Everyone probably already knows that Steve Jobs died today. We all knew it was coming but it is still a shock.

Here at Pinched Head we just wanted to pay tribute and say rest in peace to a truly inspirational man.

I have to admit it. I’m a bit of  a software junkie. I come to realize this every time I try to rehab my hard drive. I am addicted to prodding, poking, and playing with whatever appears out there in tech land. If I had to psychoanalyze myself, I’m probably motivated by an inner evil lazy-me that always looks for ways to do things faster, cheaper, and easily so that I can spend more time playing video games and drinking coffee. Maybe I’m just really critical and love finding fault in the technology that’s supposed to save our lives or maybe I’m still searching for that magic machine I talked about in a previous blog where all you have to do is pull the switch and all your wildest dreams will come true.

Whatever it is, I recently came across a very cool hosted presentation platform called Sliderocket that, in addition to having a really great name, may very well propel people in the eLearning community do things faster, cheaper, and more easily depending on their needs.

As I mentioned in my Rage Against the eLearning Machine blog, companies often end up deploying tools that are much too complicated for the type of eLearning they end up producing. They know they want to do eLearning so they go buy a robust eLearning tool and give it to the department responsible for training but end up creating some pretty basic presentation style learning — which is fine if that is all you need. So I say, why not look for a tool more in tune with what you are trying to produce so that you can do it faster? What good is all that functionality if you don’t use it or don’t need it?

Be honest. How many of you use MS Excel to do more than add up a few numbers or format a few tables?

Sliderocket is one of those software platforms that I think, can really fit the bill as an eLearning tool because it’s much more than a simple presentation tool. It is a powerful hosted authoring platform that handles audio, video, flash, text, PowerPoint import and some basic interaction through hyper-linking. You can create tables and charts with it, draw shapes and even include forms and polls when you purchase the upgraded version. It’s solid collaboration, sharing, versioning and tracking features allow you to work effectively with your subject matter experts and find out who is looking at your stuff.

Best of all, Sliderocket allows you to access your content anywhere from any platform and in either Adobe Flash or HTML 5 formats (although I have not tested it out on a tablet).

Though it’s marketed as a presentation platform, it’s actually not that far off  from becoming a full blown eLearning authoring and hosting environment. All they really need to do is add some built-in quiz-making features, a better built-in hierarchical menu system, a more robust user log in and tracking system (quiz scores and such), and some other behaviors like pop-ups and rollovers. If they added a few of these things, along with possibly of some kind of SCORM support, I think they could give a lot of the bigger eLearning vendors a run for their money. Already, they have laid a solid base for evolving their system with a plugin architecture that allows you to incorporate such things as twitter feeds, polls, quotes and word definitions.

Even without some of these additional features I can see someone using Sliderocket as an effective eLearning authoring tool.  It’s flash-based interface is easy to use and intuitive. If you have ever used PowerPoint you should have no problem settling in and creating something pretty nice – especially given the many included themes available and the ability to customize them.

Do you want to synchronize audio with images and text on the screen with nice fades and transitions? Sliderocket does that. Do you have video? It’s easy to import and add it to a screen with it’s own video controller. Need a menu? Well you can do that too, albeit manually – just create some hyperlinks on your side to various sections and then a menu button on each page that takes you back to the menu. (There is even a hyper-link option that will take you back to where you left off which could be useful).

Now I must inform you that some of the features I mentioned, including the ability to synchronize audio with text and image builds, do require an upgrade from the free plan, but even without those features, there is a lot you can do with some solid instructional design principles and some creativity. I am convinced that with a little imagination you can really stretch the boundaries of what this tool was intended for and create some very nice eLearning courses with Sliderocket. All in all, it’s one more interesting tool in your belt that just needs a little fleshing out in order for it to be that killer eLearning application we are all looking for.

Go ahead. Give it a go and tap into your inner lazy-person as you avoid working on that convoluted task matrix you created  in MS Excel.

If you don’t mind venturing into the cuddly world of cartoons for your eLearning (which I don’t mind doing once in a while because it can make boring information fun), there are some awesome tools for creating character driven scenarios that you really should check out: GoAnimate and Xtranoral. Each are micro-transaction and subscription-based services primarily targeted at the socially networked Machinima crowd (budding film-makers who like creating their own spoofs, stories, and satires using game software or other easy to use tools) but would be equally useful for groups wanting to add a little something to their eLearning courses. In this post, I focus on GoAnimate but hopefully will cover XtraNormal at a later date.

GoAnimate is a flash-based web-application that allows you to build anything from very simple template driven cartoon dialogues to complex mini movies with animation, voice-overs, and special effects. Take a look at this simple harassment scenario I built in a couple of hours using the tool (no audio).

