Ashley Chiasson, M.Ed

Instructional Design and E-Learning Resources

August 18, 2014

I get a lot of questions about the products and resources I use the most, so I thought it might be easiest to develop a resource site that I can add and subtract from as it evolves. Full disclosure: there are several affiliate links throughout, but these are all products and/or resources that I’ve used, trust, and love. You’ll see this page featured in my navigation, so if you leave the site and come back, it will be very easy to find 🙂

Tools

Articulate Storyline and Studio – I am a huge lover and supporter of both suites of software; however, I have to admit that I prefer to develop within Articulate Storyline, often using Studio-developed assets to supplement aspects of my Storyline courses. The Articulate E-Learning Heroes community is one of the most active community I’ve been apart of, and I really appreciate how supportive everyone seems to be. Both suites of software are worth the investment, and if you or your organization are on the fence about purchasing licenses, I encourage you to try out the 30 day free trials.

Adobe Captivate – I won’t be the first to admit that this is not my favourite tool to develop in; I tend to find Adobe’s interfaces more difficult to navigate, but I will say that once you’ve mastered one of their program interfaces, you likely won’t have a hard time with others. I like using Captivate to develop software simulations and the most often used feature (which is silly given the robust-ness of the program) for me is the text to speech audio recording…I said it was a silly feature to use the most, didn’t I? Working with a military audience, I gained loads of experience using Adobe Captivate, and once you get the swing of it, it really can do prove to be a great authoring investment, especially given the reasonable licensing cost.

TechSmith Camtasia and SnagIt– I use Camtasia almost on a daily basis, and I love it! I will admit that rendering video is not one of my favourite tasks, but it definitely is a reasonably priced and robust program given the features it provides. You really can create some amazing videos using Camtasia, and I use it almost exclusively to record screencasts (because this allows me to avoid javascript update prompts and errors – which I would often run into as a Mac user, when using screencastomatic and screenr.com – sorry guys!). SnagIt was a life-altering piece of software that I first grew to love about five years ago. SnagIt allowed me to easily take screen captures and mark them up, or better yet (!) have my subject matter expert do – this made some incredibly complicated and headache-inducing projects (e.g. tracing electrical flow throughout aircraft components) INCREDIBLY easier. I know I will never get that year of my life back, but SnagIt helped keep me sane. Both of these products are amazing, and if you bundle them together, you get a discount. If you don’t want to bundle, they’re both great on their own – so great, that I have licenses for both my Mac and PC. So nice, I bought it twice!

Parallels – I haven’t been using Parallels long, but I’ve been bowing down to it since DAY ONE! Prior to Parallels, I was using Mac Boot Camp, booting to my Windows OS separately to work on all of my Windows-specific projects. Doing things this way without an optimization software like the Mitrefinch solution created a bumpy workflow process – I would have to either dual boot multiple times a day (incredibly frustrating when a client called and wanted to do an unexpected screen share and you had a ton of Mac windows open with work in progress) or I would have to hoard all of my OS-specific tasks to group together, which became quite unwieldy. Parallels honestly changed my life. Now, I can operate ‘in coherence’, and selecting a Windows-specific item will automatically open in Windows. I can have both OS’ open at the same time, and I’ve experienced no lag.

PancakeApp – PancakeApp is my project management software of choice; it has an aesthetically pleasing interface and is surprisingly easy to use. I will admit that it was head-bashing-on-my-keyboard frustrating to setup, but the support team is very quick to respond to any concerns, and the fifth install was the charm for me. This program allows me to easily manage my projects, clients, hours, and invoices – taking the fuss out of small business management and administrative poo poo out of my daily life.

Storage

Articulate TempShare – Articulate TempShare takes the fuss out of getting your Articulate projects online; just upload and pass along the link – the only catch is that the links will expire, so it’s definitely not a long-term solution (but still good for most uses).

Dropbox – Dropbox is fantastic! I use dropbox to share project files between myself and clients, to deliver projects, and even as a tertiary backup for my hard drive. The subscriptions (for the amount of space you get) are silly cheap, and you likely won’t fill it all up for a long while.

Google Drive – Google Drive is RIDICULOUSLY cheap for space, and is widely used. I do find my clients are gravitating more toward dropbox nowadays, but it’s still a fantastic resource and storage solution.

