Here’s a recap of posts from 2013 where I shared free templates or assets to help you build your online training courses.

Do You Need an Instructional Design Degree?

This is probably one of the hottest questions of the past year. It comes up quite a bit and creates a lot of good conversation—both pro and con. If you haven’t weighed in with your opinion, it’s not too late.

• Do You Really Need An Instructional Design Degree?

PowerPoint Tips & Tricks

Many elearning courses are dependent on PowerPoint. The more you know about it, the better you’ll be at designing good courses. The tips below help you learn more about using the features so that you become more fluent with PowerPoint.

• 7 Reasons Why PowerPoint Doesn’t Suck

• Here’s How to Find Free Stock Photos & Clip Art for PowerPoint

• Here’s How to Create Your Own E-Learning Template in PowerPoint

• How to Use PowerPoint to Create Custom Stock Images

• 3 PowerPoint Shortcuts I Always Have at My Finger Tips

• How to Build Your Own Graphics for Online Training Courses

• A Simple Way to Create Custom Callouts for Your Courses

• How to Create Your Own Illustrated Graphics in PowerPoint

Free Templates for E-Learning

Templates are a great way to get started or transition existing content for online training. Here are a few to speed things up for your next course.

• Here Are Some Free E-Learning Templates to Speed Up Your Course Design [PowerPoint & Articulate Storyline]

• Another Free PowerPoint E-Learning Template [PowerPoint]

• Celebrate Summer with This Free PowerPoint E-Learning Template [PowerPoint & Articulate Storyline]

• Here are 3 Free PowerPoint Templates for Online Training Courses [PowerPoint]

• Create a New Look for Your Online Training Courses with this Simple Tip  [PowerPoint & Articulate Storyline]

• More Than a Dozen Bonus Tips & Tricks to Produce Better E-Learning [PowerPoint & Articulate Storyline]

• Speed Up Your Interactive E-Learning with These Free PowerPoint Templates [PowerPoint]

• Answers to Your Rapid E-Learning Questions & Free Templates [PowerPoint & Articulate Storyline]

• Close Out the Year with These Free E-Learning Templates: This post contains templates created in PowerPoint, custom quiz results, quiz question template, and an interactive tabbed folder. [PowerPoint & Articulate Storyline]

Free Graphics & Media Assets for E-Learning Design

• Free Assets from the E-Learning Community: This post contains a number of templates from community members. [PowerPoint & Articulate Storyline]
• 3 Free Tools That Save Time & Money Plus Get a Cool Job
• Find Inspiration with These E-Learning Design Tips & Free Templates
• Hundreds of Free Textures for Your E-Learning Courses & Here Are Hundreds of Free Textures: Textures galore with tips on how to use them.
• Become a Font Pro with This Time-Saving Tip
• Free Backgrounds to Use with Your Online Training Program
• More than 100 Free Callouts for Your Online Course Design

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.

I received quite a few emails last week about the iPad-inspired template in the post on how to get rid of bullet points. Here’s a link to one I did in for a previous post. I updated the template to give it a different look.

Free E-Learning Template

I opted for a flat design with larger boxes to replace the bullet points. They’ll work better on a touch device. For the demo I used the icons made available by the designers at Icons8.

See the template in action.

• Download the free PowerPoint template.

In addition to the free template above, the community team shared a number of free resources this past week.

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.

I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, but bullet points get a lot of bad press. Apparently they contribute to bad courses. Although, I’m not sure they do. I tend to think that poor instructional design leads to bad courses.

There’s a place where bullet points make sense. They help break up information and make it easier to digest. However, we do have a tendency to over inform and thus the complaints about bullet points.

Here are a few tips on how to disguise bullet points. So that you get the value of the bullet point without all of the belly aching.

Convert each bullet point to an individual slide.

Does it matter if you have five bullet points on one screen or five screens with one point each? By breaking the points into separate screens you can focus on a single idea rather than multiple ideas on one screen. This eases cognitive load and can help the learner recall more.

Convert bullet point into labeled graphics.

Find an image appropriate to your content and then instead of bullet points, use labels to present the information. Find a descriptive single word title for the label and then add the bullet point information inside the label when active.

