Sometimes, you just have to speak the language of business....And Unikitty nails it - so you see her again :) ---------------------- I talked a little bit in a previous post about Calculating Opportunity Costs.If you are asked to put together more numbers, there are a few techniques available out of the Project Management Body of Knowledge (fondly known as the PMBOK) that you may find useful.Analogous EstimatingUsing the cost of similar projects to estimate the cost of the current project.  Most useful when you and your organization has done this before.  The more similar the projects being compared, the more accurate the estimate.   I often use this as a "first draft" of potential costs.Bottom-Up EstimatingThis is best done once you have put together a detailed list of activities for your project. You then estimate the cost of each activity.  You then sum up the estimated cost of each work activity in the project.It would be nice if we knew EXACTLY how much stuff costs before we do it - but life doesn't work that way....Three-Point EstimatingUse this to help with creating the range and probability of how much an activity will cost.I would use this as I put together my bottom-up estimates. Step 1: Create 3 estimates- Most likely (cM) - The cost of the activity based on realistic effort assessment for the required work and predicted expenses.  Even if you are doing everything in-house, stick an hourly number on the labor.  It's eye-opening :)- Optimistic (cO) - The activity cost based on best-case scenario.- Pessimistic (cP) - The activity costs based on everything going horrifically wrong.Step 2: Plug resulting numbers into formulasThere are two ways to calculate expected costs.Depending on your organization, they may want to see one or both calculations.cE = Expected cost- Triangular Distribution.  The average of the most likely, optimistic and pessimistic cost scenarios.cE = (cM + cO + cP) / 3- Beta Distribution. This uses the PERT (Program Evaluation and Review Technique) technique to get a weighted estimate between optimistic, pessimistic and most likely scenarios.  The assumption is that the most likely scenario is 4x more likely to happen than either the optimistic or pessimistic scenarios.cE = (4cM + cO +cP) / 6---------------------I find this exercise helps me also determine how much to ask for in a contingency reserve.Hopefully, you won't need this. By definition, we can only account for the stuff we think can go wrong when we put together our pessimistic estimates. The "known-unknowns".There is another type of reserve called a management reserve that helps to address the "unknown unknowns" that can impact a project.  I would have a sit-down with someone in the organization to ask how they typically handle these types of issues when they appear in other projects and whether there is a standard percentage or fixed allocation for each project.Having an opportunity to run your numbers by another member of the organization at this early estimation stage is a good idea anyway. 

Most students want to know a few things about their teachers. What do they look like? Are they qualified to teach? What is their background? What is their testimony? The answers to all of these...Continue Reading »

Most students want to know a few things about their teachers. What do they look like? Are they qualified to teach? What is their background? What is their testimony? The answers to all of these...Continue Reading »

