Ashley Chiasson, M.Ed

I’m a very visual person and I have seen some terrible use of colours in e-learning, so I thought I’d talk a little bit about colour palettes and how to effectively use them in e-learning.

Colour Palettes

Colour palettes are the range of colours used by an individual in a particular project. Choosing an appropriate colour palette is essential to any project as it sets the tone for the e-learning. For example, if you choose a yellow background with white text, your learners may hate the project because it’s difficult to read the content. Whereas, a white background with black text is much easier on the eyes.

Considerations

When choosing a colour palette, you should first consider whether your client has any existing visual standards or branding guidelines. If they do, you will want to align your colour palette with these guidelines.

If you have free range to define the colour palette, you should keep the colour range between 3-5 colours. Too many colours may overwhelm your audience. If your client has provided visuals of any sort (logo, photos, graphics, etc.), you may want to begin with one of these visual elements and pull colours from the visual.

Use Your Resources!

There are heaps of colour resources out there, so don’t be intimidated if you’re not graphically inclined. These websites can help generate palette options and/or allow you to pull colours from images to create palettes. Here are some examples:

Colourlovers.com

Colourlovers.com allows you to sift through thousands of user-created colour palettes and retrieve the associated hex values – over the years, this has been one of my favourite colour resources.

Coolors.co

Coolors.co is a new-to-me resource, and is currently my favourite colour palette resource. It is a colour palette generator, and all you have to do is click the space bar to see a new palette – SO EASY! You can even adjust the colours if aren’t quite right, without losing the rest of the colours in the proposed palette.

Adobe Color CC

Adobe Color CC is neat because it allows you to upload an image and will then generate colour palettes from this image. You can choose the colour mood, which provides varying shades to the palette suggested, and you can also select a custom colour mood and customize to your liking.

Last week, at the Articulate Community Roadshow in Toronto, I provided an example of how important it is to value your time and resources, and it involved transcription…and the fact that I learned a very valuable life lesson regarding the value of my time and pricing myself appropriately.

Transcription

Transcription is a written representation of something, and often occurs when a print version of a video or audio recording is prepared. Transcription is often word-for-word, but may omit extraneous words (e.g. ‘uh’) that do not provide value, but which when removed to not impact the semantics of the message.

When I first began freelancing, my very first gig was transcribing 8 hours of audio interviews into text…for 60 dollars. 8 hours of audio transcribed to text for 60 dollars. I see you laughing. It was a painful, painful, painful, lesson, but at least the content was interesting. Needless to say, you will seldom see me volunteering to transcribe materials.

Within education, a main function of transcription is to increase accessibility of materials. Individuals may prefer to learn by reading text versus listening to audio, or they may have a visual or auditory impairment that requires a transcript. Too often I see faculty members including videos and/or podcasts in their courses without including a transcript, and while this may not be a problem 90% of the time, it puts students requiring a transcript the an awkward position of having to ask for one.

Often times individuals are oblivious to the need or feel as though someone else (e.g. disability services) will take on the responsibility of creating transcripts. The omission of a transcript is almost always unintentional. However, in keeping with universal instructional design principles, I always explain the importance of transcription and accessibility whenever I meet with faculty members. Some major concerns I hear include: “but how will I do that?!” or “I don’t have time for that!,” and for these questions, I’ve discovered some easy solutions:

• F5 Transcription – Free and easy; aids in transcription of audio/video files.
• Transcribe – Free transcription service.
• Transcriber Pro – Tool for manual transcription to test.

I have a little time-lapse demo up my sleeve for a future post, so I thought it might be relevant to first define time-lapse.

What is Time-Lapse?

Time-lapse is a photography technique that involves taking a series of photos of one object over time and stringing those still photos together, often in video format, to illustrate change over a duration of time. When strung together, the video is often sped up and the result is one of my favourites. I could watch time-lapses all day long!

A great example of this photographic technique in action can be seen in the documentary Chasing Ice. If you haven’t seen it, you really should check it out!

Using Time-Lapse Demos

When I create a time-lapse, I don’t do it in the same manner as photographers would. Instead, I record screen capture videos of a process, such as building out an interaction in Storyline, and then speed the video up to create the effect of a time-lapse.

This is a great way of demonstrating your process and giving folks a birds eye view into your developmental mind.

When it comes to technology, I prefer to create my time-lapse demos using Camtasia; it provides a lot of options, with minimal learning curve!

Examples of Time-Lapse Demos

The most popular time-lapse demo I’ve built out would have to be my Basic Storyboard Template:

Basic Storyboard Template from Ashley Chiasson on Vimeo.

 Another example is this Basic Circle Diagram created in Articulate Engage:

Circle Diagram from Ashley Chiasson on Vimeo.