Some people love font talk.  That and a glass of wine could make for a good date…by yourself!  The reality is that most people probably don’t care much about fonts but they do want to make good decisions when using them.

In previous posts we’ve looked at how to acquire lots of fonts:

• How to get more than 100 free fonts and create your own
• How to use hand-written fonts to add personality to your courses
• Download free web fonts from Google

Those posts were rich with free fonts and other resources.  But just like eating lots of sweets, sometimes too much of a good thing is too much.  So now let’s take a peek at how to manage all of those fonts.

Years ago if you had too many fonts installed on your system, chances were that the computer slowed down or ran into other issues.  So the advice was to not install too many fonts.

With today’s computers and operating systems, some of those constraints are probably gone.  However, just because you can install a boatload of fonts doesn’t mean you should.  Is it practical to install 1,000 fonts and then have to spend time scrolling through the list trying to find the “right” font for your project?

Surely, there has to be a better way to manage fonts.  Here are a few tips to help you get started.

Plan Your Choice of Fonts

Many of the people I talk to don’t plan their font selection.  Usually it goes something like this.  They’re working on a screen and then determine that they need a nice title font.  Something bold, but not obnoxious.  Strong, but not too formal.

So they highlight the title text, click on the font list, and begin to scroll through hundreds of potential choices.  Since the fonts are kind of small, they tend to pick those that stand out the most and probably spend a lot of time going back and forth between fonts.

Or, they just accept the first bold font they see as divine intervention and live with what they get.

A better plan is to determine what type of font you need prior to the screen design.  Then research the right font, make a choice, and have that font available when you need to add title text.

In that case, it matters less if you have a specific font installed.  All you really need is a good way to research your fonts and then install them on an as-needed basis.

Managing a Boatload of Installed Fonts on Your Computer

Some people want every font they have to be installed on their computers.  But they also want an easy way to manage them.  For example, I have a bunch of handwritten fonts.  It would be nice to have all of the installed handwritten fonts in a group that makes it easy to find just handwritten fonts.

Here are a couple of simple ways to manage the fonts you have installed on your computer.

You can preview your installed fonts in the control panel…at least you can in Windows 7 (can’t quite recall how it was in XP).  This gives you a quick glimpse of the font, but you don’t have a lot of options.

You can also preview fonts that aren’t installed on your computer.  Just locate the folder they’re in and view the thumbnails.

Tips on managing fonts:

• Create folders for font categories.  For example, put all of the handwritten fonts in a single folder.  When you need a handwritten font, scan the folder and install the font you need.

• Only install the fonts you need.  When you want a specific font, locate it on your computer and install it for the project.  Then uninstall the font when it’s no longer needed.  If you have grouped folders, it’s easy to find what you need when you need it.
• Keep copies of the fonts you use in your project folder.  This way when you share the project files, the fonts are always with the folder.
• Tutorial: Here’s a quick tutorial on managing fonts in Windows 7.

Managing All of Those Fonts from the Web

The approach above works fine, but you’re always installing and uninstalling fonts.  There are better ways to do so using a font management application, which we’ll look at later.  But what if you don’t want to go through the hassle of uninstalling your fonts?  What if you want all fonts installed and then have an easy way to manage them?

myFontbook.com is a free site that will load up and display all of your installed fonts.  myFontbook gives you a little more flexibility than the approach we looked at earlier.

• You can tag your fonts.
• Mark some as favorites.
• Preview sample text as either a sentence or as body text.

myFontbook only works with installed fonts and of course it only works when online.  But it is a really simple solution for those who want to manage their installed fonts.

Bonus tips:

• Save the web site to look like an application. In Google Chrome you can save a web site as an application so when you open the page it doesn’t look like a web page.  Instead it looks more like a normal software application.  To do so: click on the wrench icon, select tools, and then “create application shortcuts.”
• Tutorial: Here’s a quick tutorial of how to use myFontbook.com.  Their site offers a lot more help if you need it.

Manage Your Fonts with Font Management Software

If you have lots of fonts and you don’t want them cluttering up your computer, then a font management application may be the best solution for you.  Smashing Magazine has an older post on 25 font management applications if you’re interested in this type of software.

For this demo, I downloaded the trial version of FontExpert 2010 since it has some of the types of features I want to highlight.  But I have no strong preference one way or the other.  You can go over the list above and figure out which tool works best for you.

I’m no typographer so I only want a few simple things:

• Quick install/uninstall of fonts
• Easy way to categorize or tag my fonts
• Preview of fonts to see how they look in various modes

Here’s a quick overview of FontExpert 2010 where I highlight how those three things basically work.

Click here to view the overview.

Font management software is a really good way to go if you have a lot of fonts and don’t want all of your fonts installed at once.

So there you have it, three simple ways to manage fonts.  You can go with what you have in the operating system.  Use a web-based application like myFontbook to make it easier to locate the fonts that you have installed.  Or select a more robust font management application.

Which process works best for you?  Also, if you do use a font manager, why not do a Screenr video to show us how you use it?

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Want to learn more? Check out these articles and free resources in the community.	Here’s a great job board for e-learning, instructional design, and training jobs	Participate in the weekly e-learning challenges to sharpen your skills
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Many of us are on a limited budget. So when there’s an opportunity to get something for free I’m all for taking advantage of it.  So today, we’ll look at how to get 174 free fonts from Google.

Quick Overview

In the past when you wanted to display text on a web page you had some limitations.  Your choices were to use a generic font or you make an image of the text in a special font (if you wanted more than the basics).

Today, many of those limitations are gone because you can use web fonts.  Essentially, the font can be accessed from a server and then used to display the text….blah blah blah (already getting bored, read more here).

Google Web Fonts

Google has been actively promoting web fonts through an open source initiative.  You can learn more about this from the Google Web Fonts blog.  In addition to promoting the use of web fonts, they’ve been putting together a nice collection of open source fonts.

From the site you can preview and download the fonts.  The only problem with that is you have to download them one by one.  What if you want access to all of them at once?

