreds of Free Resources to Build Your E-learning Courses

Free E-Books

• E-Learning for Beginners
• The Insider’s Guide to Becoming a Rapid E-Learning Pro
• 5 Highly Effective Strategies for Creating Engaging E-Learning
• 9 Steps to Better E-Learning Project Management
• The Essential Guide to Working with Subject Matter Experts
• Building Compelling Interactions: What You Need to Know
• The Secret to Creating Great E-Learning Videos
• Essential Guide to Visual Design
• How to Use Typography to Improve Your E-Learning
• 6 Best Practices for Designing Accessible E-Learning
• Getting Started with Articulate Storyline
• Getting Started with Articulate Studio

Free Templates

• Free Flip Card Interaction
• Here’s a Free Avatar Template & Tutorial
• Free E-Learning Template: Timeline & Process Interaction
• Here’s a Free Quiz Template for E-Learning
• Here Are 17 Places to Get Free Templates for E-Learning
• How to Use Free Templates for Software Training

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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 created a couple of simple quiz templates to use in a workshop and thought I’d share them here as well. One is created in Storyline and the other in PowerPoint. I also added a tutorial video for those who want to learn more about using the template for a simple quiz in Storyline.

Free Quiz Template: Storyline

You can download the free template here. It contains two slides. The first slide is a graphic slide that you can customize to meet your needs. And then once you’re done, do a Convert to Freeform and turn it into a quick quiz questions.

In the video I show some ideas on how to customize it and apply a color scheme, as well as how to work with the feedback master.

• Free quiz template download: Storyline.
• I share some tips in this tutorial video.

Free Quiz Template: PowerPoint

The free quiz template in PowerPoint is pretty simple. If you want to edit the interactive part you need to do so at the slide master level. This is a good example of leveraging the slide master to make your interactive slides easier to manage and edit.

• Free quiz template download: PowerPoint.
• Learn more about interactive PowerPoint.

Hope you enjoy the templates. They’re great to practice using the software features. Feel free to use them as you wish.

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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 explored some inexpensive microphones for recording audio narration. However, sometimes having a microphone is not enough. There are other accessories that help put the microphone in the correct position and offer other assistance for recording the best quality audio.

In this post we’ll look at a few accessories to help get better audio quality when recording narration.

Use a Microphone Stand when Recording Audio Narration

It’s a good idea to invest in a microphone stand. It helps control placement of the audio. There are a few inexpensive options for microphone stands.

• Some people use simple desktop stands. They’re OK but I find they often get in the way and chances are greater of accidentally bumping the stand and messing up your audio narration. This is especially important because most people just record audio and aren’t monitoring it at the same time. Thus you don’t realize that the audio has the bumping sound until you preview it.

• Depending on your room set up, a viable option is a stand up mic stand. This allows you to record standing or sitting down with lots of flexibility with how and where you position the microphone. I prefer the ones with the boom arm so that I can move it in position. With a desktop stand like above, people tend to lean down into the mic which may mean they move around more or don’t breathe properly while talking. People tend to talk better standing up and this stand lets you do so.

• One of my favorite options is the desk-mounted boom broadcast arms. I have a standup desk and an O.C. White boom attached to it. I love it because I can quickly swing the mic into place when I need to record narration. It also looks cool when people come over and see my office. Of course all the coolness is lost when they actually hear my voice, but that’s a different issue. What’s nice is that you can buy these types of mic stands for under $20 or even make your own out of lamp stands.

One thing to keep in mind, you get what you pay for. The less expensive products are great if you’re not moving them around too much. But moving a lot, means they’re more apt to get banged up and break.

Use Audio Dampening to Get Better Quality Audio Narration

Sound waves tend to bounce around a lot. I work from a home office and the hardwood floors in the hallway act as a funnel, moving all the sound to my office. I dampen the sounds by putting a piece of carpet in front of the door and I hang a thick blanket over a rolling clothes rack I purchased from Ikea. It doesn’t look great, but it works well.

You can look more polished with just a few accessories using different types of filters that sit between your microphone and the incoming audio wave. Sometimes all you need is a simple foam ball that sits on top of the microphone. Or a pop filter which helps catch your breath sounds.

Then there are all sorts of acoustic shields that clip onto the microphone or attach to the mic stand. I like this one that expands to create a larger barrier but folds into a nice portable package.

Some people I know use the portable sound boxes that are filled with foam. You can buy them at a decent price or make your own using some acoustic foam and a cardboard box. If you work in a cubicle, it already has some sound dampening. You could also put together a makeshift studio by assembling a few cubicle walls. A lot of companies have extras laying around or you can buy some at an old office supply store. The panels are top quality and do a great job.

If you really want to get fancy you can buy a preamp to better control the audio going into your computer. I don’t use one, but David does and his audio quality is always nice and rich. It may seem extravagant to get a preamp, but consider this: your microphone takes in sound waves and outputs a signal. When you use a less expensive microphone you tend to get a lower signal (or low sensitivity). A preamp will boost the signal for better audio. This is important because you’ll never get better quality than what you record.

What I find amazing is how inexpensive and available these accessories are compared to a few years ago. All of the items are less than $100 and most are in the $20 range.

Which accessories do use? What tips do you have using them? Feel free to share in the comments section.

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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.

“How do I lock navigation?” is one of the first questions we get when showing people how to use our software. In fact it’s one of the questions we had to revisit in a recent Articulate Live webinar where people wanted to see the features used to lock navigation.

I understand the question and why it’s asked, but from an instructional perspective it’s one of the most frustrating questions to answer because locking navigation may inhibit learning and it’s a miserable experience for the person stuck in a boring course irrelevant to their needs.

Why Are We Asked to Lock Navigation?

There are a number of reasons why courses are locked. Most of the time the customer wants some assurance that the course taker isn’t just clicking the next button and skipping important information. Locking the navigation and forcing people to go through the course slide by slide is one way to guarantee that they’ve seen the slide.

But does being exposed to the content meet any real objectives? Doesn’t the content exist to promote some sort of decision-making or performance?

How to Move Past Locked Navigation

There are a number of ways to move past locking your course navigation. Here are a few ideas:

• See the course in two parts. Part one = information required to make decisions. Part two = the types of decisions they need to make to show they know the information. Focus on how the course takers can demonstrate their understanding.
• Step away from the solution. The elearning course is a solution to meet specific objectives. My guess is that the business objective isn’t to look at screens of information. Why does the course exist? Build it to meet those objectives and rest assured that locked navigation doesn’t meet them. Activities where they practice and demonstrate understanding is a better way to meet objectives.
• Avoid linear courses. Most courses are linear, “A to Z” courses. They beg to be locked. If you open them up and make them more exploratory, this makes locking them less critical.
• Create relevant content & context. People don’t normally make a habit of reading policies at work. But they routinely make decisions that hopefully align with the policies. Convert your content into real world activities where they use the information to make decisions. This requires them to know the information and prove it.
• Lock the course at decision points. You probably can’t get past some form of locking. In that case, create decision points where the course taker demonstrates understanding of the content to move on. This allows you to give them freedom to explore content between the decision points.
• Replace locking with rewards. Instead of forcing them through content, provide an incentive to collect information (or make good decisions with the information). This can be in the form of a dashboard where they collect badges to reward completion.
• Chunk the course into smaller segments. Even with all of these tips, there’s a good chance you still have to create locked navigation. In those cases, chunk the course content into smaller segments. I like to call them coursels (course morsels). No one likes locked navigation, but it’s definitely a lot less frustrating when it’s a quicker experience.

What tips do you have for those who are stuck in the world of locked navigation?

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.