If your organization provides products or services (which most do) you’re probably familiar with RFPs, or Requests for Proposal. Depending on your role, you may love them or they may be the bane of your existence. I’m kidding…mostly. RFPs certainly have benefits. If you’re in need of a commodity product, it’s wise to collect completed RFPs from a number of potential suppliers to compare not only price, but reliability of the company. It’s a bit different for creative services (like eLearning development) where solutions are tailored to unique needs. While it may be convenient to blanket the market with RFPs and see what comes back to you, there are a few reasons it’s unwise to do so. The questions don’t apply. Is each RFP written specifically for the product/service needed, or is there one standard RFP form used regardless of circumstance? It’s unnecessary to ask a creative firm to attempt to answer questions that apply to a widget manufacturer. eLearning is unique to each company. Its fully customized creation doesn’t lend itself to a standard RFP. There needs to be a real dialogue, not just filling out fields on a form. It sends the wrong message to potential partners. Not only does it suggest you’re not a serious buyer, it suggests you’re not interested in/available for real conversations at this point, which means you may not receive well thought out responses in return. Partners may be hesitant to follow up with additional questions because you’ve essentially said "talk to the hand." With limited information, the vendor can’t possibly assemble the best possible package for your unique organization, and that makes comparing vendors difficult. There’s a good chance you won’t find your true ideal partner. Business Leaders discourage vendors from responding to RFPs. Why? Because they are often used just to cost-justify a current partner or vendor business. As more product/service providers adopt this thinking, you’ll receive fewer responses from the best providers you really should be engaging. They don’t capture what you really need to know. As smartly stated on the Versa Studio blog, RFPs don’t capture "capabilities, interest level or suitability." You’ll save time for all involved by having an open dialogue rather than ask a vendor to complete a standard form, and you’re much more likely to find an ideal partner. If you must require an RFP, FCB Global CMO, Chris Shumaker, has some good advice here. While he is speaking of advertising agencies, the thought process applies to any creative services firm, including eLearning developers. Ditch the RFP. Have a real conversation instead. At Expand, we prefer to talk with potential clients and follow up with a  needs assessment. In order for us to recommend the best solution, we need to have a solid understanding of your organization, your needs, your training audience, your historical approach to training and how its worked, your timeframe, and many other pieces of information. Following that conversation, we are able to deliver a tailored, fully-custom solution containing our recommendations of the best approach for your individual needs, which are going to be completely different from the next potential client we talk to. Plus, don’t you want to spend an hour talking to these fine folks? Try our eLearning needs assessment this week. I promise you’ll come away with far more actionable information than you’d get from a standard RFP. photo credit: Definition of the RFP - 2011-11-06

This week’s challenge was an easy one for me. Mostly because it didn’t require any of my currently exhausted development brains - thanks, David! The Concept Create a small collection of e-learning images to share with your fellow e-learning developers and course designers. The Method For this challenge, I sifted through the photos on my iPhone (that were incidentally taken with my iPhone), and uploaded any I thought might be particularly beneficial to e-learning developers to Google Drive. I then renamed all of the files appropriately, and shared the link. The Result I ended up with a pretty cute, and small gallery of images that may or may not be usable in e-learning courses - there’s nothing really compliance-y in there, but I’m sure you can find a nice nature landscape. Shockingly, there are no cats or dogs in this album. Please feel free to download images and use them at your leisure. I would love you to leave a comment and let me know if you ended up using any of the images (and if so, what did you use them for), but it’s not a requirement. Have at ‘er! Click here to access and/or download all images from this gallery.

