Authentic PracTICE Through Global Collaboration [GM] The authors of this blog post "@ICTPHMS (Dan KIRSCH’s Blog)" and "@knolinfos (Gust MEES’s Blog)" have met each other on Social Media  "Twitter" and decided one day to work together on a common blog about "Digital CitizenShip", a "Global Collaboration" from authors of the USA and Luxembourg (Europe) was born. Find below, please, OUR collaboration blog: - https://gustmees.wordpress.com/2014/10/11/learning-to-become-a-good-digital-citizen-digital-citizenship/ Source: gustmees.wordpress.com See on Scoop.it - FootprintDigital

We might think that teaching coding is something boring and complicated. But when you base your exercises on games (you gamecodize :-D) then… your students get astonished! Introducing a new subject can be threatening for some people. Things get worse for those students not in favour of STEM matters.Then, how to make them buy your fabulous lessons about coding? Act as an illusionist.First of all switch your digital board and open your IDE (I’ve used Basic256). Start speaking about video games: how long they think a game needs to be coded, types of games, etc. Let them express themselves about the topic. Then start to explain what Tron is: a film by Disney which gave way to several games. Let them go on speaking about different aspects of the game while you start typing code. For sure you’ll listen to the silence (students suddenly shut up hypnotized by what you are doing) as you go on striking your keyboard, but break it to explain what you are doing and how (different aspects of coding, as main loops, debugging, variables, strategies, etc).Some tips:Use the help window: they should realize they don’t need to know everything by heart. If doubts pop up a helping window can also pop up. Make some mistakes on purpose: that’ll give them a good view of what debuging and trial-and-error are. Show some hesitation and use the expression "let’s try…" Use a scaffolding approach, constructing the main algorithm, and adding new elements around it as you continue.My basic version of Tron game needs about 10 minutes top to be coded. When you execute the final code and the students see the results they get way surprised by how easily you can make games.The coding phases go like this:Create a main loop and listen to the keyboard. If ESC is pressed exit the loop.Insert the code for the motorbike (a point) to go down the screen when pressing the down arrow.Do the same for the rest of the keys.Move the point around, with no physical restraints.Make the algorithm detect the walls left by the point, and make them "real".Let the player win when getting to the bottom right corner.Add random spheres as obstacles.The lines of code look like this:For more ideas about what games to code check the following list. MVC stands for model/view/controller, and AI for artificial intelligence. The grades have been given taking in count: that a student has to code them, and Basic’s features.DifficultyText/graphicMVCSpritesDataAIAnimal, vegetable,difficulttextyesnomatrixbasicArcanoiddifficultgraphicyesyesmatrixnoAsteroidsmediumgraphicnoyesarraynoBattleshipmediumbothnonomatrixnoBejeweleddifficultbothyesyesmatrixnoBiggest cardeasybothnonoarraynoCheckersdifficultbothyesnomatrixyesConnect fourmediumbothyesnomatrixyesConversationeasytextnonovariablenoDodgereasygraphicnoyesarraynoEscape the mazeeasygraphicbothbothmatrixnoGuess the numbereasytextnonovariablebasicHang manmediumbothnonoarraynoLand on the moonmediumgraphicnoyesvariablenoLife's gamemediumgraphicyesnomatrixnoMarble, chips...easytextnonovariablenoMaster mindmediumtextnonoarraynoMath sequencesmediumtextnonoarraynoPokermediumbothyesnomatrixmediumPongmediumgraphicnoyesvariablenoPuzzle: match pairseasybothyesyesmatrixnoPuzzle: slidingmediumbothyesyesmatrixnoSimon sayseasybothyesnoarraynoSnakedifficultgraphicyesyesmatrixnoSpace invadersdifficultgraphicnoyesarraynoText adventuremediumtextyesnomatrixnoThree in a rowmediumbothyesnomatrixmediumTic-tac-toeeasybothyesnomatrixbasicTroneasygraphicnonovariableno

Students Tweet to Class Twitter via Google Form Click here to see what this is all about! *Most of the ideas on this page came from John Calvert’s blog post linked below. I only recreated this tutorial to give more detail within each step. http://edtechtofu.blogspot.com/2014/07/using-formmule-a... Source: docs.google.com See on Scoop.it - InformationCommunication (ICT)

The post Thank you to all of the LifterLMS VIPs appeared first on LMScast.

