E-learning is a boon for the training industry, but its implementation may be a challenge for companies. So, we should have a solid plan to implement eLearning successfully across the whole organization. We should make our organization ready for eLearning. We should encourage SMEs and training managers to make everyone aware of eLearning and clear their doubts. Good coordination between the top management and employees is needed to successfully implement eLearning. Prepare for the introduction of eLearning in your organization as if you are preparing to welcome a baby in your house. Align your organization’s resources, and make your employees accept eLearning whole heartedly. Here is an info-graphic that lists four important questions you need to ask before implementing eLearning in your organization. Hope you find this blog interesting. Do share your views. Related PostsCreative Ways to Present Click on Tab Interactivity in E-learning Courses - An InfographicTop 4 Trends in E-learning4 Tough Questions to Ask While Initiating E-learning in Your Organization

Education systems around the world have long relied on textbooks, pens and paper to deliver the curriculum. The only contact many children have with computers at school will be in dedicated IT lessons, but there is so much more that can be done with technology. Find out how schools are already welcoming technology into the classroom, and how your school could make the most of the devices available. 1)      It’s about more than the technology itself While information technology lessons teach children valuable skills about how to use computer software and hardware, schools are recognising that devices can be used for virtually any subject. Whether that’s putting language skills to the test with apps such as Duolingo or showing animated simulations of tricky scientific concepts, learning on a device should be just as important as learning about a device. 2)      Devices are ideal for last-minute revision Lots of students won’t be happy about lugging six different textbooks around. The ability to access revision materials and resources on a smartphone or tablet will give them a portable source of revision which won’t weigh them down on their way into their important exam. 3)      Make reading time paperless Reading doesn’t have to involve physical books anymore. Many people claim that e-books are faster to read than physical books, and many children prefer to read from a screen than from a paper book. What’s more, e-books are often cheaper than physical books and don’t take up any space, so you can provide a richer reading experience to your classes. 4)      Bring Your Own Device It won’t work for every school, but inviting students to bring their tablets or e-readers into the classroom can be useful when you can’t afford to provide everyone with devices. As long as the school has enough devices of its own to supply students who can’t or don’t want to use their own, a BYOD strategy can be a way to get around budgetary issues to provide a more rounded education supplemented with technology. 5)      A new dimension Everyone learns differently, and while a classroom-based discussion may suit some students, others may prefer to learn independently on a tablet. E-learning in the classroom is still a novel concept, so using a tablet to learn can engage students and keep them interested. And of course, if the exact learning material you need doesn’t exist in e-learning form, you can always build your own course in gomo! Sign up for your free trial today to practice making classroom-friendly content and find out how e-learning could transform the way your students get to grips with material. The post Five ways technology is being introduced to the classroom appeared first on gomo Learning.

We can create a simple final quiz, very easily, using the default features of rapid authoring tools. But, in some cases, the requirements pertaining to quizzes are very complex. You can use Articulate Quizmaker to meet such requirements, in a highly effective manner. A training manager asked us to create a quiz that has two categories of questions. The learner should be asked to select a category, and once he makes a decision, he needs to be navigated to the questions of the chosen category. The quiz ends after the learner attempts it. We met this requirement using the question Groups option in Quizmaker. We used this option to create a number of groups, so that we could categorize the quiz questions based on requirements. Here are the steps we followed to meet the requirement: Step 1: Open Articulate Quizmaker and click the Question Group option in the Home tab. Step 2: A new group will be created. Rename it, if required, by double-clicking. Step 3: Now, click Graded Questions on the Home tab to add your quiz questions to groups. Step 4: Now add a dummy question to navigate the learner to a group of his choice. As this is a dummy question and should not be scored, use a Survey Question (I have used the Pick One type here). Step 5: Now, double click the Pick One question. Click on the Drop Down arrow beside the Feedback and select By Answer from the options displayed. Step 6: Click the More button (for every option) from the window opened to set navigation options, when the learner selects each option. Step 7: From the window displayed, click the Drop Down arrow under Branching section. Now, select a slide in the list appeared to navigate the learner to the selected slide. Step 8: Now click the Save option to finish the process. Then, publish the quiz. Hope you find this blog useful. Do share your views. Related PostsRapid E-learning through Storyline Tool: 5 Infographics Sharing Key Features4 Tips for Developing E-learning Course Using Rapid Authoring ToolsHow to Randomize Final Quiz Questions in Articulate Storyline