Inspections are a critical part of any business that maintains complex equipment or deals with mission critical processes. Accreditations, certifications and licenses that are necessary to remain operational can be lost if inspections are failed. Managers in charge of a team of field technicians or equipment operators are directly responsible for passing inspections, and that territory comes with a number of potential challenges: Old equipment requires legacy knowledge that might not be shared throughout the organization and is gradually lost as veteran team members leave the company. Procedures are followed inconsistently, which means they are either misunderstood or not taken seriously. Processes are bogged down with paperwork and antiquated processes. There are many paper job aids and checklists that quickly fall out of date. Completed paperwork is lost or stuck in a pile waiting to be entered into a system. Manual processes and data entry create significant lags in reporting and a large margin for human error. The low-tech nature of these procedures creates an inability to monitor employees as closely as desired to avoid issues. Technical jobs have relatively frequent turnover, creating gaps in knowledge between new and experienced team members. The current system likely doesn’t provide adequate information to diagnose issues, make timely decisions and swiftly make adjustments. It’s difficult to know where the bottlenecks are and how to fix them. While you may have never considered (or heard of!) a work process or knowledge sharing platform, it is your best operations management tool. Specialized technology can help overcome all of the challenges outlined above by closing knowledge gaps and tracking individual employee activity and performance. Here is how it works: A platform is custom-built for each organization and accessible anywhere there is an internet connection, from any device. Step-by-step how-to checklists are housed here rather than distributed via paper. Employees access it at their workstation or in the field on a mobile device. The checklist is completed electronically as the employee completes the procedure. The checklist guides  the user through a process while at the same time verfying and tracking completion of the steps. Supplemental content, like job aids, photos and videos, are accessible from within the checklist if an employee needs additional support. Old equipment, infrequently used procedures and new employees no longer pose the problem they once did. Users submit completed checklists electronically, which are then immediately added to a data mine for reporting. Managers use the platform to view custom reports to monitor individual users, teams or entire business units for safety, efficiency, team activity and performance. Checklists help prevent costly errors and reports help managers uncover where problems lie, so they can be resolved in a timely manner. Reports can be compiled in near-real time because there is no manual rekeying of data from a paper checklist. This also reduces the risk of human error. Users can be assigned different levels of access to the platform to view only content relevant to their role, whether checklists or reports. Naturally, not all work process and knowledge sharing platforms are created equal, so be sure to carefully review features and ask questions of each potential vendor. If you’d like to learn more about Expand’s platform, ExpandShare, and how we’ve worked with utilities and manufacturers to improve operational efficiency, schedule a time to chat. photo credit: Four Corners Power Plant

This week’s term is brought to you in the form of a rant, and maybe I’m ill-informed. Maybe I’ll spark a heated debate. Who knows? I was having a conversation this week that reminded me of something increasingly prevalent in the education system today: helicoptering. What’s helicoptering? I’m not referring to someone flying a helicopter; I’m referring to the fact that parents are becoming increasingly involved in their children’s education…but negatively. Instead of simply being a supportive presence, available to answer homework queries and/or help with assignments, parents are injecting themselves into the school system and pointing out the flaws that are affecting their children. Not all parents do this, but a lot of them do. When I was in grade school, my parents were very hands-on with my education outside of school (and so they should have been). However, in school, it was my responsibility to navigate the complexities of receiving an education…on my own. Sure, my parents and other parents would intervene if they saw that I was struggling with something, perhaps inquiring about what methods were in place for extra help, etc. However, what I see happening in our grade school system now (and maybe it’s just a regional thing), is that parents are becoming obstructions to their children’s education…unintentionally I’m sure, but becoming over-protective and hyper vigilant. Now. As I said before, there’s a certain level of vigilance that is expected from parents. We all want our children to be treated fairly and to be provided with the appropriate resources needed to succeed. It’s when this vigilance oversteps normal that things become problematic. How so? Here’s one example I can think of. A former co-worker of mine was a teacher at an elementary school, and the school had recently implemented a no homework policy - I’m not entirely sure of the reasoning behind this; although, it was probably rooted some helicopter parenting traits (e.g. not wanting to negatively affect a child’s self-esteem, etc.). Anyhow, my friend had sent her class home with a task of noting three historical events. It could have been something as simple as "I had toast for breakfast this morning.", and she was reprimanded later that week because a parent had complained that their child had been sent home with ‘homework’. Another example: Within the last few years, our schoolboard has changed assignment requirements so that all graded work can be handed in on the last day of the semester. This is unrealistic. In the real world, there are real deadlines. You can’t just take 3-4 months to finish working on something. Additionally, it creates more of a burden on the teachers, who are already working overcapacity. THIS is when helicoptering gets out of hand. If we’re not teaching our children that there are rules and assignments and deadlines, etc., then how are we bettering our children for the role they’ll inevitably encounter when entering university, college, or the workforce? The places our children will go in the future tend to all be governed by rules, regulations, impending deadlines, or at least timeliness. What may have originally been parents wanting the best for their children will end up backfiring years down the road.

