Every time you use a software that requires some tracking on your site, you’ll be asked to install a tracking script. For example, if you’re running ads to your online course, you need to track whether they are actually paying off by using tracking codes. Whether you use Google Adwords, or Facebook Ads,  you’ll need to get their tracking pixel to paste into your Thinkific site to see which ads are leading to sales. Similarly, if you’re using an A/B testing tool like Optimizely, or a marketing research tool like Hotjar, or an analytics software like Mixpanel, you’ll need to add their tracking codes to your site for them to work properly. In this episode of Teach Online TV, we explain how you can do that. So Thinkific has three places where you can paste your tracking codes or scripts. Those scripts can come from a variety of different places, like the softwares we mentioned above. We will talk more about some of these tools in future segments. Site Footer The first place you can paste them in is the site footer code. This will actually track all visitors across your site because you use the same footer across the site. This option is great if you’re using analytics software, A/B testing tools, or anything that requires a presence across every page of your site. Sign Ups You can also put them in your sign-up area if you want to specifically track anyone who signs up for your site, whether it’s signing up for free or for paid. Signup codes are used to track signups for advertising programs such as Google Adwords, external affiliate programs and anything that needs conversion tracking. Purchases And finally, you can track orders. This is different from signups because it only tracks paid courses and not free courses. This script will go in your "Thank You" page. Again, this is where you want to put your advertising scripts or retargeting pixels to see which ones are leading to revenue. In some cases, you’ll need to use all three locations. For example, you can track all three with the same platform within Facebook advertising. You can set up three different goals - one for visitors, one for people who sign up for free, and one for people who purchase. This way you can see how each ad performs in terms of traffic, signups and purchases. So give it a shot and try out the tracking codes. Create a free account with Thinkific and paste your tracking codes in the Advanced Settings area. The post Teach Online TV #05: Tracking Codes And Scripts For Your Online Course appeared first on Thinkific.

Promoting Feedback and Inquiry in the Social Studies, History and Geography classroom. Join us next Thursday February 25 @ 9PM on Twitter: #ontsshg Please take a moment and fill out our Wonder Wall!   //padlet.com/embed/9eudhsqpcubc Created with Padlet

  Inquiry is essential. The fact is that students come to school with partial knowledges.  But the curriculum documents themselves do not address the parts that students know or don’t know. It has been built to present to us about the privileged people in the world. Textbooks, websites and other resources generally reinforce this. For […]

Learning Technologies was a great kick start to February and the Wranx team had a great time at the exhibition. If you didn’t get to visit our stand, here’s what you missed…                This year our stand featured an amazing giant itab so people had the opportunity to try Wranx out for themselves. It proved to be very popular!! There was a great amount of footfall and we had lots of visitors throughout the two days of the event- all keen to see what Wranx was about. We also used the event to showcase some of our new features which we have been working hard on- including improved reporting features and brand new testing features.       On the second day, Phillip Price hosted a seminar on behalf of Wranx on ‘Enterprise Scale Gamification’, which had a fully packed audience! Phillip handles Virtual Academy Operations at PSA Peugeot Citroen, with over 20 years of experience implementing and overseeing professional development operations.              The seminar gave a real time example of how PSA Peugeot Citroen have used gamification as part of their learning strategy for both sales staff and academy learners.  In this case, they needed to refine learning and development service to enable their dealer staff to sell more cars. The results of implementing gamification were very positive, with engagement improved by 42% and dealer feedback showing significant support for this type of learning. ‘We will borrow everything the gaming industry has learnt on how to engage users, immersing our staff in an ‘always’ on world that integrates learning, working and living.’    We are definitely excited for what the future of L&D holds and Learning Technologies is a great chance to see what is up and coming in the world of learning. We have already booked a stand for next year so keep an eye out for what we will bring to London Olympia in 2017!! Share this post with your own audience

