eel-learning

Giving the info without clutter

Reading the Rapid eLearning Blog's latest entry on What Steve Jobs can Teach you about eLearning revived a debate I've been having with myself (and my customers) about decluttering elearning screens. I've long preferred Powerpoint presentations that had no text, or only a few words and relevant images; but in these cases the message is being delivered by the speaker.

Transfer this to eLearning and the equivalent is the minimalist-text-plus-recorded-voiceover that is the staple of 'rapid' elearning. And it's good, infinitely preferable to 'read these 17 paragraphs and press Return for another 17'. But what to do where audio isn't an option i.e. our intranet?

The way we've approached this in our in-house templates is to set a recommended maximum text for a page (250 words) and pages for a 'chunk' (16 - so that the learner doesn't have the prospect of 'page 1 of 30'); in practice these get stretched a little but our authors are managing to temper the expectations of our SMEs a bit, and screens are definitely looking better.  But they're nowhere near the minimalism of, for example, Cathy Moore's lovely Dump the Drone. 

Having a coffee

Tony Karrer commented:

I'm at DevLearn right ... and your post makes me wonder ... if you were here, having coffee with me right now, what would we be talking about?  And who else would you want to sit with to have those conversations?

Interesting question. I suppose one thing is a current job I'm working on: a lot of standalone multimedia PCs in my company are being decommissioned, and expensive CD ROMs training modules are being trashed. My team has been given the task of creating web-based 'versions' of these in a desperately short time. Sponsors and subject experts aren't delighted at this turn of events and don't want to put time into creating something new out of it. They want the 'content' (whatever that means) online and available asap and the paradigm they're thinking of is 'copy and paste'. We've developed our own quick and easy templates for short page turners with a limited number of interactivity types - what some writers call, perhaps disparagingly perhaps not, Power Point Plus. Several of us have been pretty much pasting the text content of these courses into these templates, trying to chunk them better and sneakily reword them into less pompous language as we go.

Confession

I started this blog as a learning tool. Inspired by Karyn and some of the others I read - that by writing about what I was doing and how I was doing it, I'd clarify for myself what I understood and didn't understand, and some of it might be of use to others.

I now find I don't write here very often. Why? Because I don't feel I have anything in the way of 'answers' and  that to write an intelligent question takes time and effort. When it comes up against the deadlines of work due, I think that half an hour should go towards my employer's demands rather than speculation on the blogosphere. How I envy elearning bloggers who seem able in (and I'm guessing here) half an hour or less to write something that seems to put a new slant on an old idea or introduce a new combination of ideas.

This is indeed part of my learning: learning that I have a lot more to think through before I become a 'writer' on elearning. That I feel my previous posts have asked enough questions and now I shouldn't write until I can deliver something. 

I also notice from time to time that bloggers write in fits and starts - daily posts for some time then weeks go by. Perhaps it's the same combination of work demands, self-censorship and and simply being 'dry' of the juice.

But at the same time here I am with a job description and a daily task list that reflect the title 'elearning'; so even if what I'm doing seems compromised, unoriginal or small fry, it's still likely that others are doing that kind of thing and I may have done something they haven't. So my resolve is to make the effort and just describe what I'm doing and any associated thoughts that may be helpful to someone desperate or idle enough to read them!