In this example I used the labeled graphic interaction in Engage. Because it’s a form-based authoring tool it’s easy to build yet offers a much more dynamic media experience.

Click here to view the labeled graphic.

In fact, you really could convert each bullet point to almost any of the interactions. Here’s an idea that’s a bit novel. Instead of using bullet points use characters and the conversation interaction. 

Click here to view the conversation interaction.

Keep in mind that it’s best to keep these ideas in context to the course objectives. The wrong information doesn’t become better because it’s interactive or novel.

Convert bullet points to interactive video labels.

This is one of my favorite techniques and works great for procedures or content appropriate to videos. Here’s an example from a previous post on how to create interactive videos.

Click here to view the demo.

What I like about this approach is the learner can watch the video, but if at certain points needs more information, she can click on one of the labels (which essentially is the bullet point content). This could even be used to enhance those standard talking head videos where the label bullets augment the lecture.

Convert bullet points to icons or thumbnail images.

Replace the bullet point text with an icon or image that represents the bullet point content. This type of visual connection to content is what makes sites like Pinterest popular. How interesting would the same pages be if they were just lists of links?

Below are a couple of ways to enhance the conversion of bullet points to graphics. Place the graphics in a context that is more aesthetically engaging.

Interactive bookshelf. Each shelf could represent the slide; and each book icon a bullet point. If you like the bookshelf idea, you can download the free template from the links below.

Click here to view the interactive bookshelf.

• Download the free PowerPoint template
• Download the free Storyline template

Mimic a mobile tablet interface. This is similar to the bookshelf idea, except the bottom shelf could represent each slide. And the icons are the bullet points. Click an icon and open an area to add more content.

Click here to view the mobile interface demo.

Bullet points aren’t necessarily bad but because there is a lot of negativity around them, it’s a good idea to find other ways to share the same information. How else can you convert the bullet points?

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.

Do a search and you’ll find all sorts of free textures to use with your online training courses. In a recent post I also shared how to get hundreds of free textures. The trick is learning to use those free resources so they make sense. And that’s what we’ll look at today—how to use the free textures to build better courses.

Use the Free Texture as a Background

The slide background is the single largest graphic in your course. The background image can turn what is a bland screen into something that is visually rich and interesting. It also adds some context and allows you to create a visual connection to the elearning course content. This is something I covered in the blog post on doing a background check your next elearning course.

Sometimes you can find one image that is perfect. If so, that will save a lot of time in your production. In the case of a single texture, there may be one that works for your course context. For example, a few months back I built a demo for the blog post on different ways to state course objectives. In that one, I used a concrete texture for the background because it fit well with the earthquake theme especially since the concrete was cracked.

Click here to view the demo.

Play around with the textures to get unique looks. For example, an easy solution is to add a blur effect to the texture which detracts from the background and allows you to draw the person’s focus to specific objects on the screen. Thus when you add content on top of the texture, you get an image that is visually rich but not distracting.

Fill Shapes with Free Textures

Another way to get more value out of the free textures is to fill shapes with them. Usually when adding shapes to the screens we tend to stick with the defaults which are fill colors or gradients. What happens is that all of our courses have the same look.

Why not fill the shapes with textures rather than colors? That really opens the doors to all sorts of options. For example, you can scale the texture or tile it. When you compress the shape, the texture compress as well and that can create a distinct look.

Working from the same idea, I’ll use a color picker to pick a color from the texture and use that as a background. Then I’ll add buttons to screen and fill the buttons with the texture, or vice versa.

Here’s a simple example from a previous blog post, where elearning super hero Stephanie Harnett took a simple notebook template that I shared in a blog post and added textures to give it a richer look. As you can see, filling the shapes with textures transforms the default look into something that looks more custom and polished.

Click here to view the tutorial.

Customize Clip Art with the Free Textures

Another way to use the free textures is by customizing clip art. I’ve shared plenty of tips in the past on how to ungroup clip art and make custom modifications. One option is to either fill the clip art shape with a texture or use the layering effect I shared above.

