16 Sweet E-Learning Tips — and an Update on the Guru Awards

This guest blog post is by Articulate Community Manager Jeanette Brooks.

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Like kids in a candy store. That about sums up how we’ve felt while digging into the nearly 200 submissions from the Articulate Guru competition! We’re totally amazed at the variety and quality of these entries. We received technical courses, multimedia marketing presentations, interactive games, and all sorts of other great content built with Articulate tools. You folks do awesome work!

In fact, with this many cool submissions, the judging process has been harder than choosing between gourmet chocolate and a tres leches macaroon. In other words, super tough.

So here’s the scoop. We’re pretty close to wrapping things up, so you can expect to hear something soon. As soon as we’re able, we’ll notify the winners, and then we’ll share with you their totally sweet winning courses. We’ll also have quite a few top-shelf honorable mentions to feature in the Community Showcase, too. So stay tuned – it won’t be much longer, and we’re as anxious to commend the winners as you are!

And speaking of sharing cool stuff, the Articulate community whipped up a nice batch of e-learning goodies during the past week to help you build great courses. Here’s a sampling of the latest tips & insights you won’t want to miss:

Notable tutorials:

• How to apply background music to a range of consecutive slides

• 5 ways to hide your production notes in your rapid e-learning course

• Quickly resize and convert images with this free tool

• Pull all the images from a PowerPoint file and easily do a batch rename, based on the project

• Make a menu for your rapid e-learning course that looks like a social media widget

Conversations in the Community:

• How do you design the concluding screen in your e-learning course?

• My SMEs just gave me a ton of dry info (org charts and bullets), and told me to make it interactive. How should I do it?

• What’s in your graphics/image-editing toolbox?

• How are you applying brain-based learning theories in your courses?

New blog posts:

• A Simple Roadmap to Better Rapid E-Learning

• WebJunction: Using Articulate to Help Libraries Build Great E-Learning

• Get 16 Enhancements, Including Office 2010 Support, with Articulate Studio ’09 Update 7

Seen on Twitter:

• @articulatebrian shares a knowledgebase article that lists optimal image/video sizes for Articulate Engage

• @SashaScottLtd shares a click-to-magnify effect for your Articulate Presenter project

• @suchadrag shares a learning resource built with Articulate tools, used by the National Network for Interpreting, and featured at the recent ALTC2010 conference

• @tmiket shares a link to “Five Ways to Improve Bad E-Learning”