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ashley chiasson, m. ed

Ashley Chiasson, M.Ed

Instructional Designer & Consultant

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Screencast: Adjusting Player Size Under Browser Settings in Articulate Storyline 360

February 12, 2019

Over the weekend, I received an email from someone looking to change the size of their organization’s existing Storyline files to a larger resolution. They wanted to do this without all of the headache involved in tediously shifting slide objects slide-by-slide to align with the new resolution. In this screencast, I’m showing you the solution that worked for her and their Learning Management System (LMS).

Check out the screencast below!

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Where Have I Been?!

January 28, 2019

The statement ‘New Year, New Me’ never really spoke to me until this year. At the tail end of 2018, I accepted a  full-time position as a Senior eLearning Developer at Traliant, and I’ve been MIA from the blog because I’ve been insanely busy ramping up with them (and learning so much!) as well as ramping down with my other obligations.

What is Traliant?!

Traliant is an e-learning company that develops compliance training – primarily Sexual Harassment and Preventing Discrimination and Harassment Training – that truly looks like something you would find on a news channel or streaming service (e.g., Netflix or Hulu). I’ve only been with the company for just shy of a month, but I’ve already fallen in love with the quality of the content, the excitement and enthusiasm of the team, and the sheer volume of exciting clients that have come across my desk so far!

What You Can Expect from Me

Aside from being MIA for the majority of this month, things will be ramping back up with the blog in the coming weeks/months. I love maintaining this blog, and there are a ton of things I’m really excited to share, so stay tuned for more content, more screencasts, and a new design (coming soon, THANK YOU, Erin)! I’ll be getting back into a normal routine with the blog, so keep checking in.

What Else Have I Been Up To?

To be honest, when I haven’t been doing something work-related, I’ve been taking time to wind down:

  • Listening to lots of podcasts (I recently started the Monster podcast)
  • Watching lots of Netflix (Birdbox, F is for Family, The Punisher, the Fyre Festival documentaries)
  • Enjoying time with my little family
  • Going gluten free (since November) – I hate to admit it has helped my migraines, but it really has (still looking for a solid pizza crust recipe though!)
  • Planning my conference schedule for 2019 – I’ll be at ATD ICE and DevLearn this year for sure
  • Helping organize a Halifax Articulate Roadshow (!!! so excited about this and will be happy to share details once they’re available)

Random

I am still waiting on a knee surgery from a baseball injury this past July. It’s progressing in that I’ve received my MRI results, received confirmation that I do in fact have to have a meniscus repair that hasn’t healed on its own, and I have a consult with the surgeon for the beginning of March. That being said, it is extremely discouraging to know that with a 3-4 month recovery and no surgery date as of yet, I’ll be unable to play softball this season (maaaaybe in the fall, but we’ll see). It’s also been extremely hard, mentally, to do zero physical activity requiring my legs (I’d even settle for a 15 minute dog walk without a swollen knee at this point).

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Screencast: Two Things That Excite Me With the Most Recent Update to Storyline 360

January 23, 2019

I know. It’s been a minute. I have another post in the works dedicated to addressing where the heck of been, but I COULD NOT WAIT to share two of the things I’m most excited about with the January 22nd, 2019 update to Articulate Storyline 360!

Check out the screencast below so you too can get just as excited as I am!

1 Comment Filed Under: Screencast Tagged: Screencast

2018 Recap and 2019 Goals

December 31, 2018

I hope everyone is enjoying their New Year’s Eve. In reading last year’s recap, I realized that our household was in quarantine with the flu and right now I’m trying to fend off whatever feels flu-y. It’s sort of comforting to know that it’s a trend. A ton of things happened in 2018 that I’m extremely proud of, but that’s for another day! Reflecting on how much I accomplished from my goal list, I feel incredibly happy with what I managed to do.

In addition to everything I accomplished, I also won Best Academic Solution at DevLearn 2018’s DemoFest, I delivered my first full-day pre-conference certificate workshop (and received pretty darn good feedback), bought a new house with my husband (and sold our first home – which was a PROCESS!), visited one of my besties, Erin, in Aspen, got to spend an entire week with my best friend, Rachel in Vegas (she will be my new Vegas pal…AMEN!), and accepted a new job that I hope will become my career. It’s been wild!