Joe Maller to the rescue!  The other day I ran across this blog post that detailed how Joe Maller had individually downloaded all of the current fonts and put them in a single folder for download.  You’ll need an application like 7zip (which is free and the one I use) to decompress the files.  Once they’re decompressed, you can easily install the fonts on your computer.

Quick links:

• Access fonts from Google
• Preview fonts from site
• Download Joe’s fonts
• Download 7zip
• How to install fonts
• Google’s FAQ
• Read more about the Open Font License

Are these really free?

Anytime I do a post about free resources, I get questions about the licensing.  The fonts that Google makes available have been submitted by the creators and each one has a link to the licensing agreement.  You can learn more by reading about the Open Font License.

When you download the fonts you have the option to pay the developers.  Paying someone for their work isn’t a bad idea and probably motivates them to create some more fonts and make those available, as well.

If you want some more free fonts, you can download the ones I featured in this blog post, Over 100 Free Handwritten Fonts.  In addition, there are some hand-written fonts that were submitted by members of the elearning community.  Feel free to use them as you wish.

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

A few days ago I came across this thread in the user community.  In it, Dave Newgass was asking how to build an interaction of a person going in and out of a cubicle.  He got a couple of responses and a demo PowerPoint file to review.

Dave’s question (and the feedback he got) really speak to the value of the user community and why you need to be part of it if you aren’t already.

• Production tips come from people who produce. Software vendors like Articulate create authoring software that has a bunch of features.  But it’s the users of that software that will come up with how to use it.  They also have all sorts of creative ideas based on their experiences that the vendors may never consider.  So tapping into that expertise can save you a lot of time trying to figure out how to do something with the tools you have.
• Asking questions builds a pool of tips and tricks.  Some of my best ideas come from the questions I get from the community.  Someone will ask how to do something.  Initially, I may be a bit stumped.  But then I play around with some ideas and usually come up with some sort of solution. So asking questions provides answers; but it also helps the experts broaden their skills, which in turn adds additional value to the community.
• There’s lots of free stuff.  Who doesn’t like free?  I like to build quick templates to practice some techniques. Then I give them away.  Ideally, you’d take the ideas and practice building your own templates.  But the reality is that you have limited time and if you get the template for free, why not just use it (which you’re free to do)?  So take advantage of all of the free assets in the user community.

Speaking of free, I’ve included some additional tips and tricks from the user community.  Many of them include free downloads.

Animated Cubicle Dude

Here’s a screencast where I break down Jeanette’s solution to the animated cubicle person so you can see how she did it.  I also expanded on it a bit and built a simple feedback interaction.  You can see the tutorial here and the published example below.  I also added the PowerPoint file to the downloads section if you want to play around with it or use it in a course.

Click here to view the demo.

Free Image Generator

There are all sorts of free image generating applications online.  If you’re on a limited budget, why not take advantage of them to create some assets for your elearning courses.  David Anderson presents a few solutions with some ideas on how you can use them in your courses.

• Road signs via RedKid.net. View the tutorial.
• Airline ticket via Music Airport. View the tutorial.
• Newspaper effect via Fodey.  View the tutorial.
• Motivational posters via Big Huge Labs.  View the tutorial.

Torn Hole Graphic Effect

Here are a few tips on how to create bullet holes for your elearning courses.  I guess this comes in handy if you’re working with street gangs or drug cartels.  Even if you don’t need bullet holes, these are good tutorials to practice doing on your own because they help you learn to use PowerPoint as an illustration tool.

• Mike’s hole tip.
• David’s hole tip.

Get Busy with the Bezier

Speaking of PowerPoint as an illustration tool, the Bezier tool in PowerPoint gives you the capability to create virtually anything.  It’s just a matter of learning to use the tool.

Fortunately, Diane Elkins (author of E-Learning Uncovered: Articulate Studio ‘09) gets you going in the right direction with this quick tutorial.

She shows how to trace objects using the Bezier curves to create your own custom clip art and illustrations.  As you can see, once you master the techniques you’ll be able to create almost anything.

Page Curls are the Justin Bieber of E-Learning Graphics

Unless you’ve been living in a cave, you’ll no doubt recognize page curls as the hottest visual design technique for elearning courses since Dr. Werner introduced the next button.

Good thing for you the elearning community is hopping with page curls.  Check out these tutorials and feel free to download the ones already created.  Be sure to use them now, because soon Bieber will be Baio and page curls will be next year’s screen beans.

• Creating hand-drawn emphasis and call out graphics.
• Create page curl arrows.
• Draw corner page curls.

Free Downloads:

• Page curl stickers v1, v2, v3.
• Page curl emphasis.
• Page curl arrows.
• Multicolored curled notes.

If you’re currently part of the community, then you know that these tutorials are just the tip of the iceberg.

There’s a lot to be gleaned from your peers in the elearning community.  You’ll save time by learning some production tips and you’ll be able to download a bunch of free assets.  You may even make a few friends.

• Bonus: download 27 Businessmen silhouette images courtesy of Linda Lorenzetti.

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

Last week I was pleasantly surprised to find Dr. Werner Oppelbaumer on the flight from Orlando to Seattle.  He’s been a hero of mine for years and truly one of the most brilliant minds when it comes to all things learning.  So I took advantage of the time with him to pick his brain and get a feel for his perspective on our industry.

Dr. Werner, it’s always a pleasure to talk to you.  Last time we met, I believe Werner Labs was working on some cool gadgets to help make air travel more comfortable.  What’s new at Werner Labs today?

Yes, this past year has been extremely busy.  We’re working on a number of projects.  Many of them are top secret, but here’s one that we’re close to bringing online.  We call it the Twitter Sitter.

We are using Twitter as a baby monitoring service.  This allows you to experience the promised freedom of your mobile technology and still remain lovingly connected to your little ones.

Here are a few sample tweets:

• Encouraging words.
• Simple lullaby.

As you can see we have a little work to do on the text-to-speech conversion, but we think this tool will be a very popular.  Many of today’s media savvy people are forced to find a way to balance their time between Facebook, video games, and watching movies.  It’s critical that we find technology solutions to take care of the day-to-day distractions that inhibit their ability to grow.