The e-Learning 2015 conference aims to address the main issues of concern within e-Learning. This conference covers both technical as well as the non-technical aspects of e-Learning. Topics for e-Learning 2015 conference include, but are not limited to: Organisational Strategy and Management Issues Technological Issues e-Learning Curriculum Development Issues Instructional Design Issues e-Learning Delivery Issues e-Learning Research Methods and Approaches e-Skills and Information Literacy for Learning The e-Learning 2015 conference will be held at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Escuela de Ingeniería Informática, Spain on July 21 - 24, 2015. This post was first published on eLearning Industry.

As 2014 sails past, we have already reached June, and that can only mean one thing: gomo is going to mLearnCon 2014! We will be jetting off to sunny San Diego in less than three weeks to demonstrate our new multi-device authoring tool and tell you more about gomo. We’ll be ready to show you live demos on stand 403 throughout the exhibition, which takes place from 24th-26th June, and will have a variety of courses built in gomo for you to explore. I will also be presenting a session at 12pm PT on the New Possibilities Stage on 24th June, where I will be talking about how gomo allows you to create your own beautiful multi-device HTML5 e-learning. This will give you the opportunity to see for yourself how simple it can be to build your own courses from scratch for almost any device. Epic’s Director of Learning Imogen Casebourne and US-based Solutions Consultant Sherry Archer will also be presenting at the event from 4-5pm PT on 24th June. Their session, ‘Make the Move to Multi-device Learning in 10 Easy Steps’, will address topics such as BYOD, selecting the best authoring tool for your needs and why your mobile learning needs to be responsive. I’m also very excited to announce that Imogen will be part of the keynote panel on 26th June from 11am-12.10pm PT. In this session, ‘Today’s mLearning: Exploring Technologies, Strategies and Possibilities’, the panel will discuss the successes and failures in m-learning and what might happen in the future of learning technologies. I’m looking forward to meeting you in San Diego, and please visit us at stand 403 to say hello and to find out more about the future of multi-device learning. Make sure you’re following us on Twitter @gomolearning to keep up with all the action from the exhibition. The post Meet gomo on stand 403 at mLearnCon 2014 appeared first on gomo Learning.

In my blog, Content Chunking for Effective eLearning, I mentioned about screen-level chunking where an eLearning course is divided into modules which are further divided into chapters. These chapters are developed separately and the navigation from chapter to chapter is linked in the Learning Management System (LMS). But, one of our clients came up with a requirement of adding a button to the last slide of a chapter that would help the learner navigate to the next chapter. Let us see how we met the requirement using Articulate Storyline. Step 01: Take the source files of an eLearning course which consists of three chapters. These chapters are unpublished. Step 02: Before publishing,you have to remember a very important point. In this functionality, you have to start publishing the chapters in the reverse order, i.e., first you have to publish chapter03, because it is the last chapter of the course. We do this because chapter03 need not have the Next Chapter button as the learner does not have to navigate any further from here. Step 03: In the last slide of chapter02, create a Next Chapter button. Step 04: Using a trigger, link the button to the story.html file present in the published folder of chapter03. The trigger would be as shown in the below screenshot. Step 05: Publish Chapter02. Step 06: Copy/ cut all the files (except story.html) from the published folder of chapter03. Go to chapter02 published folder, and open story_content. In this, open external_files folder and paste the chapter03 files. Step 07: Similarly, in the last slide of chapter01, create a Next Chapter button, link it with the story.html file present in the published folder of chapter02 and publish chapter01. Step 08: Copy/ cut all the files (except story.html) from the published folder of chapter02. Go to chapter01 published folder, and open story_content. In this, open external_files folder and paste the chapter02 files. Now, open the published file of chapter01 and check the functionality. You have the published files of chapter03 inside the published files of chapter02 and the published files of chapter02 inside the published files of chapter01. So, all the chapters come inside one folder, i.e., in chapter 01. You can use this method for any number of chapters. You have to keep in mind that you should always begin with the last chapter. Hope this blog is helpful. Do share your views. Related PostsHow to Combine Your Adobe Captivate Projects Into Single Course?Rapid E-learning through Storyline Tool: 5 Infographics Sharing Key FeaturesCreating Navigation Restriction in Articulate Storyline: Method I

