In a previous post, I share 15 free display graphics that are commonly seen in elearning courses.  In today’s post, I’m adding a few more.

The cool thing is that all of these are created in PowerPoint; so you can learn to build your own.  The steps are simple.  They’re generally just rectangles with some sort of fill.  Then right-click on the graphic and save as an image.

Free Chalkboard and Whiteboards

I offered these in a post about a year ago where I showed how to create the display boards and included links to some free fonts that would work well with these displays.

If you’re going to use the chalkboards, be sure to download the free chalkboard assets to go with them.

• 6 whiteboard and chalkboard graphics
• 32 free chalkboard graphics

Flipchart Display

Here are two versions of the flipchart display.  One has legs the other doesn’t.  The legs take up extra room, so I prefer the version with no legs because it gives you more screen space.  But if you use a full body character, then the legs version makes sense.

• Download the flipchart graphics here.

Clipboard Display

The clipboard’s great for checklists or going over a linear flow of information.  Make sure to download the hand-drawn boxes and check marks to go with the clipboard display.

• Download the clipboard graphic here.
• Checkmarks and x-marks
• Hand-drawn boxes

Personnel Folder

Take the folder that I shared in this post and combine it with the paper from the clipboard above to create a personnel folder for your compliance training.

• Download the personnel folder graphic here.

Bonus Displays

One of the things I love about the elearning community is the willingness to share.  Recently, community member Efrat Maor shared a bunch of displays and free PowerPoint templates that she created.  They’re pretty cool.

• Download the PowerPoint template here.

If you want the PowerPoint templates to make modifications to the graphics above, you’ll find them in the PowerPoint templates section here.

Hope you enjoy the free graphics and PowerPoint templates.  Feel free to use them as you wish.  And thanks to Efrat for sharing hers.

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Tidbits:

• October 16-19: Las Vegas, NV (CUNA)—Experience Learning Live!  I’ll be presenting on building communities and how to build elearning courses with limited resources.
• October 25: Houston – Elearning Symposium.  David Anderson will share a ton of practical rapid elearning tips.
• November 1: Las Vegas, NV (Elearning Guild)—Devlearn. Doing a pre-conference workshop and presentation at the conference.  Swing by the Articulate booth to say hi and check out some elearning goodness.
• November 4: San Diego, CA (ASTD)—Your Turn to Learn.  David Anderson will be leading a couple of hands-on Articulate Workshops.  You can also swing by the Articulate booth to check out what’s new.
• November 12: Los Angeles, CA (ISPI)—Articulate Workshop. Click here for the details.  I believe they have a discount that runs through the end of the month.  On November 11, I’ll be in town for a free Articulate jam session, still working on the details.  I’ll post them to the blog as soon as I get them.
• November 14: Minneapolis, MN (ASTD)—Articulate Workshop: Build Interactive E-Learning…Rapidly. Click here for updates.
• December 8: Charlotte, NC (ASTD)—Rapid E-Learning Design.  I’ll also be doing a free Articulate jam session while in town.  Click here for details.

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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 spent the day at the beach watching people learning to surf.  One of the people learning to surf was a blind girl.  It was very inspiring as she learned to balance on the board.  She probably fell off of the surfboard a few dozen times before she successfully stood and balanced on it.  And when she finally succeeded she let out a cry of joy.

Learning is a funny thing.  It’s not something that can always be neatly packaged.  Real learning isn’t a one-time event (like many elearning courses) where it’s just a matter of getting new information.  Instead it’s an iterative process where you do something, get feedback to evaluate, make adjustments, and do it again.

E-learning courses are an intrusion to the natural learning process.  With good planning, it’s a welcome intrusion because we can compress time and create cost-effective and repeatable learning events.  For example, if I was training operating room techs on setting up an operating room in the real world there’s the cost of pulling a room offline for training, coordinating staff, and maintaining a sterile environment and tools.

But in an elearning course, I have a room and equipment that is always available.  If someone fails or needs more time, they have it.  That’s one of the good things about elearning.  The challenge though is to craft a great learning experience.

Adult Learners Don’t Like to Fail

Going back to the blind surfer, it takes a lot to fall down and continue getting up.  I saw plenty of other surfers give up after a few tries.  Few people like to fail and then do so publicly.  This is especially true of adult learners.

Elearning presents a great opportunity to let people fail (or practice becoming successful) in private and in a safe environment.  Unfortunately a lot of elearning fails to exploit this opportunity with our need to score and track everything.

As learners, our culture conditions us to avoid failure.  Typically our grading systems reward successful test taking more than successful learning.  Because of this, we’re motivated to pass tests and getting good scores and not always focused on the learning process.

