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Asynchronous Learning
Fighting for Attention: Engaging E-Learning Hacks
Dec 21st
Designing e-learning is my creative passion. I get stoked at the prospect of authoring a course that is fun, engaging, and appealing to learners. As an erstwhile student and current professional, I’ve taken scores of self-paced e-learning courses over the years. I’m often astonished by how static and dull most of these presentations are. Granted, there are technical limitations (and in some cases, design standards) that dictate how much multimedia can be used in self-paced course modules. However, smart uses of multimedia in online courses can help capture attention, which is fundamental to facilitating the learning process. Below you’ll find some of my favorite hacks for adding pizzazz to online presentations. Be sure to adhere to the terms of service of each resource listed… and be a good librarian by respecting copyright.
Let’s Get Visual
If you are in need of fun photorealistic visuals, but you are not a Photoshop pro, check out 3dVia’s 3D Collage app. This neat Facebook application allows you to design hybrid 2D/3D images by using a photograph as a backdrop and importing 3D models into the scene. 3D Collage is fast, fun, and free. Simply upload your own 2D image into the program or snag one from Flickr, locate a 3D model from inside the app’s library, and then publish the output to your Facebook profile. Once the picture has been published, simply save a copy of it and paste it into your e-learning course. I’m currently working on a point-and-click adventure about customer experience, and I’ve used 3D Collage to develop all the in-game images.
Hit learners with a quick shot of fun and creativity by using any of these e-learning hacks.
Of course there are times when you may need to add video to your e-learning modules. Youtube is an excellent clearinghouse for finding video assets. Depending on your authoring tool, however, streaming videos can present a challenge. If you are using Adobe Captivate 4, there is an excellent Youtube widget that allows for streaming directly to your Captivate presentation. If you do not have Captivate 4, you can likely import the Youtube video as a Flash video file. To save Youtube video as FLV, simply go to KeepVid, enter the URL of the video you want snag, download the file, and then save it as an FLV. Voila! You should now be able to insert the Flash video into your presentation. This tip is useful for authoring tools like Articulate and the free online course builder, Udutu.
Another hack I commonly use is recording screencasts to demonstrate processes. Screencasts are digital recordings of computer screen output. You do not need anything expensive like the commercial version of Camtasia to record one. It’s possible to make a screencast directly from your browser by using Screencast-o-matic.com. Screencast-o-matic integrates with Youtube so that you have a place to host your screencasts for free, provided you have a Youtube account. After recording the screencast, simply upload it to YouTube from the Screencast-o-matic interface. You can link to the screencast, stream it during a course if you are using Captivate’s Youtube widget, or you can rip the FLV file using KeepVid.
It’s Not What You Say, but How You Say It
I prefer self-paced e-learning modules that have audio narration (with the option to mute in the event that the narrator is terrible!) When recording audio, course authors must be mindful of sound quality and audio level. A best practice that I recommend is to record the audio separately, using an editor like the freeware Audacity, and then optimize the audio before importing it into a course. This ensures that all slides have equal sound levels. You can also use Audacity for more creative purposes. Consider applying a voice filter to the narration of an objective slide for a change in pace. If you are using characters or agents in your e-learning, you can also apply filters to their voices for a bit of variety. Here are my three favorite custom filters for Audacity and directions for creating each.
Robot Voice Filter:
1. Record voice
2. Highlight selection
3. Go to Effect, then scroll down to Delay
4. Change the Decay amount 10
5. Change the Delay time to .009
6. Change the Number of Echoes to 30, then click OK
7. Go back to Effect, and repeat Delay four times.
8. Play your edited track
Chipmunk filter:
1. Record voice
2. Highlight selection
3. Go to Effect, then select Change Pitch
4. Modify the Percent Change to 117.50
5. Play your edited track
Walkie-Talkie Filter:
1. Record voice
2. Highlight selection
3. Go to Effect, then FFT Filter
4. Click on purple line and drag it up to the top (12db)
5. Click 10000Hz
6. Click OK
7. Click Effect, then High Pass Filter
8. Change Cutoff Frequency to 2000, then click OK
9. Repeat this process 2 times
10. Play your edited track
Have fun using these hacks, but resist the urge of inserting too many. There is no substitute to sound instructional design.
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Loading ...An elearning adventure
Mar 5th
We’re conducting an experiment over at WebJunction. And you can help us discover the answers. It’s called the Learn Together Project.
The challenge: can we take a self-paced, online, non-library-specific course and give it meaningful, social engagement with library context?
The course: The Customer’s Voice, a course in improving our anticipation and satisfaction of customers’ (patrons’) expectations
The setup:
- We (WJ) create a group as a virtual classroom.
- We invite people in the library world to join the group and sign up for the same course at the same time. (This is where you come in.)
- We have a live-online kickoff meeting to get the learning juices flowing.
- We proceed independently through the course.
- We share our insights and comments in the discussions, and share library-relevant resources with the group.
- We feel increased motivation and energy to learn and to apply our new knowledge to improve customer service on the job.
- We learn together.
If you want to participate in our social learning experiment, join the group, enroll in the course, and we’ll see you at the kick-off meeting.
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Sep 5th
I finally read David Wienberger’s latest book, Everything Is Miscellaneous –the one everyone was buzzing about awhile back. While I admit to a catalogically geeky fascination with the evolution of knowledge organization, the aha! that I took away from the book relates to how we learn, how we ingest real meaning from bits of knowledge, and how randomness feeds that meaning. The key to learning is connectivity.
Our society’s traditional notion of knowledge acquisition is that it’s a solo affair, as Weinberger posits in the chapter on Social Knowing. Most of our educational system is built on that assumption—just consider the weighty standardized tests imposed on high schoolers, where each student sits in a cone of mental isolation and searches for the relevant bits of information swimming around in her solitary brain. One of the great challenges of online learning is how to socialize self-paced learning, which by nature fits with the solitary model.
Steven Downes’s essay on E-Learning 2.0 (Oct 2005) suggests the potential for online learning to break out of the isolation ward and into the rich sphere of socially networked learning.
“What happens when online learning software ceases to be a type of content-consumption tool, where learning is ‘delivered,’ and becomes more like a content-authoring tool, where learning is created? The model of e-learning as being a type of content, produced by publishers, organized and structured into courses, and consumed by students, is turned on its head. Insofar as there is content, it is used rather than read … And insofar as there is structure, it is more likely to resemble a language or a conversation rather than a book or a manual.”
The success of Learning 2.0 had as much to do with the social interaction among the participants as it did with the exploration of the cool tools. As we design instruction for staff development, let’s focus on the connectivity between people, whether electronic or f2f.
btw, if you don’t have time to read Weinberger’s book, you can spend 57 minutes watching the video –the YouTube generation’s version of Cliff Notes.
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Jul 27th
Thanks to Pete and Gail for inviting me to add my words of wisdom to this blog (whatever those words may be I’m not sure yet!)
At SOLINET, we are busily creating asynchronous classes using Adobe Captivate. We used to use a product called Toolbook and unfortunately when the one person at SOLINET who knew how to use it and update it, left the company, we decided it wasn’t worth our time to re-learn it. So for a couple of years we haven’t really had any asynch training. It has been an interesting road to deciding on a product. It took a long time to finally decide on Captivate – and most of it was a money issue. I personally wanted something a lot more robust and complex but those cost a lot. So we did a lot of testing internally and finally decided on Captivate. There is a new version coming out (#3 to be exact) in August and I have high hopes for some of the quiz functionality. I’m curious to see if anyone has any specific tips to share about creating content with Captivate.
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