Ashley Chiasson, M.Ed

Answering Reader Questions #1

May 7, 2015

Over the past few weeks, I have been getting some fantastic questions from readers, and I’ll slowly be trickling through and responding to each.

The first question comes from Tristan (by the way, I love your WordPress theme – start blogging!):

Would you consider doing a follow up article on cold emailing techniques?

Cold emailing is certainly not the most fun activity, but it has landed me quite a few opportunities, especially in my early days as a freelancing Instructional Designer. First off – You need to get over yourself if you aren’t already. Take all of the fear and shame out of the idea of cold contacting prospective clients. Ain’t no shame in that! Back in the old days, businesses did this all the time, and businesses still do door-to-door, which is similar, but a lot more difficult. A cold email is how I landed my role at a university, which had I waited for a posting and applied traditionally, would have been looked over for one of the 100+ over-qualified applicants with more experience.

I had a great conversation with a friend a few months back. He was looking to break into the Technical Writing scene and wasn’t sure how to do it. I encouraged him to do some cold emailing, but he was nervous about what he would say. This happens when we’re anxious about whether we’re capable of doing the job. So my second piece of advice is to exude confidence from every fibre of your being. You enjoy what you do and you know (or are pretty darn sure) you can do what you’re saying you can, so just own it!

Now, when it comes to specific techniques, I took several approaches:

I created a canned, but modifiable, email that could broadly address any individual or organization. Once developed, I modified it based on who it was being sent to. Key elements included: introduction of me and my background, explanation of how my expertise might work for the individual/organization, link to my portfolio, attachment of my resume, and a thank you for taking the time to read the email.
I researched the heck out of the people I was cold emailing. This is important because it sets your email apart from anyone else who may be cold emailing, which in my experience, few people do this nowadays, so you really want to show off your best self because you’re already putting yourself out there. After researching, I modified my email appropriately.
I followed up! In most cases I followed up 2-4 weeks following the email.

One great thing about cold emailing is that often times, prospective clients don’t realize that they need their services, so when they’re offered (and explained clearly and without jargon), some folks will have an “Aha!” moment and realize that you’re just what they’ve been looking for to resolve a problem that has been plaguing them and/or their organization.

I will say that cold emailing may not be as fast as other means in terms of securing gigs; the university didn’t contact me until a year and a half after I emailed – how they still had my email, I don’t know, but they did, and I’ve been here ever since! However, those are the techniques that I used, and I hope that this information can help you.

Terminology Tuesday: Show Your Work

May 5, 2015

I saw some tweets awhile back about showing your work or working aloud, and the concept ties in nicely with my discussions on portfolio building, so I figured it was a good opportunity to create a greater awareness!

Show Your Work

Showing your work and working aloud are really about sharing how you got from point A to point B with an audience. Such sharing serves to enlighten your audience, and while some examples they may have previously encountered, if you continue sharing your work, your audience will undoubtedly learn something and some point.

When I started this blog, I went at it from an Instructional Design professional looking for work perspective. Blog posts were focused on clients, and had less of focus on imparting knowledge to my actual audience. Once I realized that my audience was coming primarily for the instructional design and freelance wisdom, I switched focus to cater to that audience. Initially I thought that I would see a decline in the amount of prospective clients I had, but that wasn’t the case. And, I get to share the small wealth of information I have with a group of individuals who can genuinely benefit from such information.

Ways of Showing Your Work

Now, there are so many ways for you to show your work: participating in forum discussions, creating and sharing infographics, recording screencasts, creating demos, sharing walkthroughs of how you got from point A to point B, creating day-in-the-life posts.

My explanatory posts that accompany my E-Learning Heroes Challenge entries are always very popular, and I like to think that it’s because I provide an explanation of the concept, the method I took in achieving the concept, and finally I show the result, which is typically a full demo of the interaction or free download.

Free downloads are a great way of sharing your work, because they allow users to reverse-engineer your interactions to suit their needs OR use the interaction ‘off-the-shelf’/as-is.

Screencast demos are another crowd-pleaser. These videos get a lot of views from folks looking to solve problems, so when you share your solution, it makes a small pocket of the world that much less problematic!

Of course these are just a small sampling of ways that you can show your work, so get creative!

How to Build Your E-Learning Portfolio – Part 2

May 4, 2015

This post is one in a four-part series for How to Build Your E-learning Portfolio. You can read Part 1 here.

Common Challenges

I understand that building your portfolio can be challenging. As are most things in life.

Maybe you aren’t legally allowed to share your work samples because they’re controlled goods or you’ve signed an air-tight Non-Disclosure Agreement;
Maybe you don’t have time…we’re not all Beyonce; or
Maybe you don’t know where to begin.

My goal here is to become your portfolio-building sensei and hold your hand through this entire process. There are times when you will feel overwhelmed (maybe even by looking at those three challenges), but you don’t need to feel that way. It’s okay. Everything will be okay. You just need to have a real conversation with yourself about when you want to stop hunting down every work opportunity (that costs time that no one is paying you for!) and let your portfolio do the work for you.

Challenging Yourself

Now, you may already feel challenged by those challenges impacting your lack of portfolio, but I’m asking you to challenge yourself even more!

Before taking the leap into full-time independent contractor-ship, I knew that I needed some sort of portfolio. I had been freelancing part-time for several years and was losing out on a lot of opportunities because I had nothing to show when asked “can we see your portfolio?” At the time, I had a full-time job with clients predominantly in the Defence sector, and all of my coolest work samples were classified as controlled goods; I wasn’t able to share any of my professional work, and I felt defeated.