EdTech is about to explode. The coming technology and the new trends on the rise can’t but forecast an extensive technology adoption in schools all around the globe. Specific apps, systems, codable gadgets and the adaptation of general use elements to the school environment are engaging teachers and opening up the way to new pedagogical approaches. And while we are scratching the surface of some of them, others have just started to buzz persistently.Read the whole story in Edtechreview.inhttp://edtechreview.in/trends-insights/trends/1832-edtech-trends-for-the-coming-years

Joshua Millage: Hello, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of LMScast. My name is Joshua Millage, and I’m joined here with Christopher Badgett. Today, we’re talking about how to create a sales letter for your online course. My question to you, Chris is why is it even important that we learn about sales letters? I mean, I’m just a teacher. I just want to teach. Like what’s the point? Chris Badgett: What it comes down to it, if you’re an education entrepreneur, the big job is really creating your course and figuring out how you’re going to engage with your students, but it’s also important more on the entrepreneurial side to figure out how to sell that course and make sure you’re clearly communicating your offer. There’s a couple of things that come into play that limit education entrepreneurs in the sense of it’s mindset stuff where maybe you’re a little out of touch of what we call ‘The beginner’s mind’, or you have something known as the ‘Curse of knowledge’, and we can maybe unpack that as a place to start. Joshua Millage: Cool. Let’s dive into it. Chris Badgett: The beginner’s mind essentially, if you were to tie that to a marketing concept, but the marketing concept is to get really clear on your customer avatar, like ‘Who is your ideal customer?", and then you could change out the word ‘Customer’ with ‘Student’. That’s like an avatar. It’s the perfect, ideal student that you want to teach to and sell your course to. Getting inside the beginner’s mind of "What is this person coming to you for to learn?", and like "What is their mindset like?", "What is the language that they like to communicate with?", "What types of words are they using to describe their problem or describe the solution they’re going for or what they want to learn?" That’s kind of that getting in touch with the beginner’s mind is all about zoning in and getting clear on that customer avatar. Joshua Millage: I think it’s really important. I mean, on our other podcast that I host, I had a gentleman on by the name of Josh Fagan. He has the … He’s in real estate training, but his customer avatar was insane. He had it down to like, "And Joe was in a car accident four years ago, and he has three kids, and he limps with this … because of this car accident", and just all these details of this guy’s life, but Joe was fake. All right? I don’t know if his name was Joe, but he had a name for him. When he wrote his emails, he was writing to this guy. Because he was writing to a person who made up a lot of different aspects of his customer base, he was able to create really personal emails that people would then respond to him and say, "Hey. I felt like you are really talking to me," and the trick was just actually talking to an imaginary character that embodied who your customer actually was. I think that that learning if we take that learning into the online course space, it’s really important to do that with our students. I think one of the easiest ways to do this is if you have a student base already, to get to know them, to pick up the phone and call them if there’s … and I think talking to people on the phone is one of the most incredible things that people don’t do because they don’t … They just like, "I don’t have the time", "I don’t …" whatever. They carry all these excuses, but at the end of the day, they don’t know how to speak to that person because they’re not actually touching them. I think taking the time to build a customer avatar, but maybe we should coin the term ‘Student avatar’ for people who are doing online courses is absolutely crucial I think. Chris Badgett: Absolutely. Absolutely. That really is what the beginner’s mind is all about. On the other side of that is what we call the ‘Curse of knowledge’. This is what the educator experiences in the sense that they’ve spent all this time and life experience building up the skillset that they’re now going to teach, but it’s important to remember … to me, the customer, where they are and not get bogged down in all those little subtle things that you’ve learned that have moved down to your subconscious, that you have to pull that stuff back up so that your messaging can be really clear and spot on. There’s a marketing concept here that’s important to learn and I’m going to use a quote from Henry Ford from the automotive industry, where he said if he had given people what they want, he would have given them faster horses, but instead, he built a car. Joshua Millage: Yes. Chris Badgett: Sometimes, our ideal customer and their beginner’s mind, they may not even know what they want, need or clearly be able to articulate their problems. That’s more of an advanced challenge is how do you step into that conversation with your ideal customer and communicate in such a way that your person is having light bulbs going off, when essentially, their subconscious mind is saying, "Wow. This person really understands me and get where I’m at." Joshua Millage: Right. Chris Badgett: "Oh my gosh. I never realized this could be the solution to my problem", or "This is the exact skill I really need. I didn’t realize that." Those kinds of internal self-thought is really what you want to get to. Joshua Millage: Right. I couldn’t agree more. I think one of the things that I want to share is to switch gears and get a little bit tactical here in our time today, and that is talk