Embrace the Learning Process

Here are some things to consider when building elearning courses:

• Set clear expectations and objectives.  Let them know why they’re taking the course and what they should be learning.  People like to get oriented and know what’s expected of them.
• Adult learners don’t like to fail, and they don’t like to fail publicly.  Make it clear when they are being tested and when they aren’t.
• Create an environment where they have as much freedom as possible.  Let them click around and explore.  I know that many customers want to lock navigation so that they “get all of the information.”  This is faulty thinking.  If they need to confirm their grasp of the information, then give them exercises to practice applying it so they can demonstrate their understanding in a real way.
• Give them ways to collect information.  This is a great way to counter the locked navigation issue.  Create situations where they need to make decisions and then free up the navigation to collect the information needed to make decisions.  This is a much better way to assess understanding than viewing a screen full of text.
• Focus on relevance.  I’ve worked on plenty of projects where the learners are never considered.  I recall one company I worked for that wouldn’t let me talk to any potential learners, even though we were rolling the training out to 3500 people across the country.  If your content isn’t relevant to the learners, they’ll just tune out and you’re wasting time and money.  You can guarantee that little learning will happen.
• Create a visual design that is friendly and inviting.  This helps with the initial engagement and sets the tone of the course.  I’ve had customers tell me that they can’t do that because the subject matter was real important and serious.  So they needed to have a very serious tone (read boring).  If it’s important, than it makes sense to create a course that’s as visually inviting as possible.
• Elearning is a multimedia experience so it makes sense to leverage as much of the multimedia as you can (in context though).  You don’t want to add multimedia for the sake of it, but you do want to use all of your resources to create the best course possible.
• Free Willy!  People are like orcas with floppy dorsal fins.  They yearn to be free.  One of the worst experiences in elearning is when the course navigation is locked.  There are better ways to help people learn.  Focus on relevant, decision-making scenarios.  And if you’re building a compliance, click-and-read course with no performance expectations, then make the course as simple as possible so that the learners can get in and out.  Don’t frustrate them or waste their time with a bunch of extra branched scenarios.  Tell them what they need to know and let them go.
• Do you need to test everything?  Every day we take in all sorts of information that is critical to meeting our goals.  When my boss sends an email detailing new plans, he doesn’t follow it up with a quiz.  Assessing a person’s understanding is an important part of learning, but do we need to always have a test?  In many ways it retards the learning process. As soon as people find out they’re being tested, they quit learning and focus on how to pass the test.  If you don’t need a test, don’t include one.  If you do need to assess their understanding, perhaps there’s a better way to do so.

The blind surfer was motivated to learn and willing to risk failure as she kept falling of the surf board.  She might not have been as inclined to do so if she was only allowed two attempts and then notified that she failed.

The main point in all of this is that elearning presents a unique opportunity to compress time and offer repeatable events where people can practice and get feedback.  But we need to craft an environment that encourages learning (which is not the same as exposure to information).

Focus on that part of it and you’ll build good elearning courses.  Focus on controlling the learner and creating points of friction and you’ll squander the opportunities.

What are some things you do in your courses that help the learners feel comfortable and want to learn?  How do you handle the client that asks you to lock navigation so that they can be assured that the person learned by “seeing all of the information?”

Feel free to share your thoughts by clicking on the comments link.

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Free E-Learning Resources

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

Building elearning courses is hard enough.  Most people are working with limited resources and time.  So having to deal with anything that slows down the process is a hassle.  Here are three common roadblocks and ways to avoid them.

Lack of Clear Objectives

I get to look at hundreds of courses during the year.  One of the biggest issues I see is that the objectives of the course aren’t clear.  They’re all wishy-washy with statements like you’ll “learn” or “understand.”  They tell you what you should learn, but they should be telling you what you’ll be able to do.

Don’t make a list of objectives based on what a person should learn or understand.  Instead declare what the person will be able to do.  And then determine how you’ll prove that they can do it.

At a previous place we used to ask, “If I saw it in action, what would it look like?”  This helped us to focus on actionable results.  If there’s nothing to see or no real action associated to the course completion, then you might want to consider not building the course.

Sloppy Asset Management

One of my pet peeves is tangle cords.  There’s nothing more frustrating than going to get an extension cord or a power adapter out of a box and find it all tangled and knotted.

In the elearning world, sloppy asset management is like a box of tangled cords.  It wastes time because it’s hard to find what you need when you need it.  This is easy to avoid.

Here are two simple things you can do:

• Create a generic folder structure for your courses.  I have a folder that I copy when I start a new project.  Inside that folder are other folders that will hold the courses assets.  Some of the sub folders I have are: Quizmaker, Engage, Flags, audio, images, notes, fonts, templates, etc.  Every course I build uses the same folder structure so I know where things are and it’s easy to share the project folders with others.
• Come up with a consistent naming structure.  I’ll have to admit that I can get a little sloppy on this myself.  I don’t know how many “temp” folders I have on my desktop.  There’s no set rule on how to do it, but come up with a consistent way that you and your team can identify and label your files.  Common elements are version numbers and date created.

Who Controls the Content?

Who owns the content and has final say on the design and implementation of the elearning courses?  If you’re the subject matter expert and final authority of the content, then that’s perfect.  But for many, that’s not the case.  Find out who owns the content.

There are a few things to consider:

• Who can help you identify and craft actionable objectives?
• Who gets to offer feedback and make changes to the content?
• Who owns the final sign off?  Pull those people in right away so you don’t have to make last minute changes.

There’s a lot that goes into building elearning courses; and with that a lot that can slow things down.  Develop clear objects, keep track of your files, and make sure you’re connected to the right people.  That’ll help you stay on top of things and make the development process much more successful.

What are some roadblocks you experience?  What do you do to avoid them?  Feel free to add your thoughts via the comments link.

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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 rapid elearning content finds its roots in repurposed classroom slides.  The challenge is to rework the screens and get rid of the bullet points so they don’t always look like classroom slides.

A great way to get out of the PowerPoint look is to create screens that hold content in different ways.  For example, if you put a TV monitor on the screen you’re less inclined to use bullet points.  So a good way to rework the screens (and get rid of bullet points) is to think of different types of display screens you can use as content holders.

