Here’s a learning video well worth watching.
The original, wall-sized video, was created for the Lincoln Museum to “illustrate the scale, scope and tragedy of the Civil War.”
Using the ratio of 1 week:1 second, the video begins with Lincoln’s election in 1860 and concludes with the final surrenders in 1865.
This powerfully emotional video uses animated shape tweens, soundtrack and text labels to tell the story. Amazing.
Here’s a creative way of anthropomorphizing the elements.
At first glance, this one might seem like a lot of work to produce. And maybe it would be for a single person, but what would it look like if an entire class or group were assigned to produce creative shorts?
So by now, chances are you’ve tried, or at least heard about, podcasting for learning. Whether you’re publishing content specifically as podcasts, extracting audio from existing e-learning courseware or interviewing lines of business asking them to share their stories, you’re probably well aware of the benefits of audio-based learning.
If you’re considering incorporating stories and interviews into your e-learning, but haven’t known where to begin, StoryCorps might offer you everything you need to get started.
What is StoryCorps?
The heart of StoryCorps is the conversation between two people who are important to each other: a son asking his mother about her childhood, an immigrant telling his friend about coming to America, or a couple reminiscing on their 50th wedding anniversary. By helping people to connect, and to talk about the questions that matter, the StoryCorps experience is powerful and sometimes even life-changing.
Just as powerful is the experience of listening. Whenever people listen to these stories, they hear the courage, the humor, the trials and triumphs of an incredible range of voices.
By listening closely to one another, we can help illuminate the true character of this nation reminding us all just how precious each day can be and how truly great it is to be alive.
Source: http://www.storycorps.net/about
To get an idea of how powerful these stories can be, check out their home page and listen to some samples.
StoryCorps has declared today, November 28, a National Day of Listening. To support and encourage everyone to participate, they’ve put together a free, Do-It-Yourself, guide that includes everything you need to get started with audio interviewing.
Topics include:
Most importantly, they offer a Question Generator including a “Great Questions List“. In it, they’ve created common questions around the most important family topics.
How can StoryCorps support your corporate podcasting for e-learning initiative?
From an instructional design perspective, we can appreciate the well-crafted, open-ended nature of the questions. Part of our job is to get SMEs to talk, open up and share their knowledge and experience. This is nothing new for us. What is new, however, is our intent to capture their answers in their own words, not ours.
Groups with the most to gain from audio-based interviews:
How could a similar approach be used in your organization to capture knowledge, stories and best practices?
One of the benefits of audio-based interviews for learning is its authenticity. It’s one thing for an ID to interview SMEs and rework their answers back into a course. It’s quite another experience for learners when they hear it first-hand from the SMEs.
Another benefit, from a rapid e-learning perspective, is the ability to produce audio courses considerably faster than traditional e-learning courses. Once you establish your interview format, style guide and standard questions, you have what you need to develop audio interviews based on breaking news or policy changes.
And another benefit is that audio-based interviews offer an alternative to traditional e-learning. Audio interviews, podcasts, stories are an engaging way to augment current e-learning offerings. They could also be used as a first-response to breaking news or policy changes while the final, more complete e-learning course is developed.
Audio stories are powerful, but there’s great value in supporting as many channels of distribution as possible, so consider transcribing your recordings.
This might even be a requirement for HR and Legal as they’ll probably want to know exactly what is being shared.
There are a lot of companies who offer these services and prices are reasonable. Here are two I know colleagues have worked with:
http://castingwords.com/
http://www.tech-synergy.com/
Here’s a short list of valuable resources both on mobile learning as well as storytelling. Please feel free to share your own resources.
Remember the good old days of e-learning development when your courseware would remain fresh and current for at least six months, maybe longer? It seemed even compliance courseware only needed updates a couple times a year.
Not so much anymore. Content complexity, dynamic industry regulations and an increasing need for user input has made courseware design more, not less, challenging than it used to be. Or should I say, more challenging using traditional development models.
