This year’s Pi Day was a special event, as you may have heard. If you write dates as “3.14.15,” you have the first five digits of pi. You can go even further, and have a pi second: 3.14.15 at 9:26:53 (a.m. or p.m.) gives you the first ten digits of pi. I’ve never thought much about memorizing pi. 3.14 was generally enough for my needs, and for anything more complicated,
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Kelly Rossi: What Does an Elearning Project Manager Do?
Adib Masumian from our elearning group got Kelly Rossi, project manager extraordinaire, to sit down for an interview on her job. Here’s Kelly’s view on what an Elearning Project Manager does. This segment is the first in an ongoing series of interviews that we are conducting with Microassist employees. Stay tuned for more! Q: What does a project a project manager do? Kelly Rossi: A project manager does a lot of things. Like any manager, a
READ MORE about Kelly Rossi: What Does an Elearning Project Manager Do?Producing Quality Audio Recordings – Part 2: Tips & Tricks
Producing Quality Audio Recordings – Part 2: Tips & Tricks In Part 1 of this series, I talked about creating the ideal conditions for producing quality recordings. Now that we’re familiar with recording equipment and environment, we’re ready to talk about pre- and post-production measures—as well as tips to keep in mind when actually recording—that will make narrations smooth and easy to edit. Pre-production It’s essential, perhaps fundamental, to have
READ MORE about Producing Quality Audio Recordings – Part 2: Tips & TricksElearning for Outreach Purposes
There’s training that you are required to take and finish—compliance training for ethics, sexual harassment, information security. Safety training. Training that you must complete before you use specialized applications. And then there’s training that you don’t have to take. Training that you need to be persuaded to take. One way to think about this kind of training is as outreach. Many organizations use outreach activities to bring services and information
READ MORE about Elearning for Outreach PurposesProducing Quality Audio Recordings – Part 1: The Setup
David Anderson runs a series of weekly challenges on the Elearning Heroes Articulate community blog. In one of his recent posts, he called on elearning designers to share their tips and tricks for producing quality audio: while recording audio is simple, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to improving audio quality. That means that the most helpful audio tips are the tips that align with a user’s recording needs, experience, and environment.
READ MORE about Producing Quality Audio Recordings – Part 1: The SetupThe Power of Limits
Today’s elearning tools are very powerful. Depending on what you need, you can move from something that gives you a SCORM-compliant punched-up PowerPoint show (like Articulate’s Presenter) to a full-fledged authoring environment that allows you to create, populate, and maintain variables across screens (like Trivantis’s Lectora). Yet sometimes it seems that that power isn’t enough. Take a full screen button, for example. Working in Articulate Presenter, there’s no option to
READ MORE about The Power of LimitsQuicker Development: Use a Storyboard
It might seem like a good idea to cut development time by eliminating the storyboard. After all, once you have your content down, it would be quicker to just jump into your development tool and start programming the course. Don’t. A storyboard is a graphical representation of what the learner will see once they enter the learning environment. There are many different methods to create storyboards–I’ll link to some examples
READ MORE about Quicker Development: Use a StoryboardHow Comic Books Can Cut Elearning Development Time
Voice-over takes a long time to record and adds cost to any elearning project. For a professional effect, you often have to hire talent. You have to record, listen, re-record any errors, synchronize with the presentation, publish, correct any errors. Outside of the cost of hiring talent (which you can get around by using in-house), there is still the cost in time and money. A quick way to get around
READ MORE about How Comic Books Can Cut Elearning Development TimeThe Lectora User’s Conference and my First Big Presentation – Part 6: Anatomy of a Presentation, Continued
By Mary Word You have seen some of the important elements, such as commenting and naming. Ordering the elements in a page is also important. There are functional reasons to do this, of course. If you have six actions in a group and the third one tells the program to jump to another page, the last three will never be executed. Your interaction depends on a certain sequence of events
READ MORE about The Lectora User’s Conference and my First Big Presentation – Part 6: Anatomy of a Presentation, ContinuedThe Lectora User’s Conference and my First Big Presentation – Part 5: Anatomy of a Presentation – How Did I Do That, Again?
By Mary Word (Relearn what I did—the importance of commenting your own work. Also, big cheers for debug.) If you have ever done programming, or taken a programming course, you have been told to comment your code. One of the best ways to write code is by writing the comments first – pseudocode, if you will. I have worked with programmers who thought that it wasn’t macho to write comments.
READ MORE about The Lectora User’s Conference and my First Big Presentation – Part 5: Anatomy of a Presentation – How Did I Do That, Again?