  Do you find yourself thinking "If only I had reliable performance data, I could better manage my team," or "I like our LMS, but it would be even better if it could do this or that..." We built ExpandShare just for you. Watch the video below to learn how our knowledge sharing platform is like an LMS, but better.  ExpandShare Let's talk about how ExpandShare could be customized for your organization.    

It’s hard to believe that it’s been a year since I threw myself overboard from the corporate ship, and I thought it might be fun to share some things that I’ve learned in my first full year of self-employment. Now. Don’t get it twisted. I do still have a full-time gig, but it’s in an industry I love, so while I’ve reduced the amount of work I do with my business, I’m still very active in the small business world. 1. Invest in things that will make your work-life easier. There are still investments I will make in my little business, but I cannot emphasize this point enough. You have a career that you are passionate about, so invest in the things you need to do that job well! For example, I’m an Instructional Designer who develops e-learning products. Things that make my life easier that I’ve invested in over the past year include: a computer that can handle the type of work that I’m doing, a nice desk, an all-in-one printer, some external hard drives, dropbox business accounts, software licenses, and a billing software (which admittedly I don’t leverage to its full potential, but it keeps my finances organized), professionals who know how to do things better than I do instead of trying to do X myself (e.g. my portfolio plugin and an accountant for tax time). 2. Keep organized records. Administrative blah blah is still the bane of my existence, but being somewhat organized makes my life a whole lot easier when it comes time to do say…taxes. Or locate an invoice. Or locate a software product key. I’m in the middle of preparing to file my taxes, and let me tell you…it is OVERWHELMING. However, keeping organized records is making this task a litttttttle easier for me. 3. BACK UP YOUR WORK…ALL THE TIME. This might seem self-explanatory, but I know I’m guilty of not backing things up everyday. However, after several lessons learned that I paid dearly for in headaches and extra labour, I back my work up REGULARLY. This comes especially in handy if you’re guilty of over-trusting your technology. Yesterday my Macbook decided it wanted to get lame. To the point of having to reinstall the operating system. It sucked and cost me the better part of a day to resolve, but in the end, I had all of my stuff backed up, and it was business as usual once the reinstall was up and running. 4. Reward yourself with professional development opportunities. Professional development is always important. It allows you to network with fellow industry professionals and learn new things. In this new fangled information society, it’s important to always keep learning. In 2014 I participated in two speaking engagements (Articulate E-Learning Heroes Community Roadshows: Toronto and Denver), and I learned so much! It was also a learning experience for me to get up and speak about something I know in front of people interested to listen. I also began my Online Learning Consortium Teaching Certificate under the recommendation of the Director of my department at the University. I’m almost finished now, and it’s been a fantastic learning experience. This year, I’ll be speaking at Learning Solutions Conference 2015 (later this month) and I’m hoping to speak or attend Dev Learn in the fall. I’ll also try to hit up at least one more Articulate E-Learning Heroes Roadshow. 5. Take opportunities when they’re presented to you. I understand that you might not be able to take all of the opportunities presented to you, but you can weigh the cost-benefit and determine which ones you can engage in. For me, this was authoring two books for Packt Publishing, Articulate Storyline Essentials (released in a week or so - EEEE!) and Mastering Articulate Storyline (released later this year) - the former will hold your hand and get you up and running with Articulate Storyline, while the latter will have activities and will teach you how to push Articulate Storyline to the limits. I had never before considered writing a book, because who am I to be an authority on ANYTHING?! But, when in Rome. YOLO! 6. You are your best sales person. You know what you’re capable of doing and you know (or have a rough idea) of who you want to do work for, so get out there and SELL YOURSELF! I’m not saying you’ll making half a million dollars in your first year of business, because that’s just nutty. What I’m saying is that there will always be some modicum of hustling that you have to do, and sometimes you’ll need to hustle more than other times, but eventually you’ll get to a point where you’re comfortable with the level of hustling you do. 7. Come correct! Piggybacking on #6, in order to be an effective sales person, you need to come correct. What I mean by this is: overhaul your resume, get a proper email address (e.g. not xohotgirl81), update your linkedin profile, update your portfolio, and BE PROFESSIONAL! When applying for new opportunities, you want to put your best foot forward. 8. Network like you mean it. Find out where your clients or peers are hanging out, and go hang out with them! For me, this started with the Articulate E-Learning Heroes Community. I found so many great clients through the forums, gained a lot of insight, grew myself as a professional, and made a TON of friends. I slowly began incorporating social media, so now I engage with my new friends on Twitter and Linkedin. 9. Don’t be selfish. Once you find your clients (and potential clients) or peers, don’t just engage with them on social media for your own benefit, promote them! Whenever one of my pals tweets about a new blog post or promotes an interesting article or something they’ve developed, I try to share these items as much as I can. This will help your pals out when they’re looking for opportunities, or it might help a client find the perfect person for the job. 10. Treat Yo’ Self! You might not need  fine leather goods or velvet slippies like Tom Haverford and Donna Meagle, but you do need to take time and enjoy life. Many of us are guilty of being workaholics, but there’s this thing called burn out, and if you’re not careful, you will find out exactly what it is. Going on vacations, find a hobby, get out of your chair and go outside!