What a two days the gomo team has had at mLearnCon in San Diego! With non-stop demos and some fabulous feedback, it’s been a great experience for us at this excellent event. mLearnCon is a highly focused event looking at mobile e-learning in particular, making it the perfect platform for an adaptive and responsive HTML5 product like gomo. There were some wonderful speakers and sessions as well as a packed exhibition. Almost everyone we spoke to had reached the point where they were planning their first mobile e-learning projects and they were actively looking for solutions. Most of them wanted something that had been designed specifically to create e-learning once only and content that worked across all their devices. gomo was the talk of the event and very well received by everyone who saw it in action. We had queues of people wanting demos and barely stopped at all on day one. My talk on the New Possibilities stage was fully attended and generated lots of great questions. The first thing most people said was ‘everyone’s talking about gomo - we have to see this product’. My thanks go to Mira Mendlovitz from Grainger and Robert Gadd from OnPoint for talking about their hugely successful use of gomo in delivering mobile apps (developed in gomo and delivered through OnPoint’s Cellcast solution) at their session on Wednesday. The next thing people liked was how fluid and beautiful our adaptive and responsive courses looked on their desktops, tablets and smartphones. You can access our new demo course on any device to watch it adapt and respond to your screen before your eyes. Finally, they liked gomo’s ease of use, the fact that gomo is in the cloud and the highly competitive gomo pricing model. We ended the two days very tired but with numerous enquiries and hopefully lots of new friends and customers. For me, the icing on the cake was one of my last demos of the event. A very nice lady told me that she’d watched my demo on the stage on day one and then been to see every other vendor in the room. She’d looked at all the other products and concluded that gomo was absolutely the product for her organisation. It doesn’t get much better than that to finish off two days of a fantastic exhibition experience. The post gomo is the talk of mLearnCon appeared first on gomo Learning.

What is a style guide? A style guide is a document that puts together all the standards that include grammar, formatting issues, visual effects, capitalizations, abbreviations, etc. In brief, it can be called as the "style" which defines your course. In addition to these, specialized styles meet the requirements of clients. The style guides which we follow in CommLab India are based on these standard style guides: AP Stylebook AMA Manual of Style The Chicago Manual of Style The Gregg Reference Manual Here are a few basic styles which you can follow while developing a course. Grammar  Rule 1: Abbreviations  Abbreviations (e.g., lbs, mp) can be used in a bulleted list, but in the context of a discussion (paragraphs, descriptions, etc.), they should be spelled out (e.g., pounds, megapixel). Avoid using Latin abbreviations, as it leads to complications in translations and comprehension in other geographical languages. Instead, we can use "that is", "in other words", "for example", or "such as". Rule 2: Acronyms  Spell out words on the first occurrence along with acronym in parentheses. Thereafter, use the acronym in capital letters, unless the acronym is widely known and will be understood by our audience. For Example, RAM can be globally understood. Rule 3: Capitalization  Capitalize proper nouns and all words in titles except articles, prepositions and conjunctions. With hyphenated compound words, always capitalize the first element; do not capitalize the second element unless it is a trademarked word capitalized in that way. For example, Pre-announcement Sales CD. Use lowercase for "and", "but", "for", "or", and "nor" unless they are emphasized in a particular heading. Rule 4: Hyphens and Dashes Hyphens and dashes are not the same. If you are linking phrases, use an em dash ( — ) or a colon. If you are linking words, use a hyphen (-). Avoid hyphenation unless needed to avoid ambiguity. Never split product names, trademarks, units of measure and sizes at the end of a line by using hyphens. Rule 5: Quotation marks Punctuation always goes inside quotation marks. Exceptions are colons and semicolons. Within content, avoid using quotation marks unless you’re actually quoting; for emphasis, use italics instead and only sparingly. Format  Rule 1: Bulleted lists  Bullets should be red circles. Black and gray are acceptable. No other colors. Secondary bullets should be red dashes. Spacing between bullets should be automatically set by the first look course template. However, if in question, bullets should be single spaced (1 pt.). To indent bullets, use the Increase Indent button on the tool bar or tab. Rule 2: Font Use Arial standard 16 point font for text in slides. Titles should be in Arial 20 point font. The font can be changed as per the client’s requirement, but the preferred font is Arial. The color of the font should be black. Again, this can be changed according the requirements of the client. Many other standard style guides can be followed for maintaining consistency in the course. This will help the learner learn quickly and increase the level of satisfaction. Please do share your views on style guides for a quality eLearning course. Related Posts4 Effective Ways of Presenting Scenarios in E-learning CoursesBenefits of Standardization in E-learningHidden Errors in an E-Learning course - Part I