about some proven formulas that people can use to start to write their sales letters around. One of those is AIDA which stands for attention, interest, desire and action. It’s a very old formula put together. I’m not exactly sure by [Hugh 00:05:30], but I’m sure it was [inaudible 00:05:31] or one of the great ad geniuses of the 1930s and ’40s. It’s a really easy, proven formula for putting together a sales letter that takes someone for realizing that, that what you’re doing can help them to actually taking actions. What do you think, Chris, I just go through form? Chris Badgett: Yes. Let’s start with A. A is attention, so that really comes back to your headline, and I think a lot of people look at their headline as they don’t spend enough time thinking about it, or they spend way too much time deliberating on it and they don’t take action and actually create a headline. To make it really simple for you, your headline should really only do one thing, and that is to get someone to read the second line. I know that sounds crazy, but the idea here is that you want your prospect or your potential student to read the entire sales letter, the entire course description, what the course can do for them, how the course will help them in their lives or profession or whatever it may be, and that headline is just to get them to stop and start to read. It’s a … I can give a good example of that. Joshua Millage: Yes. Please do. Chris Badgett: In my experience, I created a free course, and I titled it ‘How to Build a WordPress Website in a Weekend’. That title there wasn’t just WordPress 101 or WordPress for Beginners or whatever. It grabs your attention in the sense that I’m making the promise that you can build a WordPress website in a weekend, and right now, I have almost 7,000 students in that free course. That, I think really ties into getting the attention in the headline. Joshua Millage: Yes. I’m going to use a really crude example that I heard Ryan Holiday, who wrote a book ‘Trust me, I’m Lying’. He’s a young man. He’s like 24 or 25. He wrote a very good book about modern PR and attention and how they make things go viral and that sort of thing. He was the director of marketing for American Apparel. I’m like 22. I mean, the kid is kind of a phenom. He said something, and again, I’m going to be a little [inaudible 00:07:38] here, but he said, "One thing that people forget about when doing things online is that pornography is one click away." His point is that I have … I do not support pornography in any way, shape or form. His point is things that are biologically addicting are one click away. Keep that in mind. Someone … anything, whether it’s clothes, food … anything that someone is addicted to, anything is at your fingertips. What are you going to do to make someone stop and take a brief second to read your headline? Like the headline should have one goal, it should carry the weight of stopping you, and your track is going [nuts 00:08:15] for me. I think people, what they do is they try and speak really broad, like "Eat better with my course." It’s like, "Who’s eating better? Speak to me." I want to read that and be like vegans … ‘Three Ways to Make Five Meals in Less Than …’ or ‘Three Formulas to Make Infinite Amount of Meals in 20 Minutes’ or something. I don’t know. I’m just wrapping here. The point is they should literally stop and go, "Wait a second. That headline, that whatever it is, that sales letter is speaking directly to me." I actually head a guy who’s a very smart copywriter named Dane Maxwell talked about the formula for a headline is really pretty simple. It’s desired result in an amount of time addressing the objections. What would be an example of this? Let’s think. Chris Badgett: Let’s do something on your vegan example and how to make vegan breakfast. Joshua Millage: Yes. If people think that vegan breakfast are difficult and hard, you could say something like, "Five Delicious Vegan Recipes Using Five Ingredients that all Take Less than 10 Minutes to Create". It’s like talking about the time frame or what people want which is delicious vegan meals. Like in less than … addressing the objections of time constraints, and really painting the picture of what the outcome is. It should just capture you really quick. That one is a little hard because I’m not a vegan. One headline that really struck me was … and there’s a bunch of different ways to do headlines. If people want to learn about some really good headlines, there’s a book called ‘Breakthrough Advertising’. One of them that I heard from way, way back was a music training program. This one doesn’t use that formula, but it says something along the lines of "They laughed at me when I sat down at the piano, but when I started to play, they were amazed". The idea that people … that really identifies with someone who doesn’t understand how to play piano, like, "Oh. I think people would laugh at me if I sat down, but then with that training course, when I started to play, I’m an expert and I’m going to amaze everyone". It’s like, "Wait a second. What does that say?" You read that and you’re like, "Wait a second. Hi", and you read the second line and the third line and fourth line. Again, we’re going off on tangents here with the headline, but really, the whole thing is to hit the parking break, stop, and read the second line. The second line or really the second part of the ad should be engaging the interest mechanism in that person, so causing them to be interested in what you have to say. It’s opening and closing loops. It’s saying, "Let me tell you a story", or "Let me tell you how you  can create all these vegan meals, but first, let me tell you a story about my experience being a vegan". You’re saying some things to come, so you don’t have to read to get there, but let me tell you a little brief story. It’s like it’s engaging them to be interested. Then, the third part is desire. It’s pushing on those