In the image below you can see a simple example of a modified clip art image. In that image I softened the walls with a texture. The desk is made of layered wood. I added a linen layer to his suit and the chair padding is filled with a cloth texture.

If you’re stuck working with clip art, these types of modifications can help turn them into something unique.

Layer Textures Over Shapes

Sometimes the textures are too bold or strong. Or they may not fit with the colors of your shapes. In those cases you can layer the texture over an existing shape.

Here’s how:

• Create the shape and fill it with a color.
• Duplicate the shape and fill it with the texture.
• Place the textured shape over the colored shape. Then change the transparency of the textured shape to let the colored shape peek through.
• Group the shapes so they’re a single object. Or save the grouped shape as an image.

This technique is a great way to create custom images and soften up the texture.

There are plenty of free textures to find online. The key is figuring out how to use them when building your online training programs. Hopefully these tips will help you get more value out of the free textures you find. Do you have any tips to add?

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.

Whenever I do a workshop some extra things come to mind which has me throw in a number of “bonus tips.” At a recent workshop someone told me that I have so many bonus tips that I should do a workshop on my bonus tips.

So today I am sharing a few “bonus” tips based on recent questions and interactions with the blog readers.

“Hey, how’d you search that site so fast?”

Well, there’s this company, Google, you may not have heard of them but they do a great job with search. Most of us tend to open a Google page and do a general search.

But there are more efficient ways to search. For example, it’s easy to limit a search to a specific domain. All you have to do is type in your search term and include site: with the domain you want to search.

Let’s say you wanted to search for some microphone recommendations in the Articulate community. It would look like this: recommend microphones site:community.articulate.com

Of course, I don’t really search that way since I discovered the Search the Current Site extension for Chrome. Here’s the link for Firefox.

This is a tool I use every day because it lets me search sites without typing in the extra info. As you can see in the image below, I can search just through my blog or the entire Articulate.com domain.

Bonus tip: If you’re looking for microphone recommendations, I’ve had good success with the Samson mics. I use a C03U in my home office and Go Mic when I travel. I also like the Snowball from Blue Microphones. All are good choices for simple recording and they’re relatively inexpensive.

In a recent post I shared some ideas on how to do a course makeover on older courses. In that post I shared a free elearning template based on the interactive notebook tabs. I also shared a makeover of the overhead desktop. But that was only an image and not a template.

A lot of people asked about the image and requested a template version of the flat desktop so here it is, just for you. Below is a quick published version if you want to see it in action.

Click here to see the desktop template in action.

• Download the free PowerPoint template.
• Download the free Storyline template.

“If I can only read one book to learn more about building better courses, what would it be?”

There are a lot of really good elearning books out there. We started a list of books in the community where you can find more titles.

From my experience, many of the people doing this stuff are relatively new and don’t have very deep technical skills. So in that sense, learning to use the software better is always going to help.

However, if I was forced to pick a single book, it would be Design for How People Learn. I recommend this one all the time. It’s an easy read and Julie Dirksen does a great job helping people think through the learning process. If you’re just getting started and need to think like an instructional designer, this book will help you learn about learning.

Bonus tip: With the release of Articulate Replay, I’m anticipating that I’ll do more tutorials with my webcam. Not only is this good motivation to lose weight (and shave and move beyond old t-shirts and sweats) it has me thinking about how to set up my home office for video.

David shared this set up which includes a simple light kit, backdrop stand, and material for green screen. I recall my first low-end light kit a few years ago was close to $1000. Mike also shared a great way to get better webcam lighting for $15. Wistia also has some great tips on a DIY video studio. Is that a bonus, bonus tip?

The product links to Amazon may produce a slight commission.

I was showing someone my Springpad notebooks and someone asked why the web site I was using didn’t look like a browser window.

The community team at Articulate uses a lot of browser-based applications like Trello and Yammer. Instead of having to access them via the browser I set them up so they work like single applications.

Look at the image above. Notice that the browser features are gone? And since it’s treated like an application I can add it to my tool bar for quick access.

I use Chrome. If you do, too, this is how to create the application from the website. Go to Tools and select Create Shortcut Application. Then decide where you want to put it. As I said earlier, I like the quick access to the applications without all of the clutter I normally have in my browser.