There are many ways to pass information from one source to another. In fact, it happens all day long as we talk, read, listen to podcasts or the radio, watch television or YouTube… There is a large, free exchange of information happening daily as a result of our connectivity through technology. The downside to that free exchange, though, is the way information is interpreted rests solely on the recipient. If the goal is to teach something, leaving information open to interpretation is risky business, especially when stakes are high. Say you manage a team of pharmaceutical chemists, whose job depends on understanding new medicinal ingredients and how they behave in different compositions. Should they just start Googling and self-educate? Or, should they be provided with information from a true expert and delivered in a way that ensures every person understands the information fully and at the same level as his peers? That, my friends, is why good instructional design is incredibly important. Good Instructional Design is Audience-Focused and Objectives-Driven The role of the instructional designer is to take the most important information about a particular topic and package it in a way that will engage the intended audience and make the information memorable. This is done based on the latest learning theory and keen understanding of how the brain functions in today’s high-tech, distraction-heavy environment. It’s also his or her job to employ proof-points, like assessments and certifications, to determine whether the course met the identified learning objectives. If not, the instructional designer will adjust the course content to improve results. Characteristics of A Top-Notch Instructional Designer He or she... knows how to talk to subject-matter experts and extract key points to include in a course. has a knack for quickly understanding complex topics, and is able to break them down into easy-to-understand pieces. understands how to engage different types of learners. understands multimedia and technology options and skillfully chooses the best ones for an audience or subject. knows the importance of learning objectives and designs courses with them at the core. is an incredibly sharp communicator, both verbally and written. has the ability to spin a good story. provides solid direction to graphic designers and interactive developers to bring ideas to life. is endlessly creative and resourceful. is a genuine hybrid professional, equal parts left- and right-brained. creates fair and logical assessments to determine whether the course succeeded. understands the audience and clearly communicates the value of the course at the start. Don’t Waste Resources on Ineffective Training As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, there are many ways to share information, but when its of utmost importance the audience actually retain it, a focused approach is key.  Could you take the information from your subject matter expert and create a handbook? A 3-day seminar? A series of PDF job aids? Sure, but how effective are those methods? An instructional designer’s job is to make sure shared information is remembered. Let us explain our instructional design framework a bit further. Let us know what time you’re available and we’d be happy to hop on a call and learn more about your organization’s need for knowledge sharing. Click here to get started! photo credit: BCOER Librarian

This week’s challenge could go so many different ways! And it’s certainly a breeding ground for the crazy that’s inside of everyone’s head. Perfect! Thanks, David! Super! The Concept Apparently the Bookseller has a Diagram Prize, which reveals the annual odd book names of the year. The more you know. As such, the challenge was based on the premise of the Diagram Prize in that we were tasked with coming up with cover pages for the oddest e-learning course title of the year. The Method First, I will say that I did censor myself. In doing that, I limited myself to some stock icons I had laying around. Gotta keep it PG, folks! I had some really awesome flat illustrative icons that I bought from Creative Market awhile back, and so I decided to go through each of them, and if something spoke to me in the way of course titles, I added the icon and a relevant course title. I ended up with a whole bunch of prospective odd course titles, and only you can be  the judge. I used some fly in and fade animations to make it a little less flat looking and added custom navigation buttons because the default buttons just didn’t look right. I also changed the default player colour theme because grey didn’t speak to my icons. The Result Click here to view the full interaction.