WARNING: Course context is everything.  So don’t get rid of bad bullet points and replace them with display screens that make no sense.

With that said here are a few ideas from previous posts and those are followed with some new ones and free downloads.

You can download many of these templates (and more) from the E-Learning Heroes community.

• Folder
• TV Monitor
• Tabbed Notebook
• Flip Card & Industrial version
• Leather Notebook
• Spiral Notebook
• Laptop
• Comic look
• Envelope

In today’s post, I thought I’d share yet one more display screen graphic—the projection screen.  Projection screens are common to training so they make good content holders.  And many elearning courses use characters in front of projection screens.

Here are a few simple projection screen images that I created.  They also included the original PowerPoint files.  Feel free to use them as you wish.  In addition, here are some tutorials on how to create the projection screens on your own.  You’ll see that they’re very easy.

Generally, I like to keep the screens simple.  You want the essence of the screen, but not all the work required to make it detailed.  Plus, the less detail the better they work with the vector images.

Below are links to the tutorials where I show how to create them.

• Tutorial 1: a basic screen
• Tutorial 2: a basic screen with some depth
• Tutorial 3: a gel screen
• Tutorial 4: a gradient screen

You can download the projection screens as images from here.  And if you want the PowerPoint files to deconstruct them, you can download from here.

I also pulled the tutorials into a single module for those who can’t access Screenr.

Click here to view the tutorials.

Hope you enjoy the free resources.  If you make some of your own projection screen images, feel free to share them with the community or via the comments link.

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Free E-Learning Resources

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

We’re in the middle of beta testing a new product.  It’s an interesting process because I get to see how people approach their projects and the steps they use to solve problems and find solutions.

I had a conversation with a beta tester who was struggling with doing something.  One reason for his struggle was that he was applying production techniques he used for a different product to the beta software.  So things weren’t working as he had planned.

His struggle was one common to many of us.  He started with a solution and then tried to make it fit the problem he was trying to solve.  He started with a production process (solution) and then tried to force his objective (completing his project) to the solution.

He should have stepped away from the solution, taken a closer look at what he wanted to do, and then look at the options he had for meeting his objective.  At that point he could have determined the most effective solution for meeting his goals.  It would have saved him some time and frustration.

Starting with a solution isn’t an issue isolated to those beta testing software.  It’s really an issue with a lot of training and elearning programs.  How often have you been in a meeting where the client says, “We need a new course,” before they even presented their objectives?  It seems that almost every time I start a project, the client’s already determined that some sort of training is required even if that’s not always the case.

Recognize that elearning courses aren’t the objective.

E-learning courses (and training programs for that matter) exist to meet objectives.  They really aren’t THE objective.  They’re solutions.  If you start with a pre-determined solution without evaluating your objectives, there’s a good chance that you won’t meet your objectives.

It’s easy to be seduced by solutions because these seem tangible and active, especially with the simple and quick authoring of rapid elearning tools.  They allow you to easily create solutions.  Need a quick course?  No problem.  I can get one to by the end of the week.  And many times you’ll be the rock star at work because you’ll have this cool, interactive elearning course to show off.  That’s a lot more tangible than a brainstorm list of possible solutions.

Step away from the solutions.

Before committing time and resources to a solution make sure you fully understand the objectives.  What do you hope to accomplish?  Once you’ve done that, you’ll be able to look at all of the solutions available to you and then decide which is best to meet your objectives.

Another reason to step away from the solution is that we tend to get enamored with features and then work to get our objectives to meet the feature whether or not it adds real value.

Collect data to help make an informed decision.

We’re an information-driven culture so it’s easy to understand why we fall back on the need to create a course.  The thought is that if only people knew more they’d be able to make better decisions and accomplish their goals.  So a lot of our training is focused on pushing information to people so that they can know more.

Let’s take a step back and do the “knowing more” at the front end.  What do you know about your objectives?  Why do they exist?  Usually there’s some sort of gap between where you are and where you want to be after the training is implemented.

What’s causing the gap?  Is it really a lack of knowledge or understanding, which may require training?  Perhaps there’s a lack of resources?  Maybe there’s an issue with motivation.

As you can imagine, not all gaps are covered by a training program.  Many times there are issues like performance support, management styles, personal motivation, or available resources.  No matter how hard you try, the elearning course won’t fill those gaps.

Determine the best solution.

Once you’ve identified your objectives, you’re able to determine the best solution to meet them.  Somewhere in the process you’ll know if an elearning course is part of the solution.  If it’s not, then you’ve saved the organization time and money.  On the other hand, if it is, you’ll have a better handle on the objectives and what you need to do to meet them.  You’ll also have some metrics to compare the pre- and post- course results.

Elearning courses play a role in your training initiatives.  But they’re not always the right solution.  Before you invest a lot of time and money into building courses, make sure you know that the course will meet your objectives.

And then when you do start building the course, worry less about using the feature and more about what you want to do.  Then figure out which features let you do that best.

E-learning books don’t usually deal with this type of stuff and the decisions you have to make prior to building the course. But your successful implementation of elearning requires that you’re building the right type of courses (if at all). While you don’t need an MBA in business, you should be familiar with performance consulting at some level.

Here are a few book recommendations.

• The Performance Consultant’s Fieldbook
• Performance Consulting
• First Things Fast
• Training Design Basics via Scott in comments

The links to Amazon books produce a slight commission.

If you want to recommend a good resource or performance consulting blog, feel free to mention it 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.