With the release of our first major update imminent, we’re extremely excited to show you more of the improved functionality of gomo. Our multi-device e-learning authoring tool has been designed to be a constant work in progress with regular updates to give you all the new features you need in the fast-moving world of learning technologies. With gomo 2.1 now just days away, we have been working hard to incorporate the feedback from our beta programme and our triallists from the past few months. In gomo 2.1, you can expect lots of new features, including: Display conditions - allowing you to target content to a specific device or devices Screen templates - for even quicker content creation New themes - two beautiful new designs to get you up and running as quickly as possible New assets - even more interactivity and an iFrame asset for embedding external content Multiple language support - via XLIFF translation export/ import. If you want to see the new features in action, make sure you register for the next gomo webinar on 31st July to learn more about gomo 2.1. We’ll be telling you more about the detail of these new features very shortly but, for now, our work to improve gomo definitely hasn’t stopped. In fact, we’re already thinking about what we can include in gomo 2.2! That is why we want you to take our gomo summer survey. The summer survey has been created to help us find out what it is you want from your e-learning authoring tool. We want to know about the way you create content, the devices your learners use and how you want that content to adapt and respond. It’s very quick and straightforward, and it will help us shape the future releases of gomo to give you the exact features you need. We’re always listening, so please take the survey now, or feel free to tweet us @gomolearning to let us know what you think of our multi-device authoring tool. The post Shaping the future of your e-learning authoring tool appeared first on gomo Learning.

