Ashley Chiasson, M.Ed

Instructional Designer & Consultant

Instructional Design

Terminology Tuesday: Podcasts

This week I thought I would chat a bit about podcasts, because 1 – the weekly e-learning challenge (you can read about it in my previous post – scroll down) inspired me, 2 – I looooove listening to podcasts, and 3 – they’re commonly used within distance higher education courses (albeit, they’re rapidly being replaced for video).

What is a podcast and why are they popular?

Podcasts can be considered anything requiring a subscription to a digital media download; however, within recent years the subscription part of things is becoming less and less of a necessity. I’ve been seeing more and more folks use podcasts for their opt-in email lists as a way of giving subscribers something extra (and building their lists), but typically, the subscription part is optional nowadays.

Podcasting seems to have come into its own within our new information society and with the emergence of smartphones and other portable devices (e.g. iPods) – people want information and they want it now! Or, they want to numb the commute to work with a little bit of education or entertainment.

Podcasting in Education

One of my contracts is with a local university who was quite the pioneer (at least provincially) with their broadcast distance courses. I remember watching channel 33 when nothing else was on and ‘sitting through’ Psychology lectures as a 10 year old. With the evolution of technology, costly television broadcasts have been replaced by a number of solutions; however, many faculty members I’ve encountered seem to lean in to podcasting as a means for disseminating their lectures; primarily those who were used to the former television broadcast format.

Now, there’s good things and bad things about podcasting in education (in my honest opinion). Some good things are being able to reach audiences and simulate a traditional lecture style. Some bad things are that folks often replace their 1 hour video-based lecture with a 1 hour podcast based lecture, and that can be BAD NEWS…especially for individuals who aren’t audio learners. Personally, I have a hard time learning from audio, so I appreciate visuals with complementary audio. Podcasts for education really aren’t my thing…but, I have seen them done well, and those are usually podcasts that are broken down into palatable chunks of information which support the weekly readings in a meaningful way.

You seem to support the idea of podcasts, yet you don’t enjoy educational podcasts? What podcasts do you enjoy?

I tend to save my learning for more practical and/or visual approaches (supported by audio – sure, but not predominantly audio), but I do really enjoy listening to podcasts. I find myself favouring those podcasts that are interview-based and with hosts who can captivate my attention and make my laugh. Therefore, I listen to a lot of comedian-based podcasts. Some of my favourites include:

Totally Laime, Totally Married, and Totally Mommy – Elizabeth Laime and her husband, Dr. Rosen Rosen (er Andy) really take my week to the next level; I find myself listening to all three of their podcasts each week (Monday/Wednesday/Friday) while I muddle through my work. They make me laugh, dish out tons of unqualified advice, and allow me to effectively multi-task.

Alison Rosen is Your New Best Friend – I enjoy listening to Alison and her gang; they have two streams per week and the interview style is engaging and relatable. I especially appreciate the tangents she tends to go on and her segment Just Me or Everyone.

This Feels Terrible – I don’t tune in on a regular basis, but when I do, I find myself in a McGathy marathon, listening to everything I missed since the last time I tuned in. Erin interviews folks about their experiences with love and relationships, and the stories are often relatable and hilarious (and sometimes sad).

So while not quite educational, these podcasts provide a great background noise solution to my work week and seem to amp up (or at least support) my productivity!

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E-Learning Challenge #39: Podcasts for Learning

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(Image credit: David Anderson)

Hat’s off to David for this week’s e-learning challenge – this was a fun one! I’ve never been interviewed, but I feel like it helped me out in chatting candidly (or kind of candidly…alright…not really at all – I scripted myself haha) – something I’m going to be doing next month at the E-Learning Heroes Community Workshop in Toronto…I’m scared!

The Concept

This week, we were tasked with recording our responses to the following 10 questions:

– Tell us a little about yourself and the types of e-learning projects you most enjoy.

– How did you become an e-learning or instructional designer?

– What are the essentials of good e-learning design?

– Tell me about your most successful e-learning project.

– What are the most important criteria in evaluating e-learning?

– What are some common mistakes new course designers make and how can they avoid them?

– How is designing mobile learning different than designing for the desktop?