I know some of you folks might be done hearing about this book, but I’m really proud of it! Last year I started writing Articulate Storyline Essentials, and it gets published this week (and is available for pre-order over on Packt Publishing’s website - go check it out!) Packt Publishing has three tiers of books: Essentials, Learning (which Stephanie Harnett wrote and is a fantastic resource), and Mastering. Essentials is my first foray into book writing, and it’s been a long road to publishing, but a great learning experience. Now that Essentials has been taken care of, I’m in the middle of writing Mastering Articulate Storyline - YAY! Articulate Storyline Essentials is meant to get you up and running with Articulate Storyline, from starting a new project to publishing that project to share with your audience. Unlike Learning and Mastering there are no activities; instead, there are many screenshots that will hold your hand through the development process and walk you through tasks step-by-step. Mastering Articulate Storyline will be geared toward advanced topics, and I’m really excited to teach folks how to use some of the functions I don’t get to use as often as I’d like…most clients don’t need fancy JavaScript incorporated within their products…however, Storyline really is a powerful authoring tool and I want to teach people how they can push Storyline to its limits and learn how to do some really cool things! Writing a book has been a huge learning experience and I have been extremely grateful for the fantastic team of editors I’ve been able to work with - they’ve done nearly all of the heavy lifting, and I could only thank them more if they had the power to make me focus my attention more. Sometimes you just need to sit down and write! Again, I’m very proud of this book and I think it will serve a broad audience and compliment Packt Publishing’s other offerings within their suite of books focused on Articulate Storyline. Please go check it out, pre-order it, order it, tell all of your friends about it, and then tell me about it! I’d love to hear what you think! I’ll be presenting at Learning Solutions 2015 later this month and if the stars align, I’m hoping to have some hard copies to sell at the expo bookstore. If the stars don’t align and you’re also attending, please don’t hesitate to stop me in passing - I’d love to meet you!

There’s a fair amount of Apple geekery in the Expand office. Some of us gathered in our conference room to watch the iPhone 6/Apple Watch announcement. Our one non-iPhone user faces almost daily badgering and ridicule. And, we often look to Apple’s products and Steve Jobs for inspiration on everything from design to marketing. Jobs was a force that will never be matched and one we all can learn from. Below is a selection of Jobs’s most notable quotes, and how we eLearning folk can pull inspiration from a brilliant man. "Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected." Aren’t you always pleasantly surprised when a product or service does exactly what it claims to do, as well as it claims to do it? It’s so rare it’s almost shocking when it happens. The Apple brand has never been one of inflated claims. Instructional designers and eLearning developers hold the professional development of others in their hands. Quality is of the utmost importance and shouldn’t be limited to customer-facing aspects of an organization. "I’m as proud of many of the things we haven’t done as the things we have done. Innovation is saying no to a thousand things." Jobs was never one to settle for anything. Every draft or idea turned down should bring about a new and improved one. Innovation is an iterative process and you’ll never find the best solution on the first, second, third...twentieth...or maybe even one-hundredth time. This is true of any creative process, including eLearning. "A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them." Apple’s iPad is the perfect example. Consumers were skeptical of the iPad until they saw it in action or held it in their hands. Suddenly it was a top-selling product. The same could be said for many aspects of eLearning, such as performance support. Employees might hate the sound of learning follow-up and job aids, but once they have them and reap the benefits, they’ll wonder how they ever did their job without performance support materials. "That’s been one of my mantras — focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex; you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple." eLearning pros often work in teams, and once you’ve incorporated everyone’s ideas you can wind up with a complicated first draft. Remember to focus on simplicity, whether you’re working on a single screen or an entire course. "Quality is much better than quantity. One home run is much better than two doubles." One really good course is better than 5 mediocre ones. While time is important and you have deadlines for your deliverables, avoid sacrificing quality. "Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations." Know that you probably won’t hit the nail on the head the first time with your training audience. Be sure to ask for their feedback and focus on continuous improvement. "Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works." At Expand, our Creative Director and UI/UX Director work hand-in-hand on every project to make sure our courses and software not only look great, but function exceptionally well and in a way that’s intuitive to the end user. "I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world." Diversity in teams contributes to the greatness of the team. Allow your eLearning team members the flexibility to explore their creative sides and contribute their unique perspectives to each project. If you share our passion for all things Apple, we might make great partners! Check out a couple short videos that explain who we are and how our software platform is like an LMS, but better. photo credit: _DSC2263