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.

3 Tips for Better Project Management

Project Management and Instructional Design

There is some truth to saying that all Instructional Design requires some amount of project management; however, some roles require more project management than others. In a previous life, I was fortunate enough to have project managers who would deal with all the more frustrating client communications and assert their dominance, but now I’m foraging my own path as an Independent Contractor and I’m finding that I wear the Project Manager hat a bit more often than I’d like to – but it’s necessary.

Today I’m going to be discussing tips for managing your Instructional Design projects and the corresponding client. Hold on to your hats! You’re going to quickly notice a theme.

Tip # 1 – Communicate!

This may seem like an obvious thing to do, but the reality is that a lot of people don’t communicate effectively or enough. When beginning a new project, it is essential to discuss all project requirements with your client and THEN draft a Statement of Work or contract. This document will outline everything from project requirements to deadlines to payment to what will happen if the client initiates project delays, etc. You must detail EVERYTHING in this document. An important aspect often overlooked within a contract is a section on communication and how the client is to communicate with you, when they can expect a response, etc. Your client needs to know that they’re not the only client you have. You’ll be respectful of their time and they should be respectful of yours.

So the project has begun and you’re confused about something. Instead of spending days troubleshooting and trying to find a solution, ask your client – they may provide a simple solution, ask your colleagues – they may be able to help, and ask the internet – it’s one of our greatest resources.

Tip # 2 – Be Clear with Your Expectations

This goes hand-in-hand with Tip #1. In all of your communications, be very clear. Do not be wishy washy. Make decisions, and stand by these decisions. Including these expectations within your Statement of Work or Contract is a smart idea as doing so allows you to refer back to this signed document anytime the client starts moving toward scope creep or going back on their original agreement. Contracts can be always be amended, but they need to be mutually agreed upon.

Tip # 3 – Assert Yourself!

Now this one can be tricky for a lot of people. I have a hard time asserting myself and tend to prefer to go above and beyond to please my clients. However, going above and beyond is fine – so long as it’s in your contract. If it’s not in your contract and it’s going to add time on to your process, you need to let your client know and assert yourself by explaining that you can do X, but it will be an additional charge. It also helps if you explain this in your contract by indicating that any work above and beyond the work outlined in the contract will be billed at your hourly/daily/weekly rate of X. If scope creep begins to occur, you can refer your client back to their contract and they won’t be surprised – here they can decide whether the work is in fact required, or whether they can do without the additional work.

Bonus Tip: Learn from Your Mistakes

This is an important one! If you don’t learn from your past mistakes, you will likely keep making them. This will likely create more aggravation than good, so don’t be too proud to admit to your own mistakes.

For more tips, check out my mentor’s site: Lea-p.com

E-Learning Challenge #31: Creative Resume Templates for E-Learning Portfolios

So I’m a bit late to the party on this one – things have been BUSY (and I won’t complain)! The e-learning challenge two weeks ago was to create a creative resume template to showcase e-learning portfolios. While not necessarily a template, I came up with a cutesy way to showcase my experience and some work samples.

The Concept

Create an interactive resume to showcase my education, work experience, and samples of my development work.

The Method

I was initially inspired by a desktop wallpaper posted by Smashing Magazine for the month of May (how is it May already?!). I downloaded the non-calendar version of the wallpaper, and formatted my slide background to display the image.

Then, I used shapes to create the a stick-figure version of myself and included a little blurb about what I do and why I’m passionate about it. Using shapes, I created buttons along the bottom of this slide which would launch additional layers. Each layer would contain information about my education, professional experience, and work samples. The work samples layer used hotspots to launch the actual sample interactions provided.

The Result

Resume_Large

To view the complete interaction, click here.

Terminology Tuesday: Bloom’s Taxonomy

Since the dawn of my days as an Instructional Designer, Bloom’s Taxonomy was pounded into my brain – the military realllllly loves Dr. Benjamin Bloom’s verbs. I made the assumption that everyone in the field of Education had heard of Bloom’s Taxonomy, and you know what assumptions do – they make an A** out of me and you! In developing a model course for faculty members, I initially thought it was too elementary to be discussing Bloom’s Taxonomy with folks holding PhDs in educational fields…that is until I found out that a faculty member had admitted to not knowing what Bloom’s Taxonomy was. SAY WHAAAAT?! So this week, I’m discussing Bloom’s Taxonomy, and maybe you too can become king (or queen) of the verbs!

So way back in the 1950s, Dr. Benjamin Bloom decided that he wanted to move away from simple recall tasks in education – you may remember this as memorizing text book passages and recalling them later in some regurgitated form or another – to him, this wasn’t really a deep form of education. Wanting to foster higher thinking in education, Dr. Bloom came up with classifications of verbs which would be used to write learning objectives.

