It’s Time to Take the Content Dump to the Dump
April 26th, 2022
I've been at this e-learning game for close to 30 years. While the technology has changed over the years, I still see a lot of the same problems e-learning (and training for that matter) had 30 years ago.
The main problem is that pushing content passes for training. Thus a lot of what we call e-learning courses are mostly content dumps. Because the technology has made it easier to build "courses" the content looks better than it did 30 years ago; but courses like that are both ineffective training ...
I am a simple person and usually try to explain things in three steps. They're easy to remember and share. Here is a round up of all previous posts that share three steps to do something to improve your course design and development.
General E-Learning Course Design Tips
As a general rule, it's good practice to edit files on your local drive and not a network drive (or online storage like Google Drive or Dropbox). For example, when I work with a .story file that's on Dropbox, I'll sometimes get some sort of syncing error or a series of duplicated or conflicted files. This makes sense because the drive is constantly monitoring changes in the file and updating the file. One tip for Dropbox is to pause syncing if you're working from a Dropbox ...
I do a lot of presentations live and online. I also record a ton of tutorials. During those presentations I'm usually showing how to do something and attendees need to see the mouse movement and where it's at. Here are a few simple tips to highlight your mouse when presenting or recording your tutorial.
Here's a video tutorial that walks through the tips below if you want more detail.
https://youtu.be/y_pZEX2c7tA
I've written about the Microsoft PowerToys in the past. They come with some handy applications. There's an application that 
Visually branding your e-learning courses is a common requirement. A great way to figure out how to brand the course is by mimicking what's available publicly from the organization's website (and intranet).
These sites tend to have all sorts of media assets that are already vetted to fit the organization's brand and often work well for e-learning content. The challenge is how to get access to those assets.
Connect with the Marketing Team
Before you spend time scraping your sites for images, connect with the marketing (or web) team. In the ...
I'm not sure what the number is, but my guess is that compliance/regulatory training makes up a large majority of the e-learning that gets created.
Most compliance training isn't training to change performance. The focus is awareness and certifying that the learner understands and accepts those expectations. Or perhaps it's some sort of annual refresher.
I used to work with a community healthcare group and the nursing staff did a week of annual training. They already knew the content. However, they had to review the content each year and be ...
If you're not using 
Ideally you have an LMS or using a product like 
The death of Flash has created a mess for many e-learning developers who have to look for things in older e-learning courses that were published in Flash.
I run into that a lot in the community and with some of my old demos on this blog. It sure is a pain. Not being able to see the file makes it a challenge to recall what was in it or to even know what to look for to update it and republish.
The good news is that I 
Let’s be honest, a lot of training is useless. That's because there’s a lot of demand to put content online and force feed it to the learners and call it training. Most of that demand comes from various regulatory or compliance requirements so that type of training will always exist.
Most learners take those courses begrudgingly and hope to get in and out and certified as fast as possible.
The training that isn’t useless is performance-based training that helps people do something new or better. Because there are performance expectations ...
Are you tired of building the same courses over and over again? Sure, you may get to build a hundred courses, but they’re the same course built a hundred times. The result is that many of the courses look the same and they don’t provide the opportunity to expand your course design skills.
Today I’d like to offer a few tips on how you can get out of the hundred course rut.
Build Better E-Learning by Making Time to Do Something Different
Many organizations allow ...
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