Instructional Design

Yesterday I had a discussion with the university about something I’m very excited about. It’s really the potential that I’m excited about, because it’s too early to tell whether anything will come of it or not. As part of my take away, I will be conducing a needs assessment, and as part of that needs assessment, I will need to conduct an environmental scan.

Environmental Scans

Environmental scans are a means of data collection aimed at gathering information on internal and external factors related to whatever it is that you’re researching. Environmental scans allow you to compare what other organizations/institutions, etc. are doing and where they’re doing it. Are they doing something comparable to what you want to do? If so, what is their target audience? Will their program deter individuals from participating in your program? How much competition is there? What does the target audience want?

These questions can easily be answered by conducting a thorough environmental scan. These scans will help you determine whether there are any needs or gaps and how you can meet those needs or fill those gaps. Furthermore, an environmental scan may help you prioritize. For example, if I wanted to create a new program on How to Bathe a Cat, I would look at what others are doing, how they’re doing it, and whether their audience or instructors are experiencing any gaps. My priority would be to address any gaps identified in the environmental scan within my program to ensure that I maintained a competitive advantage.

Resources

Environmental Scanning – What it is and how to do it by Thinking Futures

Environmental Scanning by James L. Morrison

What’s the purpose of the environmental scan and how do we get this? By Nonprofit Answer Guide

There’s a section of my next book that I’m working on, and one sub-section discusses asset management (my editor will be pleased to hear that I am in fact at least thinking about writing). While at Learning Solutions Conference 2015, I attended a morning buzz session on Content Curation, wherein asset management was discussed…A LOT. It seemed as though many folks either didn’t know what the heck ‘asset management’ meant, or how to go about managing their assets, so I saw an opportunity for a great Terminology Tuesday topic. What can I say, I’m an opportunist…when it comes to blogging at least.

Asset Management

Asset management is just what it sounds like – managing your assets. Now, your ‘assets’ may come in many forms. For example, Media Assets (images/video/audio), Customer Furnished Assets (files provided by the client, which could be images/video/audio/PowerPoints/Word documents, etc.), Content Output (outputs from whichever authoring tool you’re using). If you’ve worked on large projects, you will likely relate to how unwieldy these assets can become if you don’t have a system in place for keeping everything organized.

This is where the ‘management’ element comes into play. What I like to do to manage my assets is to set up a folder structure. I’ve adopted a folder structure based on that of an organization I worked for previously…because it made sense and was easy to follow. It looks something like this:

Project Folder

• 100 Project Management
  • Depending on how large the project is, this folder may have sub-folders; for example:
    • Meeting Minutes
    • Action Tracking
    • Risk Management
    • Contracts
    • Invoices
• 200 Development
  • This folder typically contains sub-folders related to my development; for example:
    • Client-Furnished Information (CFI)
    • Scripts and Storyboards
      • Audio Narration
    • Media
      • Video
      • Audio
        • Scratch Audio
        • Final Audio
      • Images
      • Flash
    • Output
    • Quality Assurance
• 300 Client
  • This folder will include anything sent to the client for review; for example:
    • Delivered
    • Review Comments
    • Final

Within these folders, there may be other sub-folders, but this is the general structure I follow. When it comes to filenames, I either follow a file naming convention dictated by the client, or will follow an internal file naming convention I’m accustomed to, which indicates the project, type of media, asset number, and version number. For example, PROJECT_A_001_01 (which indicates Audio file 1, version 1). If there are multiple or courses for one project, I will also add an arbitrary course number so that I can keep everything in check, and I will maintain these filenames within a spreadsheet, housed within the main 200>Media folder.

Now…I get that all of this may sound super detailed and overwhelming, but when you get used to operating in a somewhat-organized manner, it really helps streamline your workflow and make you more efficient. It also makes it a lot easier to call up course assets in the event you need to re-use them (e.g. if you’re working for a client with multiple projects that may have shared elements).

Basically, you just need to commit to a structure, and then keep using that structure and process whenever you begin work on a new project. It can be a pain in the butt to set up sometimes, especially if you’re really busy and especially if you cringe at the thought of doing ‘unpaid’ administrative duties for your business, but believe me…you will thank me later. When you aren’t spending even more ‘unpaid’ hours digging through external hard drives or flash drives looking for some obscure storyboard you worked on two years ago. Can I get an amen?!

I read a fantastic article on Active Learning, written by Christopher Buddle, in University Affairs this morning, and it served as inspiration for this week’s terminology Tuesday.

