Rage Against the eLearning Machine – How technology can make fools of us all.

Posted on June 22, 2011 by Rick

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.

Easy Mobile Learning (Sort of…)

Posted on July 13, 2010 by Rick

Ok, so you have some existing e-learning with audio, video, animation that your users access online with their personal computers (Do we still use the phrase “personal computers?”). Maybe you have created your course in something like Articulate Presenter or Flash where a large part of it consists of more listen-and-learn content and less click-and-read.

Why not make it available on mobile devices as another option so that users can access at least part of (the less interactive part) while on the road? Now by mobile format, I don’t mean true mobile learning. I simply mean video files that can be played on your IPod, Iphone, Ipad, Blackberry, or Android device much as you would a video podcast.

Here is an easy way to convert your online learning to a mobile format.

Step 1: Get some screen recording software

Get yourself a copy of Camtasia Studio 6 or 7 from Tech Smith. I use Camtasia and not something like Captivate from Adobe because, not only is it cheaper, but it has a great Pan and Zoom feature that allows me to effectively zoom in on parts of the presentation and pan across the screen. These are very important features when adapting something for the small screen that was originally intended for the big screen.

Step 2: Record

Record the main stage area of your course with Camtasia. Camtasia, allows you to record not only what appears on your computer screen, but also the system audio before it comes out of the speakers. This will give you the best sound quality. If you don’t have it set right, you may end up recording the audio that has been picked up by your external microphone as it comes out of your speakers. I had to fool around with the audio properties somewhat to get the settings right. In Camtasia Studio 7, in the audio options I chose Record System Audio.

In Camtasia Studio 6, you will need to go into the audio options and choose either the Stereo Mix or Speaker Audio. Test it out on a short clip and see if it captures the audio correctly.

Once you know how to do it, you can record anything that you can see and hear on your computer just the way it was created. It is a great way to keep a copy of a video you like, extract audio from a flash movie, create a video from a flash movie. Whatever.

Tip: Some programs like Articulate allow you to let the entire course play automatically from one section to the next. If you can, set it up to do auto play so that you don’t have to stop and start the recording and have multiple recordings to import into Camtasia. If you can’t do this, you can make smaller movies for each section of your course and then combine them in Camtasia.

Step 3: Import into Project

Once you have your recording(s), you will import them into Camtasia for editing. You will need to create a new Camtasia project. I suggest you choose a size for your project closer to the size of the output you want to create so that you can see how much you will have to zoom in on the material. However, if you want to create multiple sizes and formats for new devices as well as older ones you may want to start with a larger size and scale your videos down later with another tool. In my case, I wanted to create output for older Blackberry Curves as well as newer Ipod Touches and Iphones. I wanted various sizes to take advantage of the larger screens so I set my project setting to 640 x 480 and used another tool to process the other sizes and formats of videos.

Step 4: Edit

Once you have your movies in the Camtasia program, it is time to edit them. This will consist mostly of starting from the beginning and progressing to the end all the while zooming in on key parts of your presentation that might not be as visible on a smaller device.

You will need to make some judgment calls. Sometimes this may mean showing a full screen and then zooming on a particular image or bullet point, other times you may have to sacrifice showing the larger screen with associated images and pan around the screen focusing on individual elements. Since this is only good for narrated courses where the user can fill in the blanks by listening, there will be some trade-offs.

We did this for one client who had a course that was about an hour in length. In this case, we had to break the video into three parts to make it easier for users to download and watch them in reasonable chunks. This meant also finding logical breaks and creating a clear title for the beginning and end of each part.

Step 5: Convert

Once you are done the editing, you can export the course from Camtasia and start converting the videos to other formats and sizes. In our case, we chose one of the output formats that produced a standard MP4 file. Once we had the MP4 file, we ran it through a program like Format Factory to give us the various sizes and formats for common mobile devices. With newer smart phones this can mean quite large resolutions so make sure you keep this in mind when exporting from Camtasia. Also, keep in mind some older devices only handle 320 x 240 video and some only run 3GP. In most cases MP4 is the best format for devices out there.

Conclusion

Though the final product may not be as interactive as some people would like, this is one more good option to make existing elearning content accessible for people on the go.

Articulate Engage 09 – Do the Monkeys Love it?

Posted on August 4, 2009 by Nancy

If you want a simple way to interject interactivity into your eLearning courses, check out Articulate Engage. The folks at Articulate describe Engage as ”a quick and easy tool that lets you create lean-forward experiences that learners love”. I’m not exactly sure what lean-forward means — but they’re right on the money with the fast and easy part.

