Terminology Tuesday

It was requested by several readers, many months ago, but it’s finally here…

Terminology Tuesday: Year 1 – The Ebook

What do folks in education mean when they refer to ‘accessibility’? Well, in the online learning context, it really means allowing all learners, across all browsers and devices, access to all course content in an equitable manner.

Learning should not be impeded by inaccessible course content. 

In this context, accessibility does not necessarily mean increasing access to course content for individuals with disabilities. Of course, this is always a concern, but the perspective should change to just ensure course content is inclusive of all learners, not just those individuals with self-reported disabilities.

Sure, you should be conscious of ADA/508 compliance issues and include transcripts to all video or audio elements, use ALT tags for your imagery, and ensure your course materials are formatted in a way that can easily be processed by assistive technologies, but you should also look at accessibility from the broader lens of usability. Is your course functional? Is it mobile responsive? Are all applications used within your course accessible to all learners?

A lot of course content developers or Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) simply don’t think of these elements when developing the content, but it’s important, prior to launch, to review your course as a whole from an accessibility and usability perspective.

Content should be chunked into smaller portions to avoid cognitive overload, it should be presented in a logical format, it should be presented using various formats (e.g. text/audio/video) alongside relevant transcripts, the course navigation should be straight forward and/or explained at the beginning of the course, formatting should be consistent, and your assessment strategies should be varied.

Resources:

• Web Accessibility for Online Learning by CANnect
• Improve Accessibility in Tomorrow’s Online Courses by Leveraging Yesterday’s Techniques by Emily A. Moore

As this series on the phases of Instructional Design comes to a close, I’m going to be talking about an under-utilized phase (in my opinion) – Evaluation. I’ve talked about Formative and Summative Evaluation in the past, and I have to emphasize the cyclical nature in which I believe evaluation should occur.

Evaluation is essential to the success of any course. How can you know if your learning outcomes are aligning with the course objectives? How can you identify whether your students are grasping the material in the intended manner? How can you identify training gaps in the course? How can you gauge the overall success of the course? Evaluation. That’s how!

Now, evaluation doesn’t need to just be reserved for post-implementation. You can evaluate your course at various phases in the Instructional Design process. For example, you might want to evaluate your analysis for the course…is a course going to solve the problem? You might also want to evaluate during the design phase…will the design of this course meet the project requirements (is it responsive? Does it meet the needs?)? You may want to evaluate during the development phase…What are the stakeholder’s thoughts on the prototype? And you’ll definitely want to evaluate in the implementation phase, because that’s where your users will likely barrage you with ‘it’s not working!’ emails.

But at the very least, evaluation should always occur at the end of the instructional design process as doing so provides you with feedback and additional context with which you can improve upon the course. No one is perfect, and that can be also be said for courses – no one course is perfect. You can get close, but there is likely always something you could have improved upon. Evaluation gives you the information you need to improve upon your courses.

For the past month or so, I’ve been discussing the five main phases of Instructional Design. Now it’s time to talk about the implementation phase!

The goal of implementation is to get the training you developed to its intended audience. Or deliver the training. Essentially, you’re pressing the Power ON button for your course! There are several elements that might come into play along the way, but it’s all in the name of implementation. Some of these elements might include:

• Training faculty members or facilitators in the technology
• Making a course ‘go live’ for the audience
• Creating job aids and course documentation
• Installing the courseware on a client’s server
• Testing courseware in the intended environment

However you or your organization chooses to deal with implementation, the goal is always the same – get the training to the audience!

For some, the implementation phase might be the end of the road in terms of instructional design processes; however, for many (should be for all), there is one more critical phase: Evaluation. Stay tuned next week for my thoughts on evaluation and its importance in Instructional Design.

Last week I spent some time talking about the Development phase of Instructional Design, but I got bogged down with itemizing the various elements that you might develop, so I didn’t get to talk too much about my favourite part of development. In e-learning, this would be the authoring element of development!

This week, I thought I would chat a bit about some of the authoring tools that are used for e-learning development, and what I think about them.