Bloom’s Taxonomy emphasizes the importance of using the three domains of learning (cognitive, affective, and psychomotor), and if you’ve ever worked within the Defence sector, you will see this translated in Job Task Analyses (JTAs) as knowledge, skills, and attitude – often in a very fancy looking excel spreadsheet that makes your eyes bleed and sucks a little bit of your soul each time you open it.

These verbs were classified into six groups: Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation. Later on, the taxonomy was revised, with the new groups being: Remembering, Understanding, Applying, Analyzing, Evaluating, and Creating.

But Why Do I Need Verbs!?

Well. Every good training program has a set of learning objectives which outline the goals of the course – or what you should be able to do upon completion of the training program. Now to be good and measurable learning objectives, you must include a verb within the learning objective that seeks to somehow measure what the learner is doing.

For example, say I want the learner to be able to calculate a variable based on a mathematical equation discussed within the course, I may write a learning objective like “Apply your understanding of the Pythagorean Theorem to the length of X.” This is much more measurable than say “Solve for X.” In the latter learning objective, I’m not even telling the learner which formula I expect them to call upon; this is confusing. You want to create clarity within your learning objectives as this outlines clear expectations you have of your learners.

As much as I like to harp on Bloom’s Taxonomy (honestly, it’s been beaten to death with me), it is important for any effective training program. Especially when it comes to assessment. Like I said before, we want to create measurable learning objectives; this means that we need to assess our learner’s knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation (notice a trend here?) of the information presented throughout the training program. Doing so will ensure that our learners successfully achieve the learning objectives (or have all possible chances to do so at least).

You can find some neat visuals for Bloom’s Taxonomy (a few good ones are here, here, and here) – this may help clear up some confusion. And if the visuals don’t help, check out Don Clark’s explanation – it’s a darn good one!

Like this post? Want more Instructional Design tips? Sign up below!

 

Surviving the Revision Apocalypse

A fellow community member (Hey, Adam!) posted an interesting infographic for Surviving the E-Learning Revision Apocalypse over at e-learning heroes, and it made my day and struck a chord, so I thought it might be a good time to discuss what you can do to make your revisions go as smoothly (and cost-effectively) as possible! There were so many great points that they honestly bear repeating.

Everyone (regardless of your profession) has likely encountered the dreaded revision cycle or has come to a point of project rework. This can be a painful experience, but you need to set yourself up for success. As the infographic indicates, the number one way to ensure you don’t get caught up in endless revisions is to dictate and define your revision scope. Some individuals dictate which types of revisions are included and which are out of scope; however, I find it easiest to dictate a revision limit and outline the associated daily rate for each additional set of revisions. For me, this has worked well – clients generally get the brunt of their revisions worked out in the first iteration of their review, and while they may not balk at the daily rate for additional revisions, it usually keeps them within scope and reality. Let’s face it – without defining the terms of your revisions, you may get locked into an entire project re-development – who knows! It sounds scary and I don’t like it, so I cover my butt and you should too!

Another essential element within your contract should be to outline the revision deadlines and how they are to be communicated to you. Time and again I have had multiple reviewers look at a project and send 487932423 different documents outlining their revisions. The last thing you want to do is be faced with consolidating those revisions. This will yield a lot of work and likely a lot of redundancy between reviewers. What I like to do is provide my clients with a change log; here they are able to track all of the necessary revisions in one place – all neat and tidy. Then come revision time, I don’t feel compelled to bang my head repeatedly off my keyboard (or maybe I just do this less, depending on the revisions required).

Thoroughly review all deliverables. I cannot stress this enough – it’s going to save you a lot of time and headache AND it makes you look more professional. Sometimes it can be really hard to review our own work, especially when you’ve been looking at one document or project for so long – you may need a fresh set of eyes. In this case, I recommend having someone you trust give it the once over for basics like spelling and grammar…or if you don’t have that luxury, close the project, refresh your mind, and review a few hours later.

If there are multiple members on a project, ensure there is a clearly defined team lead; after reviewing your work, it should be submitted to the team lead for their input. All team members will submit their work to the team lead, and this will ensure consistency in look and feel. Once revisions come rolling in, it is important for the team to have a meeting to discuss all comments. It has been my experience working on teams that a reviewer may comment on one element in one place and expect a global change. Without meeting to discuss these ‘global changes’, there will inevitably be more revisions down the line. And you might cry. And your project manager might whine about deadlines and resources. No one wants either of those things, so please…go forth and meet with the minds. Share now or cry later.