Even a monkey could use it

An intuitive, uncluttered interface makes Engage mind-numbingly simple to use — Not being one who likes to expend unnecessary brain power, this alone makes it a worthwhile purchase. It’s so easy most people won’t need any instruction to use it — most simians won’t either. monkey_business

Engage comes with ten flash-based interactions that will jazz up even the most basic page turner. Just pick one, enter your content in the template, press a button, and Bob’s your uncle. The only challenge, and part of the fun, involves figuring out which interaction to use for your content. Just because an interaction was designed for FAQs doesn’t mean you have to use it for an FAQ. Articulate provides excellent tutorials, demos, two really great blogs, and online forums to help get the creative juices flowing.

You can publish your content to several formats. I especially like that you can publish to Microsoft Word. We use this option a lot as a way to distribute the content for review although we did have some issues with Engage crashing when trying to generate the Word documents.

Here’s a labeled graphic interaction that I put together in about 5 minutes. It uses the default settings for the colours, fonts, navigation and labels.

Click here to see the Engage interaction

We often use the labeled graphic interaction for software training — we insert a screen image and then use the labels to highlight key elements. The really cool thing is that you can add audio and media (image, video, Flash, even another Engage interaction) to enhance the experience.

If you explore the posted interaction, you’ll see that I nested the Engage interaction within itself a couple of times just for fun. Some of the other interaction types handle this better but this one should give you a taste of what can be done with just a little imagination. Ah but I digress.

A little yoga wouldn’t hurt

The thing that makes Engage great — its beautiful simplicity — also poses a limitation. Take the presentation template for instance. I can adjust the elements such as the colour scheme and fonts, but I want more flexibility. Give me the ability to change the style of the player controls, the title bar and import my own buttons and arrows for the labeled and guided interactions. We rarely use Engage on its own so would give anything (well almost) to be able to hide the title bar when integrating the interaction into a larger course. It’s funny, you can make the background transparent but not the header bar.

I modified the colour scheme in a guided image interaction to illustrate what I mean.

engage_mods

10 out of 12 monkeys wanna do this

Within each interaction type, there are only a few places to insert text or media. This could be construed as a good thing as it forces consistency and makes it harder to screw up the design. I find it a little restrictive. Take my simian (sorry, I mean monkey) example for instance. I could only add one main image in the labeled graphic interaction. This meant that I first had to use another tool to combine all my separate monkey pictures into a single image. I’d rather just insert the separate images and have the flexibility to move them around to get the optimal positioning.

In some interactions, I can’t re-size the imported images, videos or Flash files. In others, I can. Why not make them all function the same way? There is a work around in which I can edit the sizes in the data.xml file that is produced with the published output, but this is inconvenient as I’d have to make this edit every time I publish the file.

There are options to control the playback. Unfortunately, we rarely use the one that sets the presentation to advance by itself because there is no way for the learner to pause the playback or step back to review something they missed. Seems to me like something people might want to do.

At the risk of sounding cranky, (I love this product honest), I have to mention the file naming convention. When publishing an interaction, Engage always names the output file engage.swf and the content folder engage_content. This isn’t an issue when using Engage with Articulate Presenter, but we often import multiple Engage interactions into other authoring tools such as Lectora. Each time we publish an interaction, we have to manually rename the output files to give them unique files names; otherwise, they will overwrite one another when exported from the authoring tool. This makes dealing with revisions a pain.

The importance of the company one keeps

Some products have great potential only to be ruined by poor marketing, sales and support. Some companies hide their products from view forcing you to buy them before you can even see the list of features. Here I’d like to give a shout out to Articulate. This is one awesome company. Not only do they provide a fully-functional 30-day trial version of Engage, they do an excellent job of showcasing their products and building a user community. Everything from the design of their website to their excellent demos, blogs and customer support reinforce the message they believe in quality.

How to make a monkey happy

Aside from an unlimited supply of bananas, the following enhancements would really make Engage rock.

More interaction types — an interactive flow chart or work flow diagram would be nice for starters. To their credit, Articulate makes the SDK available. If you have some Flash knowledge and a little imagination you can make your own interactions and even share them with the wider Articulate community. People have not grabbed on to this yet, at least the sharing part anyway. We’d like to hear what other people think might make a good interaction or any feedback from people who have tried working with the SDK.
Give us the option to name the output files/folder
Give us an option to hide the title bar.
Add an easy way to link different Engage presentations together.
Add an easy way to synch the audio with graphic labels.
How about a rollover option in the labeled graphic interaction?
Engage output currently displays at 720×540. Give us an option to change the default size when we publish.
The ability to publish to PDF or other formats — maybe even where self-playing interactions can be exported to iPod/Blackberry video or any video format for that matter.
The ability to publish partially “skinless” (sans border, title, etc.) — this is a feature in Adobe Captivate that I really like.

I’ve prattled on long enough. Do the monkeys like Engage? Why yes they do — in fact they love it.

10 out of 12 monkeys like this product

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eLearning Technologies and Practice

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