Looking back at your experience of school, what did you enjoy the most? For many, it will be meeting lifelong friends, having plenty of laughs in the playground, and participating in extra curricular activities like a sports club or field trip. But these cherished memories don’t take into account the setting where you probably spent most of your time - the classroom. This doesn’t mean to say that classroom lessons were pointless or forgettable, as they no doubt provided you with invaluable knowledge about various different subjects. But at the same time, being told to sit still in your seat while listening to the teacher endlessly ramble on was usually far from enjoyable. Even so, classroom-based teaching and tuition is still the preferred technique among countless corporate training courses. It may well have worked at school when impressionable and mouldable young minds were starting to build up their skillset from nothing, but in the world of work where employees already possess a great deal of verified astuteness, classroom trainees won’t react well to direct and submissive instruction. Thankfully, corporate training is starting to move away from the classroom-based teacher-centric model towards interactive-based student-centric learning, where individuals are given the opportunity to explore and experiment with their own destiny. For this reason, classroom training is quickly becoming a dying art.   Reasons why classroom training may no longer be effective   It doesn’t encourage learning Even though classroom teaching will still give you insight and instruction into the topics and themes you need to know about for your job role, this kind of training places an emphasis on covering a pre-defined curriculum rather than prioritising employee learning. It is far more beneficial from a business’s perspective for members of staff to grow and develop as individuals instead of simply knowing how to pass their final examination or test.   It doesn’t promote critical thinking In the environment of a classroom, teachers have complete control and ultimate power over students. The teacher’s role is that of a knowledge dispenser, whereas students must sit there passively and accept the information that comes their way with little to no room for response. Unfortunately, this does not promote critical thinking skills among employees and fails to provide trainees with the opportunity to apply their teaching. Your workforce won’t receive a level of understanding that is required for complex concepts or lifelong learning either.   It bypasses the journey of learning With teachers only interested in telling the classroom what knowledge and skills are required, trainees will miss out on one of the most important aspects of learning - the process of individual exploration. In the classroom, employees are not encouraged to understand the methods or techniques required to find the right answer or solution. As a result, they just accept what is in front of them. But in order for training to be truly effective, your employees must have a say in their journey of learning, otherwise they will fail to acquire appropriate expertise.   It avoids the bigger picture In many respects, there is nothing wrong with focusing on basic skills first and gradually building up an employee’s acumen. However, this doesn’t take the bigger picture into account and provides little context for your workforce’s learning. Not only will this hinder learning, it can also discourage and disconnect your workforce from the training experience. Most members of staff won’t want to be spoon-fed ideas or concepts in the classroom. Instead, they will want to take hold of their learning and understand how it relates to their job.   It lacks interactivity Perhaps the biggest problem with classroom training is that it fails to prepare employees for work. With an insistence on the individual quietly completing their own work, there is no room for interactivity. Therefore, when it comes to being back at work, members of staff won’t know how to apply their newly acquired knowledge. Furthermore, they won’t have experience of working in teams or collaborating with others either. In the classroom there is hardly any scope for employees to practice group dynamics, which is becoming increasingly important in a day and age where cloud computing, BYOD, and telecommuting are on the rise. Seeing as interactivity is such a significant classroom issue, it makes sense that the solution gives this top priority. With online training and e-learning, employees are in complete control of their learning experience, where they can gain access to appropriate training materials while also building a skillset that will benefit them at work and in life.   Reasons why online training and e-learning is the answer   It is extremely cost-effective Employees can complete their training at any time and from virtually any location with an Internet connection. From a budget perspective, businesses no longer need to spend out vast sums of money on the associated costs of training courses, such as accommodation and transport. On top of that, members of staff may not even need time off, as training can be completed on their daily commute, at lunchtime, or during periods of downtime.   It can help employees of all abilities It goes without saying that some people are quicker learners than others. But in a traditional classroom, each and every employee must keep up with the speed of the trainer. Some staff members could miss important bits of information, while others might feel as though the teacher is going too slowly and lose focus. However, online training and e-learning enables your workforce to work through the course at their own pace, making sure nothing is overlooked or ignored.   It is much more engaging There is a strong chance that employees will grow bored and tiresome of classroom training quite quickly. But with online training and e-learning, the materials on offer will capture the attention of your staff and keep their interest levels high. As well as being actively involved with what is in front of them, your workforce will also benefit from other teaching techniques such as gamification, which adds an element of competition to encourage further self-discovery. These reasons only scratch the surface of online training and e-learning, as there are countless other advantages to adopting this approach. This is why classroom training can now be considered a dying art. Share this post with your own audience

In Ireland, as you ride through the green hills, you occasionally see a little circle mound with high grasses, or a circle of mushrooms or trees.  "In Celtic folklore, fairy rings are said to be caused by dancing faeries (hence the name), or burned into the ground by dancing elves and left to appear in the morning after a moonlit night. Whatever the case, they say you should never enter a fairy ring, or else you’ll be cursed by their otherworldly protectors. You may even find yourself whisked away into the fairyland, or perhaps even driven mad." -Rob Schwarz. Here's a comment made at the end of this article "I stepped into a faerie ring- it was more like two rings, like the symbol of the infinite. I wished for true love, and within a week, it found me. Six years later, he was killed." The end of an Irish story always carries a wallop.Think of our strengths and blind spots as the fairy circles we have created to protect ourselves. We all have strong and weak behaviors. We are all motivated by different things and demotivated by others. We each have different areas of Emotional Quotient (EQ) we can continue to grow and competencies that we can continue to leverage or learn. We will always be a work in progress, but our beliefs that we are limited may hold us back.  It's tough to see a clear view of our strengths and blind spots without a little help. Our Trimetrix EQ assessment provides feedback based on your own input to give you not only a clear picture of current state, but also suggestions on how to get where you want to be, or adapt temporarily when needed. It's a great way to step out of your circle and own your own development.   