– How do you evaluate whether your course was effective?

– How do you keep up your skills and stay current in the industry?

– What is the future of e-learning?

The Method

I loathe public speaking and I’m working on getting better, so the first thing I did was script my responses to these questions, because I’m really not great at responding to questions on the fly. After scripting out all of my responses, I hit up Camtasia and recorded (and re-recorded) all of my responses! I exported to .wav format (thanks advanced export options!) and uploaded the entire playlist to Soundcloud, added tags and a description, and saved the playlist – easy peasy!

The Result

You can listen to my recording, below (or by clicking here), in all of it’s awkward glory – hopefully you find my responses insightful or informative – that was the goal!

Terminology Tuesday: Needs Assessment

This week I’m talking about Needs Assessments. Why? 1 – They are critical (and I’ll tell you why) and 2 – I received a call yesterday from a developer at another university; they were inquiring about the cost of developing 1 hour of training – when  I asked them a few probing questions, they were clearly in the infancy stage of their process and had not considered many of the variables they should have been considering. This happens often.

So, you’ve got my attention, but what IS a needs assessment?

A needs assessment typically occurs within the Analysis phase of development and involves a collection and synthesis of information to appropriately determine training needs or if training is even necessary. A needs assessment will identify whether there are any training gaps that need to be closed, and if so, which training needs exist.

Not all problems are training problems (although many are).

But why is a needs assessment so important?

As I mentioned to the developer yesterday, it is essential to assess your client’s (or potential client’s) needs and have all of that information documented so they can sign off on (or agree to) what they want developed. Your needs assessment may identify what type of training may be deemed most effective in addressing the training need, and this information is important for clients.

A needs assessment will help you write a detailed Statement of Work (more on that in a coming week), and will provide your clients with greater clarity with regard to their training needs. For example, a 1 hour computer-based training session may be more effective (and efficient) than a half day seminar. Or perhaps the issue is one necessitating practical training, in which case on-the-job training may be needed.

Alright, Alright

Basically a needs assessment can save your tail (and time) and keep your clients happy. You want to be revered as one who develops necessary training and as someone who solves problems, not someone who wastes the time and resources of their clients and/or their client’s employees.

That’s really a high-level overview of needs assessments, so if you’re looking for more information, here are several resources:

Learning and Training Needs Assessment, as explained by Don Clark

Methods for Conducting an Educational Needs Assessment – Paul F. McCawley

Learning Needs Assessment: Assessing the Need – Janet Grant 

Needs Assessment Idea (Free Download) – Craig Von Korlaar

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3 Tips for Backing up Information

Recently, I experienced issues associated with backing up information, causing me to lose work and want to sob uncontrollably. Since then, I have spent time getting to know the lovely folks at my local Apple Store, and have invested in several pieces of technology (one of which I mentioned in the previous post – Parallels for Mac – not necessarily for backing up information).

Today I’ll be discussing some important tips when it comes to backing up your information, and hopefully these tips come in handy, allowing you to avoid uncontrollable sobbery – because no one wants to watch that.

1. Ignorance is not bliss – back EVERYTHING up.

When beginning my foray into the realm of virtual work, I blatantly ignored the process of backing up my information. Sure, I had some things on flash drives, some things in my email, some things hanging out on dropbox…but these things weren’t all necessarily current and some were just too large to be backed up on any of those three options, so I lazily left them where they were on my hard drive, believing foolishly that hard drive malfunctions or user error were things that would never happen to me. Boy was I wrong!

After experiencing the loss of important work (work I had slaved over for weeks in some cases), I quickly realized that trusting technology is not always the best way to deal with the security of your files. So I recommend to trust MANY technologies. I now have my hard drive backing up hourly, daily, and monthly to an external hard drive, my working files backing up hourly to dropbox, and all important text-based documents backing up to Google Drive and USB flash drives, as necessary – call me paranoid, because I am.