Education/Lifelong Learning

Lynda.com (Get 7 days of free, unlimited access to lynda.com) – Lynda.com is a fantastic resource for learning, and is SUPER affordable (given the enormous course selection); for instructional designers or developers, I would specifically recommend:

Up and Running with Articulate Storyline (by David Rivers)
Articulate Storyline Advanced Techniques (by Daniel Brigham)
Camtasia Studio 8 Essential Techniques (by Chris Mattia)
Screencast Fundamentals (by David Rivers)
Instructional Design Essentials: Storyboarding (by Daniel Brigham)
Up and Running with Captivate 7 (by David Rivers)
Captivate Advanced Techniques (by Anastasia McCune)

Discover Udemy’s featured courses!” target=”_blank”>Udemy.com – I was a user of Udemy before I began working with the interface. As a developer, Udemy is an extremely easy user interface and has a large-enough following that you can easily make passive (or active, depending on your goals) income publishing courses through the site. As a user, I find the interface very manageable – the information is presented in bite-sized chunks, and Udemy’s quality regulations ensures that all users are getting the best possible experience. Courses range in price, but there are many fantastic options; for instructional designers or developers, I would recommend:

Adobe Captivate 6 and 7 Training for Beginners (by VHOT Training Inc.)
Create Interactive Courses with Articulate Storyline (by Jeff Batt)
Learn to Create eLearning Courses using Articulate Storyline (by Prashant Kumar Gupta)
The ABCs of Instructional Design (by Debra Scott)
The Ultimate Mind Map Course for Education (by Sean Mitton)

Resources for use in E-Learning

Creative Market – I LOVE using Creative Market – there are tons of modern visuals available for purchase (e.g. illustrations, stock photos, hero images, fonts, etc.), and every week they offer a handful of free downloads (which ends up building into quite the repository if you hang around for awhile). But I think my favorite aspect of this site is that designers and developers are getting paid for what they’re producing…which sure, maybe you can get it for free somewhere, but everyone deserves a payday, how else are we to become top Chicago interior designers!

istockphoto.com – I remember searching Getty Images at the beginning of my web-design hobby as a teenager; now on the cusp of thirty, I can appreciate this membership approach to royalty-free images. Memberships range from 250-750 downloads per month, and are reasonably priced, especially if being used often for larger organizations.

E-Learning Heroes Download Section – The download section has been developed largely from submissions by E-Learning Heroes community participants. There are LOADS of resources for all Articulate products, in addition to course assets and administrative templates (e.g. storyboard templates). This is an invaluable resource and is constantly growing!

E-Learning Heroes Community – As previously mentioned, the Articulate E-Learning Heroes community is one of the most active communities I have been fortunate enough to be a part of, and you can find almost ANYTHING (related to instructional design and/or Articulate products) on this forum. And if you can’t, someone can definitely answer your questions!

ColourLovers – This isn’t necessarily an e-learning resource; anyone needing to select colours can really benefit from this site. I specifically like looking at palettes, because sometimes I’m not creative when coming up with colour palettes and there are a lot of folks out there who are – why exhaust yourself?! I’ve used these colour palettes in e-learning courses, on websites, and when painting the interior of my home.

E-Learning Books

Design for how People Learn – Julie Dirksen

The Accidental Instructional Designer: Learning Design for the Digital Age – Cammy Bean

Learning Articulate Storyline – Stephanie Harnett

E-Learning Uncovered: Articulate Storyline – Diane Elkins and Desiree Pinder

Small Business

Designer Scripts – Email Templates for Sticky Client Situations – My good friend Erin created this swipe file of email scripts for dealing with various sticky client situations; while you may not be a designer (perhaps you’re a business coach or a software developer), but if you run any sort of freelance operation or small business, these email templates are adaptable for almost any industry. And at $17 dollars, it is a steal. Just think of all of the cringe-worthy client situations you’ve been in…and how frustrated you were because you just couldn’t think of a way to deal with the situation. One of my favourite situations outlined has to do with a client requesting more revisions than originally agreed upon (come on, instructional designers, I know you feel me on the revision apocalypse). In any event, this is an ESSENTIAL investment in your business and will save you a ton of headache in the end!