Active Learning

According to Buddle (2015), “Active Learning is a philosophy and an approach in which teaching over beyond the “podium style” lecture and directly includes students in the learning process.” With the millennial students and those to come, this seems to be a teaching strategy that will become increasingly popular. When I consider myself as a student, I learned a lot from the traditional teaching approach, but it was more akin to the professor making deposits into the student’s mind. You go to the lecture, you’re talked at for an hour or more, and even if you don’t have issues plaguing your attention and focus, you’ll likely get distracted sometime within that hour. This is why active learning will be important when it comes to enhancing student engagement and overall academic achievement.

Active learning strategies discussed in the Buddle (2015) article include:

• The teacher becoming the student
  • Teacher poses questions to students drawing from material taught within the lecture.
• Clear and muddy
  • Students indicate areas of the lecture that were clear, and other areas that were muddier or more confusing; in the next lecture, the teacher spends some time re-explaining the more universally muddy components.
• Groups
  • Students are placed in groups to discuss a particular question and they report their response to the entire class.
• Instant feedback
  • Students are provided with instant feedback in the form of scratch-off cards. I have to admit that this seems a bit more complicated an approach, so the uptake by other teachers (unless the cards are provided by the institution) may be slow. However, instant feedback is very important, and can be provided through other means (e.g. online quizzing).
• Pair and share
  • Students pair up and discuss the teacher-posed question with one another.

The great thing about these strategies is that they force the students to become more engaged with the material. Students may initially find these approaches uncomfortable, but in the long run they will likely lead to increased information retention, and ensure that students are actually paying attention to the lecture instead of zoning out mid-way through.

This week’s term was inspired by the need to streamline and become more efficient. Hopefully it will help open your eyes to one of the many ways in which you can streamline your development process.

Slide Masters?

Slide masters are a view in Microsoft PowerPoint and Articulate Storyline (and possibly other products I’m not considering right now) that allow you to design slide layouts for use in content screens. They allow you to structure slides and add placeholders for text/images/video, etc. They became a thing for me when I began using Microsoft PowerPoint, and to be honest I didn’t really use them much until I started working in Articulate Storyline.

Once I began using slide masters in Storyline, I quickly saw how they could streamline my development process. I liken the process of creating slide masters to an argument organizations often engage in when debating the benefit of training – yeah, there’s a pretty good initial ‘cost’ of development, but the Return on Investment (ROI) will be even greater!

Another benefit – if you’re working on a project with multiple developers, designing slide masters will enhance consistency, especially when it comes to positioning of elements (e.g. title text).

I suppose this isn’t so much a definition as it is a recommendation…so go forth and master the slides!

This week’s term was inspired by an acronym-laden course I had the opportunity to recently review. Oof!

What is a Glossary?

A glossary is a list of acronyms, terms, or phrases used within a certain context. If you’re reading a book, you’ll often find a glossary of terminology in the back pages of the text. If authors feel that it’s necessary to include a glossary for their text, why shouldn’t course developers feel a similar urge?

Why would I want to add a glossary to a course?

Every industry has their phrases and acronyms, and these acronyms might mean something different to different people. Good courses will want to avoid this confusion, and a glossary is a fantastic way for doing just that. One good example of how a glossary can be helpful: the military often uses the same acronyms across divisions (e.g. Air Force/Navy/Army), yet these acronyms change meaning – not always, but often. For individuals who have trained in multiple divisions, this can be extremely confusing, and a glossary will help ensure that the terminology used within the course is clarified, as necessary.

Resources

• 5 Easy Ways to Add a Glossary to Your E-Learning Course by Tom Kuhlmann

 

Content Map

Many people associate content maps with mind maps, but not me. For me, a content map is a defined structure of a course or project based on client-furnished information and overall learning objectives. I would liken it to creating an outline for an essay. Remember how your high school English teacher always made you write out (and usually submit) that damn outline for your essay? It may have been annoying, but it was important. The same way content maps are important.

It’s a lot easier to modify the structure of a course in the design phase, when you’re mapping out your content and the structure of the entire course. Here, feedback can be provided, and you won’t have to go into each and every module to make modifications. Sure. It might seem like an unnecessary step, but in the long run, it will save you time.

A content map will typically include, but is not limited to, the following elements:

• High-level course objectives
• Timing per module
• Module information, including sub-modules and topics
• Assessment information (e.g. type of assessment items to use).

Some folks might call this design documentation, but it’s really just a small portion of the design documentation.

In the Defence sector, it was not uncommon to walk into a room and see a wall full of post-it notes. This industry referred to these walls as ‘Scalars’, which provided overall scaffolding for training programs. At the smaller scale, these scalars are really just enormous content maps.

If you haven’t started using content maps, you should make this documentation part of your development process, even if it’s not a deliverable and even if it’s written on a post-it or napkin. In the end, it’s going to guide you and keep your project structured, which stands to increase the overall effectiveness of the training you’re developing.