I recently purchased a Ricoh Theta S, a camera with two fish-eye lenses, which creates both 360 degree spherical panoramic images as well as spherical videos.  You can find out all the information about the camera on the Ricoh site here.The images taken with the camera, when imported in Photos on the Mac, look like this.When you run them through the Ricoh Theta app (available for Mac and Windows), they are turned into spherical panoramic images. These images then live on the Ricoh Theta360 where they can be shared with other via the URL or embedded in a site using embed code, like the one below. The images can be rotated in any direction using a mouse (or a finger on a touchscreen or tablet) and be zoomed in and out.NEW SHOT WITH BETTER TRIPOD - Spherical Image - RICOH THETAHowever, I did not necessarily want to host the images on their site. I did a lot of searching around, and there were bits and pieces of how to host the images somewhere bu I could not find a definitive solution.  My son, Rockwell, located the Pannellum page which, if you host your images on Imgur or  in Dropbox, you can make the same spherical panoramic images and give you the embed code to use or share with others.The steps are as follows:Make sure your Ricoh Theta M camera is set up not to remove the photos when downloading them to your smartphone.Take your pictures with the Ricoh Theta M. Hook the Ricoh Theta M up to your Mac via the USB cable.Open the Image Capture app on the Mac and drag copies of the images onto your desktop. (You can remove the images on the camera through Image Capture at this point if you wish.)Resize the images to 4096x2048 pixels. Put the images online somewhere where they will have a URL and can be shared. Open this Web page:  https://pannellum.org/documentation/overview/tutorial/Put the URL of your hosted image in the panorama URL box (real URL from Imgur and take off the "?dl=0" from the Dropbox image URL), add a title and author if you wish, check the autoload box, and generate the panorama. Below is the filled-in form.And below you will see the embed code version of the spherical panorama via the code from the Pannellum site.  IFRAME  Visit Kathy's Web pages: Kathy Schrock's Home Page Kathy Schrock's Guide to Everything

I’m kind of obsessing about complexity theory right now (Dave Snowden’s Cynefin Model mostly), and looking at simple, complicated and complex systems. I had a lot of conversations about this last weekend, and have been thinking about it a lot. A couple of upfront disclaimers — first, I’m just learning about this, so I don’t pretend to really understand this stuff.  It’s my interpretation, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all to know I’m getting the details wrong. Second, I’m not digging into Chaotic (for now at least). Third, there’s a much longer post on this brewing, and I have more questions than answers right now. So — let’s apply this to the question of school testing, for example: Simple things (with explicit rule sets) are probably fine to assess via multiple choice tests. MCQs for multiplication tables? Sure! No problem! But complicated things (e.g. the subtleties of designing a scientific experiment) and complex things (e.g. problem-solving skills) do not have explicit rule sets, and are therefore NOT appropriate topics for a really reductionistic assessment methods. School testing models are trying to squeeze all the ambiguity out of the system by trying to control every variable. You can do that with simple and possibly with complicated systems (though it’s an insane amount of work — witness the amount of procedural documentation in the air safety industry, or the nuclear power industry in their attempt to eliminate all ambiguity. It’s usually only justifiable when people’s lives are at stake). But you can’t (by definition) eliminate all the ambiguity in complex systems. E.g. you can teach principals for problem-solving, or a process, but how it gets implemented depends on the context, which you can’t control. That’s where teachers, with their personal judgment and ability to adapt, become really important. It’s one of the limitations of computer-based instruction. People don’t like not having control. School testing is trying to exert control by pretending that everything can be put in the simple box, so it can be measures using simple, objective measures. But it just doesn’t work. I think there’s some real value in having a good way to assess whether or not  you are dealing with a simple, complicated or complex situation, and adjusting not only your assessment, but also your learning design for that. Working on this, but if you know of anything really useful, please let me know. A couple of good resources: Chris Dede’s Sleeping, Eating, Bonding metaphor. The first link in this blog post has a short audio clip that explains it. Dave Snowden’s Youtube channel — a great entry point for complexity theory. The excellent Donald Clark on using Cynefin as an orientation framework for learning design (about halfway down the page) Harold Jarche on understanding complexity Measuring What Matters Most: Choice-based Assessment for the Digital Age by Schwartz and Arena Thoughts?

Do decision-makers in health insurance organizations have the needed skills to meet strategic objectives and move ahead of the competition?

Data shows having female leaders pays off. How can women leaders ignite their own impact and how can you coach, mentor, and grow the next generation of leaders?

Ardour 4.7 is now available, including a variety of improvements and minor bug fixes. The two most significant changes are: A new dialog that shows a detailed and wide-ranging analysis of the audio file(s) generated by export. It shows waveform, spectral and level distribution views as well as peak and true peak level information and allows for previewing of the exported files. The development of this dialog was sponsored by Harrison Consoles, and represents another great example of their collaborative engagement with the Ardour development process. The greatly improved version of Mackie Control support that we're really excited about. Ardour's support for these devices is now very close to where we want it to be in terms of using the visibly obvious features of most Mackie Control surfaces. We still plan to go deeper into plugin control and more in future releases. The full list of changes is shown below. Download   read more