That looks really promising.  Let’s change the subject and talk elearning.  I just got back from the Learning Solutions conference.  There’s a lot going on in the industry with the convergence of easy to use technologies, social media, and learning.  Considering your experience, what insights can you share with the blog readers?

You are correct, there is a lot going on.  So I put together this simple presentation to address some of the important things I see happening in our industry.

Click here to view the presentation.

I think you’ll agree that Dr. Werner’s tips resonate with most of us in the industry and there’s much to be gleaned from his wisdom.

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

I just got back from the Learning Solutions Conference in Orlando.  Like always, it was great getting to meet so many blog readers.  I truly appreciate the enthusiasm and kind feedback.

At the close of the conference, I participated in a panel presentation with some really smart people (not sure how I got invited).  If you’re not familiar with them I included links to their sites below.

We each had to present a “big idea.”  For my part, I decided to present on how to get better at building elearning courses.  It’s a subject asked about frequently through the blog.

For those who didn’t get to go to the conference, here’s my presentation on 5 Ways to Prepare & Be a Winner.

Are you prepared for the opportunities?

Good fortune doesn’t just happen.  It’s usually the result of preparation and opportunity.  While there are always all sorts of opportunities available, the challenge we face is that we’re not always prepared for them.  Because of this, we are usually oblivious to the opportunities that exist.

For example, I don’t read Spanish.  So if there was a sign in front of me that read, “Bajo este signo es una olla de oro.”  I’d miss the opportunity to get my hands on some free gold.  Instead I’d walk right past it oblivious to what’s right there in front of me.

So instead of sitting around waiting for something to happen, the key is to prepare yourself for the opportunities that exist.  You won’t see them all, but you’ll see a lot more than if you just sat around doing nothing.

What opportunities exist for us?

I’ve been in the training industry for about twenty years.  Typically when times are tough, the folks in training are usually the first to be let go.  The main reason is that we still haven’t figured out how to determine our ROI; so many organizations aren’t always clear what value we bring.

While today’s economy is still tough, this is the first time I can remember where what’s hot in the outside world is also so closely tied to what the learning industry.  There’s an interesting convergence of social technology, mobility, and community.  It’s a perfect storm and it’s all so closely linked to learning and what we do.

While there are still plenty of challenges for many of us, there really is a lot of opportunity.  For example, with rapid elearning technology you can hand off all of your work to the subject matter experts and spend your time surfing YouTube for Justin Bieber videos or playing Angry Bird on your sophisticated mlearning device.

All you have to do is confuse your employers with words like pedagogy and tell them to consider whether or not the process is legitimate peripheral participation.  Do enough to keep them off balance and you’ll preserve your job, appear smart, and be able to hum all of Justin’s dandy little ditties.

Steps to Becoming a Winner

Here are just a few ideas on how to be prepared based on my experience.

1. Practice your craft.

I’m a sports fan.  One thing common to all great athletes is the extra effort they put into their craft.  While their peers are at home resting, they’re working on technique, studying film, or running an extra mile.  It’s what separates great players from other players with comparable skill.  And the same can be said for other disciplines like music or art.

To be good at something requires practice.  How many of us really practice our craft or do those things necessary to be better?  What if we approached learning to build courses the same way Peyton Manning approached being a quarterback?

You may be employed as an elearning developer and not desire much more than having a job.  That’s fine.  But if you really want to be a good elearning developer, you have to own your development, especially since it seems so many of us work alone.

2. Connect with others.

Software companies build software with features.  But it’s the people who use that software that come up with ways to use those features.  That’s one of the reasons why you want to connect with people in your software’s user community.  They offer practical tips and real world advice.

You can see evidence of this in these two posts that covered over 100 PowerPoint tutorials and more than 200 rapid elearning tutorials.  Many were created by community members and blog readers.

Another reason to connect to others is they’ll help make you better.  One of my favorite examples is when Joe Deegan asked for some ideas on creative ideas for creating a course on bed bugs.  He got lots of ideas with over 52 comments in his forum thread.  That team of one, became a virtual army of brainstormers.

In addition, using tools like Twitter lets you connect with all sorts of experts.  In fact, Jane Bozarth shared a great example in her part of the panel presentation of how she saved time doing some research by posting a question in Twitter.  What would have taken her hours was accomplished in no time at all.

If you want to learn and improve your craft, it’s important to connect with others.

3. Think like an entrepreneur.

One of my favorite books is How to Be a Star at Work.  It’s a great book that addresses a lot of what it takes to be successful.  The author makes a lot of good points.  After reading it a few years back, I was reminded to have more initiative and develop an entrepreneurial spirit.

Businesses that sit around for work to come to them don’t last long.  But those that understand their customers and then strive to meet their needs prove to be successful.

Tomorrow, start your day, not as an employee.  Instead see yourself as a vendor who sells elearning services.  And then develop a business strategy to be successful.  Who are your customers? What do they need?  How can you help them?

Don’t sit around like a lot of training people do waiting for projects to arrive.  Instead, find out where the business is going and then find ways to support them getting there.

4. Maintain a portfolio.

I get a lot of requests from elearning developers looking to be connected.  So I ask if they have a portfolio.  The answer is usually, “No” or “I can’t show you because it’s proprietary.”  Without a portfolio, how can you document your skills?

Here are two quick reasons why you need to a portfolio:

You need a sandbox to play around with ideas.  Your organization may want you to crank out click-and-read courses like there’s no tomorrow.  That’s your job and they sign the check.  So you have to do what they want.

But you shouldn’t let them determine how you develop your skills.  If you don’t get to build the types of courses you want at work, then build them on your own.  They don’t need to be full-fledged courses.  At a minimum build mini courses or examples to practice and show off your skills.

If you lose your job, will you lose your portfolio?  I see this all the time.  You come to work and are notified that you’re no longer needed.  The company hands you a cardboard box filled with your belongings and that certificate of appreciation they gave you last quarter.  Then they have security escort you out of the building.

When you get home you realize that not only do you no longer have access to the elearning software to create courses, you also don’t have access to any of the courses you built to show off your skills.  All of a sudden, looking for a new job becomes a little bit more challenging (especially if you ignored point #2).