desire mechanisms, making them want the outcome that your product, or in this case your course can give them. Then, the fourth aspect is action. You’re literally telling them what to do next. "Click the button", "Enroll now", "Register in my course" … entering your name and details and we’ll move … It’s very … This methodology is very direct response, but the thing is, you cannot assume that your prospect or your potential student knows what to do. You literally need to outline it for them. John Carlton who’s another great marketer and copywriter said … He curated in what people call the ‘Carltonian formula’ which is, "Here’s what I got. Here’s what it does for you. Here’s what to do next." That’s another copywriting and sales letter formula that works really well. These are very time-tested. You can go and just type ‘Carltonian formula’ or ‘John Carlton sales letter’. Find that. Dan Kennedy who’s a very prolific direct response copywriter has a book on sales letters. All these people essentially say the same thing though. Get their attention, tell them … Give them the interest mechanisms, show them why they would be interested, a list of desire and tell them to take action. I think these are just key things that people need to think about when they’re writing that piece of copy that goes with actually registering for their course. Chris Badgett: Absolutely. If I can tie it in and I bridge the gap between internet marketing, sales letters and online courses, course descriptions and things like that, many of us have a love/hate relationship with marketing. You don’t want to be seen as like a used car salesman, and for a lot of people on their entrepreneurial journey, they learn to embrace marketing and they eventually realize that it’s just a necessary part of doing business. Daniel Pink wrote a great book called ‘To Sell is Human’. I highly recommend it. Joshua Millage: Yes. Chris Badgett: Once you study sales letter, you’re going to Google that and you start looking around, you’re going to see a lot of like red headlines and yellow highlighter. I just want to encourage people to not be dissuaded by that … what may feel like scamming, but just look at that stuff and learn from it. At the end of the day, it’s about making a promise, putting your offer out there, getting people’s attention for your online course in a way that you really connect with people and get their attention. When we talk about things like headlines, we’re talking about the actual title of your course or a sub-headline and the description of your course to really get attention, or maybe you’re writing a blog post and you improve their pre-selling about this course you’re going to create. These are all opportunities to create at what we’re calling as ‘Headlines’ and then get into the actual content and elicit that interest and  call to action and desire and those things. Joshua Millage: Yes. I think people … Marketing in a lot of ways is a dark art. You can learn some very powerful things in marketing about persuasion and about changing human behavior. With that is like classic Spider-Man saying, It’s like, "With great power comes great responsibility", and it’s definitely true in marketing. I think if I were to end with this thought, is I think the most powerful marketing is simply the course instructor’s story. The reason I say that that’s the most powerful marketing tool is that for one, it’s truthful. If you can’t tell your story about how you became an expert, you shouldn’t be teaching the course. Any marketers who are listening, who abide by the whole like, "Let me go pre-sell something I don’t know," and then learn about it real quick and then teach, I just think that’s wrong, and I don’t think that you should be participating in what we’re trying to do here. What we’re trying to do with Lifter LMS, what we’re trying to do with the new vision of codeBOX and changing the online education is creating tools for people who are actually teachers, who actually care about their student’s learning. I think this is the fundamental difference between people who are looking at learning, management systems that are really focused on learning, and people who are looking at new course systems or membership. I don’t want to digress too much because we’ve already created a podcast all about this, but really tell your story. Tell why you’re an expert. Talk about that journey. You talk about is it … His last name is Campbell, right? ‘The Hero’s Journey’, Joseph Campbell I think? Chris Badgett: Yes. Yes. You got him. Joshua Millage: Yes. Talk about your journey about being the beginner and all the pain and struggle and triumph and victory and defeat or learning whatever it is that you’re going to teach. That is the most powerful marketing. That fits right in with attention, interest, desire and action because you can take your story and mold it into that. You know what? You don’t have to feel bad about it at all because you lived it. You experienced it. Maybe your story is you are an undergrad who was dissuaded by job opportunities, and you found yourself down and out, and so you started freelancing, and then you started a company, and then now you can actually speak to the fundamental business nuggets, and you want to train the world. I mean, that’s like my story. That’s not a lie. I lost it all. I was on my parents’ couch. I know option. My back was up against the wall. I started freelancing, and then boom. As the story rolls on, codeBOX happened. Lifter LMS happened. Joining forces with you happened. I can speak to these things about partnerships and about picking yourself up by your bootstraps, and I can speak from it from a very real and true place in my heart because I lived it. There’s no lie at all. I’m not embellishing anything. It’s been a hard journey, but now, I can take that journey, package it in a course, train people, and I believe that information will help change the way that people look at