My guess is that some of the most common screen elements in elearning courses are computer monitors.  They’re nice to use because contextually they fit elearning.  And they’re great for holding the images and multimedia we use.

There are all sorts of computer monitors available through the office online site.  But sometimes it’s just easier to build what you need.  Plus, it’s a great way to learn more of PowerPoint’s illustration features.

In today’s post, I’ll show you how to build a laptop monitor inspired by the free laptop image file you can get from the psdGraphics site.  It’s pretty simple and is made up of a rounded rectangles and essentially the same gray gradient.

Below is the tutorial.  And at the end of the post you’ll find the original PowerPoint file for you to download and deconstruct.

Click here to view the tutorial via Screenr.

Here are some simple steps to create the laptop:

• Start with a rounded rectangle to create the top of the laptop.  Then fill it with a gray gradient that runs from the top left-corner to the bottom right-corner.  Add a thick line to the outside and use the same gradient, but make the light gray on top just a bit lighter.
• Duplicate the rounded rectangle shape and scale it down a bit.  Center it and then fill it with your wallpaper image.  I also like to add an inset shadow to create some separation.
• The bottom keyboard shape is a rounded rectangle with the top squared off.  Use the format painter to fill the shape with the same gray gradient as the top and change the angle of the gradient to straight down so the dark is on the bottom.
• Create a small pill-shaped rounded rectangle and use the format painter to fill it with the same as the keyboard section.  Then turn the shape upside down to create that indented look.
• Add a trapezoid shape to connect the top and bottom of the laptop.  Fill it with the dark gray and then send to the back.
• To create the light effect, use a shape filled with semi-transparent white.  Then right click and edit the points to the angle you want.  If you find it a challenge to create the light effect, just skip it.

Bonus tip:

• If you want to add pictures or videos over the laptop image, then it’s probably a good idea to just fill the inside with black and square off the corners since the videos won’t have rounded corners.
• I combined shapes in PowerPoint 2010 to cut a hole in the lid and make it transparent.  I saved it as a PNG.  The inside is transparent and lets me put anything under the laptop image.

Here’s a quick mockup of how you could use the laptop image in an elearning course. I also added the tutorial to the last slide for those who can’t access the Screenr tutorial.

Click here to view the demo.

As you can see, building your own illustrations in PowerPoint isn’t that difficult.  It’s just a matter of doing a few and soon you’ll develop a knack for building your own.  At a minimum, these types of tutorials are good for you to practice your PowerPoint skills.

Of course if you don’t want to build the laptop image yourself, feel free to download the PowerPoint file or the laptop images I created from the Elearning Heroes community:

• Original PowerPoint file: feel free to deconstruct and see how it was built
• 3 laptop images: rounded corner, squared corner, and transparent background

Here’s an illustrator tutorial that shows how to build a different type of laptop.  Do you want to try building it in PowerPoint?  If so, let us know how it comes out.

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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 elearning developers are working with limited resources.  So any time you can find a free solution, you’ve won. The other day I was playing around with Urtak.  The site lets you build simple surveys.  The value is its simplicity and how the questions engage people.  It also lets you, the survey taker, to ask additional questions—another way to engage.

Ask Questions to Engage Your Learners

Most elearning courses I see are info-centric and just push content out.  Often there’s little concern about how relevant the information is to the learner.  Thus the learner is usually not engaged and has to wade through a lot of information.

A great way to switch from an info-centric course to one that’s learner-centric is by asking questions. These aren’t quiz questions.  Instead they’re questions to get the learner to reflect on the content.  Good questions can challenge the learner’s understanding and perspective.  This is something an information dump can’t easily do.

And once you challenge what they believe, people tend to be engaged.  In addition, the process of having to create engaging questions forces us as course developers to put the content into a context that’s relevant to the learner.

If even you don’t use the Urtak site, there’s something in how it’s structured that can help in your own course design.

Engage Your Learning Community

Now let’s go back to Urtak and discuss how we could use a free tool like this in elearning.  As I mentioned before, Urtak provides an embed code.  This means you can easily add your survey to your elearning course.

In the example below, we created some information about student/teacher ratios.  And then we followed it with an embedded Urtak survey.

Click here to view the demo.

In this example, we asked some questions about public education.  We purposely asked questions where we know people have strong opinions.  The goal isn’t to ascertain their understanding of the content.  Instead it’s to engage them in the process.

The problem with yes/no questions is that you can’t fully qualify your opinion. It begs another format to strengthen your position and discuss it in more detail. Thus the questions are a great way to prompt reflection for further discussion offline or in an online community.

Urtak would work great in a blended course where you combine elearning and facilitated discussion.  Create an elearning course and then use the survey to ask questions that spur some thought and engage the learners.  The trick is to ask questions that you know will elicit strong opinions.  Use them to prime the pump for further conversation outside of the course.

What questions can you ask that are controversial or engage strong opinions in your elearning course?

YOUR E-Learning Survey

How often do you get to ask a question in those industry surveys about elearning?  Well, now’s your chance.  I used Urtak to create an informal industry survey.  For the sake of simplicity, I started the survey by only asking 20 basic questions.

You can also add your own questions.  What do you want to know?  For example:

• Want to know about gender?  Are you female? Are you male?
• Want to know about income?  Do you make between $50K and 60K? Do you make between $60K and $70K?

What do you want to know about your peers?

Click here to view the survey.

Once the community’s answered some questions, click on the “results” page and see how they were answered.  You can also compare two questions.