Take control of your career.  Enjoy the company you work for but understand it’s a business and sometimes we’re on the short end of things.  It’s nothing personal.  So be prepared.

5. Be proactive and look for opportunities.

A few years back I was managing media production for the education department of a healthcare organization.  One day I was putting some PowerPoint slides on 35 mm film so I had some time to kill during production.  I started reading an article in about Etienne Wenger and his book on Communities of Practice.  I decided that’s what I wanted to do and set my career on a path to get to where I’m at today.

I looked over job descriptions for the type of work I wanted to do and then made an effort to get the experience I needed to get the types of jobs I wanted.

If I can do it, so can you.  Like I said earlier, there are all sorts of opportunities.  In fact, considering the state of our economy, the elearning industry is super hot.  Every freelancer I know is swamped with work.  Don’t sit around and let things happen to you.  Determine what you want to do and then look for the opportunities to do them.

There are a lot more things you can do to be an elearning winner.  What advice do you have?  Feel free to share your tips in the comments section.

Learn more about the other panel members:

• Sivasailam “Thiagi” Thiagarajan: “resident mad scientist” at the Thiagi Group. He has a some links to free resources and games and a number of good books.
• Jane Bozarth: I think she creates half of the tweets on Twitter.  She just released Social Media for Trainers. Blog readers may also be interested in Better Than Bullet Points and her other book E-Learning Solutions on a Shoestring. They both offer practical, real world advice.
• Marc Rosenberg: regular presenter at industry conferences and author of
  E-Learning: Strategies for Delivering Knowledge in the Digital Age and Beyond E-Learning: Approaches and Technologies to Enhance Organizational Knowledge, Learning, and Performance
• Jeanne Meister:  check out her blog and new book, The 2020 Workplace: How Innovative Companies Attract, Develop, and Keep Tomorrow’s Employees Today
• Mark Oehlert: Innovations Evangelist at the Defense Acquisition University. Unfortunately, he’s like me and bookless (come on Mark, get to it) but he is very active online and a frequent presenter on new learning technologies.

The links to Amazon books may produce a slight commission.

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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.

If you add characters to your elearning courses, odds are that you’re also adding some speech bubbles. PowerPoint comes with the ability to create your own text callouts, but I find that I like to use ones that look more organic than the PowerPoint shapes. I try to create my own.

I created some speech bubbles for a recent project so I’m making them available for you to use as you wish. I also added a few bonus tips below.

On a side note, you’ll notice that the download links go to the new community site’s download section. I now have a place to put all of the blog downloads so it’ll be easier for you to find resources that I’ve shared in the past.  Not only can you find all of the resources from previous blog posts, but you can also get a bunch of other free assets to help with your elearning design.

Rounded Speech Bubbles

Download rounded speech bubbles here.

Squared Speech Bubbles

Download squared speech bubbles here.

Thought Clouds without Tails

Download thought clouds here.

Thought Clouds with Tails

Download thought clouds with tails here.

Bonus Tips

• Organic fonts look great in speech bubbles. You can probably find some free ones at sites like dafont.com. I gave some away in a previous blog post on adding personality to your elearning courses. You can download those (and more) from the new community, as well.
• Use Microsoft’s clip organizer to manage all of the free assets. In a previous post I showed how to import your own images into the clip organizer. That will make it easier to find and insert the free speech bubbles.
• Don’t use speech bubbles. Sometimes the screen can get a little crowded and using speech bubbles doesn’t help make it less crowded.  If you want to free up some white space, use simple lines that connect the character to the text. That’s what I did in this demo.
• Take full advantage of the new community. I uploaded the text bubbles into our new elearning community. You’ll find all sorts of other free assets like templates and graphics. You’ll also find some additional callouts. There’s even a practice course with all of the files available for you to use.

Hope you can use the speech bubbles (and the other free stuff) for some elearning projects.  If there’s something you’d like to see in the downloads, let me know.

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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.

When I meet people who aren’t in the elearning industry I usually ask them if they have to take elearning courses at work; and if so, what they think about them.  For today’s post, I’d like to address some of the more common issues I hear from those who have to take elearning courses and offer a few ideas on how to deal with them.

Is this course important?

To quote James Stockdale, “Who am I? Why am I taking this course?”

Our industry talks a lot about creating engaging courses; and then we’ll offer up tips on building interactive scenarios and all of that.  That’s fine and dandy, but the best place to start when you want to create an engaging course is to make sure it’s relevant to the person taking it.

If a course is relevant to the learner, you’re more apt to tap into their own motivations for learning.  If it’s not relevant, it becomes a lot harder to keep their attention and make the learning stick.

The solution? Create courses that are learner-centric.  Focus less on dumping information on the learner and more on what information they need to do what it is they’re supposed to do.  Then help them figure out how to use the information.

What’s this course all about?

You’re asking people to invest some of their valuable time in the elearning course.  So they need a clear understanding of what the course is about, what they’re supposed to learn, and any expectations of them after the course.

Conveying clear course objectives is critical and a good starting point.  With that said, it doesn’t mean you have to create a bullet list of objectives.  There are other ways to state the objectives of the course.

For example, you could challenge them to solve a problem prior to starting the course.  Not being able to solve it exposes their need to know more.  This then becomes the basis of explaining what the course is about and what they should learn from it.

You can frame the course from the perspective of what the world would be like without your valuable information.  Create an opening scene that demonstrates something negative that happens as a result of a lack of understanding—perhaps a workplace injury occurred…or a sale was lost.  It could be anything.  The main point is that there are more creative ways to state the course’s objectives without the standard objectives screen.

What’s my motivation?

A big concern when building elearning courses is that people just click through the course and don’t look at all of the screens.  So our solution tends to be that we lock the screen navigation.  This forces the person to see all of the valuable information and of course that causes them to learn everything they need to know.

Wrong.  When you think about it, the reason they’re just clicking through the course is probably because the course really means nothing to them.  So that takes us back to the first point: make sure the course is relevant.

Something else to consider.  If the course included a free iPad upon 100% completion, my guess is that they’d have no problem being focused and meeting the course objectives.  That’s because there’s motivation to complete the course.