Click to See my GoAnimate Example

GoAnimate comes with hundreds of different characters, scenes and props allowing you to build anything from a sweeping period-piece epic to a sci-fi action adventure depending on your budget and the amount of effort you want to put into it. If you don’t like the stock characters and scenes provided, GoAnimate let’s you customize to your heart’s content by giving you an interface where you can swap facial features, clothes, props and even import your own backgrounds and other items. If you have ever played an RPG video game where you can customize your character, you get the idea. If you haven’t,  building these characters can sometimes be the most fun part of the creation process. Ok admit it. We all want to see ourselves in an episode of The Simpsons.

Create Custom Characters

Once you have your characters built, you can start constructing your cartoon animation. Goanimate provides two mechanisms for this. One is a simple template-based process that allows you to make simple choices and create a fairly basic dialogue between two characters. This can be perfect if you want to quickly create a scenario where two people are discussing something. The other is a more complex tool that provides a timeline interface where you can create some very complex and impressive scenarios with many actions, characters and scenes.

Scene-based Timeline editor

In terms of eLearning, there are hundreds of applications. Maybe you want to do some soft-skills training to show how to resolve conflicts or demonstrate some of your cutting edge sales principles in action or management training (come on! don’t tell me managers don’t like cartoons too!)  GoAnimate can help you depending on your level of creativity and imagination.  Now I do suggest that you assign the job to someone who possesses at least some of these two last qualities not to mention, an ability to write and a sense of humour. Basically what you are creating here is a short film so make sure you think it through before you attempt one of these cartoon based scenarios.

You can incorporate dialogue into your movies in 3 ways. The first is by means of your standard voice bubbles. This is a classic cartoon convention that almost everyone understands. The second, is a simple text-to-speech feature where all you have to do is type in some text and the characters will dutifully say their lines, albeit in an awkward robotic voice. The third is a voice-over option where you can import your own audio clip and the characters will lip-sync their lines. Perfect for when you have some pretty good voice talent on hand. Personally I don’t think I would use the text-to-speech option because the awkwardness distracts from the presentation. It’s either professional voice over or voice bubbles for me.

Goanimate is a powerful tool for creating compelling cartoon scenarios. It has a breadth of options but you need to be aware that costs for creating this can add up as you have to purchase GOBUCKS in order to select different options, characters and props. Also, if you want to download an MP4 version of your movie to include in your projects you will need to find out more about the commercial licences they offer.

All in all, though, a great way to add some fun when building your eLearning scenarios.

There is a problem in the world of eLearning and I am not sure how we fix it.

It’s not a new problem. In fact, it has existed ever since the invention of the computer and the rise of the Internet but it continues to plague us. I am sure any time new technology like the printing press popped up throughout history the same problem reared it’s head. I’m talking about the tendency of businesses to over-invest in technological solutions and then skimp on the quality of the content that the technology is intended to serve up.

Far too often, companies who discover that eLearning is the way to go, jump in and invest inordinate amounts of time and money in a system or set of tools, whether it is a new LMS, a Content Management System, Human Resources Management system, or latest authoring tool, only to discover that it is not meeting their needs.

Why does this happen? Because, in my opinion, organizations fail to invest properly in content development. It happens all the time in our technology loving world. Just ask Research In Motion. They have a decent hardware platform in the new Playbook, but fail when it comes to delivering the content people want – the killer Apps. They have not focused enough on getting killer content and are paying the price. The same holds true for organizations looking into eLearning.

Time and time again, I have seen companies implement a new system  or buy a bunch of new eLearning tools and then feel their job is  done. They then assign the task of developing content to people that are often ill-equipped to create effective, engaging online courses. Usually, they give the job to an underfunded training department which must make the shift from from the old world of traditional stand-up training to the new world of online learning. Unfortunately, many of these training people do not have, or may never have, the necessary skills for online training development. This often results in what I call, Plop and Play eLearning.

Understandably, these new “developers”, sometimes not very technically savvy, wanting to keep their jobs and develop their careers, take up tools like Articulate, Lectora or a dozen other content development products and attempt to create some courses to go on their LMS.

Unfortunately, because of their lack of technical or design skill, they simply cut, paste, and plop the content into their tools or systems, in a way they are familiar with without any thought (or with lots of thought but no skill) for this new medium.  What you are left with is very bad eLearning which in turn get’s plopped on to a very expensive infrastructure.

When users access this type of learning, they don’t  care if you have spent a gazillion dollars on your system or authoring tool set, all they see is a bad course that gives them a bad impression of you and your bad system. Did I say this was a bad? Well, this situation isn’t even good for the company that sold you their fantastic tool or system because the average person often does not differentiate between the content and the system behind it.