We all have those little things that drive use crazy … pet peeves. Have you ever considered that you can learn good practices by paying attention to someone’s pet peeves? Changes are that if it bothers one person it will bother others. Check out this article Dashe & Thomson on some elearning pet peeves - Don’t Disturb the Beast: Three eLearning Pet Peeves.

Styling can really make a project stand out. But new developers might not realize how unlimited their styling options really are. Take, for instance the Entry Field. Lectora® does not provide a style menu for this object, so at first it seems we can only adjust its size and background color, but is that really all? The answer is a resounding "No." As a web designer, one of the greatest strengths I see in Lectora is its extensibility. Not only does it natively provide what might seem like an overwhelming amount of options for new eLearning authors, it leaves the door wide open for advanced users with the HTML Extension object. In the year or so since switching from another authoring tool, I have yet to come across a design or functionality issue in Lectora that couldn’t be solved with the addition of external HTML, JavaScript, Styling, or a combination thereof. In this example I will show you how to take a generic entry field and make it pop with additional styling. Don’t worry if you’ve never written a cascading style sheet (CSS) before because we are going to use one of the many free online CSS generators to do the heavy lifting. Here are additional bonuses that come with using cascading style sheets. They are reusable. Save the sheet and save valuable time by adding it to any project. I maintain a library of my style sheets. They make project-wide styling changes as simple as editing one line of text. If multiple objects are assigned a CSS rule, changing the rule will change all the assigned objects. No need to monotonously change each one at a time. There are plenty of other reasons to use style sheets, such as maintaining styling across multiple projects, leaner code, and faster loading times—but enough of the sell. Let’s get down to business. First, we’re going to build the style sheet. Head over to Enjoy CSS (http://enjoycss.com/). Feel free to use whatever online CSS generator you like—this is one of my favorites. Once there you should choose "Input" as what you want to style. While this article is not intended to explain how to use this site, I will go over a few important things you must do. In the window that opens when you select input, there should be a settings option (with little gear icon) on the bottom left of the screen.  Select it and put checks in the hover and focus states, so we can apply styling to them as well. Click on the top rectangle to edit the "normal" state of the input box. Any changes you make using the expandable styling options menu on the right will immediately be reflected on the input shown. When you make changes to the hover state, hovering over the normal state will show you the hover state in action. The focus state is the "selected" state of the input box. When you have the input box styled how you like, click the little blue icon (Enjoy CSS logo)  that is located in the top right of any design state to access the CSS. Initially, when clicked it will show the CSS for that state only. To see all the CSS, click CSS on the left side (above LESS and SCSS). Copy all the text shown and paste it into a notepad or other text file. If you didn’t alter them while generating the CSS, you’ll notice that the three styling rules are named .enjoy-css, .enjoy-css:hover and .enjoy-css:focus. For all three, change the enjoy-css to whatever "class" name you will want to use to assign to your entry fields in Lectora. In my example, I called them entry1, entry1:hover and entry1:focus respectively (class name highlighted in yellow). Next, save the file with .css extension. To do this, select File > Save As and change the save extension to "all files". Save the text file as any name you want with .css as the file extension. That’s it! Now, we will use a simple line of JavaScript to assign the class to entry fields in Lectora. Important! Because Lectora internally puts the entry field inside a div, you cannot use the appearance menu to assign the class name. It will assign it to the div, not the actual entry field and therefore will not work correctly. Add an Entry Field to a Lectora project. Rename the entry field to reflect the HTML Name Lectora assigns it but add "id" (lowercase, no quotes). You can find the HTML name on the object Description. So if Lectora assigns the entry field an HTML Name of entry39, the real name of the input would be entry39id. Next, add an HTML Extension object to the title level of the project and select type - Cascading style sheet then browse for and select the CSS file you just made. You’re almost done. Now you need to assign the class to the entry field. Remember, because the class that you can add via the appearance menu is for the div, not the actual entry field, we cannot use it. Instead, we will add the class via JavaScript. Add a "Run JavaScript" action to the "on show" of the page the entry field is on. Then add the following line of JavaScript (substituting your entry field name and class name from your style sheet): document.getElementById("entry39id").className = "entry1″; This line of code selects the entry field and assigns it a class. In this example the entry field is entry39id and the class name I made in my style sheet is entry1. Note that you do not need to assign the hover and focus classes. That is part of the magic of CSS. They are considered pseudo classes of the initial class and will automatically be triggered on hover or focus. If you wish to have initial text in the entry field (such as First Name), you can do so via this line of code: document.getElementById("entry39id").value="First Name"; This line of code selects the entry field and assigns it an initial value of First Name. Change the line to reflect your entry field id and whatever initial text you wish. That’s it. Preview your project and marvel at how it looks. Remember, you can add as many entry fields on any pages with this styling as you like—just copy the line of JavaScript and replace the entry field id as necessary. Save the Style sheet you made, and you can add it to any future project. Many elements can be styled with CSS—think of the possibilities! I hope this provided some inspiration for you to experiment with CSS. As always, if you have any questions, wish further explanation or assistance feel free to contact me. Note: I have noticed that sometimes if you copy and paste directly from posts or articles, quotes do not copy correctly. Therefore, if you copy and paste from this, I suggest you delete any quotes from the pasted text and then add them back in. Want to see the completed example? Download it now in the Trivantis Community.   About Darrel Somoza In the corporate world I am the Assistant Director - Technology Based Training for the largest commuter railroad in North America. My side business is web design and application programming. Originally an Adobe Flash programmer, I shifted gears with the industry to fully embrace HTML5. eLearning modules are web applications/pages. Authoring tools, such as Trivantis Lectora Inspire, provide non-programmers a WYSIWYG interface to build engaging learning content. While some authoring applications are extremely closed and proprietary, Lectora leaves open the door for extending many of its capabilities by allowing for custom code insertion via the HTML extension. This is great news for eLearning developers because even if the program cannot perform a certain task natively, you usually can find a way to accomplish your goals. That is where I come in. My experience allows me to write eLearning material from scratch or via a rapid development tool and customize it as I need. Hopefully, I can use my skills to assist you in your eLearning authoring endeavors. Website: www.elearningcode.com The post How to Style Entry Fields in Lectora Using CSS appeared first on .