Bonus tip: Trello is a cool application for simple project management. My team uses it daily. If you’re looking for a solution, give it a try. Mike even featured Trello in his quick Replay demo so you get a peek at how it looks.

So there you go, a smorgasbord of bonus tips & tricks to help in your course design. Do you have any bonus tips to share?

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.

Graphic styles change. What was hot one day, starts to look old the next. One way to make your courses look fresh is by adapting to the changing styles. The past few years we’ve seen a shift from bevels to glossy gel to reflections. Now the hot design look is flat UI (user interface).

Just the other day someone asked me for feedback on a course they wanted to makeover. I recommended that they try and convert it to a flat design. It wouldn’t take much time to do so, and in a short time you’ve got a whole new look.

What is Flat Design?

Do a search and you’ll find all sorts of resources online concerning flat UI design, but here’s my basic overview:

• Simplicity. The goal is to have a simple design that is clean. For example, instead of creating an overhead desktop that looks real, create one that has the essence of the desktop with less distracting detail.

• Consistency. What generally works with flat design is to stick with similar line styles. Choose straight or round. But don’t mix them. Or when you do, use it for effect. For example, use a circle on a screen with all straight lines to create contrast. And that contrast is a great way to draw the learner’s attention to a specific place on the screen. Also, if you go with rounded corners, make sure the rounded elements are the same.
• Limited depth. The one thing you see with a lot of flat design is that there are rarely any drop shadows. And when they do exist, they’re simple. Depth is created by stacking objects or with solid color drop shadows.

• Simple colors. Select a solid color scheme. If you do a search for flat design color schemes you’ll notice that they tend to be bold but a bit muted. Here’s a good starting point to find some colors. An easy way to get a muted look is to add a semi-transparent white shape over the colored shape.

• Lots of white space. White space is great for learning design. It forces us as designers to get rid of content. Since we have less space, we need to make sure that the information we put into it is clear and contributes the message we want to convey.

Free E-Learning Template: Interactive Tabbed Notebook

To put my own thoughts into practice I did a makeover of an existing PowerPoint template that’s available as a free download in the elearning community. The original tabbed notebook was part of a workshop I did on creating interactive elements for rapid elearning design.

Click here to view the elearning example.

As you can see, the original design is simple and a bit dated. Below is the new design with an updated flat UI look.

Click here to view the elearning example.

How to Create the Flat UI Template

Here are some of the decisions I made converting the old template into an updated flat UI design.

• Created a minimalist version of the notebook. I wanted the essence of a tabbed notebook with as little detail as possible. I decided to include a cover, tabs, and a simple spiral.
• I played around with different ideas for the spiral. For the PowerPoint version I stuck with straight lines. I remade the template for Storyline and used the rounded shapes instead. Which spiral type do you like best?

Click here to view the interactive Storyline version of the template.

• To create depth without detail I added a corner on the page to imply a bend and I added a solid line under the main page to lift it a bit from the tabs.
• All of the colors are built using the design schemes so you can easily swap out colors or add your own design colors.

• I stuck with a simple font pair, using Rockwell Condensed for the titles and Trebuchet MS for the body.

Download the Free Template

You can download the free templates below. I created one in PowerPoint to use with Articulate Studio and another to use with Storyline. You’re free to use them as you wish.

• Download the free PowerPoint template.
• Download the free Storyline template.

If you do a flat UI makeover of an older course, I’d love to see the results. In fact, David had a recent challenge asking for a flat UI design. You can show off your work in that forum thread.

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.

At a recent workshop I was showing some tips on creating elearning templates. I decided to finish up the template I started in that session and make it available for you to use as you wish. There’s a version created in PowerPoint and published with Articulate Studio ‘13 and a version created for Articulate Storyline.

General Structure of the Free E-Learning Template

There are three main sections: objectives, modules, and resources. There are five modules so I created a unique layout for each module giving you five layouts from which to start. From there you can make all sorts of iterations.

Free Fonts

For this template I used a couple of free fonts from Google. You can learn more about Google Web Fonts here.