2. Invest in technology that will save your butt!

I’ve made some personal investments and will be making several more in the near future. Losing information has been a traumatic experience, and I’ve learned that the amount of cash I would typically balk at when it comes to storage and data back up is worth the expense if it saves me from tears. Here are some items I have recently invested in (or will be in the very short-term – no I am not being paid to promote these products):

AirPort Time Capsule – There are other, slightly cheaper, alternatives to Time Capsule, and while the guy at the Apple Store wasn’t entirely convinced it was a necessary purchase, it will be a purchase for my business within the coming weeks. Why? Because of my sanity. Time Capsule backs everything up wirelessly and works double duty as a router – hooray!

WD My Passport for Mac – While not the best external hard drive, this little guy has proven to be a valuable purchase and comes with me almost everywhere. It’s lightweight, portable, and doesn’t talk back. It lets me back up information regardless of where I am.

Flash Drives – I have SO MANY of these and they are in every one of my bags. I use them predominantly for backing up documents, saving scanned documents, and backing up working files on the go if I don’t have my WD Passport on hand.

Dropbox – Get a dropbox account and upgrade it; you’ll quickly need more space than what is offered, and it’s a pretty small monthly investment for the service it provides. You can download the application and easily auto back up your information.

Google Drive – I haven’t had to upgrade my Google Drive account yet as I use it primarily for text-based documents, but if I had to (or if you were interested) you can upgrade from the free 15GB of space to 100GB (!) of space for a measly 1.99/month – chump change – DO IT!

3. Have a Good Emotional Support System

This one might seem a bit silly, but you’ll understand why it’s important once you experience your first loss-of-work. My husband is always my greatest support, and he didn’t let me down when I royally screwed myself work-wise; we spent about eight hours attempting to recover my data, he empathized, and was very understanding in my time of need.

Alternatively, consult your communities. Wherever your tribes are, you should consult with them about how they go about backing up information and what systems they have in place. Industries vary and one system for backing up information within one industry may not be the best option within another industry. Find out what your colleagues are doing and take their recommendations – worst case scenario, you end up with way too many methods for backing up information – a problem I would consider small (and cautious) in the grand scheme of things.

How I Streamline My Development Using Articulate Products

It should be no surprise that I love me some Articulate products (come on – my entire portfolio is based on Articulate Storyline outputs right now). They’re just so versatile and user-friendly! And I’m not even being paid to say that.

In taking my freelancing full-time, I was quickly becoming overwhelmed with the amount of work I had to do, most of which is done in one Articulate product or another. I decided that if I was feeling overwhelmed, other freelancers may share that feeling, so some tips may be in order. Today I’ll be talking about three ways that I have streamlined my development process using Articulate products.

1. Parallels for Mac

I have a Mac Book Pro, and do the majority of work from my laptop. Now, anyone who has a Mac knows that Articulate products are currently only available for Windows OS. This makes it extremely frustrating. When I first purchased my Mac, I knew I would need to set up a Windows OS partition using Boot Camp, but this was before I took my freelancing full-time. Once I went full-time, I quickly found out that I needed a lot more space than I had allotted to my Windows partition. Not to mention, dual-booting was extremely frustrating to me. I often found myself syncing files to dropbox or using flash drives to access files previously stored on my Mac OS (which I work exclusively in UNLESS I’m using an Articulate product). This very quickly became annoying, especially when I forgot a flash drive at home.

The Boot Camp setup works for a lot of folks, but for me, I found it annoying and I often felt disorganized and stressed out. After running into a deleted file situation, I consulted the folks at my local Apple store and the guy I spoke with recommended Parallels for Mac. Parallels allows you to run Windows OS within your Mac OS (simultaneously). It was probably the fastest and simplest install of Windows OS I have ever experienced (which says a lot as a former serial PC purchaser) and it runs like a charm. I’ve experienced no lag (even while working in larger Storyline files), and it has a coherence setting which allows my Windows applications to behave like Mac applications. IT IS AMAZING! I never thought such a simple solution would be so life-altering. I’m not being dramatic – Parallels for Mac has honestly changed my workflow for the better, and has allowed me to streamline processes that were previously very clunky.

Now I can work within all of my Articulate products, launching them from Mac OS, and still access anything I would have previously saved on Dropbox or a flash drive. It is so much better! I’ve only been using it for 3 days now, but I feel confidant in recommending it to anyone with a Mac who is looking for a solution to running Windows OS-based programs seamlessly.