A case in point. I recently, had a chat with the girlfriend of the owner of a very large LMS vendor. She took an online course at a local  University which uses her boyfriend’s LMS. She was not impressed with this eLearning stuff. She basically said to her boyfriend: ” What kind of crappy system are you selling here?!”  That didn’t sit well with him so he went online and discovered, that, yes, it was a crappy course, done by a professor who might be a genius in his field but knew nothing about online course design, media, information development, or presentation. As with every great technological system, you get out of learning technology what you put in to it. It’s the whole garbage-in garbage-out story. Unfortunately garbage tends to stink up impressions of the entire package it’s in.

This is not just a problem in academia. Not very long ago, a company called us asking if we could help them spruce up a course they had done.  But here is the problem: it was bad – really bad– badly written, badly designed, badly everything. Basically, what the developer had done was simply copy and paste Word documents into Lectora and then added a couple of arrows at the bottom for navigation. This was supposed to be a  completed course that only needed some tweaking.

Apparently, this organization purchased a site licence for Lectora but no one knew how to use it. Since, they were mandated to develop eLearning but were not properly staffed to do so, they left their copies of Lectora sitting on a shelf and hired an external consultant to develop the course. I am not sure where they got this person from, but this consultant did not know how to use Lectora either.  By the time we were asked to quote on fixing the course, their budget was completely spent. We did our best to kept our quote quite low – knowing full well that we would probably end up doing a lot of extra work for free just to make the thing half decent. Unfortunately, it wasn’t low enough.

After three or four weeks, we received a one-line email from an assistant that informed us that our quote was not successful. That’s fine. You win some you lose some. Now I don’t mean to dish up sour grapes or attempt to get back at someone for rejecting us like one might do on Facebook, but I think this illustrates how organizations invest in tools and learning management systems but when it comes down to content development, scrape the bottom of barrel. They are not given the expertise, guidance, staff or budget to do the job the way it should be done and often the wrong people end up leading the way.  It is unfortunate that this organization will end up with very poor eLearning on a very expensive LMS created by a very expensive authoring tool.

As with cooking (my favorite subject),  if the people using the appliances don’t know how to best mix and present the ingredients (even though they know all about properties of the ingredients), all that anyone ends up with is indigestion. It does not matter if you use the best ovens, mixers, utensils and put the final product on golden plates. You need to invest in a good chef and good cooks who know how to use the tools and technology to it’s potential. Perhaps your current cooks have the potential but need to go back to school and be retrained. Maybe you just need new cooks. Either way, if you are going to be in the business of serving food, you need to keep on investing all the way down the chain until you get a quality final product.

For those companies wanting to get into eLearning, I suggest you don’t just throw money at some tools and eLearning infrastructures and expect to get an effective learning program. I can’t tell you how many times I have talked to companies who bought a system or set of tools before they had good eLearning developers or a development process in place. Focus on quality content first and then get the tools that will take you to the next level.

One way to do this is to invest in people with the new skill sets first. I am not necessarily talking about people with an “instructional design” degree. Now they might be fantastic depending on the person you get,  but sometimes, in my experience, these people can bring a lot of nice theory to the table and a lot of buzz words but sometimes a lack of realism and practical skill. Of course I generalize but it has often been my experience.

Here are a few things companies can do to help fix things:

1. Find excellent communicators for your eLearning team – people who can write, think and create.

2. Look for people with  good technical aptitude. This is a must. If a person can’t unzip a file or figure out how to get files remotely using ftp, Dropbox, Sugar Synch or some other service, seriously think about NOT having them working on eLearning in any capacity. Sorry we are talking about survival skills here. Maybe you can teach them but find out if they have what it takes first.

3. Make sure your leaders have hands-on experience or are at least very technically literate when it comes to all aspects of eLearning. I don’t care if he or she is always going to be a manager in the department and plans on moving up the ladder and loves paper-work. Having a manager that has never personally done eLearning or something similar is just asking for trouble.  They need to know if these tools and technologies can do what you are asking them to do and the technical complexities that go with it. If the manager of your department does not know anything about stuff like Flash, HTML 5, LMS, a CMS – get one who does or train one.

4. Get Money. If only this was so easy. Someone, somewhere must  free up some cold hard cash to get these courses. It’s not cheap to do top-notch courses but you need to spend the money to develop training that’s accurate, engaging and complete. Of course, I am not saying you should just throw money at a project. But consider investing more heavily in good course development both in people and budget. If your organization does not have enough money to invest properly in eLearning, you are wasting what money you do have. I can’t tell you how many times I have see something that would have done just as well as a PDF that you hand out or put as html on an Intranet but instead get’s the eLearning treatment. It’s kind of like buying a restaurant-grade oven to cook chicken nuggets with. I know a lot of you are saying, “but my company won’t give me more money to do eLearning.” Consider raging against the machine and being honest with those in leadership about the quality of training they will get if they don’t pony up.