• Francois One
• Forum

You can use your own fonts but you’ll need to make some adjustments to their alignment since the fonts will be a bit different.

Free PowerPoint Template

Here’s a published version of the free template created in PowerPoint. While it’s published in Studio’13 it will work fine in older versions, too.

Click here to view the elearning demo.

Free Storyline Template

Click here to view the elearning demo.

Free Downloads

Here are the free elearning templates and a bonus download:

• Download the free PowerPoint template here.
• Download the free Storyline template here.
• In a recent I shared some free callouts. Here is another set of free callouts courtesy of one of the community members, DeLora Reardon.

Bonus Tips

Here are a few bonus tips regarding the free elearning templates:

• The pictures in the layouts are filled shapes. To adjust them you’ll need to modify the fill settings.
• The objective slide shape is filled with a pattern.
• The resource icons are from clip art style 1307.
• Many of the slide objects are on the master slide, so if you want to edit them, go there.

This week is Thanksgiving for those in the U.S. It’s often a time where we reflect on those things for which we’re thankful.

I am thankful for the blog readers, community members, and all of the great people I get to meet at the workshops each year. I am always inspired by the creativity and willingness to share by so many.

Hope you all have a great week.

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.

Recently I was looking for some free textures. While it’s easy to find “free” textures it’s not easy to find free textures that are really free.

A lot of sites that give things away for free often have stipulations that they’re only free for personal use. Yeah, right! Like I need those free stock images for the elearning courses I’m building at home.

Today I am sharing some sites where you can find free textures (and other assets) that can be used for commercial work. Since the licensing terms may change, be sure to read them before using for commercial projects. However, at the time this post was published all of the sites allow free commercial use.

Lost & Taken: lots of cool textures. I really like the quality of what they share.

Texture King: not a massive selection, but they’re high quality.

Design Instruct: another great collection of free textures. Also has some good articles on design.

Media Militia: all sorts of cool free assets to go with the free textures.

Deviant Art is also a good resource. They have a lot of members who give away free assets. But you’ll have to look over their agreements individually.

If you search, you’ll find all sorts of other sites to find free textures. What I found though is that most of them pull from the four sites above. So why not go to the source? The sites above are vetted and should be good to go for your next elearning course.

If you’re a user of free textures (or other free online assets) be sure to give props to the person who provided the resources. Share the love via a blog post. Or perhaps you can tweet the link or make a comment on Facebook.

How do you find free textures that are free for commercial use? Share your comments here.

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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 read a blog post recently on website usability. The author mentioned five usability issues from navigation to engaging the site’s visitors. While the post specifically deals with website design there is a lot in there that’s relevant to the design of elearning courses, too.

After reading the post I reflected on a few issues I see quite a bit.

Are you intentional in how the course is designed?

One issue is what I call the bouncy button where the button to navigate changes location. Often this happens because of the way content is laid out on the screen. Each screen is a bit different, so the developer moves the button to accommodate the screen’s content. This makes it confusing when trying to interact with the screen.

The fix is to be consistent in how the course is designed and how the user is to interact with the content. For basic courses, the authoring tools already provide consistent navigation. But when creating custom navigation, make sure to be consistent so that navigating the screen is as intuitive as possible.

Is your software creating usability issues?

One common problem with rapid elearning courses is that they’re built with multiple tools. When they’re added together they look cobbled together. It’s what I call the Frankencourse.

As you can see in the image below, by inserting outside content, the navigation starts to get a bit confusing. You’ll also notice duplicate volume controls, two sets of navigation, and two menu lists.

If you’re an Articulate customer you’ll be glad to know that this isn’t an issue now that Studio ‘13 has a unified player. Compare the image below with the image above and you can clearly see the difference between the older cobbled look and the new unified player.

Are you providing clear instructions?

In an ideal world the user experience is intuitive. If you have to explain how to navigate the course, then there’s probably more that can be done to make the course more user friendly.

However, that’s not always the case. As noted above, sometimes the software creates a few issues. Other times, there may be an interaction or something else you want to add to the course where the navigation is different than the default. In those cases you need to add additional instructions.