Improving Corporate Online Learning Success Through Improving Learner Attitude and Organizational Support The benefits of training and learning in the corporate scenario are undisputed. It is not surprising that many organizations make considerable efforts to create training initiatives to make sure that their employees are at par with the developments around them. A lot of funds are also directed towards creating sustainable as well as impactful trainings that benefit the employees as well as the organization, in the long run. But training initiatives often fail to make the anticipated impact. This is a waste of time as well as effort of the learners; and, furthermore, a waste of organizational funds as well. Digging into the reasons why a training initiative fails, the two main culprits are: Firstly, the learners’ apathy towards learning and secondly, lack of organizational support. Improving Learners’ Attitude Towards Corporate Online Learning Many learners’ view Online learning as a ‘necessary evil’. They take up mandatory training programs that are required to advance within the company. This is where the negative attitude towards learning often originates. When the training is closely linked with organizational actions like employee evaluations or bonuses, it is a definite ‘push’ for learning. But it is important to note that the learners are only motivated by the reward and not the subject matter. Rather than something that they have to do as a mandatory task, learners must view learning as a task where they benefit directly. There are ways to improve the learners’ attitude. These work for a variety of organizations: Highlight actual benefits of corporate online learning. Most employees ask the same question when starting a training initiative -- "What’s in it for me?" If they perceive that the training is for organizational benefit only, it discourages them to put in their best efforts into learning. Thus, if the benefits of learning are pointed out to the individual before the start of the training endeavour, it can do a world of good to the end-results. Mailers or e-brochures can be created to highlight the benefits, and sent out to the learners. Mini-contests and other activities can also be held to create a buzz around the training initiative. Within the e-course, badges or certificates can be created to help the learners achieve goals and improve engagement with the learning process. Encourage peer learning. Learning is a social process and the best results are reaped when there are ample opportunities for peer interaction. But due to time restrictions, this is often not a viable option. But with technology-aided online learning platforms, learners can be given the opportunity to interact with fellow learners through instant messaging, discussion boards or even virtual classrooms. The social platform can also be utilized for peer learning, where advanced learners or high performers can be given the onus of leading discussions or even conducting short lessons for their peers. This is a huge driver for learning. It gives a sense of pride and achievement to the best performers within the learner group. For others it’s a source of inspiration that propels them to put in extra efforts and encourages them to aspire for the same achievements. Personalized corporate online learning. Learning is a personal experience, and every individual has a different learning style. It is not possible to build-in all the personal styles into a single training course. But it is important to give enough options to cater to some personal requirements as well. Contrary to popular belief, it is possible to build-in the avenues of personal learning without drilling a huge hole in your training budget! For instance, while building an e-course, G-cube created a structure that split the course into two - the first one, an introduction; the other. giving the details of the subject in hand. Advanced learners could choose to skip the first part and move on to the more pertinent second part. To make sure that all the learners do not skip the introduction, a small test was assigned at the beginning of the second part, which made sure that the learner had the necessary background to fully understand the subject ahead. The bifurcation within the course provided an option to the learners that helped them save time and effort. In addition, it provided them the opportunity to concentrate on newer knowledge while they did not have to forcibly study something they already knew. Improving Organizational Support The organization has to support the corporate online learning endeavor to reap the true ROI of the initiative.  Organizations should develop a solid organizational program that provides choice to the employees by making available courses for individual learning needs as well as custom training courses for team learning and development needs. It is possible for the organization to do its bit and make sure that the corproate online learning initiative is not headed for failure: Defining training objectives. As basic as it sounds, many training initiatives begin with no clear objectives in mind. Most of them are created to cater to a pertinent need within the organization, but how the employee can improve or can become more better-suited for his or work through learning remains unclear. For instance, when creating a training to improve the selling techniques of employees, the objective should take into account the improved sales figures of the learner group over time - both before and after commencement of training. By defining objectives, the organization makes the training ‘purposeful’ and thus gains the most out of it. Training evaluation is critical. Many organizations don’t direct enough efforts to evaluate how well employees have learned after they have completed a training course. Organizations should extend support to fully gauge the impact of training efforts that benefit employees as well as the organization. Some organizations simply rely on employee feedback to understand how well the training was received. But this only gives a measure of initial reaction to the course, which is often insufficient in measuring the true impact. Organizations should not only test the actual skills learned during the training, but do it on a continual basis. Also, it is necessary to test an employee immediately after the training and repeat the testing multiple times to measure the skills decay. This will provide the true impact of online learning and also reveal the training needs as and when they emerge. Practice what is learned. Measuring skills decay is important, but it is also necessary to take proper steps to avoid the loss of skills over time. It is common knowledge that 79% of information learnt is forgotten within a month, if nothing is done to reinforce it. So, the good news is that there are re-enforcement activities that can decrease loss of information over time as well as increase retention rates for the learners. Organizations should provide the learners ample opportunities to practice newly-acquired skills or knowledge. If this is not possible in actual place of work, assignments or workshops can be conducted to make sure that the learners can practice and perfect. Simulations can also be created to provide the learners a safe and secure environment for practicing before embarking on applying them in their work. Employees are the greatest assets of an organization and employee development can be attained only if both parties are on board - employees as well as the organization. In the current competitive global market, the organizations who invest in employee training and development are the ones that succeed. Also, employees who realize the worth of giving their best towards employee training and development initiatives are the ones who succeed along with the organization. This post was first published on eLearning Industry.