Last but not least (and to reiterate my first point), be aware of project scope. Be very aware. If it is the one thing you do 150%, be cognizant of your project scope. Clients like to ask for things, and I want a pony, but I’m not getting one. I’ll liken scope creep to the difference between feeding a 38lb border collie and feeding a 150lb Bernese mountain dog. Today I went to pick up pet food; there was a Bernese mountain dog (and its owner) in the store. On the counter, there was the Bernese mountain dog’s food – 6 raw ‘medallions’ 1lb each with a price tag of 56 bucks on it, and when I asked how many feedings that was, the response was “well, we only give her one a day”…okay so 6 days at 56 bucks…We pay 27 bucks for 2.5 weeks of food for our 38lb border collie. MUCH more cost effective. Ashley – Where the hell are you going with this? Well – your client may be paying to feed the border collie (e.g. what they agreed to pay you), but come revision time, they ask you to feed the Bernese mountain dog (e.g. scope creep). DO NOT FEED THE BERNESE MOUNTAIN DOG! If you do, you will lose a lot of your profits.

Like this post? Want more Instructional Design tips? Sign up below!

 

Terminology Tuesday: Chunking

This week, I’m going to discuss the term chunking, and how it plays into the world of what I would consider good Instructional Design.

Chunking is the process wherein complex information is broken down into smaller, more palatable pieces of information. I understand this verb could be used for something that occurs after a long night of drinking and I’d like to think that the outcome is similar. It’s a concept that came to existence in and around the 1950s when its inventor (George A. Miller) argued that our working memory can only do so much, and how true that is!

Like Miller, cognitive load theory dictates that the volume of information and interactions, of which the learner is presented, is directly correlated to feelings over being underloaded or overloaded. For example, compare a first year university intro class versus a fourth year university class – here you can easily see that the former is likely less of a workload versus the latter. Another great example is to think back to the days of Geocities and Angelfire (bonus points if you’re a kid of the 80s, whose formative years were in the 90s boy-band era) and ALL of the images that took forever to load on your 14.4k modem, the auto play midi background music and the marquee banners. Were you able to focus on the content? Probably not. Believe it or not, there are still a lot of educational sites that resemble this format…in 2014, but I digress.

Why Should I Care About Chunking?

As an Instructional Designer, educator, or even writer, it is CRITICAL to chunk material, especially if the goal is to have the end user retain information. Or maybe you’re a business owner or training and development coordinator transforming source materials (e.g. new hire training) into a larger presentation – while perhaps not your usual task, you must understand the importance.

Chunking information allows for enhanced retention, which will likely yield a more productive and efficient operation – your team will run like a (more) well-oiled machine if they can process the information presented in a meaningful way. If you just toss all of the information in one pot without creating smaller segments (or chunks), you’ll likely notice that your learners have become withdrawn from their tasks or seem to have forgotten all of the information you worked hard to present. Why? Well, cognitive load theory would indicate that your learners are overwhelmed and overloaded with information, and they just can’t process it effectively. This is bad when you need your target audience to recall the information for use at a later time.

Connie Malamed provides a great explanation of why content should be chunked. She explains the history behind the concept and identifies methods for chunking content, so please check it out if you need more information!

Basically, you can choose not to care about chunking your material, but don’t say you haven’t been warned. The goal to creating a successful learning experience should always be focused on the student and their ability to achieve your learning objectives, so please take the time to consider the concept of chunking further if you want to achieve optimal student achievement and satisfaction!

Like this post? Want more Instructional Design tips? Sign up below!

 

Time-Lapse Demo: Very Basic Storyboard Template

I thought it time for a new feature; from here on out, I will try to reserve my Friday blog posts for time-lapse demos or tutorials. For the inaugural demo, I thought it best to keep things very simple – I was just getting the hang of stringing this stuff together and adding some fun audio (thank you, Pharrell!), so I am showing everyone how to create an incredibly basic storyboard template.

Most Instructional Designers create storyboards for a variety of reasons; maybe it’s one of your deliverables or maybe it just helps you organize your content before you begin rapid development. For me, I always storyboard – even if it isn’t required. It helps me with the layout of course content and I find it easier to pull the relevant information (e.g. audio narration) from a storyboard than having to develop it when I get to the audio recording (trust me – this makes a huge difference when you’re looking at recording 34832932 audio files for one course).

This time-lapse demo will be the first in a two part series – this is the type of storyboard template I would use in a non-deliverable, for my own personal content organization; next week I’ll go into a bit more detail, including cover-pages, multiple sections, page numbering, headers, and footers – hooray! The more detailed storyboard template is one that I would use for a client deliverable, and would encompass some more superfluous elements that are most often required in a formal deliverable.

I’m very excited about this feature because I would also like to show everyone how to create a detailed media task analysis, Articulate templates, and more! So, I hope you enjoy this new addition to the blog, and definitely stay tuned for more chances to watch me fumble my way through these videos (and hopefully provide some useful information along the way)!

Basic Storyboard Template from Ashley Chiasson on Vimeo.

You can download the document created within the video by clicking here.

Like this post? Want more Instructional Design tips? Sign up below!