Assuming e-learning courseware is your primary training product, what would it look like to offer an alternative, rapid course model based on O’reilly Rough Cuts?
Have you seen these? They’ve been out now for a couple years. From a recent search on both oreilly.com and peachpit.com, it appears they’re gaining momentum.
What are they? Rough Cuts are essentially book unpublished drafts that you can purchase (yes, real money) to access the books while they’re being written. You can even interact with the author to provide feedback and corrections
From their FAQs:
Rough Cuts content usually becomes available anywhere from two to six months prior to a book’s publication. It’s updated as the author and technical reviewers progress, so you’ll have access to new versions as they’re created. Chapters won’t necessarily be written and posted in the order in which they’ll appear in the published version. Rough Cuts titles live up to their name - they haven’t been fully edited, subjected to final technical review, or formatted for print. In other words, they’ll be very current, but they won’t be pretty.
You’re getting the content up to six months prior to release! In addition, you’re able to interact and provide feedback to the authors during this process. And this is from the publishing industry who, historically, hasn’t been the most amenable to digital publishing.
And if you think Rough Cuts are the lighter, “fluffier” titles, think again. They’re covering it all:
Developer:
Designer:
Educator:
True, you could argue this is just another business model designed to “rapidly” separate readers from their money, but the e-learning 2.0 in me sees this as a creative way to get “something” in front of my learners quickly, while enabling a greater number of learners to participate, and contribute, in the course design process. For this to work, there has to be an element of trust between consumer and publisher.
O’reilly obviously trusts its consumers to understand the tradeoffs of having access to unfinished products. O’reilly clearly states what it is you’re buying in Rough Cuts and trusts consumers to use the information with the understanding the content hasn’t been finalized.
Combined with input from actual readers, this model has to make the product that much better. The larger question is how many corporate training departments could trust their learners to buy into such a model? Would they throw out words like “risk” and “liability” before trying to understand how such a model could be applied? How could you initiate a grassroots initiative with individual lines of business?
This will no doubt be scary for some organizations. To be clear, this model does not mean the process has to be democratized to the point that no clear owner exists. Your SMEs, legal and business owners still own the final, published version. What you’re offering learners is more immediate access to content while capturing learner feedback during your normal course development cycle. Your audience is now participating in part of that design.
I’d be interested to see, either from O’reilly or its authors, how the model (+/-) impacted development times, quality and errata.
Rough Cuts clearly aren’t for all readers and neither is a similar courseware model. They’re designed for those long tail readers/learners who have a sincere, professional and passionate interest in having immediate access to content today, rather than tomorrow.
Thinking about your organization, its lines of business and the types of e-learning you currently create, could such a model be incorporated into your e-learning offerings?
Who would you need to work with to initiate such a model? Which groups and types of training content would be best suited for such a model?
Predictions for training departments in 2009 are anything but optimistic. Check out a recent Jay Cross post on the state of the industry and forthcoming “cataclysm”. Clive Shepherd also comments on our industry and offers now is the time for change and taking action.
If you’ve been trying to advocate for more e-learning 2.0 and informal learning, this could be the opportunity you’ve been looking for.
Last night we Netflix’d a PBS documentary on Benjamin Franklin.
I’ve actually seen this documentary before, but this time something stood out: Benjamin Franklin learned to swim by reading a book.
He didn’t learn with a swimming coach, or from ILT or WBT classes, but with a book containing simple illustrations.
The book is called The Art of Swimming and was published in 1696.
The book’s illustrations aren’t the detailed, technical illustrations created by Boeing engineers. Rather, they are simple drawings depicting a series of swimming moves. Benjamin Franklin’s intellectual curiosity also led him to add a few moves of his own to the book. Talk about learning transfer:-)
As we interact with our customers, business units and other trainers to debate which types of content are best delivered in ILT or WBT, blended and so on, it might be helpful to remember that a truly motivated learner will learn from any modality.
Mobile phone companies continue to raise the bar for the most creative compliance public service announcement (PSA).