You can’t give an iPad to all of your learners (especially not an iPad 2), but you can identify what motivates them and then build courses that address those issues.  A motivate learner is one who will learn.

What’s motivating your learners?  Why would they want to take the course?  What do they get out of it?  Are you helping them do something better?

How do I know I’m done?

I recall a few years back I was showing a manager this really cool interactive scenario.  I was excited because it was one of the nicest elearning interactions we’d developed.  His response was, “We hate scenarios.”  The reason was because they just wanted to quickly get to the end of the course and get back to work.  This probably speaks to the first point again and ensuring that the course is relevant.

Another complaint about the scenarios was that it took a lot longer to get the essential information and the scenarios made them unsure of their progress.  They felt like they were stuck in a labyrinth being taunted by David Bowie.

The solution for this is easy.  Let the learners know upfront what is expected and how long it will take to complete the course.  In addition, offer some sort of indication during the course of where they’re at.  I’ll also include that if you add interactive scenarios, they need to be meaningful and not waste their time.

What now?

What do you want the people to do when they’re done with the elearning course?  A common complaint is that people are forced to take elearning courses with no expectation for them to do something with what they just learned.

This is especially true when you get the November email telling you that there are twenty courses you need to take before the year’s end.  You take the courses and no one really cares what happens afterwards.

The other side of it is that you take a great course, learn some good stuff, but then don’t have a place to practice using it.  I’ve seen this quite a bit in places that roll out soft skills or management 101 type training.

Here are a few ideas:

• Indicate a way for the learner to continue learning.  Direct them to additional resources or a shared practice community where they can build on what the elearning course taught.
• Connect the managers to the course expectations.  It always confused me why the training group was more involved in employee development than the managers were.  We used to send the managers an update of who took a course and then provided some additional coaching tips so that their staff could continue to be developed.
• Provide some handy cheat sheets or job aids they can use when they get back to the job.  Or ask them to design some to share with others.  This is a great way to assess their level of understanding.

There are a lot more things you can do that connects the course to the learner’s real world.  If you have some additional tips, feel free to
share them in the comments section.

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PowerPoint’s Clip Organizer is one of those features in PowerPoint that’s been there for years and gets very little use.  However, it’s also one of the most powerful time-saving features in PowerPoint, especially if you work with a lot of custom graphics.

In today’s post, we’ll explore how to use the clip organizer.  This comes in handy if you download and customize lots of clip art.  Or if you take advantage of all of the free downloads available from the blog and community.

What is the Clip Organizer?

The clip organizer is one of those funny applications where the name pretty much tells you what it does.  It organizes clips.  Clips in this case can be vector illustrations (clip art), photos, videos, and audio files.

You load your media assets into the clip organizer so that it’s easy to search for them when working on your elearning courses.  The clip organizer lets you modify keywords so that it’s really easy to find what you’re looking for.  Once you start using it, you’ll find that it saves a lot of time looking for the images in folders on your computer.

Prior to PowerPoint 2010, the clip organizer was located via link at the bottom of the insert clip art panel.  In PowerPoint 2010, it’s not there.  Instead, you have to click on the Windows Start icon, go to All Programs, and then locate the Microsoft Office folder.  Inside the folder, you’ll find and Microsoft Office Tools folder with the clip organizer inside.

Here’s a quick tour of how to locate the clip organizer in various versions of PowerPoint.

Create Custom Clip Art & Add to the Clip Organizer

Find clip art characters you like.  Make modifications to them and then save as complete character sets.  I show you how to do this in the blog post on creating custom characters.

Over time you could end up with a big library of custom characters.  And the more images you have the more valuable the clip organizer becomes.  Here’s a quick tutorial that shows how that could work.

Click here to view the tutorial.

Manage All of the Free Stuff You Get From the Blog & Community

Over the past few years, I’ve given away a lot of free assets.  It’s easy to lose track of all of them.  You could always go to the community, do a search, and then download the files all over again.

Or you can download the files and then load them into the clip organizer.  This way, anytime you want a graphic, all you have to do is search for it and then insert it onto the slide.  Easy as that!

Here’s a tutorial that shows how to load the free blog and community assets into the clip organizer.

Click here to view the tutorial.

Make Searching Easier with PowerPoint’s Clip Organizer

The more stuff you add to the clip organizer, the more important it is to make the search process easier.  By default, when you load an image into the clip organizer it will create keywords based on the image title and the folders it’s in.

This is pretty cool, because if you keep your images inside project folders, the name of the project folder gets pulled into the keyword.  This is really handy because it’s a fast way to search for and reuse graphics from previous projects right inside of PowerPoint.

Here’s a quick tutorial that shows how easy it is to organize by keyword.  You can edit individual files or do batch edits all at once.

Click here to view the tutorial.

Tips:

• Keep images grouped by project and just insert the project folders into the organizer.  Any time you need an image from a previous project, just do a single search for the project name.  It’s easy enough to scroll through the thumbnails.
• Do batch keywording to save time rather than trying to keyword one image at a time.
• Develop a consistent naming stru
  cture for folders with graphics.  This way when you import the images, the keywords will be set.  That means a lot less time managing that part of the process.
• Test to see if it works on your network drive.  If it does, then you’ll be able to easily share your graphics with each other on the team.

Using the clip organizer requires a few extra steps so most people don’t use it.  But the reality is that if you build a lot of elearning courses then the clip organizer is your friend and a big time saver.

Develop the discipline of using the clip organizer and soon you’ll find it to be a time-saving feature.  If you currently use the clip organizer, what are some additional tips for the community?  Share them by clicking on the comments link.

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Many of us take a Field of Dreams approach to elearning.  If we build it, they will learn.  But the reality is that elearning is just an event in the timeline of learning and not the entire learning process.  And in some ways, the elearning course is an intrusion on the person’s natural learning process.  Because of this, we want to make sure that the investment we make in elearning produces the results we desire.

Sure enough, the elearning course is important because it can compress time and save resources.  But the reality is that most of a person’s learning happens in the time before and after the elearning course.  We looked at this briefly in a previous post, Ignore This Post If You Don’t Care About Effective Learning.