5. Hire experts like us. It doesn’t have to us but we certainly would like that. We and other small eLearning companies have done this for a lot of different companies. We are good at it and efficient because we have been through it before. Our experience with different technologies and types of content means that we know how to roll with the punches and can deal with whatever comes. We are content experts. We will not waste your time as we ride the learning curve. You need to consider if you really need to build an in-house team and spend money on expensive tools to do your eLearning. Maybe you just want to be subject matter experts and manage the development by outsourcing to a proven vendor who does this for a living. It’s always an option.

Let me tell you a story to wrap it up.

In a land not so far away and not so long ago, in a previous company of mine there was a group of documentation and training wizards who promised us a world where, through the magic of SGML, the power of databases and intelligence of sophisticated software all our wildest dreams would come true. All we would have to do is pull a switch and  out would pop sophisticated modular information products whether it was training courses, user manuals, multimedia materials, or online courses. It would be like Charlie’s Chocolate Factory only technical information instead of chocolate.  Needless to say, it was a pipe dream that wasted millions of dollars and many hours and there was no glass elevator to the sky.  The company was Nortel and it is now at the bottom of the sea.

We’ve just made available some  great new silhouettes of our illustrated Presenter People –  Zena, Frampton, Raj, Luba, Seymore and Serena  - in one down-loadable package – it’s over 100 images in all.

Silhouettes are a great addition to any course or presentation. Use them as section dividers, for creating contrast or drawing focus to key information.

Check them out at our online store presenterpeople.com

I’ve been seeing a lot of debate lately in various online forums and discussion groups about the merits of using photographs vs illustrations for presenting characters in elearning courses.  Some people say illustrated characters are cheesy while others talk about  how difficult it is to find useful photos.

To be honest I don’t believe one is better than the other – both have a place in our elearning courses.  The trick is knowing when and how to use each type to its best advantage.  We’ve done projects using illustrated characters and photographs so thought I’d share with you how we go about deciding which type to use.

Tone

The first thing we do before starting any design work is determine the tone of  the course - formal, informal, intimate, sarcastic, solemn, somber, playful, serious or whatever (I particularly like whatever).

Some tones lend themselves nicely to the use of photos while others are great for illustrations.

Photographs work well when the tone is formal, serious or somber. In this project, we use a serious tone to depict problem gambling and the stock photos work perfectly to visually depict the tone.

Illustrations, on the other hand, are great when using informal, playful or sarcastic tones. This is not set in stone, however, because photos can be fun and illustrations can be somber and serious – it’s just a guideline that we use to get us started.  Sometimes the most engaging courses flip conventions on their head.

Now here is something to consider just to add a bit of confusion to the mix – just because a topic might be serious or formal doesn’t mean you have to present it using a serious or formal tone.

Here is an example we did recently using one of our illustrated characters (now available through our online store). In this case, our client wanted us to take a creative approach to present some dry management training (I won’t bother you with the details).

We presented the instruction as a game show and the illustrations where perfect for conveying the information in a fun and informal way.

Narrative

Another thing we take into consideration before making our choice is how we plan to use the characters in our course. Do we just need a single shot of a person to convey a concept or do we plan to use the character in a story or scenario that will require multiple poses and expressions?

We often build our courses around a central story or narrative in which a character or set of characters appear in different situations throughout the course. When incorporating a narrative or storyline into our courses, we often use illustrations instead of photos because they provide more flexibility in how we present our characters.  We can position them any way we want, animate them to make it look like they are responding to on screen evens or decisions made by the learner.  We can even simulate it to make it look like they are talking.

Style

The style (overall look and feel) of the course also plays a role in whether we use photos or illustrations. When it comes to style, there are two things that we take into consideration. First, we want to make sure that whatever images we use have a cohesive look and feel so that we don’t end up creating something that looks like it has been cobbled together like some kind of weird patchwork quilt.  Second, the style of images (whether photographs or illustrations) has to support the language and tone of any narration, text or any other elements on the screen.

One drawback when using photographs over illustrations is that it is often hard to find photos that have a consistent style. They may use different lighting techniques,  have different backgrounds, be shot at different distances and different angles.  Illustrations can also be problematic especially when relying on free images or clip art, but if you are lucky enough to have access to a good illustrator the sky is really the limit.  I know what you’re thinking – ya if only we had an illustrator. If you can, I’d suggest hiring a freelance illustrator – there is plenty of talent out there for hire. If this is not an option, more and more elearning companies (including Pinched Head) are starting to make available royalty free collections of characters designed for use in online training courses. We offer a set of illustrated characters we are calling Presenter People (www.presenterpeople.com) that come in multiple poses and with a wide range of facial expressions. Other organizations such as eLearning Art and elearning brothers also offer character packages.