2018 Recap

Personal goals:

  • Slow down and enjoy the present; – I have made this goal for many years in a row and I SUCK at achieving it. 
  • Maintain a consistent exercise schedule; – This is a half-achievement. In July I tore my medial meniscus in my left knee, so exercise has been just a nice thought since then and until post-surgery (whenever the heck that will be…AMEN to universal healthcare).
  • Be more mindful of the food I’m putting into my body and make positive dietary changes; – I completely forgot that this was a 2018 goal, and I actually achieved it. This past year I went gluten-free, which has been both a blessing and a curse. I hate to admit that it’s been effective with my migraines and visual auras…because GF pizza crust just isn’t the same, but I’m sticking with it!
  • Run the Bluenose Half Marathon and participate in a relay race (should be do-able since I won’t be attending ATD ICE this year); and – This didn’t happen because I did end up going to ATD ICE (which was amazing).
  • Travel to Toronto with my husband for the Blue Jays Home Opener and plan and execute an epic 5-year anniversary vacation. – Went to the home opener. They got crushed. It was still great! Executed a 5-year anniversary vacation to Portugal, and it was beautiful.

Business Goals:

  • Increase business income by 25%; – Business income has been blown out of the water.
  • Attend 2 conferences; – I actually attended 3: ATD ICE, ATD Core4 Toronto, and DevLearn 2018.
  • Speak at 1-2 e-learning conferences; – I spoke at 2 conferences: ATD Core4 Toronto and DevLearn 2018. 
  • Participate in the e-learning heroes community challenges (period – not regularly, just participate); – I’ve realized that to do this, I need to discover cloning technology…I would LOVE to participate, but have been swamped.
  • Blog regularly; – This definitely happened!
  • Break 1,000,000 views on the blog; and – The blog has hit 1,025,000 thereabouts! And I cannot believe how much love and support (from you folks) that I get for this blog and the content I produce. When I hit 1 million, I actually teared up. I’m not crying…you’re crying!
  • Get more courses up on Sprout. – Essentials of Instructional Design and Articulate Storyline 360 Essentials both launched and have been enjoying a very successful learner-ship!

2019 Goals

Personal Goals:

  • Slow down and enjoy the present;
  • Have knee surgery to repair the torn meniscus;
  • Rehab the knee and then return to a maintaining a consistent exercise schedule;
  • Make additional dietary changes (maybe get rid of dairy?); and
  • Hit the cottage at least four times for max relaxing.

Business Goals:

  • WORK LESS;
  • Work smarter – implement processes that will make my work-life easier and more efficient;
  • Hire an accountant (something that I’ve been long overdue for);
  • Maintain relationships with my existing clients;
  • Invest in sprucing up the blog;
  • Blog regularly; and
  • Continue to grow Sprout E-Learning.

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Two Coming Soon Articulate 360 Features That I’m Pumped About

December 19, 2018

This week Articulate announced some new things coming to Articulate 360, and there are two things in particular that I am very excited about:

“Create more types of interactions in Rise: Create compelling scenarios in Rise with the new scenario block. And easily create gorgeous bar, line, and pie charts that help learners make sense of information with the new chart block.”

Rise is such an easy and fantastic web-based authoring tool, and I love that Articulate keeps expanding upon its current pre-fabbed offerings. Adding in options for charts and graphs is going to be a game changer for a lot of data-driven courses.

But the feature that I’m most excited for is:

  • “Author more quickly in Storyline 360 with media library: Save time by managing all of your Storyline 360 project assets in one place. You can add, remove, replace, reuse, and export images, videos, audio tracks, and characters.”

The media library is going to be a game changer for ANY e-learning developer. Half the battle of course development is asset management…heck, I even gave a less than exciting (though passionate) session at an Articulate Community Roadshow entirely on asset management and data back up several years back. Sounds exciting right? Someone has to deliver those sessions! ANYHOW, the media library is going to help e-learning developers streamline their development approach by proactively providing developers with a library to contain all of their course assets…AMEN! Developers will no longer need to (most often) reactively create their file structures, and it will help everyone be more organized, well-oiled machines.

What new features are you excited about?!

1 Comment Filed Under: Instructional Design

Screencast: Make an Image Background Transparent in Microsoft PowerPoint

December 17, 2018

In this screencast, I’m showing you how to make the background of an image that isn’t transparent, transparent.

If you’ve ever received files from a client that don’t have a transparent background, but you need one because you’re placing it on something other than the image’s current background colour, this tip is going to be a lifesaver!

Check out the screencast below!

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Meet Ashley

Ashley ChiassonI’m a Instructional Designer with over 15 years of professional experience, and have developed e-learning solutions for clients within the Defence, Post-Secondary Education, Health, and Sales sectors. For more about me, click here!

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