In today’s post I want to look at some things to consider before and after you build your elearning course.  We’ll look at three core parts of the process.

• Motivated to Learn: How do you get people interested in what you have to offer?
• The E-Learning Course: Design the right instruction, visuals, and interactivity.
• Support Ongoing Learning: What happens the morning after?

1. Motivated to Learn

The elearning course is going to stick if the learners are motivated to learn.  If they’re not, then odds are that while they complete the course, they’ll walk away from it without having learned much.  There’s a lot that can be written about what motivates learners—definitely a lot more than I can cover in a simple blog post.  But for today, we’ll touch on a few ideas to help you get started.

• Is this course relevant to the learners?  If you’ve read this blog for a while, then you’ll know that this is a common question.  Relevance is the key to effective and engaging elearning.  You can forego some of the bells and whistles (and even interactivity) if the content of the course is relevant to the learners. Think about the last time you needed to learn something and did a search online.  Some sites probably just had text and images, and some may have offered more interactive media.  In either case, the main point of engagement was relevance.  Was the site providing what you needed to learn?  You probably didn’t stick around long if the site didn’t offer what you needed.
• Is this course practical? I’ve worked on courses where the client had grand notions of what should be taught, but was completely disconnected from the learner’s real world and how they used the information.  In fact, I once built a course (brilliantly designed by the way) that ended up requiring the learners to spend hours in pre-work.  They all complained about how long it took and how pointless the activities were (my fault). A brilliant course is only brilliant if it works.  Learn about your learners and build courses that make sense to them and their world.
• How long is this going to take? I get lots of links to YouTube videos and other sites.  The first thing I do is look at how long it is.  If it’s less than two minutes, I’ll probably click on the link.  Any longer than that and I’ve already decided it’s a waste of time.  Guess what?  Your learners probably do the same thing.  They’re mentally doing a cost-benefit analysis.  They want to know what type of commitment they have to make prior to taking the course.  And they also want to understand what value they get.  Can you provide that to them before they click next?

2. The E-Learning Course

Elearning course design has three core parts.  You design the content, the look and feel, and the interactivity.

• What content needs to be in the course?  There’s always more than enough content for most elearning courses.  The challenge is usually figuring out what to get rid of more so than what to put it.  I like Cathy Moore’s action mapping process.  She does a great job helping you figure out how to make relevant courses without too much extra information.  You can also manage the content better if you find ways to get the learners to pull what they need.
• What should the course look like?  The visual design of your course is multifaceted.  You want a course that looks good.  But you need more than a great looking course.  It also needs to visually communicate the context of your content.  Focus on solid instructional design, but don’t neglect the aesthetic of the course.  And remember, visual communication is an important part of instructional design when you work with a visual medium.
• What is the learner supposed to do with the content?  You go through this process of building an elearning course and the ultimate question for the learner is, “So what?”  How can you design the course so the learner has to use the content?  You want them to interact with the course.  In an ideal world, they get information, reflect on it, and practice using it all inside the course.  This allows them to collect feedback and make the adjustments critical to the learning process.

3. Support Ongoing Learning

One of the biggest downfalls to elearning is the lack of support after the fact.  I saw a study once that showed about 90% of the course budget was committed to the design and implementation of the course.  Little was left over for post elearning support.

If you want the course to be successful, you need to consider what happens once the course is completed.  Here are a few thoughts:

• Get the managers involved.  They should do more than just forward a link to complete a course prior to December 31.  Use the course as an opportunity for managers to coach their employees.  For example, if someone takes a course on leading effective meetings, that’s probably a good time for the manager to assign some meetings to that person to see how well they do.  She can then assess their understanding and provide ongoing feedback in a meaningful context.
• Leverage your organization’s social media technology. We don’t just learn t
  hrough official channels.  We learn from peers, managers, and customers.  The problem is that many times this learning is lost to the organization.  However, if you can create a shared practice community (or find other ways for people to regularly connect and share what they know) there’s a good chance that the learning continues and remains for others to benefit.
• Provide quick bursts of refresher training.  People will remember more if you space out some of the learning.  You can provide little follow-up sessions to the course where they get refresher content.  I once designed a course for project managers.  After the elearning course, we sent out a series of planned emails.  They included some quick scenarios which they had to solve and then discuss with their managers.  This helped them retain the information and it also gave them an opportunity to dialogue with their managers.
• Don’t lock the course behind the LMS.  Elearning’s not cheap.  The courses created are great resources but often are locked into the learning management system.  Many times, you only get one shot at the course.  Once you pass, it’s no longer available.  If your system doesn’t provide access to the course after completing it, perhaps it makes sense to also make the course available somewhere else, like in a resource library.

Learning is a complex process.  An elearning course is an important part or the process, but it isn’t the entire process.  The secret to elearning success is to know how to tap into the learner’s need for the course content, to build the right type of course, and then to ensure that you have ongoing performance support.

What do you see as some of the challenges in these three steps?  Share your thoughts here.

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When it comes to graphic design, it’s important to continually find inspiration from other sources.  One of the main reasons for this is because over time, you develop a distinct visual style.  And when you’re the only one working on your elearning courses, eventually they all start to look the same.

I’ve discussed this in previous posts:

• Here’s How to Get past a Screen Full of Bullet Points
• Inspiring Designs to Keep Your E-Learning Courses Looking Fresh
• The Secret to Creating Your Own PowerPoint templates for E-Learning

A great place to look for design ideas is in magazines.  On a recent trip I was looking through one of those airline magazines they have in the seat pockets.  One of the illustrations in the magazine caught my attention.  I thought that the way it was designed would work great in an elearning course.

So I continued through the magazine, challenging myself to find at least 10 graphic design ideas I could use in an elearning course.

Here’s a link to the issue I was looking at.  And following are the tips.  I also created some tutorials to show how to create some of the effects in PowerPoint.

Layout Ideas

What I find most valuable is coming up with new ways to layout the screen content.  There are a bunch of good ideas that you can glean from the magazine.  For example, I liked the colors and general layout of this page below.

