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.

Terminology Tuesday: Fear of Not Knowing (FONK)

flat_line_icon_1

Most of us have heard the phrase Fear of Missing Out, or FOMO. FOMO occurs when you experience anxieties associated with being afraid that you’re going to miss out on something. However, until today, I had never heard of the phrase Fear of Not Knowing (FONK).

FONK? 

I was reading Mind Change: How Digital Technologies Are Leaving Their Mark on Our Brains by Susan Greenfield, and she began to discuss FONK. Specifically how it impacts our use of technology. You know that feeling you get that drives you to obsessively check your email, applications, etc.? That feeling is driven by FONK. By constantly checking in, you’re satisfying your mind’s need of being constantly up-to-date.

However, there are bigger implications associated with FONK that impact our behaviours. One such example is staying in a job that you hate because you’re afraid of what changing jobs/roles/etc. might involve or that you’re afraid of not being satisfied with the change. This too is FONK, and this is a situation that we see more and more. I feel like the millennials are a bit better at being more adaptive to change, and being more willing to subject themselves to change. However, in a traditional sense, we’ve been programmed to do things in a certain way, check the boxes, and stay put. This is causing unnecessary stress and suffering on a generation of working class individuals.

I don’t have any good suggestions for combatting FONK, but my greatest recommendation can only be to do what you can to be happy. Set boundaries for yourself (e.g. working for 1 hour before you allow yourself 5 minutes to check your news sites), and don’t let FONK control your destiny. Take a cue from FOMO, and give yourself permission to become more adaptive.

Screencast Monday: Personalization in Articulate Storyline – Part 1

In today’s screencast, we’re kicking of a new series: personalization. First up, I’m going to show you how to create a button set of characters in Articulate Storyline. In the next screencast, I’ll be showing you how you can take the selected character and carry them throughout your course.

The giveaway is also ending soon, so click through the banner (below), and enter to win an awesome Articulate Storyline book prize pack!

Giveaway_Banner

WIN THIS AWESOME ARTICULATE STORYLINE BOOK PACKAGE!

I mentioned yesterday that Mastering Articulate Storyline has been published, and I wanted to give one lucky person a chance to win a copy, and some other really neat things!

This giveaway includes 1 copy of each of my books, Mastering Articulate Storyline and Articulate Storyline Essentials, a $50 gift card to Creative Market (one of my favourite places to find e-learning assets), a $50 gift card to Amazon (because you can find everything there), and a Blue Snowflake Microphone (portable microphone with incredible quality)! The giveaway will run for one month from today, you can earn a maximum of 3 entries (per person), and a winner will be selected at random on August 7th. Good luck!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Mastering Articulate Storyline is Published!

B01959_MockupCover_Normal

 

Everyone – these past couple of weeks have been a whirlwind of activity! I’m so happy to announce that Mastering Articulate Storyline has been published, and is available for sale. Get your copy now!

Packt Publishing | Amazon

It took quite awhile to write this title and get it published, but it’s finally finished, and I really think it will help Storyline users level up their existing skills. I was actually contracted to write Mastering Articulate Storyline way back in October 2014, but Packt also saw a need for Articulate Storyline Essentials, so we shelved Mastering until Essentials was finished, and then plugged away at completing Mastering.

In addition to being excited to teach Storyline users some more advanced techniques, I’m also excited that I no longer need to procrastinate! I mean, I’m sure I’ll find some way to procrastinate doing other things, but writing won’t be one of them!

The other really great thing about having released these two books is that they’ll be really helpful for those registering in the Articulate Storyline courses that Sprout E-Learning will be offering in the near future – if you haven’t signed up to hear more about sprout, sign up for the mailing list!

Other exciting things that have happened: The Articulate E-Learning Heroes Community Roadshow: Toronto was last week, and was a big success, and I found out that one of my sessions was picked up for DevLearn 2016, so it seems as though I’ll be getting to Vegas in the fall. I’m hoping to get back on schedule this week, so stay tuned, because you’re going to see a few posts appearing not on their regularly scheduled days.

E-Learning Heroes Community Roadshow: Toronto 2016 – Day 2 Recap

E-Learning Challenge 1: Convert Bullet Points to Interactive Content

I’ll have to have a chat with Tom, David, and Nicole, because there was not enough coffee in my morning to unleash creativity…but that’s for another time. Tom provided us with some content, and we were tasked with creating an interaction from that content.

Our group spent a lot of time talking about all of the cool things we could do:

  • Using sliders to create a conveyor belt of gifts/tickets
  • Once a gift is selected, using a slider as a decision making tool
  • Using tabbed interactions

Then we settled on some buttons to make a decision making scenario with images for each gift, three options (Accept/Politely Decline/Read Policy). Dylan drove the development, and made everyone laugh with his firing feedback.

 

E-Learning Challenge 2: Create Character Driven Interactions

For this challenge, we were tasked with creating character-driven interactions, specifically related to the content provided by Tom. In this situation, a supervisor is giving an employee feedback on their job performance.

Samples included text-messaging discussions using motion path animations, text-messaging discussions with data entry fields, and quiz question conversation interactions.

With five minutes to spare, I settled on the idea I had for my interaction, which would be a flip book animation style interaction. Because it took me so long to decide on what I wanted to do, it will be a forth-coming challenge I feature here on the blog, so stay tuned! Until then, you can take a look at the intro slide, below:

Screen Shot 2016-06-30 at 11.21.01 AM

E-Learning Challenge 3: Establish the Right Look and Feel for Your Course Part 1

 

I’ve participated in this challenge several times now, but it’s always a good one to provide developers with ideas for when they get to development.

David is having us create a mind map for a course associated with Canada Day, which has the goal of being used in E-Learning Challenge 4.

E-Learning Challenge 4: Establish the Right Look and Feel for Your Course Part 2

David prompted us to commit some of our paper ideas to more physical ideations. He then discussed the importance of this mind map in helping your through your development process.

He had a shockingly (Come on, David! You don’t know The Tragically Hip?!) low level understanding of Canada, but we’ll forgive him (because we’re Canadian), but he managed to relate his point to our points of Canadian reference.

E-learning Challenge 5: Incorporate the Company’s Brand into Your E-Learning

For this e-learning challenge, Tom prompted us to use a company’s brand in our e-learning; originally, he asked us to develop using Good Belly’s branding, but then halfway through, he wanted us to change to Disney’s branding standards to create e-learning for using company vehicles for business.

Once everyone was finished, Tom provided some tips and tricks related to colour customization (e.g. using the Design tab and themes in Storyline, using theme fonts, and customizing the Player colours).