When paragraphs of instructions aren’t doing the trick, videos can guide visual learners through steps to complete a task. Whether it’s something physical or on a computer, sometimes the best way to show someone how to do something is to, well… show them! The recording process can sometimes be long and you may need to do some editing after the video is submitted, so here are some tips to help you get the right video the first time and keep it accurate.
Continue reading “Creating and Maintaining Instructional Videos”Tag: Tools
Engage Learners with Instructional GIFs
You can’t really go anywhere on the internet without running into the ubiquitous animated GIF (graphical interchange format). Originating in 1987, GIFs shaped—and grew—with the internet in the following 30+ years (for those who missed the 90s or want to reminisce, the Internet Archive created a search for early GIFs).
Continue reading “Engage Learners with Instructional GIFs”Budget (but not free) eLearning Content Creation Tools
Can we all agree that paying recurring costs for licensing software, particularly when you are a small (or even one-person) team, sucks? It ends up being a large, recurring cost that can be difficult to justify or subsidize, particularly in lean times. Oftentimes you don’t even need all the new and shiny features that a regular subscription provides.
But purchasing software outright (when it’s still an option, as many companies no longer offer it) can have a prohibitively expensive up-front cost—high-end software often costs upwards of $1000 dollars, even for just a single license.
But, free tools aren’t always the answer either. Continue reading “Budget (but not free) eLearning Content Creation Tools”
Formatting eLearning Documents: Hop, Skip, and a Hyperlink
The Formatting eLearning Documents series is an overview of various Microsoft Word functions, how to find them, and how best to use them in eLearning. These tutorials are not exact step-by-step directions. The how-to steps in software change so often, the blog would simply become post after post correcting the ever changing tutorials! Can you imagine? We’d have to re-title our blog and everything! Nobody wants that (especially the editors).
In this post, we’ll look at creating both hyperlinks and a Table of Contents (ToC) as the two are related in Word. They are also important items in eLearning, especially Continue reading “Formatting eLearning Documents: Hop, Skip, and a Hyperlink”
Choosing the Right Tool to Design Interactive Scenarios
Have you ever had an idea you knew was good but didn’t truly understand the work involved until you began laboring to make it a reality?
This happened to me when I started changing one of the assignments in my history class into a branching scenario. Continue reading “Choosing the Right Tool to Design Interactive Scenarios”
Efficiency: The Trap of Modern Design
We live in a culture, and work in a field, that prizes and demands efficiency. A million things always need to be done immediately, and at least a thousand projects needed launch yesterday. We make endless to-do lists, debate time tracking and performance metrics, hire project managers by the truckload, and do everything in our power to wring every last drop of “efficiency” out of our daily lives.
And often, we’re making a mistake. Continue reading “Efficiency: The Trap of Modern Design”
Making your eLearning Assignments More Interactive
History is rich and vivid, and it shouldn’t be presented in a way that students see as dry. As an adjunct history instructor, I am always looking for ways to motivate students to explore history and to look at it from different perspectives. I’ve discovered that infusing a scenario-based assignment engages learners and encourages them to think outside the box. Continue reading “Making your eLearning Assignments More Interactive”
A Year’s End Review
When our team started Model eLearning in January, we wanted to explore and share the eLearning theories, trends, and tools that excite us. One of the top instructional design skills is Googler—so we wanted to contribute to that growing body of knowledge and help the eLearning community.
Over the past year, we’ve shared our team’s practical tips for instructional designers (ID), subject matter experts (SME), and instructors. Now—in a time-honored December blog tradition—let’s review some of our favorite posts of 2017. Continue reading “A Year’s End Review”
Engage your Learners with Interactive Video
“In addition to enhancing learning, video can also reduce training time. It’s easier and takes less time to watch a well-made video than it does to read through pages of dense text or complicated diagrams to grasp a concept.”
Andy Cole (Via Brainshark; originally included in The Benefits of Video in eLearning)
In my last post, we explored some benefits of using scenarios in eLearning. Today, we will examine the value of learning with interactive videos using PlayPosit. Continue reading “Engage your Learners with Interactive Video”
Improve Your Course Content: Active Voice
Content is difficult to read on a screen. If you want students to engage with your online course, you need to improve the cognitive load. The best practices used for writing for the web include active voice, positive tone, the inverted pyramid, chunking text, bullet and number lists, and descriptive headings. In this post, we’ll examine how to improve the readability of your course using active voice. Continue reading “Improve Your Course Content: Active Voice”
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