3 Reasons to Use Animated GIFs in E-learning
November 6th, 2018
At a recent workshop we discussed the popularity of working animated gifs and how they can be used in e-learning courses. Here are three reasons you can use them in your courses.
Animated Gifs for Novel Visual Design
E-learning courses are still mostly visual. And one part of engaging you learners is to create visually rich experiences. This doesn't replace instructional design, but it does help make your course look more interesting and contributes to capture the person's attention.
I love this example created by one of ...
Developing the content and flow of an interactive branched scenarios is one thing. Creating the visual structure is another. In today's post we'll look at some key considerations when building scenarios and come up with a simple storyboarding process to help think through the scenario design and layouts.
Branched Scenarios: 3C Model
Years ago, I introduced the 
Do you need to be an e-learning programmer to build e-learning courses?
A lot has changed with e-learning over the past decade or so. As noted before, it 
There's a lot that goes into building interactive scenarios. Obviously content is king and critical to building a branched scenario that is both engaging and effective. One key part of the scenario construction is establishing context. The good thing is that a single image often suffices to establish the scenario context.
The free stock images I shared recently are perfect for building interactive scenarios and establishing visual context.
A while back I shared some 
Between the workshops I run, blog emails received, and helping in the community, I get to see hundreds of e-learning courses. A common issue for many courses is transitioning from sharing content to helping people 
Some people asked how I created the animated .gifs similar to the ones I gave away for 
One of my favorite features in PowerPoint is saving the PowerPoint slideshow as a video. That means anything you put on the PowerPoint slides (from animations to slide transitions) is output as video. With some creativity, you can pull together some pretty slick explainer-type presentations with a tool most of us already have.
Today, I want to show something simple that may give you some ideas for your own training videos.
Create Videos in PowerPoint: Examples
Before we get started, here's a cool example from Duarte that Microsoft included in ...
I did a workshop on simple ways to create animated .gifs for e-learning courses. In part of the workshop we play around with using them as header graphics for Rise courses.
Header graphics are mostly decorative so the trick is to get decent enough quality while keeping the file size down (which is a major challenge with animated .gifs). I created a number of .gifs from some generic videos and figured I'd share them here for those who may be interested in using them.
Examples of Headers Using Animated Gifs
Here ...
Variables add all sorts of capability to the learning experiences you create. They allow to move past linear, click-and-read content to more complex interactions with branched scenarios and personalized, adaptive learning.
Today I'd like to share a tip that really comes in handy when working with variables. It'll save time and really help when you use a bunch of variables that are interdependent.
The 1-2-3 of Variables
Working with variables is a three-step process:
The question I see asked almost every day revolves around locking navigation until a user has completed a task. In the most common case, the first slide is a course menu. The user clicks a button, goes to a module, completes it, and comes back.
At that point, the module is marked complete and the user goes to another module and repeats the process until all of the modules are complete. Once that is satisfied, the user can continue.
There are a number of ways to approach this, but I'll show ...
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