I like to use gate screens because they pause the course and allow me to redirect the person’s attention. You can learn more about gate screens in this post and find some free ones to download here.

Are you getting feedback from your users?

It’s important to pilot test your course design to make sure that there are no blind spots. As I mentioned earlier, most of the software already provides a user-friendly player. That covers the basic navigation. However there may be other ways the person is supposed to interact with the course such as during a decision-making scenario.

In those cases it’s good to get some feedback from those who take the courses. You don’t need a big pilot group. Just find a few people who don’t normally take elearning courses and watch how they interact with the screen.

Usually I find that my instructions aren’t clear and the user’s not quite sure what’s expected. It’s also good to do this before you spend too much time designing the course. Use an iterative approach where you can quickly test ideas and make adjustments before you spend a lot of time and resources.

Those are a few of the issues I’ve run into. What usability issues have you identified in your course design? Share your thoughts here.

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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 was leading a PowerPoint workshop last week and noticed that Microsoft recently changed the way images are searched on their site. That impacted part of my workshop and some of my blog posts where I show how to find free clip art images online.

I’m sure you’ll run into similar issues if you haven’t already. For those who depend on the Microsoft site for free stock photos and illustrations, the recent change makes it challenging to find the right images.

Bookmark This Link to Get Free Stock Photos & Illustrations

Following is a direct link to the site that allows you to search and find the free clip art and stock photos you need. Bookmark it because unless they change their site back, there’s no easy way to locate the same images which I show below.

Bookmark this link.

The link will take you to a search results page that will state “Sorry, no results found for…” That’s OK. This is just a blank search results page. From here you can access the image search by typing in the image you need.

In fairness to Microsoft, they do a make a lot of free stock photos and illustrations available to those who use their tools. And many of those can be found from inside the Microsoft Office applications. But the online search from their site is lacking and their solution with Bing doesn’t work to find only the free stock photos that are part of the office suite.

How to Find Free Stock Photos & Illustrations

If you search for clip art and pictures using the feature inside of PowerPoint (or the other Office applications) you’ll get a good list of images. But there are a few issues compared to the online search. Let me explain.

Fewer search results. The first issue is that it’s not an exhaustive list. You don’t get as many search results in the clip art box in PowerPoint as you do searching the same thing online. Make sure to bookmark this link to search online for free stock photos and illustrations.

Can’t search image properties. Online you can view the properties of the free clip art and free stock images. From there the search can be fine-tuned based on the keywords because they’re linked. You can’t do the same when viewing the keywords from inside of PowerPoint.

No way to find free images of the same style. A lot of clip art is related to a specific style. One of my favorite tips is to use the free clip art of the same style. This helps build a visually cohesive course. Online you can find images of the same style. That doesn’t work offline inside of PowerPoint because there’s no indication that the clip art or free stock photos are linked to a specific style.

No connection to similar images. A feature I really enjoy on the Microsoft site is searching similar images based on “visual style and shared key words.” This really comes in handy.

Many of the free stock photos or illustrations that Microsoft makes available aren’t catalogued by a specific style. However, when using the “see similar images” feature there are a lot of options from which to choose.

Do you use the free clip art and free stock images from Microsoft? If so, save this post and bookmark the link. Be sure to share it with your co-workers or anyone else you know who may be frustrated with the recent changes to the site. It’ll save them some time looking for free stock photos and illustrations.

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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.

A lot of teaching and elearning focuses on sharing information and pushing it out. Sure, that’s part of what’s required. But learning is more than acquisition of information. Learning involves processing the information and applying it. Then seeing what happens and making adjustments.

So when building your online courses, consider how the learner can apply what’s being shared. But let’s shift the focus to our own development. What do we do to develop our own skills? How do we learn new things?

Today I’d like to offer a simple way to help you improve your skills.

A Simple Way to Develop Your Skills

For the past few weeks, David’s been running small challenge activities to help people practice their skills. We try to keep the challenges simple and short enough so that they’re something you can do without a big time commitment.

The objective of the challenge isn’t to build the fanciest demo or module. Although, it is a great way to show off your skills. Instead the goal is to learn new techniques and practice using the tools. It’s also a way to inspire ideas and help others think through their own projects.