Here’s a quick tour I did of the Urtak site to point out how it works.

Urtak’s a cool application that could be useful in elearning courses or your online community.  What are ways that you’d use a tool like this? Share your ideas via the comments link.

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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 had a great time in Atlanta last week.  It’s always so much fun getting to meet the blog readers and learning more about what people do in the real world.  Two things always stand out during these trips:

• There is no one way to do elearning.  We use the same words, but we don’t always mean the same thing.  Some people build courses, some create marketing material, and some use the rapid elearning software to create multimedia information.
• People don’t have money.  It doesn’t matter if you’re from a big company or small; odds are you are working on a limited budget.  That means you’ve got to be creative with the resources you have.

One of the sessions I did in Atlanta was on how to get the graphics you need for your rapid elearning courses.  So I thought it a good idea to share the presentation with the rest of the blog readers.

Understand Graphic Formats

You don’t need to be a graphics artist, but you should know the difference between a bitmap and vector image because they play a role in the quality of what you see on the screen.

You’ll notice that some graphics will scale up and remain crisp and others get pixelated.  The reason is that they’re two different types of graphics.  The ones that get pixelated are bitmap images.  When you scale the image, you’re scaling the pixel.  Thus the pixels themselves get larger and become apparent.

The images that don’t pixelate are vector images.  When you scale them they remain nice and crisp.  They can be scaled because instead of pixels the image is based on a mathematical formula.

It’s Not about the Images

Before investing a lot of time finding the right graphics, invest time in learning basic graphic design.  Graphic design is about using screen elements to communicate meaning.  So it’s important to not only know how to create screen the elements (like your graphics) but also how to create meaning with them.

The E-Learning Heroes community has a great exercise that walks you through getting the right look and feel for your elearning course.  It’s worth spending some time on this because it will help you create the right visual context for your course content.

In addition, it’s important to understand basic graphic design.  Many people are familiar with the C.R.A.P. acronym which stands for contrast, repetition, alignment, and proximity.  Those are basic design principles that help direct the learner’s eye and use the visuals to assist in the communication process.

You can do a search online for “CRAP design” and find all sorts of free help.  If you want a book, then try the Non-Designer’s Design Book or any basic graphic design book.  In either case, learning the principles will help you build screens that look good and are effective.

Now let’s look at some tips and tricks to get the graphics you need.

You Already Have What You Need

If you’re building rapid elearning courses, then most likely you’re using PowerPoint.  And in that case, you already have an application that lets you do quite a bit.  Despite all of the lamenting about bad PowerPoint presentations, the fact remains that PowerPoint the application is quite powerful and offers a lot of flexibility (and capability).  So you should be able to create much of what you need.

Microsoft Provides Free Resources

They just updated the Office Online site and have some partnership with providers like Fotolio, iStockphoto, and iCLIPART.  So you should be able to find most of what you need to get started.

A good tip is to try and find images of the same clip art style.  This way you can maintain consistency throughout the course.  Just click on the style number under the image properties and you’ll get all of the images in that style.  Keep in mind that not all images are grouped in styles.

Customize the Clip Art to Meet Your Needs

I’ve covered this in the past, so you can check out the following posts to learn more.  The main point is to ungroup the vector clip art images and then add or subtract the elements you need to create the right images for your course.

As you can see, you ungroup the clip art to pull out characters or props, modify the people, and create custom backgrounds.

• What You Need to Know When Working with Grouped Clip Art
• Little Known Ways to Create Your Own Graphics Using PowerPoint
• 3 Simple Steps to Create Background Images for Your Next E-Learning Scenario

Create Your Own Illustrated Objects

I’m not a trained illustrator.  What I do know I learned by copying what others do.  This has helped me develop some basic illustration techniques and taught me how to get more out of PowerPoint.

I’m a big advocate of visiting some of the illustration tutorials online and applying them to PowerPoint.  You’ll find that you can do much of what illustrator does and you’ll learn how to do a lot more with the tools you have.

Here are a few previous posts where I show you how to use PowerPoint to do your own illustrations.  It takes a little practice, but soon you’ll find that you can create quite a bit on your own.

If you don’t want to learn to do the illustrations, you’re more than welcome to download them from the community since I’ve made them all available for free.

• Here’s How to Get Past a Screen Full of Bullet Points
• See How Easily You Can Create Graphics in PowerPoint
• Rapid E-Learning Workshop: How to Create a Tabbed Notebook
• Create E-Learning Templates With a Consistent Clip Art Style
• How to Design the Visual Elements for Interactive Elearning Courses

Take Your Own Photos

If you have a budget you can buy stock images, but if you don’t AND you don’t want to use clip art then taking your own photos is easy enough, especially nowadays with the digital cameras.

Some things to consider:

• Get a signed release so that you have permission to use the images.
• Try to get as much light into the scene as possible. You’ll never get better quality than the starting image.
• And read this post that offers more tips and tricks.

Fixing the Bad Stuff

Clip art can seem boring and trite, and if you take your own photos most likely they’ll look a lot different that the pro quality images you can find on stock sites.  So here are some tips to help you fix some of the bad stuff.

Use Image Filters to Convert Boring Clip Art & Bad Photos

Most graphics editors (and PowerPoint 2010) offer simple filters that help you convert your image.  In the example below, I applied a pencil filter to a common piece of clip art and added it to a piece of paper for effect.  Here’s a post that offers more detail and a free PowerPoint template.