How is your customer service? What do people say about how they’re treated when they call about a product or service that you offer? When you call someone about a product or service that you need, what has your own experience been? And how can eLearning make a difference? The use of automated systems means that customer service begins before anyone even says, "hello." So when a customer finally talks to a human being, their experience depends on how well your service staff is trained. In this post, we’re examining how eLearning empowers and enhances your customer service training. But first, we’ll look at the vital role that customer service plays in the success of any organization. Even Your CEO is Part of The Customer Service Experience In essence, every person who works for any organization is a potential customer service representative. That may seem like a broad stroke. But think about it: whether you’re talking to the CEO or the custodial staff, you’re talking to a representative of that company. And some companies, like Walt Disney World, are very aware of this. In fact, everyone who works at Walt Disney World - and we mean everyone - goes through Disney’s Traditions training. A large portion of Traditions involves customer service training of the highest standards of excellence. And it works: the Walt Disney World corporation operates at a level of customer service that even other corporations talk about. For the purpose of this post, we’ll focus specifically on the people who staff the front lines of customer service. They’re the folks who answer your phones and talk with your callers and customers. They sell your products and services. They make appointments, take messages, and solve issues. They listen, offer advice, upgrades, and refunds. They take responsibility for issues that very often have nothing to do with them. Within the boundaries of organizational guidelines, policies, and procedures, they work to keep your customers satisfied. They straddle the boundary between the organization and its customers. Consider: while a customer service representative’s loyalty is to the company, they actually often work for the customer. They are the face and/or voice of your company. As far as your customer is concerned, your customer service representative is your company. You talk to customer service personnel when you require a product or service. And you know how important it is for you to have your needs met and your issues resolved. The confidence and empowerment of your frontline service folks are more than just a passing notion or a nice idea: it should be part of the heartbeat of your company. There are those who believe that you cannot teach customer service, that a person is either good at it, or not. And on the surface there’s some truth to that: we all know someone who is not a "people person". For those people, customer service positions are not a match for their abilities, personalities or temperament. And we relegate those people to positions away from the public eye (or ear). But let’s look deeper. Customer support is a fine art. It requires a masterful balance of the interests of the organization with the satisfaction and needs of the customer. And the two are intricately related. It’s a dance. Customer service is a skillset. And anyone can learn - and practice - a skillset. It takes time, experience, practice, and guidance. A good customer service training program prepares your customer service representatives for any potential person — or situation — that they may encounter. An excellent customer service program empowers employees to take what they’ve learned, apply the knowledge, and expand on it. Employees get to create and develop a personal expression of service, without sacrificing the standards of the organization. And this is one of those places where eLearning works its magic. Consider that your representatives are going to be interacting with human beings, whether face-to-face or via phone. Therefore, their training should be a match for the challenges of customer interactions that are unique to your business/industry. However, there are some foundational elements to effective customer service training: Blend instructor-led training with eLearning. Balance the time spent with an instructor with scenario-based video clips, webinars and other interactive media. Feature your best customer service personnel in different real-life interactions with your customers. (By the way, this has the added benefit of acknowledging and validating your best performers.) Scenario-based training allows for real-life application and prepares your employees for the real-world situations that they’ll face. eLearning interactivity can be used to train your customer service team in areas such as: body language, and how they present themselves to the public (including attire and grooming, where relevant); effective interactions by phone; listening for the issues behind the complaint; resolving the issue, rather than simply placating the customer; security and safety.   Employees can also be presented with simulations where they learn to prevent escalation while upholding organizational policies and procedures. And eLearning takes place within the safety of a simulation. In other words, trainees receive the benefits of experiencing real-life situations without compromising their own personal safety, their job security, or the reputation of the organization. With eLearning, even the worst mistakes become some of the best opportunities for both training and development. In addition, you can standardize your training, and track the progress of your trainees. In the meantime, you also provide training that benefits your employees outside of the workplace. After all, customer service is a skillset that has benefits beyond the time-clock. Most importantly, an eLearning-enhanced customer service program creates flexibility, engagement and fun. Another major advantage of eLearning that’s worth reiterating is the ability to capture the legacy knowledge and experience of your best employees. Using video, high performers can contribute ongoingly to your training program. Video also allows you to capture and preserve your best practices and legacy knowledge. And, the use of video goes a long way to standardizing your program, which preserves your knowledge base as well as your organizational and branding message. At the same time, interactivity empowers your employees to develop their individual expression as they train and learn together. As we said earlier, it actually begins before "hello." Various studies show that it takes about 7 seconds to make a first impression. And that first impression is lasting, even permanent. The same is true of customer service. We’ve all experienced customer service of varying levels. Depending on the experience, we may leave ranting, or raving. And it’s the raving we want — those "WOW!" moments — no matter which side of the interactions we’re on. Those are the experiences that have customers coming back for more. And if we do it right, our customers might just bring their friends along with them when they return. Before anyone even says, "hello," your customer service staff could be prepared to deliver a "WOW" moment. For more information on how to harness the power of eLearning in your customer service program, please contact us for a free demo. The post How to Turn Your Customer Service Into A World-Class Support Experience appeared first on KMI Learning.