Ashley Chiasson, M.Ed

Instructional Designer & Consultant

Grab the free Course Development Plan

Sign up for my newsletter and grab your free Course Development Plan PDF to streamline course creation.

Where Have I Been & Where Am I Speaking: Fall 2019

Where the Heck Have You Been?!

I know, right?! I didn’t blog at all in August. So some of you might be thinking, “where has Ashley been?” At least I hope you’ve been thinking that, because I’ve really missed connecting as frequently, and I’m about to get back to it!

In July 2018, I tore my medial meniscus and damaged a bunch of cartilage in my knee playing softball. If you remember my jaw saga, you might be thinking “choose a different sport, please”, but no. No. I. Will. Not! ANYHOW. I had been waiting since then to have knee surgery, and on July 31st 2019 the wait was over!

I participated in a really neat research study that had two options: Option 1 – I get the surgery they’ve been doing successfully for years, which would only require one surgery, or Option 2 – I get a fancy 2-surgery deal that would first extract cartilage, mail it to a lab, grow new cartilage, and then 3 weeks later I would have a second surgery to implant the newly grown cartilage – cool, right?! I wouldn’t know which I had been selected for until I woke up from the anesthesia of surgery 1.

I really wanted the cool surgery so I could tell everyone I was bionic or part cattle (because the grown cartilage matrix was made with bovine matter), but my maiden name is Murphy and I abide by Murphy’s Law (anything that can go wrong, will go wrong), so I was randomly selected for the old surgery, which is referred to as ‘microfracture‘ plus a meniscus repair. Now that I’ve had this surgery, I am extremely glad to be nearly 6 weeks post-op, and not having to restart the post-op countdown with the second surgery, but it’s not nearly as neat sounding.

Long story short: I’ve been caged up on crutches and in a bulky range of motion brace for the past 4.5 weeks, and I have 1.5 more to go before I get the fancy custom brace and get cleared to resume normal life tasks like driving. I’ve had 2-4 appointments every single week, and it’s been incredibly exhausting. But, I’ll spend another 12-18 months in the new brace, and then my knee should be almost good as new. Which means: more softball and more travel.

So, that’s where I’ve been, and like I said earlier, I’m very excited about getting back into the swing of things with the blog…and with speaking opportunities!

Where Am I Speaking?

 

If you’re in the market for some Miami travel this November, I’ll be delivering two sessions for ATD Core4 Miami:

Session 1: Instructional Design for E-Learning

Oftentimes, eLearning programs don’t fully consider instructional design principles and best practices. Without considering these principles, though, how can you ensure that the eLearning is effectively addressing the issue for which it was developed?

In this session, you will learn about several key instructional design tips to consider when developing your eLearning. These tips stand to help you create a more targeted, consistent, and accessible eLearning program.

Key Takeaways:

  • Why it is so important to know your audience
  • Methods for ensuring consistency
  • Strategies for designing more universally
  • Ways of building in feedback opportunities

Session 2: Top 10 Tips: Articulate Storyline

So you’re developing some pretty awesome e-learning in Articulate Storyline, but you’d like to streamline your development…this is where all of those software secrets can come in handy! If you’ve ever felt like you could use a clone, this session aims to make you twice as productive doing what you do.

In this session, you will learn 10 top tips for working in Articulate Storyline, and how these tips can help you become more productive in your Articulate Storyline development.

Key Takeaways:

  • Methods for streamlining your development process
  • Strategies for making the tool work for you
  • How to speed up your development, without sacrificing quality
  • Articulate Storyline tricks of the trade

And, then I’ll be delivering a 2-day workshop in Washington, DC, so if you have any recommendations for things to do and/or people to see, definitely let me know!

This is one of the first years in a long time that I won’t be participating at DevLearn because I won’t be cleared to fly until early November, so I’m having some serious FOMO…but 2020 will be a good one!

Freelance Advice: Pricing Yourself Appropriately

One of the freelance questions I get asked most frequently is: How do I price my services? 

When going freelance or taking on contract projects, pricing yourself appropriately is critical. Your. Time. Is. Valuable. I’ve been on both sides: freelancing myself and hiring freelancers, so I feel like I can offer some advice in this arena. You can even take some of this advice and apply it to the “a prospective employer asked me ‘what is your salary expectation?’ – how do I respond?”