Stress Less & Impress (by Leah Kalamakis) – Sometimes the hardest part of doing freelance work and/or running a small business is ironing out your processes. In Stress Less & Impress, Leah takes you through the steps (and provides helpful worksheets and a Facebook community) of streamlining your process, and while it may not be industry-specific, streamlining your basic processes will allow you to spend less time with administrative schtuff, and more time focusing on your clients and providing solutions to their problems.

Helpful Websites

The Freelance to Freedom Project – This is a website developed by Leah Kalamakis, wherein she provides helpful freelance information – from the trenches. She has an incredibly Facebook community that I participate in weekly, and of which I’ve been able to sub-contract out overflow work, when necessary. Leah is incredibly honest and supportive, and her blog posts address common freelance questions or concerns.

Be Free, Lance – Much like Leah’s site, Breanna provides a witty blog category, periodically updated with helpful freelance information. Her posts are informative and engaging, and I’m looking forward to her upcoming course (of the same name).

Random

How to Undo the Damage of Sitting – or what many may refer to as Desk-er-cize. Seriously – these exercises can help. A LOT. Stop complaining about your back pain now and do these exercises!

Terminology Tuesday: Assessment Items

August 12, 2014

Some of my first freelance roles were writing assessment items for various training materials. Namely, I wrote new driver training tests for each and every single state. This was a very profitable endeavour, and assessment item writing comes pretty easy to me, but you multiple each state by 100 (or more) and tell me how sore your fingers are after typing out all of those assessment items…that being said, I do still hold a place in my heart for assessment item writing.

What is this ‘assessment item’ you speak of?

Well. An assessment item is any item, able to be measured, which tests what (or whether) your learner has learned the material you have presented to them. Basically, each question in a quiz/test/exam/knowledge check, etc.

Most of us distinctly remember hand-writing detailed responses to long answer essay questions in high school…or filling out bubble sheet upon bubble sheet upon bubble sheet in our undergraduate degrees (at least if you majored in Psychology). Multiple choice, true/false, drag and drop, essays, long answer, short answer, fill-in-the-blanks – these are all types of assessment items (but certainly not the whole gamut).

Assessment items have different bits.

Assessment items consist of several variables: The stem (question) and the answer (either provided or needing to be written out) – in the case of multiple choice questions, there are also distractors .

In writing the new driver tests, I considered an assessment item to be the Stem, the Answer, and three Distractors. The stem would be the question (e.g. You arrive at a flashing red light. What does this mean?), the answer (e.g. you must come to a complete stop before proceeding when it is safe to do so), and three distractors (e.g. you must come to a complete stop and wait for the light to turn green before proceeding, you may proceed – slowly, you may only make a left hand turn).

There is much to consider when writing assessment items.

In the case of the new driver tests, the only real consideration was to be cognizant of the target audience (14-22 year olds) and write in a language for which they would understand, and to develop assessment items based on the individual state driver’s handbook.

However, I also have experience developing assessment items for college-level text books. For these items, I had to consider the content (the relevant chapter of the textbook) and write meaningful assessment items to test the learner, but I also had to consider the learning objectives for that chapter (to ensure I was assessing the learner in order to meet the learning objectives) and I had to consider Bloom levels. I previously wrote about Bloom’s Taxonomy here, and in relation to assessment item writing, there was typically a requirement to test to higher-levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy. No good college-level assessment is comprised entirely of recall (in my honest opinion).

But…how do I know I’m writing high-quality assessment items? Don’t panic – Here are some resources:

20+ Tips for Writing Great Quiz Questions and Response Options

Improving your Quizzes with Immediate Feedback

Constructing a Bloom’s Taxonomy Assessment

Assessment and Bloom’s Taxonomy

Best Practices: 30 Tips for Creating Quiz Questions

The Anatomy of Great e-Learning Quiz Questions

E-Learning Challenge #46: Show Us Your E-Learning Portfolio

August 11, 2014

This week’s e-learning challenge is a fun one that’s near and dear to my heart! Why? Well – Since building what small portfolio I have, my job prospects have increased exponentially (and therefore so has my profitability) and I’ve been able to become more selective with the projects and clients with whom I engage. Portfolios are also dear to me because my very first professional presentation (at the E-learning Heroes Community Roadshow: Toronto) was on how to build your portfolio.