You can do the same thing for pictures when the lighting is off or you want to have the essence of the image, but not all the detail.  The cool thing is that if you have PowerPoint 2010, you already have most of the features you need to make these types of edits.

Create Silhouettes

Silhouettes are the hot thing.  They’re the Lady Gaga of images (only more discreet).  You see them all the time in advertising.  They work great for elearning because they represent objects without any detail.  It’s easy enough to take photos in-house and then convert them to silhouettes.  This way you can make up for fading fashion styles, bad lighting, or blurry images.

You can also create silhouettes out of clip art, which is another way to get more life out of something many people fine old and overused.  Here are some posts that teach you how to create silhouettes:

• 3 Easy Ways to Create Silhouette Characters
• 5 Ways to Use Silhouette Graphics in Your E-Learning Course
• How to Turn a Picture into a Silhouette

Most of us aren’t trained graphic designers, so we’re scrambling to find the tools and resources that help us get the job done.  The tips above are easy enough to apply and don’t really cost much more than time to learn.  The good thing is that once you learn how to apply some of these tricks, it goes faster the next time.

And as I mentioned earlier, if you don’t want to build them, then feel free to jump into the community and download the stuff that’s already there for you to use.

What tips do you have for creating your own images?  Feel free to share them with the community.

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.

A lot of rapid elearning hinges on PowerPoint.  That means your success building courses is influenced by how well you know PowerPoint.  To help you learn more about PowerPoint I pulled together a solid list of PowerPoint resources.

From The Rapid E-Learning Blog

Here are a few posts that cover some of the essentials tips and tricks required for successful PowerPoint-based rapid elearning.

• 5 PowerPoint tips essential for effective rapid elearning.
• Dozens of PowerPoint tips and tricks.
• More than 200 tutorials (most demonstrating excellent PowerPoint tips).

From the PowerPoint Team Blog

One of the best places to go for help with PowerPoint is from the makers of PowerPoint.  Many don’t know it, but Microsoft has a number of really good PowerPoint resources starting with their PowerPoint Blog.

Of course, many of the tips on the blog are specific to the product and not necessarily relevant to rapid elearning.  So I went through the blog posts and pulled out the ones that I think provide the most relevant content for building elearning courses.

Tips on Presentations & Organizing Content

There are a lot of similarities between creating content for presentations and elearning courses.  The following tips provide ideas on organizing your content and connecting with those who look at the slides (or elearning screens).

• 5 Tips on Getting PowerPoint to Sing!
• 12 Tips for Creating Better PowerPoint Presentations
• 2 Steps to Change the World with PowerPoint
• 3 Ways to Make Your Picture Fit Your Slide
• 3 Presentation Secrets for Nonprofits
• 5 Ways to Avoid Irritating Your Audience
• 3 Tips for Making Powerful Presentations to the Government
• Moving Beyond Bullet Points with Cliff Atkinson

Tips on Using PowerPoint

The more you know about PowerPoint, the better you’ll be at creating your courses.  Here are some tips to help you learn more about the PowerPoint features you’ll need for successful rapid elearning.  Even if you don’t use the specific tips in the posts, you will learn more about some of the PowerPoint features, so it’s worth a look.

• Faster Design with the Layout Button
• Office Themes: The Infinite Variety Generator – Part 1 and Part 2
• Choose Slide Colors Like a Pro
• Create a Table with Nifty Rounded Corners
• Trouble Aligning Objects on Your Slides? Use Drawing Guides
• Better, Faster, Slicker PowerPoint Presentations with Keyboard Shortcuts
• A Picture + 1000 Words…
• Create Sexy Curved Lines in Your Slides

More Resources and Free Templates

Free PowerPoint Templates

• Templates from the PowerPoint team
• Templates from the Rapid E-Learning Blog
• Free templates & downloads from the E-Learning Heroes community
• Microsoft’s PowerPoint Templates

Good PowerPoint Books

• Beyond Bullet Points: What Cliff Atkinson shares for presentations is just as relevant for elearning courses.  He addresses some of the same multimedia design principles as Ruth Clark does in her book, e-Learning & the Science of Instruction and provides a solid blueprint for applying them.
• Better Than Bullet Points: Jane Bozarth shares a lot of practical tips and tricks to help you get the most out of PowerPoint.
• Speaking PowerPoint: To be honest, I haven’t read the book yet.  However the author, Bruce Gabrielle, shares a lot of good practical tips in the PowerPoint blog.  So I am going to assume the book offers the same approach.

The links to Amazon books may produce a slight commission.

PowerPoint Resources

• PowerPoint MVPs: A great resource for PowerPoint tips and help.  The PowerPoint MVPs usually have blogs with all sorts of tips and tutorials.
• Microsoft’s PowerPoint Forum: Get specific answers to PowerPoint questions from the makers of PowerPoint.
• PowerPoint Online Help: Microsoft updated the Office Online site and offers all sorts of tips and tricks.

PowerPoint’s been around for a long time, so there are all sorts of free resources and help available online.  The secret is to take advantage of them and soon you’ll be a PowerPoint pro, too.

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 get lots of questions from those who are just getting started with rapid elearning.  They want to know what they can do to build good elearning.  In today’s post I’d like to offer a few tips to those of you who have the same question with links to some books and previous posts.

1. You are where you are.

When I first pick up a video camera, I don’t expect to create Hollywood movies.  The same goes for elearning.  Accept where you are in your current skills.  You won’t necessarily build world-class elearning the first time you build an elearning course. But you can build a decent and viable course. And if you want to get better, you can. It’s just a matter of learning, which entails practicing your craft.