Within very first development gig, I spent a ton of time working in an internal Learning Content Management System (LCMS), and I have to say that for all the little bugs, I truly believe our company could have brought it to market and it could have been a big deal. After having worked in several other LCMS’, I feel pretty comfortable saying that it was one of the most user-friendly tools I have ever used. Unfortunately, I don’t believe it’s being used any longer and therefore is definitely not out in the market…an e-learning industry’s loss -sigh-.

This position also afforded me the opportunity to work within OutStart and Ilias…which were alright, but not for me. Ilias was Linux-based, and I just didn’t have enough familiarity with it to really form much of an opinion aside from noting the inconvenience of working in an almost entirely Windows-based office. OutStart was alright, but it was buggy, expensive (for what it is), and had one major character flaw (at least in the version we had access to): any of the developers could accidentally delete an entire program…you know a series of courses that a team of 20 had worked tirelessly on for months. Whoops! It did have a lot of helpful features for course development, but I often found myself looking for workarounds to get things functioning properly.

I was introduced to Adobe Captivate, used it for way too long, hated it instantly, and still have a deep-rooted dislike for it. That’s all I’ll say on the matter.

Articulate Studio proved extremely helpful for developing media assets without needing a media team (in terms of interactive graphs and charts – which is what we used it for primarily). It was an extremely under-utilized authoring tool in that corporate environment; however, I’ve since used Studio in my independent development, and I’m still amazed by some of its capabilities – I have one project in mind that had a unique way of using the Player tabs, and I always go back to that one as an aesthetically exceptional use of Presenter, if I do say so myself.

Articulate Storyline has my heart. It’s truly my favourite tool to author in, and the reason you’ll only ever see Storyline samples in my portfolio. Why bother including samples from OutStart or Captivate if I know I don’t want to work within those tools? It’s my favourite authoring tool because it makes my life so much easier! The functionality and features in Storyline allow me to streamline my workflow and development process, which is half the battle. With such a supportive community, I know my inquiries will be responded to expediently, and I won’t have to wait weeks for a response from a support team of 1.

TechSmith Camtasia is my favourite video editing tool. I use it in my independent work, I use it at the university, I encourage all of my faculty members to use it, and it really provides a wide range of video development and editing capabilities with a very small learning curve.

Moodle is the Learning Management System (LMS) the university uses, and while it’s not flawless, it does exactly what we need it to do, which is great for an open-source LMS, and for a university known as ‘the’ distance university in our region.

I’d love to hear about the authoring tools you’re using and your experiences with them, so let me know in the comments below!

Edit: Well – that was poor scheduling on my part; Thursday is not Tuesday – whoops! My bad!

It’s time to talk Development – my very favourite phase of Instructional Design! Why is it my favourite? Because I get to create things! I suppose that could be said for the Analysis and Design phases (Job Task Analysis and Design Documents…), but development is my favourite phase because I get to play in authoring tools that I love to create magical (ok…maybe that’s a strong term) e-learning for my clients.

In this phase, you get to put all of the information you defined in the Analysis and Design phases into practice! Another reason this is my favourite phase is because there’s been a lot of build-up at this point – you’ve poured over the details of the e-learning project, but you haven’t physically seen anything just yet (outside of a ton of Microsoft Word documents).

This might be a bad analogy, but it’s like hearing you’re going to have a wax figure of yourself made, and finally having it unveiled…alright, it’s probably a really bad analogy – I don’t actually know how that feels, but it seems like a very hyped up lead in to an exciting result!

However, development isn’t always working within your favourite authoring tools. It could (and often does) involve:

• Scripting
• Storyboarding
• Drafting audio narration scripts
• Creating prototypes
• Developing assessment items
• Creating lesson plans
• Developing style guides
• Creating media assets

If your project calls for rapid prototyping (aka forgoing most of the previously mentioned documents), you’ll jump into your authoring tool with both feet and immerse yourself in the wonderful world of e-learning authoring.

In summary, the development phase of instructional design involves the development, and the processes involved in such development, of e-learning course content – Regardless of medium (e.g. Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, or e-learning authoring tools such as Adobe Captivate or Articulate Storyline).