A question I hear a lot is, how long should my online course videos be, or your online course lessons. If you are creating lessons for your online course, you want to have a good idea as to what your students can actually absorb, enjoy and learn from. And the answer is, probably shorter than you think. Watch the video to learn more. I definitely see a lot of people putting out a half hour long or one hour long videos and this is generally a lot greater than our current attention span for online videos. The attention span for online videos is shrinking and shrinking. Now it’s a little bit different statistically in the context of an online course where people have usually put aside some time to go and learn, as opposed to a YouTube video or a marketing video. With your YouTube and marketing videos, people are getting down to a minute or two of attention span or even shorter in some cases. With the online courses, you can usually do a two to seven minute window, but try to usually keep it around the five-minute mark. If you have something that requires longer than that to teach, which I’m sure you do, it just means breaking up the content into multiple pieces. At its easiest, you can shoot an hour long video and then, in editing, just cut that up into five-minute segments at natural break points. But if you do a little bit of planning ahead of time, you can create some natural pauses between mini-topics that make up a part of a larger topic and that will get you down to those two to seven minute videos. By doing videos that are two to seven minutes in length, you can still stack them one after another and make it very easy for someone to flow through all of that content, back to back, but it does give people that momentary break where they are able to blink and take a break from watching. And just that moment where they blink and then click to go to the next video or ideally if you have a gamified online education system, like Thinkific, then we’ll show them a bit of progress indication, give them a little pat on the back and a the reward, digitally of course, to let them know that they have finished something in the course and they are ready to move on to the next lesson or the next video. That kind of thing will dramatically increase your engagement rates, the retention of student information, and course completion rates. And if you’re not getting people to complete your course, they’re not getting a lot of value out of it, and they’re not sharing it with their friends and bringing more people to check it out. So if you’re doing lessons within your course, please keep them short, you’ll get much better feedback from your students from it. If you already have long lessons, you can cut them up into smaller pieces, but two to seven minutes is what we find is kind of that ideal length for online courses, videos or lessons. If you need to stretch it, again, no rule is absolute; it’s just a guideline for most of your content. I hope that helps and that you can implement it in your next online course. The post Teach Online TV #17: How Long Should My Online Course Videos Be? appeared first on Thinkific.