At first I wallowed, but then I had some real-talk with myself, got serious, and created my first two portfolio pieces. The first was a tabbed interaction with hotspot pups designed to teach you how to bathe a cat. When in doubt, go with what you know. I’m a crazy cat lady who didn’t really know how to bathe a cat, but wikihow came to the rescue with some hilarious illustrations, and that simple tabbed interaction is still a hit with clients.

Portfolio Piece # 1

The second portfolio piece was inspired by many of the small business books I had read. I wanted to share brief reviews of these books, so I created a hotspot-based interaction that linked to book reviews contained within scrolling panels.

Portfolio Piece #2

Both of these portfolio pieces were very basic in terms of technological prowess, they were developed in Articulate Storyline before I had become more experienced within Storyline, and were the launching pad for my portfolio.

The moral of this story: When feeling defeated, challenge yourself to be creative!

Terminology Tuesday: Vlogs

April 28, 2015

I’ve been watching a lot of YouTubers lately. It’s one of my favourite ways to take time out and get my head out of work mode. One of my favourite video styles to watch are vlogs, because they give you a glimpse into the lives of others. Now, I know that sounds creepy, but sometimes it’s just refreshing to get out of your own head.

What is a Vlog?

A vlog is a video-blog. Instead of blogging traditionally, as I’m doing now, the user video-blogs or vlogs. These videos are often done in a day-in-the-life style, but can also be optimized for training and development, akin to webinars or screencasts.

Vlogging has a huge presence in the YouTube content creator community for obvious reasons, but there are many Instructional Designers and IDs who are creating similar content. One cool way that I can see a day-in-the-life style working might be to set up your camera behind you while you work to create some cool time-lapse demos.

Another approach could be similar to the beauty gurus you see on YouTube – these content creators often explain how to achieve different beauty looks. You can use this approach as an opportunity to create brief tidbits of instructor-led training.

When thinking about this post, I really just wanted to emphasize the importance of thinking outside of the box with regard to your training, and leveraging approaches that are working well in other contexts!

How to Build Your E-Learning Portfolio – Part 1

April 27, 2015

I’ve presented on How to Build Your E-Learning Portfolio several times over the past year, and it still amazes me how few e-learning portfolios I come across online. For this reason, I’ve decided to take a four-part approach to sharing what I know about building your e-learning portfolio.

The Importance of an E-Learning Portfolio

For e-learning professionals, and for many folks working in other ‘visual’ industries, a visual portfolio is essential. I said it. Essential. A portfolio will help you out if you eventually seek to change jobs, roles, or move into a freelance/contracting role, and it will quell the inevitable question from prospective employers/clients, “can we see some work samples and/or your portfolio?” Portfolios should be considered the cornerstone for every e-learning professional.

In my opinion, there are three main reasons why having a portfolio is important:

It highlights your capabilities; specifically with visual technologies;
It can act as a visual resume. Most Instructional Designers have had a Subject Matter Expert review their Word storyboard only to say “but, I just can’t visualize it.” As an ID, you know that the next phase is developing the content and media assets, but the SME just can’t get past the storyboard phase. This problem is similar to one that prospective clients have when trying to visualize how you and your abilities could work for them and their needs; and
It can lead to an increase in job offers. Once prospective clients can see what you’re capable of doing, their confidence in your abilities will increase, which can help you reduce the amount of hustling you have to do.

My portfolio started out with just a few items, but once it went live, I saw a dramatic increase in the amount of prospective client inquiries I had. You will never stop playing the sales person as a small-business owner, but you can significantly reduce the amount of hustling you do, and will likely be able to enjoy the luxury of being able to choose who you want to work with.

Since tossing my portfolio online, I’ve been able to focus on working with clients I’m passionate about doing work with instead of scooping up anything and everything. It’s also allowed me to funnel work into the hands of other hustling independents to keep their revenue streams open when mine is at capacity.

With all of that being said, I would consider investing time into building my portfolio to be a direct correlation with an increase in my quality of work life and overall job satisfaction!

Terminology Tuesday: Reusability

April 21, 2015

First off, I have to address something I didn’t pick up on until this morning – last week was one year of Terminology Tuesday posts. Sure, I didn’t hit every single Tuesday as I had intended, but there have been 52 terms discussed (53 today), and that’s just bananas!

This week, I wanted to talk a bit about the concept of reusability in e-learning, and perhaps veer from the traditional concept discussion that’s often related to SCORM.

Reusability in E-Learning

When I think about reusability in e-learning, I think about objects and content that can be reused in a variety of contexts. Developers often run into this when working on large projects or in industries that involve trade-specific courseware development. My first experience with reusable assets was working with clients in the Defence sector. Often times we were working on projects for the same aircraft (although perhaps several years between projects), and it became quickly beneficial. For instance, one client had provided us with a 3D model of the aircraft, whereas another client several years later did not have access to this same model. We were able to reuse the initial model to suit the needs of the new project. Reusability also came in handy when developing component installation courses and then removal courses (we simply had to reverse the interaction, but could use the same objects).

Being mindful of reusability is critical as it can save you time and money in the long run. Reusing previously established assets (for the same client, of course – in the Defence sector example, the end client was the same, whereas the contractor may have been different, so the end client ‘owned’ all of the assets) will reduce the amount of development various departments and/or individuals have to spend.

Best practices for reusability might include creating your own content repository and defining a file naming convention that will make it easy for you to find what you’re looking for. If you’re extra savvy, you can create a coded database, but that might require a lot more effort than you have time for.

If you work in a specific authoring tool, it may save you time on a new project to have a repository of developed themes and/or interactions; this can help shave time off in the initial prototyping phase, and provides you with an arsenal of ideas for what you might be able to do from a design perspective, and can prove invaluable if design is not your forte.

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