Here are a couple of things I learned from the recent challenges:

• Diverse ideas expand our horizons. Three different people will come up with three different ideas even if they’re looking at the same thing. It’s a reminder that there’s not only one way to do things. It also shows the benefit of getting different perspectives. That’s why the elearning community is such a value especially if you work by yourself and don’t get a lot of feedback.
• Production tips abound. I can’t list them all, but many of the demos had me open up Storyline to see if I could replicate the effect. I was an engaged learner as practiced some new techniques and played around with my own ideas. This interactive squares demo is one example that got me thinking.

Below are a few examples from a couple of recent challenges. One was on how to create some comparisons between images. And the other was on creating a tabs interaction.

E-Learning Challenge: Show Meaningful Comparisons

The objective of this challenge was to compare one object to another. David used this airplane graphic from Wikipedia as the starting asset. Here are some of the submissions from the community:

Click here to view the elearning example.

• Montse Posner Anderson showed a nice clean design which makes it easy to distinguish the differences when doing the comparison. The top and side views are on a single screen.

Click here to view the elearning example.

• Blair Parkin’s example lets me isolate the planes and then I can compare one to another or multiples. And at any point I can clear the screen to start over.

Click here to view the elearning example.

• Tricia Ransom has a slightly different take. In her example, you drag and drop the planes to compare them. People like dragging interactions so the novelty can pull them into the module better than the standard click.

What I love about these demos is that each is a bit different. It shows that there’s not a single approach for most problems. Can you imagine the results if they teamed together and had more time?

E-Learning Challenge: Create a Tabs Interaction

In a recent post I shared a number of free PowerPoint elearning templates to download. They were different types of tabs interactions which are common to many online training courses.

David used that post as inspiration to practice building your own tabs interaction. Below are some of the demos. You can click here for more details on the weekly elearning challenge.

Click here to view the elearning example.

• Heather Steckley offers up a right-side tabs interaction built for a new hire road map.

Click here to view the elearning example.

• Tricia Ransom went for a less orthodox tabs interaction. In her example, the tabs are on a file cabinet and the drawers open when clicked.

Click here to view the elearning example.

• Przemysław Hubisz offers up a quadrant tabs interac
  tion. I love this design.

Click here to view the elearning example.

• Kevin Thorn cleaned out one of his recent client projects and then made his tabs interaction available as a download, too.

Click here to view the elearning example.

• Montse Posner Anderson opted to decapitate the office team and put their heads on the tabs. Salome and Henry would be proud. This is a good reminder that tabs don’t always need to be text-based.

Click here to view the elearning example.

• Heather Steckley shows another variation of the side-tabs interaction. Her demo has to examples. I love the faux scrollbar look. Very clever.

Click here to view the elearning example.

• Andrej Rudnik uses circles as tabs (we can be a bit loose on these demos). I like the transparent circles with the sliding pages. Pretty cool design.

Click here to view the elearning example.

• Jenise Cook leveraged some of the free downloads in the community to create her overhead desktop tabbed notebook. She also shares her template for you to use.

I love seeing what other people create and how they do it. I also find that when I review these demos they prompt my own ideas on how I’d approach the same thing. Sometimes it’s easier to learn when deconstructing someone else’s work than it is to start your own.

Like any profession, building expertise requires practice. These weekly challenges are a great way to connect with the elearning community and a great way to practice building your skills.

Are you ready to take up the challenge?

If you want to learn to build better courses, connect with the elearning community, or practice using your authoring tools, then take up the challenge. It’s not too late.

These challenges are fun and simple enough to do. And you don’t need to worry about things being perfect. They’re just quick hit prototypes.

This week’s challenge is creating an elearning template based on a single clip art style.

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.

Many elearning developers are challenged because they work with a lack of resources, formal education, and experience. In a recent post I asked whether or not one needed an instructional design degree. That prompted some really good discussion.

While pursuing a formal education is great, it does take time and money. So what can you do to build skills today? Here are a few tips to nudge you forward.

