I've begun searching in earnest for more work in the e-learning and instructional design field, and in particular, remote work, which I could do from any location. In the process, I've discovered a humorous glitch, showing how some job aggregator sites have not properly prepared for the increase in jobs that are available for remote workers. When you search on these sites for 'remote' work, you find there are hundreds of very desirable tech jobs listed in Remote, Oregon; a location with zero population, that was literally named for its distance from any other populated places: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote,_Oregon So, how can a place with no people, let alone a single office building, be home to so many tech employers? The answer is that these job search sites require employers to list a job at a verifiable location, even if your future employee will never have to commute to work. There happens to be other states hosting locations with the name Remote, but it seems that Oregon has the only one with it's own zip code, which appears to be enough to satisfy the online 'bots that check validity of a job listing's location. Thus, the slew of telecommute jobs listed in a place that barely exists. Still, it might be worth a road trip someday ;)
Rehearsal VRP is a web-based training platform that allows you to easily create video role-play scenarios your team can respond to by using almost any device with a webcam and an internet connection.
http://www.rehearsal.com/ As an instructor of art + design, I'm always trying to make my students' experience more engaging and sticky. I'm always re-writing exercises, trying out new ones, and asking the students themselves how they'd like to experience something.
One of the required components of my Foundations Making class, which a wide range of 1st-year students must take - from fine arts to fashion design majors - is an unwieldy and intimidating glossary of terminology that covers every aspect of the visual arts professions. It's presented as 4 pages of text in a Word document. Ugh. Few of the students become familiar with even a portion of these terms, and most seem to consider this a grueling exercise that doesn't contribute to their talent as a budding creative. As a highly visual person, I know I love learning by seeing how something looks or works. Clearly I had to do something about this dead page of text, that was rich with visual concepts. I also wanted to steer them to solid executions of each term, and also turn them onto some really influential current artists and designers. My new glossary would have to be highly hip, and full of animated interactions that didn't present all the terms in the same way, over and over. Click the image above for the whole experience, or the the image below to see an animation I did within it. As I work on more projects, I get more capable and competent at development. I also try to practice doing rapid projects, going from a very brief set of criteria, to researching the SME data, organizing the results into a course structure, then mapping out a learning scenario, and then jumping right into an interactive prototype. To start, I have a randomizer web page I built earlier this year, which gives me ideas for concepts to develop. Everytime I refresh the page, it gives me new images in each category. Here's what I got this time: Hmmm.... how about.... "How to survive the loss of your dedicated desk in an office"? From there, I jumped into Googling articles on leaving your desk behind, becoming a remote worker, and ways to have access to file storage and team connectivity without actually being in an office. I tossed all the salient points onto a page, and filtered for the biggest issues and solutions to problems, and then arranged them into a sensible order. Then it was on to the trusty whiteboard to come up with a theme for a learning experience. it got silly pretty quick: In the end, I liked the sound of a character-based scenario, a tale of breaking up with a significant other (your desk), and all the subtle humor I could milk it for. Then it was time to pace around the room, imagining the scenario, based on a standard module structure I've learned while working at Focus Learning Solutions, which is loosely based on Gagne's Levels of Learning. Then I went back to the board to flow-map the module steps. Here's what that looked like: At this point, I was ready to sit down and start slapping something together in Storyline. I was just going for a quick prototype, but I did add a bit more to make it presentable. I also considered this to be a template module that I could use for projects that could work in a similar structure. This is what resulted. Click the image to open the interactive prototype: Altogether, up to the point before I began prototyping, I'd spent about 2.5 hours. I'm sure other people can be much faster at this, but that's what I'm practicing for, so I can eventually keep up with all those elearning Olympians.
Did you know Lynda.com actually has an entire series of courses on Instructional Design? If you work at a college, or a company that invests in training resources, you might already have access to these. The courses are typically about an hour each, and cover Models of ID, Needs Analysis, Storyboarding, Working with SME's, Adult Learners, and Creating Video Training. The presenters are working ID's and eLearning Developers (I've started using the term, 'eLD's'), including Jeff Toister, Daniel Brigham, and Jolie Miller. Also, They have more lengthy beginner and advanced courses on Storyline, Captivate, Lectora, and various graphics and video softwares. I was lucky to have an account through my current employer, and have made it a point to complete them all. In my daily dredgings of the interwebs, I came across Canva; a nifty little tool which can not only do what it's intended to do - create simple but elegant graphic layouts - but I think can be exploited to generate ideas for authoring templates, and to generate the actual templates, as you can strip one of these of it's text, and download the resulting clean background image, as well as quickly make variations and download those too. Hmmmmm....
Back in August, I organized another Meetup where we invited other learning development professionals to come show us their portfolios, and it was a grand success, and after looking at my portfolio, Hadiya Nuriddin said, "We should talk" and the next thing I knew, I was being offered part-time work developing e-learning for her company, Focus Learning Solutions. Of course I had to google her and the company, and now I consider myself mighty damn lucky to be getting paid work that is also effectively an internship and mentorship from a senior instructional designer with a couple decades worth of experience in the field. As they say in the news, "More on this story as it develops"... Always looking to make our Thursday nights better, Christopher Nyren of Educelerate (far left in the photo) managed to round up a posse of of Chicago's sharpest shooters in the world of tech-equipped K-12 classrooms. Who knew that Chicago was home to at least three of the world's top mobile K-12 edtech platforms for the iPad? The event was hosted in the snazzy confines of the tech incubator 1871 in the Mechandise Mart (we keep ending up there for some reason...). Repping their wares were: Andrew Rowland, founder of Classkick: "Classkick brings real-time feedback and teacher-made assignments to the iPad." David Vinca, Founder of eSpark Learning: "eSpark enables teachers to bridge the gap between engagement and academics on the iPad. Their platform curates the best iPad educational apps available and personalizes a plan for each learner's unique needs." Christopher Hull, Co-founder of Otus: "an easy-to-use, yet powerful classroom tool that brings the best iPad and Chromebook education features together into one secure environment, and uses a single login." Dealing out the questions and weighing in with wisdom as moderators were K-12 consultants Lucy Gray and Marci Goldberg. In the room were the founders of Edmodo, an older app (from way back in the stone age of 2008), and they offered more wisdom on getting your technology into classrooms, and making it be more useful to students and teachers. And to top it all off, the view was pretty nice, too As I learn the process of Instructional Designers, I've read numerous times about the steps in creating a course or module, but I've learned in execution, that there's a plethora of steps that can be taken to get to the final product, and the final analysis of what your product achieved. Not every project requires all of these steps, and not every designer or consultancy works in this linear progression. As noted on the right, adherents to the Rapid Development model skip steps that are considered redundant or unnecessary.
I plan to show all of these steps in my portfolio of skills, but I have to admit, skipping paperwork, and getting to iterative stages of prototyping looks like a more productive way to keep your client in the loop, get to a workable product, and in the words of IDEO founder David Kelley, “fail often, to succeed sooner”. |
Carl BoydMusings from the world of eLearning Development and Training. Archives
October 2020
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