Portfolios are essential to any e-learning developer and you really shouldn’t sleep on building one out. Even if it’s sparse and not the most well put together portfolio, it’s a jumping off point, and you’ll be able to grow your portfolio and evolve its presentation as time goes on. Truth be told – My website and portfolio page will be undergoing an overhaul in the coming months, and I’m excited to share the new design just as soon as it’s complete!

The Concept

This week, we’re being challenged to share our portfolios, create a header image for the E-Learning Heroes Challenge recap post, create social media images for Twitter/Facebook/Pinterest, and then share our portfolios through various social media postings – WHAT A DOOZIE! So many components!

The Method

First things first, I grabbed the link to my portfolio page. Next, I opened a new document in Photoshop and created a header image for my section of the recap post. Then, I sought after the social media image dimensions from this site and began creating appropriately size social media images. Finally, I went ahead and started sharing these posts all over the social media sphere (Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest)

The Result

Click here (or in the navigation bar above) to access my live portfolio.

Challenge Header Image:

Twitter Post Image:

Facebook Post Image:

Pinterest Thumbnail Image:

Pinterest Post Image:

Terminology Tuesday: Target Audience

August 5, 2014

This week’s term was prompted by a thread I read recently about acronyms. Don’t see the connection? I’ll explain it to you in a few – don’t worry!

Target Audience

Your target audience is anyone who will be participating in the e-learning program you are developing. This is a very small detail, usually discussed in a client’s Statement of Work or a Design Document (or sometimes not at all), but it makes a huge impact on the development of your training materials.

For example, the training materials you develop for a group of 18-21 year old students will likely be different than those developed for a group of 50-60 year old women. For the 18-21 year olds, you might use a more colloquial manner of text or you might use a more interactive, game-based interface. For the 50-60 year old women, you would likely recognize their prior learning experiences and explain the content in a more professional manner.

It is essential to understand and consider your target audience in order to create effective learning experiences!

I’m a huge supporter of conducting an instructional analysis, and while not all clients will see the benefits of paying for anything indicative of an ‘analysis’ phase (many clients may feel as though they’ve conducted this portion), it’s still important as an Instructional Designer to ensure you’re conducting a brief instructional analysis – even if it’s just in your head. If the target audience hasn’t been defined by the client, ASK!

Alright. So how does this connect with acronyms?

Regardless of your target audience you need to avoid use of industry jargon whenever possible. You need to take yourself outside of your industry body and put yourself in the shoes of your target audience. Do they know what TNA means? Because to you, it’s a Training Needs Analysis, but to them it could be an offensive term used to describe several body parts or a popular retail store.

When using acronyms, ensure you are spelling out the first instance of each acronym; this will ensure that your target audience does not become lost in a sea of acronyms, leaving the training more confused than anything. Another suggestion, in acronym or jargon heavy training materials, would be to include a glossary of acronyms or terms; this will provide your target audience with a resource to consult if ever they find themselves confused.

E-Learning Challenge #45: Recording Audio in Online Training

August 4, 2014

Phew! This week’s challenge was an easier one. I figured I could definitely squeeze this challenge in between the swamp of work I’ve been wading through.

The Concept

This week’s challenge was more of an informative type of challenge, and it was all about how you setup your recording space to record audio for online training. For me, this was an easier challenge because I don’t have a whole lot of setup that goes into my audio recording…because I don’t tend to do a lot of audio recording – this is typically a task I sub out to other e-learning professionals because 1 – I find recording audio tedious, 2 – I’m not an audio learner so I find it extra tedious, 3 – I don’t have nearly enough time to prep things as I’d like to have, and 4 – I’m Canadian (and many of my clients aren’t), so the revision cycle tends to be a bit more frustrating with me trying to take on a different dialect for just a couple of words (which is SO HARD if those words are in the middle of sentences…you know…like people use).

The Method

For this challenge, I took a photo (with my iPhone) of my setup, and then I took a screen capture of my software setup. Presto! Tada!

The Result

There were three questions for this challenge:

1. Tell us about your recording setup.

I will say that the setup I have at home versus setups I’ve used in the past is quite different. I’ve married into some software (shout out Camtasia) that I love using, but haven’t taken the leap into purchasing a professional microphone or anything. At the university, there is a real fancy microphone – I don’t even know what brand it is, but it requires a line-in input and it’s HEAVY! Needless to say, a post-secondary institution can definitely afford these luxuries…but I’ll digress! Basically, my set up is the opposite of what you’d find at a university.