Good books to get started:

• e-Learning By Design
• e-Learning & the Science of Instruction
• Guide to e-Learning

The links to Amazon books may produce a slight commission.

2. Learn to use the tools.

It never fails that when I show people a few tricks in PowerPoint that they’ll say they never knew that was possible.  If you don’t know what the tools can do, odds are that you’ll minimize what you can do with your courses.

The more you know about the tools you have the better you’ll be at building courses.  Understanding the features and what they allow will open the door to all sorts of creative ideas and interactivity.

Learn more:  If you’re an Articulate user, there are two good books and the user community with hundreds of tutorials and thousands of active members.

• Essential Articulate Studio ‘09
• E-Learning Uncovered: Articulate Studio ’09
• E-Learning Heroes Community: tutorials, PowerPoint templates, and free downloads

3. Click & read isn’t bad.

I hear so many complaints about boring click-and-read elearning.  But the only ones I hearing complaining are those in the elearning industry.  I don’t hear it from the learners.  In fact, I routinely ask people I meet what types of elearning they take at work and what they think.

What they complain about isn’t that the course is linear or click-and-read.  Instead, they complain about content that is irrelevant to what they do.  So they’re not bored with the course structure; they’re bored with information that they don’t need.

• The 3 Essential Questions Every Learner Wants Answered

4. Treat elearning like a textbook

Learning is a complex process.  The elearning course isn’t the end-all to the person’s learning experience.  It’s just part of it.  Often we treat the course as if it’s the only way a person’s going to learn.

Think of your elearning course more like a text book.  Some texts require that you read and reflect.  And some are like workbooks.  You get some information, apply it, and then see how you did.

In either case, elearning is just part of the process.  You’ll have more success if you focus attention on performance support prior to and after the course is completed.

• Ignore This Post If You Don’t Care About Effective Learning

5. Make it meaningful.

Like I stated earlier, people complain about courses that are meaningless.  The first step towards success is to create courses that are meaningful to the learners.  Many times the courses we build are information dumps.  Instead of an information dump, create situations where the learners have to use the information to make decisions relevant to what they’d do in the real world.

• The 3 Essential Questions Every Learner Wants Answered

7. Get rid of stuff.

One of the best things you can do is take information out of the course content.  Often we put too much information in the course, more than the learner needs.  Focus on just the information you need to meet your goals.  All of the other information can be pulled out and placed in addendums, reference links, or in downloadable job aids.

• Build Better E-Learning Courses By Getting Rid of Some of the Content

8. Focus on objectives.

Determine your learning objectives.  Figure out what you need to do to meet them.  Then figure out how you’ll assess that the objectives are met.  Simple as that.  Ideally your objectives are focused on action.  What will they be able to do when they complete the course?

• E-Learning & Instructional Design 101

9. Develop a simple style guide.

I’m not in favor of style guide fascism where all course have to look the same.  However, when you build a course, you should develop a style guide to go with the course.  This will help you build a consistent design where you are intentional in colors, alignment, fonts, and overall look and feel.

Templates are great for this. They help with the general course structure and get you pointed in the right direction. You can create templates to guide the look and feel as well as templates that help guide the interactive components.

As you build skills, you’ll rely less on the templates. You’re better off with a basic course that is well designed than one that has every bell and whistle but doesn’t work well for the learner. Plus if you’re just getting started, a more elaborate course will take more time to build.

• The Real Purpose of the E-Learning Template

10. Apply sound graphic design.

People are drawn to things that look good.  So you can start engaging them by creating a course that has the right aesthetic appeal.  Will a nice looking course be enough?  No.  But it’s a start.

Graphic design is also about directing the flow of information and how the eye scans the screen.  This contributes to the successful transmission of the content.  In addition, it’s important to have the right contextual design.  Ideally you’re able to craft a visual context that matches the course content.

• Why Looks Matter in E-Learning Courses (And What You Can Do About It)
• How Good Graphic Design Helps Build Meaningful E-Learning
• Make Sure Your E-Learning Course Looks the Way It’s Supposed To

These tips and resources should help point you in the right direction.  Build your first course and then do a post assessment when you’re done.  Reflect on what went well and where you could make improvements.  Then the next time you build a course, work on those areas.  And in no time at all you’ll be a rapid elearning pro.

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 like to keep things simple so I usually package ideas around three key points.  It all started when I was taught that there are three steps to getting things done:

• Prepare to do the job. 
• Do it.
• Then clean up when you’re done.

Did this give me all the details I needed to do the job?  No.  But it did provide some clear steps to guide me.  And that’s what I see as my mission with this blog.

I like to provide some simple steps to help you move in the right direction.  Of course there’ll be some gaps between the steps, but that’s OK.  They’ll get filled as you apply what you’re learning and gain more experience.

For this week’s post I decided to review all of the posts where I provided three steps to do something.  You’ll find them below with a summary (and of course loosely organized in three groups).

General Thoughts on Rapid E-Learning

• 3 Things You Can Only Learn from a Real E-Learning Expert: Learn to work with subject matter experts and the tech-savvy millennials; and get a definitive explanation of how to finally spell e-learning eLearning elearning leearning.
• Three Things I Learned About Learning on My Deathbed: Motivated learners will learn.  It’s all a matter of being prepared to try.
• Three Practical Ideas for Using Twitter in E-Learning: Social media tools are all the rage, but what’s their role in elearning?
• 3 Creative Ways to Empower Your Learners: Want your learners to learn? Give them something to do.