It could be the inspiration for a safety training module, like the example below.

There are a lot more cool layouts that could help bring a fresh perspective to the way you design your screen content.

Markers

I noticed that the magazine had all sorts of call outs and markers that you could also use in your elearning courses.

I counted at least ten different markers and callouts used in this issue.  All of them could find their way into an elearning screen.  Build out a few ideas, and then save them as images.  This way you always have some different markers and callouts available to use.

Filled Shape

You’ll notice that in several places they use circles filled with images.  This is easy enough to do in PowerPoint.  And if you have a lot of straight lines, using an occasional organic line helps to break up the content and adds some good contrast to the screen elements.

Click here to view the tutorial.

Once you learn to do the effect, you’re not limited to just using circles.  In fact, Stephanie Harnett had a good follow-up tutorial to one of my PowerPoint templates, and used the fill effect to add more pizzazz to the template.

Organic Lines

Adding organic elements to your content area is a great way to add contrast and draw attention to parts of the screen.  I discussed this a bit in the post on adding personality to your courses.

Creating the non-straight lines is easy enough.  Use the drawing tools that come with PowerPoint.  In most cases, I’d probably use the curved tools rather than the scribble because the lines look better.  But if you have a tabletPC or Wacom tablet, then you can draw your own.

Of course, you could always download all of the hand drawn objects from this post, Here’s a Boatload of Free Hand-Drawn Graphics.  That makes it a lot easier.  We also have some additional hand-drawn shapes in the user community.

Organic Shapes

As I mentioned above, organic shapes are effective in creating contrast that you can use to draw the learner’s attention.  The magazine also used a few organic shapes throughout.

They used them as titles and in highlights.  I like the look of the layout on the titles.  Here’s a quick tutorial where I walk through how to create the shape and a quick layout.  I also created a quick tutorial to show how easy it is to create highlights for your text boxes.

• Create organic shapes.
• Create organic highlighted text.

It’s all about consistent design.

There’s really a lot more to mine from that issue.  One of the most important things to consider when building the look and feel of your course is creating a unifying design theme.

As you page through the magazine, look at how certain visual elements are used throughout.  Those are the things that tie everything together.  Then when you build your courses, do the same thing.  Make a li
st of the screen elements that you normally have and then design them with a consistent look so that they tie the course together.

Here’s a challenge for you.  Design a template around one of these layouts.  If you do, share it with me and I’ll be sure to make it available for others to use.

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There’s a lot of debate about instructional design and whether or not you need a formal education to create effective elearning.  We looked at that in a previous post (which includes some good discussion in the comments section).

Today I want to explore some elements of instructional design and why it’s important when building an elearning course.

Learning Happens

I’ve been in the training industry for over twenty years.  And sometimes we act as if people would just sit around in a vegetative state and not know what to do until we built a course.  But the reality is whether or not we build courses, people still learn what they need to learn.

That’s because learning happens.  It doesn’t happen because you decide to build a course.  It just happens.  We learn all the time.  We are continually learning as we take in information, explore and solve problems, and interact with people.  It’s just how we’re wired.

It’s as if Mitch and Murray sent Blake into our heads to remind us to “A-B-L…Always Be Learning.”  There’s never a point where we turn off the ability to learn.  Our brains just keep on working, whether we plan it or not (unless of course you’re at an Emo Phillips show).

Instructional Design

Good instructional design can make learning happen faster and more efficiently than what might happen more organically.  Instructional design is the process of assessing the learning needs and then applying the appropriate learning strategy to meet them.

I’ve always seen instructional design as an intrusive process.  It’s a manufactured attempt to make learning more efficient and effective as it intrudes on our natural learning process.  Ideally, this intrusion is beneficial and helps us learn better.

In a simple sense, there are three core components to instructional design:

• Understand how people learn
• Construct learning activities based on how people learn
• Measure the effectiveness of the learning activities

Understanding How People Learn

You don’t need to be an expert on every theory, but you should be familiar with the main ideas so that you understand how people learn. Because this understanding is the foundation of how you design the elearning course to meet the instructional needs.

There are plenty of good instructional design books from which to learn.  We started a list in the user community.  I also think that Don Clark does a nice job collecting instructional design resources, if you want to do it on the cheap.  And of course, it makes sense to improve your craft with continued education and practice.

In either case, it’s important to learn more about how we learn so that you can develop the right instructional methodology for the courses you design.

Do you have some good book recommendations? Add them the to the comments list.

Construct Learning Activities

Armed with an understanding of how people learn, you’re able to construct effective and efficient learning activities.  Unfortunately, much of what we call elearning today falls flat; mainly because we take a very narrow approach to instructional design.

First, we treat the event of elearning as the total learning process.  But the reality is that the elearning course is just part of the learning process.  Instructional design considerations can be broader than just the immediate elearning course.  I discussed this a bit in this post on effective elearning.  Ideally, the instructional design considers the big picture including ongoing performance support outside of the elearning course.

The other issue with many elearning courses is that they are typically limited to presenting information with a quick assessment to determine recall.  This is instructional design at the simplest level.

Considering how people learn, there is a lot more we can do in the design of our courses.  An obvious step is to switch from info-centric design to one that is more focused on the learner.  With the learner in mind, we can create more meaningful activities that have a real impact and tap into the learner’s motivations.

Measure the Effectiveness of the Learning Activities

How do you know that what you’re doing is improving their learning? Are they able to demonstrate the level of understanding you desire? Are you using the most effective approach?  Ultimately, you want to ensure that the theory-inspired activities produce the results you desire.

For example, it takes a person two weeks to learn a task without any training.  You design a program that lets them learn it in one week.  You want to show that the learning intervention proved valuable both from a learning perspective and from an economic perspective.  You may have compressed the learning time, but at the same time introduced a negative impact on production while the person was away from their job.

I’ve worked on projects where our approach was instructionally sound, but the process didn’t work best for our learners. So we had to modify what we were doing to make the course work better for the people who actually had to go through it.

They also need to be timely and make sense based on your resources and technology.  The strategy you use with two weeks’ notice is going to be different than one if you have ninety days to plan.

