Ashley Chiasson, M.Ed

There’s a section of my next book that I’m working on, and one sub-section discusses asset management (my editor will be pleased to hear that I am in fact at least thinking about writing). While at Learning Solutions Conference 2015, I attended a morning buzz session on Content Curation, wherein asset management was discussed…A LOT. It seemed as though many folks either didn’t know what the heck ‘asset management’ meant, or how to go about managing their assets, so I saw an opportunity for a great Terminology Tuesday topic. What can I say, I’m an opportunist…when it comes to blogging at least.

Asset Management

Asset management is just what it sounds like – managing your assets. Now, your ‘assets’ may come in many forms. For example, Media Assets (images/video/audio), Customer Furnished Assets (files provided by the client, which could be images/video/audio/PowerPoints/Word documents, etc.), Content Output (outputs from whichever authoring tool you’re using). If you’ve worked on large projects, you will likely relate to how unwieldy these assets can become if you don’t have a system in place for keeping everything organized.

This is where the ‘management’ element comes into play. What I like to do to manage my assets is to set up a folder structure. I’ve adopted a folder structure based on that of an organization I worked for previously…because it made sense and was easy to follow. It looks something like this:

Project Folder

• 100 Project Management
  • Depending on how large the project is, this folder may have sub-folders; for example:
    • Meeting Minutes
    • Action Tracking
    • Risk Management
    • Contracts
    • Invoices
• 200 Development
  • This folder typically contains sub-folders related to my development; for example:
    • Client-Furnished Information (CFI)
    • Scripts and Storyboards
      • Audio Narration
    • Media
      • Video
      • Audio
        • Scratch Audio
        • Final Audio
      • Images
      • Flash
    • Output
    • Quality Assurance
• 300 Client
  • This folder will include anything sent to the client for review; for example:
    • Delivered
    • Review Comments
    • Final

Within these folders, there may be other sub-folders, but this is the general structure I follow. When it comes to filenames, I either follow a file naming convention dictated by the client, or will follow an internal file naming convention I’m accustomed to, which indicates the project, type of media, asset number, and version number. For example, PROJECT_A_001_01 (which indicates Audio file 1, version 1). If there are multiple or courses for one project, I will also add an arbitrary course number so that I can keep everything in check, and I will maintain these filenames within a spreadsheet, housed within the main 200>Media folder.

Now…I get that all of this may sound super detailed and overwhelming, but when you get used to operating in a somewhat-organized manner, it really helps streamline your workflow and make you more efficient. It also makes it a lot easier to call up course assets in the event you need to re-use them (e.g. if you’re working for a client with multiple projects that may have shared elements).

Basically, you just need to commit to a structure, and then keep using that structure and process whenever you begin work on a new project. It can be a pain in the butt to set up sometimes, especially if you’re really busy and especially if you cringe at the thought of doing ‘unpaid’ administrative duties for your business, but believe me…you will thank me later. When you aren’t spending even more ‘unpaid’ hours digging through external hard drives or flash drives looking for some obscure storyboard you worked on two years ago. Can I get an amen?!

I read a fantastic article on Active Learning, written by Christopher Buddle, in University Affairs this morning, and it served as inspiration for this week’s terminology Tuesday.

Active Learning

According to Buddle (2015), “Active Learning is a philosophy and an approach in which teaching over beyond the “podium style” lecture and directly includes students in the learning process.” With the millennial students and those to come, this seems to be a teaching strategy that will become increasingly popular. When I consider myself as a student, I learned a lot from the traditional teaching approach, but it was more akin to the professor making deposits into the student’s mind. You go to the lecture, you’re talked at for an hour or more, and even if you don’t have issues plaguing your attention and focus, you’ll likely get distracted sometime within that hour. This is why active learning will be important when it comes to enhancing student engagement and overall academic achievement.

Active learning strategies discussed in the Buddle (2015) article include:

• The teacher becoming the student
  • Teacher poses questions to students drawing from material taught within the lecture.
• Clear and muddy
  • Students indicate areas of the lecture that were clear, and other areas that were muddier or more confusing; in the next lecture, the teacher spends some time re-explaining the more universally muddy components.
• Groups
  • Students are placed in groups to discuss a particular question and they report their response to the entire class.
• Instant feedback
  • Students are provided with instant feedback in the form of scratch-off cards. I have to admit that this seems a bit more complicated an approach, so the uptake by other teachers (unless the cards are provided by the institution) may be slow. However, instant feedback is very important, and can be provided through other means (e.g. online quizzing).
• Pair and share
  • Students pair up and discuss the teacher-posed question with one another.

The great thing about these strategies is that they force the students to become more engaged with the material. Students may initially find these approaches uncomfortable, but in the long run they will likely lead to increased information retention, and ensure that students are actually paying attention to the lecture instead of zoning out mid-way through.

This week’s term was inspired by the need to streamline and become more efficient. Hopefully it will help open your eyes to one of the many ways in which you can streamline your development process.

Slide Masters?

Slide masters are a view in Microsoft PowerPoint and Articulate Storyline (and possibly other products I’m not considering right now) that allow you to design slide layouts for use in content screens. They allow you to structure slides and add placeholders for text/images/video, etc. They became a thing for me when I began using Microsoft PowerPoint, and to be honest I didn’t really use them much until I started working in Articulate Storyline.

Once I began using slide masters in Storyline, I quickly saw how they could streamline my development process. I liken the process of creating slide masters to an argument organizations often engage in when debating the benefit of training – yeah, there’s a pretty good initial ‘cost’ of development, but the Return on Investment (ROI) will be even greater!

Another benefit – if you’re working on a project with multiple developers, designing slide masters will enhance consistency, especially when it comes to positioning of elements (e.g. title text).

I suppose this isn’t so much a definition as it is a recommendation…so go forth and master the slides!