Ashley Chiasson, M.Ed

Instructional Designer & Consultant

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Freelance Advice Round-Up #1

Over the past couple of years, I’ve written and spoken frequently on the topic of freelancing and independent contracting. After presenting on How to Become a Successful Freelancer at the Articulate Community Roadshow 2015: Toronto, I had a lot of questions that involved things I learned through doing (e.g. sending my first invoice, drafting a contract, etc.). In an effort to respond to these questions, I’ll be starting a new blog post series!

The series should go live next week, so stay tuned, but in the meantime, here is a collection of some of my most popular blog posts where I become your Freelancer Sensei and impart all of my wisdom:

Take a look through those posts and let me know if you have any pressing questions – just leave those in the comments section; I’ll address them, I promise! And don’t forget to pop back frequently next week when the new post series goes live.

Terminology Tuesday: Transcription

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:

Articulate Community Roadshow 2015 – Toronto #ELHToronto

This year I’m presenting at the Articulate Community Roadshow 2015 – Toronto; I presented at this event last year, and it was so much fun! So nice I thought I’d do it twice! All of the presenters are fantastic and the group looks like a fun one.

Last year I presented on How to Build Your E-Learning Portfolio, and you can check out some blog posts based on that topic below:

Screen Shot 2015-06-17 at 10.49.18 AM

This year I’m presenting on How to Become a Successful Freelancer; the presentation is very broad in the sense that users from many industries can take this advice and run with it. It’s based entirely on my own experiences as a freelancer and independent contractor, and I really hope that you can glean some good tips. I’ll post the presentation after I give it, but for now here are some resources for the presentation:

Freelance Sites:

Where Clients Might Be Hanging Out:

Time Management:

Terminology Tuesday: Time-Lapse

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.
 

E-Learning Challenge #74 and 84 – First Joint Challenge

Alright, folks! This is my very first joint e-learning challenge, and amen! Because…time is a hot commodity. This entry satisfies the requirements for both E-Learning Challenge #74 – Using Toys for Storytelling in E-Learning and E-Learning Challenge #84 – Using Image Sliders and Photo Galleries in E-learning.

The Concept

For e-learning challenge #74, the concept was to design a short interaction using toys as your primary characters, and for e-learning challenge #84, the concept was to show and share an image slider for e-learning.

The Method

Back in March of this year, I purchased a Lego Creator set for the express purposes of completing e-learning challenge #74 in March. It’s now the end of May. I had my husband set up his camera on a tripod set to record, and first filmed myself building the lego. Then, I disassembled my water plane and used a remote for the camera so that I could capture images of each step in the water plan development.

Once all of the images and video were compiled, I tossed the video into Camtasia, removed the audio, and sped things up a whole bunch.

Now, on the day of recap for e-learning challenge #84, I felt motivated to get something together for submission…at the last minute. I thought this might be a great way of using the image slider to display the steps for building out my water plane, so I audible-d all of my other ideas for this challenge and merged #74 and 84 into one!

I chose a theme, tossed in the shapes for the steps, grouped them, added some animations, added layers for each step, and tada!

The Result

Screen Shot 2015-05-28 at 9.41.45 AM

To view the full interaction Click Here.

Learner Activities: Military Sector versus Academic Sector

I was reading through Rachel’s post related to activities for your e-book, and was reflecting on my own experiences developing e-learning courses in various industries, and I thought some of you folks might be interested to hear my perspective on working across industries and about which type of activities worked best for which industry.

For many years I worked in the private sector developing military courseware. Most of these courses were related to aircraft familiarization, component removal/installation, and common core training. Within these programs, the most effective activities, by a landslide, were Electronic Performance Support Systems (EPSS’) as they provided the learner with both just-in-time and practical training for the task to be completed. These EPSS’ worked best for practical training (e.g. component removal/installation procedures), and were very effective at creating concrete learning experiences.

Assessment was most often scenario-based or multiple choice, and of the two, scenario-based assessment activities seemed to be the most effective at ensuring the achievement of learning outcomes.

After spending so much time in the private sector, I switched to post-secondary education. There was a steep learning curve in terms of determining effective communication strategies with faculty (who are very different than military SMEs) and navigating collective agreements, but I’m finally in a good groove and my pedagogical recommendations are more often implemented than not (woohoo!).

Within the academic sector, there is a much broader range of learning activities, and it’s really neat to see what faculty members are doing in their classrooms. There are no EPSS or job aids, but there is group work and forum discussions, and synchronous sessions – oh my!

With some courses, there are still instances of ‘read this, do that multiple choice’ styles, but this is few and far between, as faculty members are revising their learning activities to favour more active learning components (e.g. forum discussions, case studies, and presentations). It’s been really neat to see faculty members guiding their discussions (and sometimes complimenting this guidance with technologies, such as Actively Learn!) instead of lecturing students for 2 hours.

Similar to military training, there is a predominance of self-directed learning as with most online courses, but all online courses have a synchronous requirement, where students must participate in a live session once or twice a week; to accommodate many learners (e.g. those who have scheduling conflicts), these sessions are recorded and can be watched asynchronously at a later time. Additionally, the faculty members are engaging their learners more actively (e.g. guiding forum discussions) than military instructors ever were. Where military training tended to be moving away from instructor-led training in favour of online learning, post-secondary it merely looking to enhance accessibility by creating an equitable learning experience for both on-campus and online students.

  • What differences have you seen in learning activities, if you’ve had the opportunity of working across industries?
  • Which type of learning activities seem to be working best, and which industry are you seeing these activities implemented?