Here are the new courses we added to our EHS Training Library last month. You can also just check all of the titles in our EHS training library and our Mining Safety training library. We’ll keep announcing new courses each month as they roll out, so stay tuned for more. You can view samples of each course below, but contact us for a demo for full-course previews. DOT HAZMAT Safety Respirator Basics Blocking and Cribbing for Heavy Equipment Metal-on-Metal Safety While you’re here, why not download our free guide to effective EHs training? The post New EHS Training Courses Available: DOT HAZMAT Safety; Respirator Basics; Blocking and Cribbing for Heavy Equipment; Metal-on-Metal Safety; appeared first on Convergence Training Blog.

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you’ll know that I always speak about principles that are important to gamification - to make it work. I write about intrinsic motivation, the right type of competition, utilizing the right narratives for the right goals, and more. But one core issue to address with gamification is personalization and segmentation. People aren’t made of the same stuff - they are likely to be driven by different things. While we can segment employees and set different (personalized) targets, so they will get a sense of success with gamification or learning materials that suit them, what about the "game" in "gamification". For instance, assuming there is a sports narrative in a gamification deployment, would it apply to all employees and motivate them in the same ways? Gamification for employee engagement isn’t one size fits all. Gamification isn’t a one size fits all type of solution. The beauty of it is that it is flexible and versatile, and, therefore, we can find something appropriate in the game mechanic arsenal for any demographic. Yet, workforces are diverse - with several generations - so how do you personalize gamification? In order to do this, and to make sure that the solution that we are offering is the optimal one, we need to make an effort to understand our users. Not just who they are and what field they are from, but even deeper. We want to know how they react, to what, and when. We want to know what effects them the most, and what they don’t care too much for. This way, we can cater to their needs and offer them the best training, insights, motivation and competition possible. Player types and games Some people look at player types according to Bartle. This is useful for enterprise gamification, but not that much. The Octalysis framework is also a useful way to address choice - but more centered on the goal of the game. What about profiling, the art of understanding your users? I’m not even talking about enterprise gamification like us at GamEffective, but actual computer and video games. Companies that create video games are faced with exactly the same challenges that we face. They want their users to be as engaged as possible and in order to do that they need to understand them. One company which is a great source for game creators is Quantic Foundry. Their blog is full of insights they have found about gamers and games. I especially love their analysis of gaming motivations and personality traits, found here. However, when designing an enterprise gamification deployment for a customer, even assuming you can personalize game activities, how can you address the differences between people when choosing the overall narrative? Looking for the common denominator? Strategy, not competition Here are some great insights from the Quantic Foundry blog: Strategy is the most stable motivator as gamers age. It turns out that in contrary to what you may think, competition is a motivator that doesn’t necessary work for all ages. Competition is more of a youth motivation than a gender motivation. On the other hand, strategy and complex thinking keep gamers interested and engaged at all ages. Gender matters, but not as much as age. As you may expect, female gamers are more likely to be motivated by games that involve design elements such as self-expression and customization, fantasy elements and story elements. Male gamers tend to be motivated by competition, challenges, excitement, and strategy. This all fits the stereotypes that we are all familiar with. The interesting thing is, that as gamers become older, this becomes less relevant. These are just two examples from a multitude of possible ones. The point that is important to make here is that understanding your users is super-important. At GamEffective, we’ve been doing this for a while now, in countless different environments. We’re still learning all the time, but we’ve also gained a whole lot of insights that we implement into every solution we create.