Another time, I worked in a production environment where a machine operator had to do task X three times a day.  This was a critical task in the production process, so only the most proficient were allowed to do it.  When they trained new operators, they didn’t even let them do task X until about the third week because they didn’t want them messing things up.

As we were designing the training, I recommended that they learn task X right away.  This let them practice it as much as possible (part of how people learn).  Within a few days they were proficient at the task. The old way required that they wait three weeks to even start.  However with the new approach, by the third week they would have already had at least 30 repetitions on the task.  In addition, they took away some
of the dread they inserted into the process by not letting them learn it initially.

By compressing some of the daily activities and increasing their opportunities for practice we were able to decrease the time it took to train new operators from 90 days to less than three weeks.

This is a good example of how the instructional design process helped the business meet its learning goals and business objectives.  We created an artificial environment that provided more opportunities for practice in a shorter period of time.

Action Plan

If this is all new to you, I’ve included a few ideas to help you get going:

• Grab an instructional design book.  Find a book that interests you.  Read it and then plan on applying what you read to your next course.
• Start small.  Build mini modules on simple topics, like how to make toast.  Play around with some ideas.  Keep it simple so it’s not overwhelming and it’s easy to modify.
• Solicit feedback.  Create a portfolio page or blog where you can host your modules.  Jump into the user community and ask for feedback.  Write simple blog posts on what you tried and how it worked for you.
• Be proactive.  Unfortunately many times we’re stuck doing projects the way the client wants them because we’re invited into the process too late.  Figure out how to get in on the process early.  This gives you a place at the table to share ideas on better instructional design.
• Don’t worry about being perfect.  I look at some of the courses I did early in my career and they’re not very good.  That’s OK.  Over time, I got better.  So will you.

If you want to build effective elearning, you have to learn more about how we learn and then how to combine this understanding with the courses you create.  What are you doing today to make your elearning courses instructionally sound?

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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.

Most people only see linear, click-and-read elearning courses.  So when it comes time to build their own courses, they tend to build what they’ve seen before.  The same goes for your clients or subject matter experts.  They tend to expect something similar to what they’re used to seeing.

There are many times when a linear, click-and-read course is appropriate.  So this isn’t a rant against click-and-read courses.  However, there are also plenty of times, where a click-and-read course isn’t the best solution.  In those cases, it can be a challenge getting your client to see past what he’s used to and considering a different approach.

Today, I’d like to offer a few ideas to help your client and subject matter experts understand what type of course they need to build.

Clarify the Course Objectives

What does the client expect as an outcome?  I’ve worked on plenty of projects where the outcome was only to have the course tracked at the end of the year.  And I’ve also worked on courses where the client expected real changes in performance.

In clarifying the objectives, steer the client away from courses that don’t offer any tangible value.  If the course isn’t aligned to tangible goals, then most likely it’s a waste of time.  But the reality is that sometimes you still have to build courses where the only real objective is that at the end of the year some group can say X people went through each course and got a 100% on the quiz.

In those cases, try to commit the least amount of resources possible.  You can build simple courses that look good and meet your client’s goal without spending a lot of time and money.  Your client will be happy and you free up your time and money for the more meaningful courses.

If you’re new to this, I recommend the Performance Consulting (2008) book.  It does a great job walking through the process of helping your clients understand their performance goals and objectives.  Knowing this will help them build impactful courses.  I’ve also heard good things about The Performance Consultant’s Fieldbook.

Key points:

• Determine objectives
• Align objectives to performance goals
• Allocate resources appropriate to the objectives

Determine Which Type of Course is Best

If you listen to some in our industry, you’d think that any elearning course that isn’t performance-based is wrong.  I don’t take that view.  Instead, I see an elearning course just like any other medium used to support the learning process.  It’s a tool to facilitate learning.  Sometimes it’s the only tool, and sometimes it’s just one of many.

When it’s the only tool, then it makes sense to be as complete as possible.  In those cases, the course probably needs more performance-based interactivity.  However, if it’s augmented by other tools and activities, then perhaps an information-only focus is fine.  And because, it’s information-only doesn’t mean it has to be linear.

Look at the way the news industry creates infographics.  They’re not that much different than many elearning courses.  Information-only doesn’t mean it has to be linear; or that all of the information needs to be buried in job aids or PDFs.

The question ultimately lies in the doing.  What is the learner supposed to do with the course information and WHERE is it done? I can build a performance-based course where the doing is built into the elearning course with various interactive elements like branched scenarios and case studies. Or I can build an information-based course where the doing is outside the course in the real world.  For example, I compress the delivery of information into simple elearning modules and combine them with some facilitated sessions in the real world.

Key points:

• What is the learner to do with the course content?
• Information-only can stand alone or be augmented with activities outside of the course.
• Performance-based expectations require appropriate interactivity inside the course.

Present Alternative Types of E-Learning

Going back to the opening paragraph, we tend to expect those things with which we’re familiar.  Odds are that your client doesn’t have a lot of exposure to different types of elearning.

It’s your job to help them see the light. Expose them to different ideas and you’ll probably build better elearning.  An easy way to do so is to offer a few treatments.  Take some generic content and then build out a few versions of how it could be treated as an elearning course.

If they want an information-only course, show them some examples and how that type of course would support their learning goals.  This is also a good way to open up the conversation about how they might need additional performance support if it’s not built into the elearning course.  If they want a performance-based course, then provide a few examples of what that means and how different types of interactivity work in the course.

Doing this helps your client see elearning from a different perspective.  It also helps clarify their goals and expectations, especially if resources like time and money are scarce.  They may want something interactive, and find that they don’t have the budget or time to get there.  On the flipside, they may have wanted a linear course, but after reviewing their goals and your examples, realize they need something better focused on performance.

Key points:

• Collect and share elearning examples
• Create a demo course with different treatments
• Discuss the different treatments and their associated resource requirements

The goal is to build a course appropriate to your client’s needs.  Sometimes the need is simple and sometimes complex.  By clarifying their objectives you’ll know what type of course to build.  And by showing them examples, you’ll help them see elearning from various perspectives.  In the end, all of this will help you build better elearning courses.

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