When recording audio, I use my Macbook Pro’s internal microphone. I open Camtasia up to create a ‘new recording’. When you do this, a little window pops up (see below), and I turn the screen off and the camera off, but leave the microphone on. Unless I’m doing a screencast, in which case I leave the screen on and the microphone on.

I record in my office, and once I finish recording, I often have to edit out background noise and/or my beagle’s barking, in Camtasia. Once I finish my recordings, I export the audio files to MP3 (or MP4 in the case of screencasts) format.

2. Show us your audio setup.

3. Share your three favourite audio recording tips.

Here are my tips:

1 – If you’re recording audio often, invest in a professional microphone. I would recommend Blue Microphone’s Yeti Pro or Audio-Technica AT2020 – I’ve heard good things about both of these and have used the Yeti Pro.

2 – Create an audio script – Sure; you might think you can wing it and for a lot of things you can…just not professional anything. Especially not training courses. Especially not if the training course is procedural and the steps are exact. Trust me, it will save you a lot of heartache (and revisions) in the long run.

3 – Be consistent. Try to use a consistent voice, tone, and background whenever you record. It may also be good to record all audio in one fell swoop, if possible. I’ve found in my experience that if I record audio for the same project in different sessions, my tone tends to vary more. When I say background, I mean record in the same space for all recordings. This is important for anyone using their laptop.

4 – Bonus tip: Don’t feel obligated, by a client’s needs, to record the audio yourself. If audio is a component and you really aren’t the best person for the job, sub-contract the audio portion out to someone who knows what’s up. The result will be a lot more professional, and you’ll be able to focus your attention on more important aspects of your role.

Terminology Tuesday: Adaptive Learning

July 28, 2014

I first came across the concept of adaptive learning when working at my last corporate gig. Someone had a pie-in-the-sky type of idea for moving into adjacent markets, and adaptive learning would give us a HUGE competitive edge. I say pie-in-the-sky because, at the time, the organization could certainly not fund something so new to us. This past weekend, I came across the term again – this time in the context of its increasing popularity. If it’s becoming more popular, I figured we should probably talk about and get to know the term a little bit more.

What is Adaptive Learning?

Adaptive learning is an educational approach which uses technology to create individualized learning experiences. Computer programs, which work diligently to collect data, adapt the material presented based on the user’s learning needs (which are dictated by their responses and interactions with the computer program).

Sounds creepy? Yeah, a little. I sort of liken adaptive learning to the way in which advertisements on websites are adapted based on your browsing history. While it might be creepy, it’s also really cool!

Why is Adaptive Learning Cool?

Adaptive learning is pretty neat, in my opinion, because it allows students to step outside of the traditional face-to-face classroom environments, where teachers are often times over-saturated with the amount of students per class, leading to very generalized teaching (in most cases). Teachers have it tough! And it can be incredibly difficult for them to veer from traditional teaching methods to make learning an individualized experience for each and every student.

Many teacher friends of mine who have taught in the K-12 school system are incredibly frustrated; because of the ‘no child left behind’ concept, kids are being pushed through, regardless of which grade level they’re functioning at. This results in lower-level learners struggling further with the curriculum. Another problem is that it’s getting to the point where teachers are becoming responsible for developing Individualized Education Plans for more than half of their students per class – Doing this is understandable in that the education system wants to cater (as much as possible) to student’s needs, but it also takes a lot of time on the individual teacher’s side of things, which may lead to increased rate of teacher burn-out. Frustrating, no?!

Adaptive learning may be a solution to such a problem, saving teacher resources and frustration!

The only questionable aspect of adaptive learning that I have found is that implementation may be incredibly costly, so institutions really need to recognize the need and the ultimate cost savings on human resources (and ultimately increase in return on investment), before it will ever gain mainstream traction.

Examples, please!

There’s really only one key example that I want to share – Knewton is a technological platform designed to personalize “digital courses so every student is engaged and no one slips through the cracks.” Using analytics, learning gaps are predicted and the presentation of educational materials are adapted to satisfy these learning gaps. HOW COOL IS THAT?!

A more rudimentary example could be a choose your own adventure book; while not necessarily ‘learned’, the outcome is dependent on (or predicted by) the reader’s choices. Who didn’t enjoy a good choose your own adventure book? Come on!

Ashley Chiasson, M.Ed

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