Let Others Inspire Your E-Learning Skills

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, then you know that I routinely stress the need to find inspiration from others. This helps you glean design ideas and production tips. Once you have them it’s a matter of practicing and applying them to your own projects.

We recently released Articulate Studio’13. One of the things I like when we do a product launch is that some people from the community share quick examples using the tools. The examples are a great source of inspiration for those just getting started.

Below are three of the examples. They’re not full-fledged courses but they give you some ideas of what you can do with the rapid elearning tools you use.

E-Learning Example: Space Training Mission

Click here to view the elearning example.

E-Learning Example: Kids Sun Safety Game

Click here to view the elearning example.

E-Learning Example: Journey as a Sea Turtle

Click here to view the elearning example.

Coming from the perspective of inspiration, here are some tips I pulled from their demos:

• Avoid the Frankencourse. Rapid authoring tools are powerful because they remove a lot of the programming requirements. But because they often use media created from multiple applications the courses tend to get that disjointed Frankencourse look. In the examples above, most combine PowerPoint slides with inserted quizzes, interactions, and a Replay video. But it’s not easy to see where one starts and the other stops. Part of it is the new integrated player in Studio ‘13, but most comes from the course designers who found a way to make all the tools work together. Regardless of the tools you use, focus on creating an integrated look.
• PowerPoint is still powerful. There are plenty of critics of PowerPoint and rapid elearning. But they’re mostly wrong. As you can see in the examples above, with some creativity you can do quite a bit and produce great results. Essentially PowerPoint is a blank screen. What you put on the screen determine how it looks.
• Don’t stick with the defaults. By default you get a standard player with a sidebar menu. But you don’t need to stick with the defaults. You’ll notice each demo had a custom look. That means they ditched the default PowerPoint templates, the default blocky quizzes, and the default player settings. The same can be said for how the vector characters are used. I really like the way Prometheus added the space suits to the characters and integrated them into the course. That gives the characters context and makes them more meaningful to the content.

• Out of the box thinking. One thing that stood out to me was the way the space training demo used the presenter panel. It’s designed to display the course presenters. But they used it as a way to show progress in the course. Instead of inserting presenter images and names, they inserted the “System Status” and level. Pretty clever. This is the type of stuff you’ll only learn from other users and a good reason why connecting with other users is important.

Be an Active Voice to Develop Your E-Learning Skills

Communities of practice are built on the foundation of sharing and learning from each other. When people ask how they can learn more about elearning one of my first responses is to be active in the community. Ask questions when you need to learn. But also commit to sharing what you know.

Tim Slade is a great example. He’s an active community member who regularly shares what he knows. And it’s in that sharing he’s grown quite a bit in his own skills. Here are a few examples of how he’s involved in the community and how it’s helping him develop his elearning skills:

• Be present. Tim is an active presence in the community, helping people. A lot of people find being active a chore. But if you want to stay connected and learn, then being part of the community is important.
• Share what you know. Tim shares free elearning templates which you can find here, here, here, and here. As he shares in this forum post: they’re simple to build and a great way to practice your skills. By sharing these templates and helping in the community, Tim is building his reputation and authority.
• Write a blog. A great way to learn is to commit your thoughts to paper. Don’t worry about writing a blog to get subscribers. Instead write a blog to capture your learning. In turn you’ll share your expertise and help others. I like the way Tim’s blog has evolved from when he first started to where he’s even doing product reviews. He can do that because people trust him. He’s developed his credentials in the community by showing a commitment to their needs. How do you think this helps his professional prospects going forward?

Tracy Parish is another good example of someone who is active in the community and regularly captures her thoughts to make her learning journey public. Even Prometheus has gotten into the act. They’ve started a series showing how they built their Space Training Demo.

You don’t need a polished blog like Tim’s and you don’t need to build free templates to develop your skills. The main point is to be connected to the community and share what you know with others. Many of the other elearning developers are in the same boat—working under sever time constraints with limited resources. So any help and advice is appreciated.

Finding inspiring ideas and applying them to your own courses will help you build better elearning courses. But better yet, be active in the community. You’ll grow in your skills and build a network of peers.

What do you do to practice and develop your skills?

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.