It continues to amaze me (read: annoy) how groups *outside* the training department regularly design more creative and engaging training than those in the training department.
Consider the most recent Sprint PSA reminding moviegoers to turn off their cell phones before the show:
Awesome! Talk about creative compliance training. Can you imagine something similar in your next compliance, ethics or Code of Conduct e-learning course?
Look, this is nothing new for the film industry. AT&T has Martin Scorsese doing a similar PSA. Just as you’re getting into the clip, Whammo, you’re reminded to turn off your cell phone.
Understand that this is not unique content that lends itself to creative interpretation. Rather, this is a straightforward compliance message “reminding” you to turn off your cell phones. What is different, is the presentation of the message.
The compliance message could have been:
Using the same approach from Happy the Hedgehog, we could have created intros showing people from various departments in the company. Maybe each person introduces themselves and says what they do in the company. Then, after six or seven people, the final person comes up, introduces himself and what he does: “I’m Bob. I’ve been here fifteen years, I work in Finance and I use the data from these reports to steal from the company.” And the final onscreen text could read, “It takes many people to make a company. It takes one to ruin it.” Find a connect and use it.
In a recent post by Karl Kapp, we’re reminded how “Southwest Airlines takes the boring compliance requirements of airline safety and makes it fun..” If you can make airline safety fun, you can make your e-learning content fun.
One of my favorite quotes around content design comes from Michael Allen: “There’s no such thing as boring content, only boring treatment of content.” I heard that at one of his e-learning workshops over five years ago and I’ve used it with my teams ever since.
With that, do you think the average e-learning compliance course would write a Cell Phone Awareness course?
Most elearning is predictable. Sure, you can upgrade your image subscription from Photos.com to Getty.com, add some Flash widgets, BigShot clips, and so on. Those are all ways to enhance the design. But when we talk about truly engaging content, we’re not only talking about the content, but also the way the content is presented.
For those who think video, multimedia and high-budget production development is required to present engaging content, consider this creative non-smoking PSA from the 1970s:
Can you believe that audio? This is obviously low production value by any standards.
The Bic example could easily have been created with two static images animated as Gifs or Flash. The scenario is what matters most. Granted, the Bic example might be too risque for most corporate audiences, but the concept of two products interacting to deliver a compliance message is spot on. This would make a great opener to a module on appropriate and inappropriate smoking places.
There’s no need to re-develop your existing courseware.
Instead, consider enhancing what’s already developed by including engaging, “Happy” intros at the beginning of each module.
You can get a lot of mileage from creative openers that set the stage for a chapter.
If you’re struggling with trying to create more engaging openers, consider reaching out to someone from marketing, sales, IT or any other department. Take them to lunch or coffee. Share your project with them.
You’re not trying to offload the training on others, but rather you’re looking for a non-training perspective on communicating the message.
One idea that worked well was to take the entire team to lunch and hold script read-throughs. We’d read through each module and throw out crazy ideas for communicating each slide. This took a few hours but the end product was always better than what we started with.
The advertising industry is a great place to look for inspiration. One site I’ve used for years is AdCritic. AdCritic that hosts the best agency-created TV commercials. Most of these are commercials trying to sell products, but isn’t that what training is also trying to do?
One of my favorite magazines is Communication Arts. This magazine celebrates the best in visual communication. Each year they offer the best in each area with an Interactive, Advertising, Illustration and Photography Annual. If you skip the subscription, at least pick up those four issues.
It’s all about creativity, having fun and most of all, not taking ourselves too seriously.
The cell companies obviously take pride in creating the most talked about, most engaging PSAs. In other words, the more they pull you in with their PSAs, the more you talk about it. The more you talk about it, the more you remember it.
Folks, this is TRAINING we’re talking about. Why can’t this be your training? What would it look like for instructional designers to compete internally for the most creative course opener, module or course? Could creative, good-spirited competition among designers help bring fresh ideas to your courseware?
The media industry realized they have to make commercials more engaging and unpredictable to connect with consumers. How much longer before e-learning begins connecting with its learners?