But first, a story…

When I first began freelancing it held a very simple goal: pay off my student debt faster. Kthx. And I did. And I learned a lot from my very first freelance gig. I went on a bid site (freelancer.com), bid on any job I thought I was even remotely qualified for, and won several contracts. One such contract was transcribing 40 hours of interviews for someone’s PhD research. I did this job for ONE. HUNDRED. DOLLARS. WHAT?! Yeah. I had no idea what to price transcription services at. This was obviously a steal. This is a period of my life that was absolute agony for me. I’m not a quitter. I did the job. I hated the job. I learned that my time was valuable. #lifelessons. I now know that, and that will never transcribe anything ever again. Never.

Cool story. That was dumb. Now get on with the advice please.

Alright, so there are several things you want to consider when pricing your services:

  • What do you want to earn?
    • Be realistic; I initially based this annual value as what I was making at my first ID role
  • Consider the things you have to pay out, such as taxes, HST (if you’re Canadian), and health care
    • The biggest mistake I see people make is pricing their services too low and only finding out when they owe a bunch of $$$ to the CRA or IRS. It can be an expensive lesson to learn.
  • Do you want project based pricing? Hourly pricing? Salary?
    • Salary is self-explanatory, but you still need to factor in the things you’ll pay out to. Hourly pricing can be good if you’re unsure of how much time you spend doing each type of task you’ll be doing. Project-based pricing is typically higher, but if you do project-based pricing you may get into an underpaid pickle if it takes you longer to complete a project than what you had quoted.

For me, as I previously explained, I initially priced my services based on the hourly breakdown of my first ID salary. I then added to that. So, let’s do a simple example:

  • Starting rate: $20/hr
  • I set aside 35% of each project for taxes, and 15% for HST, so I would add those two things (50%) and then add that to my rate – so now I’m at $30/hr.
  • Then, I add 20% to that to put aside for healthcare – now we’re at $36/hr

Now, this takes a bit of research, but I recommend you start with your provincial/state/federal tax sites to identify how much you need to pay in to taxes based on certain tax brackets. It might suck to contribute more to your tax account than necessary, but at the end of the day, it’s always nice to not have to pay out all of your tax savings vs. owing more.

The other major things to consider is: What experience do you have? How long have you been doing certain types of jobs/roles? Where do you live? These factors all play a part in pricing yourself appropriately.

Pricing yourself can be incredibly intimidating, but I’ve learned that valuing myself accordingly and confidently negotiating my pricing has more often resulted in prospective employers not batting a lash versus balking at my pricing. And if you’re being fair with your prices and still encountering prospective employers balking at your pricing…are those the employers you want to work for? For me, it’s not. There will always be more contracts. I promise you.

Resources:

  1. The eLearning Guild has an incredibly helpful calculator: 2018 Salary Calculator, and you can use this as a starting point to base your annual value according to various elements (e.g., state in which you live, education, years of experience, etc.). Another thing the eLearning Guild does is an annual salary and compensation guide – aimed at recruiters, but also helpful to peruse if you’re looking into working for yourself.
  2. Estimating Costs and Time in Instructional Design by Donald Clark provides a great overview.
  3. The Chapman Alliance – How Long Does it Take to Create Learning is a resource I recommend OFTEN.

Hanging Out with The eLearning Guys – Episode 32

 

I was so excited when David and Nejc reached out to me to be interviewed on their podcast, The eLearning Guys. I’ve been a listener since their first episode, and I love seeing all of the cool things they’re doing on the side.

This was super fun, so if you’re interested, hop on over and check it out (click the image below)!

E-Learning Heroes Challenge #199 – Tabs Navigation

Tonight I was feeling a little nostalgic for the E-Learning Heroes Challenges. For that reason, and the fact that David Anderson is probably going to nag me to participate more when we see each other this week (I KID!), I whipped something up in my evening wind down.

Challenge

This challenge was to create one of the most common of e-learning interactions: tabbed navigation. Every e-learning developer has created a tabbed interaction, so it’s always nice to have a repository of suggestions to consult when you feel as though you need to freshen up your development approach. This is what I love about the E-Learning Heroes Challenge recaps – sometimes my brain is too tired to think!

Method

For this tabbed interaction, I first went to Pinterest, where I stumbled upon this horizontal tab menu, and I loved the look/feel. Next, I opened Storyline to try and replicate the effect. It’s not perfect, but it’s close enough for me. I fiddled with the design size, consulted coolors.co for a colour palette, and then wrote a bunch of things about myself.

Result

Like I said, it’s not perfect, but it’s close. And at past-bedtime-o’clock, I’m happy with it.

Click Here to view the full interaction.