• 3 More Free Tools to Help Build Better E-Learning Courses:  We’re all on a budget.  Here are three free applications that may help you build elearning courses.
• Three Sure-Fire Tips to Build Better E-Learning Courses:  Here’s an overview of some key decisions we made pulling together a rapid elearning course in just a few days.
• Save Time with These 3 Rapid E-Learning Tips: You’ll only save time and make your job easier with these three PowerPoint elearning tips.
• Three Time-Saving Rapid E-Learning Tips: Three more production tips that will save you time.  You can also download a PowerPoint template.
• 3 Simple Ways to Measure the Success of Your E-Learning: Everyone’s yacking about ROI, but here are three practical tips to wow your boss and co-workers.

Instructional Design

• These 3 Tips Can Change Your Compliance E-Learning Forever: Compliance training’s probably one of those things that will make eyes roll.  But these tips can help you overcome that challenge.
• The 3 Essential Questions Every Learner Wants Answered: Are you wasting your learner’s time? Answers to these three questions may help you avoid that.
• 3 Proven Techniques to Add Creativity to Your E-Learning Courses: Here are some ideas to engage and motivate those who take your elearning courses.
• 3 Things to Consider When Building Your E-Learning Courses: Instructional design should be intentional.  What are you doing to build the best courses possible?
• 3 Ways to Define Interactive Rapid E-Learning: Are your courses engaging and interactive? It’s not as hard as you may think.
• 3 Graphic Design Principles for Instructional Design Success: Instructional design involves creating flow and movement through the course content.  Here are some tips to learn how.
• 3 Simple Techniques to Guide Your Learner’s Attention: You can capture your learner’s attention with these three ideas. How’s that for an explanation?

Graphics & Course Design

• Build Branched E-Learning Scenarios in Three Simple Steps:  Interactive elearning starts with providing the learner a challenge.  And then offer some choices that produce consequences.
• 3 Simple Steps to Create Background Images for Your Next E-Learning Scenario: So you’re ready to build your first interactive scenario, but you’re not quite sure what it should look like.  Learn to create the backgrounds for your elearning courses.
• 3 Brainstorm Ideas for Your Next E-Learning Course: Stuck on what to do with your next course.  Here are three ideas to help you get started.
• 3 Ways to Build Remarkable E-Learning: Are your courses something people are talking about?  These ideas will help you build courses that are noteworthy.
• 3 Sure-Fire Ways to Make
  Your E-Learning Graphics Sizzle: Simple tips to turn your basic graphics into something more dynamic.
• 3 Easy Ways to Create Silhouette Characters: Stuck with clip art and boring pictures? Get more life out of your graphic assets by converting them to silhouettes.
• 3 Simple Ways to Find the Resources You Need to Build E-Learning Courses: Here’s a list of resources that are free and easy to find.

So there you have it.  Seventy rapid elearning tips that will help you get started, save time, and find the resources you need to build better elearning.

What three tips do you have?

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.

The other day I had to re-install the webcam software for my Dell laptop.  Usually I don’t install all of the other junk that seems to get bundled with software these days.  But what I noticed in the Dell webcam software is that it came with Creative’s Live! Cam Avatar Creator.  So I installed it.

The avatar creator is basically a simplified version of Reallusion’s CrazyTalk (which is a pretty decent application for the price).  You can always buy it if you want more features and capabilities; but for me, what comes with the webcam software is more than enough.

If you have a Dell computer, here’s a link to download the file.  I tested it on my desktop without the webcam, and the software works fine.  If you don’t have a Dell computer, odds are that your webcam software has something similar.  You’ll just have to do some digging.

Following are a few tips and tutorials to help you get started.

Create an Animated Avatar

Creating the avatar is simply a matter of uploading an image and then applying the settings so that the mouth and eyes are detected.  From there you can fine tune the settings, and then add eyes and teeth if you want.

Once you have the avatar working, you can easily add a script.  There’s a simple text-to-speech program, but I just recorded some audio and added the .wav file.

Considering how fast it converts the images to speaking avatars, I’m pretty impressed with the overall quality.  I think the output is pretty decent for something that only took a few minutes to build.

Ideas on Using the Avatar

Of course you’ll have to play around with the different settings to figure out what’s going to work best for you.  But once you do, you’ll be able to find all sorts of uses for this simple software.  Here are a few ideas:

• Animated Talking Head: Often you’re using a subject matter expert’s headshot in the presenter panel.  With this tool you can make it much more interesting.  Instead of a static image, you have a talking head.  Click here to view the tutorial.

• Convert Static Images on the Slide: You can also add the image to the slide.  Use the free images you get with Microsoft Office Online or buy some from sites like istockphotos.  In either case, in a few minutes you can go from static images to something a bit more dynamic.  Click here to view the tutorial.

• Convert Simple Clip Art: Don’t limit yourself to real images, feel free to experiment with some of the clip art that’s available to you.  Click here to view the tutorial.

You can see some examples of how they’re used in the demo below.  I also included tutorials for those who don’t have access to Screenr.

Click here to view the demo.

If you’re working with a limited budget, a tool like this lets you add some creative flair to the assets you have access to as you build your elearning courses.

Are these perfect, high-end avatars?  No!  But the software’s free (for those with a Dell computer) or inexpensive.  And if you want to use some avatars in your courses, this is a viable option.

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.