2. Cheat Sheets!

We all have a lot of things to remember on a daily basis, and for most of us, hot keys don’t rank very high on the list of things to remember. Especially the more obscure hot keys. Luckily, the kind folks over at Articulate have provided several job aids (or cheat sheets) to help users streamline their development process.

This printable collection of time-saving Articulate Storyline short-cuts is printed and on the cork board in my office – thanks, Mike!

Articulate even has a Job Aids download section which provides users with tons of helpful resources for adjusting player properties in various products.

Everyone likes shortcuts, and I’m not one to buck the system on that one!

3. Saving Frequently and Backing Up Regularly

Now this may seem like a no-brainer, but sometimes you just trust your machines too much. This type of trust can greatly hinder your productivity and throw a huge wrench in your development process. This is not necessarily an Articulate product-specific tip, but my most recent productivity-destroying experience occurred with several Storyline files, so it’s kind of relevant. When I was blabbering on about Parallels, I briefly mentioned having a run in with a deleted file situation – ugh.

I had spent an entire week developing three modules for a client, and once they were all sent for revision, I backed them up to my external drive. Or at least my computer made me think I did. Silly me. The next day, the client came back with several revisions; I was on my way home, got the email, and thought ‘Great! Only two small changes! I’ll do those as soon as I get home!’ – I arrived home, bitterly dual-booted into Windows, and went to open the files…but the files were no where to be found. After consulting The Google (many times) and spending about 7 hours trying to recover the files, I was able to recover two of three…except that Storyline would not longer recognize them. This left me to spend my Saturday and Sunday morning foregoing a fun and exciting hiking trip to redevelop all of that work from the Storyline outputs. I wanted to cry, but in the end it took me a lot less time to reproduce the files than I had originally thought it would take, and the world was alright again. But I did miss that hiking trip – dammit!

What did I learn? Save ALL THE TIME and back things up every other second. To multiple places. I know have Mac’s Time Machine running on my external hard drive, backing things up hourly, and I also have all of my files backing up to Dropbox. When I’m feeling extra paranoid, I’ll save files to Google Drive or a flash drive. Eventually, I’ll probably get a Time Capsule from Apple (it’s a product – I’m not crazy enough to bury a bunch of flash drives in my yard) so I can set up wireless backups, but for now I’ll leave my external hard drive tethered to its USB port (first world problem, I know).

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Terminology Tuesday: Authoring Tools

Today I thought I would approach the subject of ‘authoring tools’, as I use this term frequently, but often don’t take into account that individuals outside of the industry may not understand what this phrase really means. I recently encountered this issue of my own ignorance while revising a contract sent to a client. The client asked me to more clearly define what I meant by the use of authoring tools…leading me to provide clarification.

Authoring Tools?

Authoring tools are more or less any tool that facilitates the development of your courses and/or products. This isn’t just a phrase used within the e-learning industry, but one familiar with those within design and programming industries as well (and likely more). Any tool that helps you design, develop, program, write (or author) your product can be considered an authoring tool. There are countless options, and I could drone on for days and still come up short with my list.

What kind of authoring tools are available for the e-learning industry?

As stated previously, there are so many options! However, a few of my favourite authoring tools have been Adobe Captivate, Articulate Storyline, Articulate Studio, and Camtasia. I also use Microsoft Office (Word/Excel/PowerPoint) extensively for authoring (albeit less interactive).

Depending on your preferences, you may also dabble within Adobe Photoshop, Flash, or Dreamweaver…or perhaps you have an internal Learning Content Management System that you use. There are so many options out there, you really just need to consult some industry professionals or The Google and start playing around.

But…how do I choose?!

Choosing really isn’t so much of the issue – you can choose multiple authoring tools to produce your courses, you don’t have to choose just one, but I would limit the options a bit to streamline your process or you’ll quickly find yourself overwhelmed with your development process.

The truth is that you won’t know which tools you prefer or which are effective (for what you need to produce) until you start playing around within the environments and authoring content. If you’re new to the industry, I would suggest you attempt to align your preferences with well-known tools (e.g. Articulate/Adobe Captivate), as these products are more likely to have a strong community of support, which is critical when attempting to meet delivery dates and troubleshoot products simultaneously.

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