I’ve been putting the final touches on my Second Life workshop for DevLearn08. This will be a great opportunity for anyone looking to get started with Second Life as a corporate learning environment.
The workshop will be an all hands-on event where participants will have the opportunity to create personalized environments they can take back to their own organizations.
I’ll post an outline over the weekend but here’s a quick overview of the workshop:
Building Basics: 3D does not have to be difficult. In fact, Second Life offers one of the easier environments for learning 3D.
In this module, participants will learn to:
Texture Basics: Textures are a great way to create personalized environments with your organization’s branding. Simple prims come alive after your logos, branding and training content is applied.
In this module, participants will learn to:
Training Scripts: Second Life offers a lot of ways to create meaningful interactions. While these are limited in some ways compared to the types of functionality offered by the Internet and Flash, it is important to understand what’s available and how to configure them.
Some of the learning scripts participants will learn to use and configure are:
Video and Audio: Did you know you can convert your existing Flash-based elearning courseware to video that can be brought into Second Life? That’s right!
In this module, participants will learn how to:
Training Aids and Presentations: Whiteboards, slide shows and presentation tools are a great way to enhance synchronous and self-paced learning in Second Life. Regardless of one’s pedagogical views on using such tools in the virtual world, it’s helpful to at least understand the available tools, how they work and how to configure them.
In this module, participants will build upon their texturing and scripting knowledge to:
Bonus:
To make this an even more meaningful workshop, I’m offering some additional support for participants:
This workshop is designed is to provide the necessary hands-on training and support for participants to begin designing their own virtual spaces.
If you’re interested in learning more, please drop me a note or contact Elearning Guild.
One of the features my team is most excited about in Flash CS4 is the new object-based animation.
This should significantly reduce a lot of basic elearning production times for tasks such as:
Granted, Elearning is (should be) much more than animated bullets and sliding text but this is a popular courseware format for a lot of organizations.
If this new feature reduces development times like I think it will, development managers will have more time to allocate for custom content and interaction development.
Let’s take a look at where production times are spent in a given course. Leaving aside custom elearning development, consider that most corporate, Flash/audio-based elearning contains the following components:
Clearly the majority of most courseware development is around content screen development. Maybe I’m overly optimistic about this feature, but I’m hoping it frees up more time for custom content and interactions.
We all know how templates enable design teams and their customers to jump over much of the upfront drudgery and focus on the important part: the content.
Should it then be any surprise that newsmakers would use such templates in their social networking efforts?
Barack Obama’s group obviously wanted to maximize their Flickr juice by rapidly updating their Flickr site with images from today’s news. Today, at least, it appears the production team outpaced the communication team on some of the images.
But should we care that we see their generic captions? The images obviously aren’t generic. They’re real-time and were probably uploaded within minutes, if not hours of the event. What’s the primary purpose here? Is it to provide near, real-time photos of an event we’re following, or an edited description of the event? (Hint: Flickr is a “photo management and sharing application“) Traditional media will have plenty of time creating content describing today’s events in tomorrow’s papers.
Do you see it as a sign of sloppiness and poor attention to detail on the Obama side?
Or, do you see it as getting something “now” and the rest “later” (maybe)?
I wonder if our perceptions of the Obama’s Flickr site also reflect how we view and treat our elearning design. Does every elearning event: custom, rapid and informational, require the same development cycle? Are there types of content so urgent that a full, 3-pass QC isn’t necessary?
Personally, I appreciate the real-time approach and look past any missing extras. Oh, and I also like getting a glimpse into the Obama Flickr Style Guide 
Heading to Las Vegas next week for the AICPA Tech+ conference.
Focus for this conference is on AICPA’s 2008 Top Technology Initiatives.
While Second Life didn’t quite make it to that list, the session should still prove valuable for CPAs interested in learning more about how people are using, learning and working in Second Life.
Some screengrabs from the Second Life build I put together for my presentation: http://www.flickr.com/photos/oque/tags/aicpa/
David Anderson david@multimedialearning.com
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