business. That is yet to come. It’s going to happen in the next six months. I’m going to create some courses. We’re all going to create courses. What a better way to show people to how to create, to marketing and sell courses online by simply just doing it ourselves. Chris Badgett: Absolutely. Just to echo your [cinema 00:17:43], Josh, telling your story helps your current students and future prospective students really connect with you on a personal level. Joshua Millage: Right. Chris Badgett: If you happen to be a part of the Lifter LMS plug-in that we created our VIP community, and you saw us launch the course or the plug-in, you notice how we did a full video about how it all started with breakfast, and I told my story about making my first course about how to make better omelets, and then we went on this whole journey to where this plug-in now became available to the world. If you’re looking for another example that you may have seen before, there you go. Joshua Millage: It works, man. I really hope that people find this valuable, it helps teachers look at their courses and their life experience in a different way, and be able to package it and make it a little bit more persuasive, hopefully get them more sells and really have more impact. I mean, that’s the key thing here, is we want to help people have more impact by using online education, using WordPress and our plug-in to make that happen. Any closing thoughts, Chris? Chris Badgett: I would just say one of the common mistakes that people make when they are writing headlines and copy is that they focus on the features and not necessarily the benefits. If you’re telling your personal story and you’re getting into what it will do for the student, the number of modules you have and all these things are important, but what’s really important is your message of like, "What journey are you going to take me on? What are you going to teach me? How is my life going to be different after I take this course?", not "How am I going to get there?" Joshua Millage: Absolutely. I think it’s a great way to cap off this episode. All right. Until next time. You can reach me at ‘Joshua@LMScast.com’, and Chris over here at ‘Chris@LMS.com’. Until next week. We’ll talk to you soon. The post How to write a Sales Letter for Online Course appeared first on LMScast.

Facebook and Twitter may be ubiquitous, but there are many other social media tools out there that can enhance teaching and learning. Here, three educators share their favorites. Source: campustechnology.com See on Scoop.it - InformationCommunication (ICT)

Looking for a Wordpress LMS Plugin Dos and Donts transcript? joshua millage: Hello everyone, we’re back with another episode of LMS Cast, I’m Joshua Millage and joined like I am every day with Christopher Badgett. We are broadcasting to you not live, but somewhat live, from Santa Cruz in Whitefish, Montana, right, Chris? chris badgett: Yeah. joshua millage: Cool. Well we love LMS Systems, we love WordPress, and today is actually a really good episode for me because I don’t know the answers to some of the questions I’m going to be posing for Chris, and really what we’re trying to figure out is the WordPress LMS plugin do’s and don’t’s, like what is it we should be focused on when we’re looking at LMS plugins, how many plugins should we be stringing together, is that a good idea, is that a bad idea. I’m not really that technical, as you know, Chris, and so for me it makes sense. I’m going to go get this plugin to this and that plugin to do that and it all seems fine and dandy to me. Why not? They’re plugins, string them together, see what happens. I’ve learned from your kind, generous teaching as well as Mark and Tom, that that’s not always a great idea. There’s some disadvantages to that, so give me the top level, high kind of bird’s eye view of how we should be looking at LMS plugins and how we should be considering buildign this bullet-proof foundation of an online school or online course system. chris badgett: Let me back up and first start with when you’re learning WordPress and you start building WordPress sites or you’re hiring development design marketing teams to do it for you, a more beginner person, if you’re doing it yourself, or a beginner agency, they may be very quick when you pose a question, to be like can we make the website do X, that be like, oh, let me search and see if there’s a plugin for that. Plugins on the WordPress repository, there are some that are extremely popular and almost ubiquitous, and there’s others that come out, they’re great ideas at the time, but the developer behind them stops supporting it, and you’ll see a lot of plugins at WordPress that haven’t been updated in over 2 years. Not all plugins are created equal. There’s a core group of plugins outside of learning management systems that I almost always recommend and always use. To give a couple examples of those, one of them is Akismet, which comes when you install WordPress to prevent spam, another one is WordPress SEO by Yost, and then those are really core plugins and anything else is really extra, and you don’t even need the SEO plugin if you don’t plan on investing time into developing your SEO, but to tell a story of Lifter LMS, the WordPress learning management system plugin that we’ve built here at [Cobox 00:02:55], we decided to make that a plugin and not a theme because it’s really all about functionality and we’ve built it in a way that it can work with any well coded WordPress theme, and we also … A lot of times people don’t realize this with certain themes or plugin, the plugin or theme developer has actually bundled all these other plugins inside of it to make it look as if it does more. It’s not that they’re doing  a bad thing, they’re taking shortcuts to getting functionality quickly into their plugin. We were very intentional about how we created Lifter LMS in that we didn’t bundle or sneak in some plugins for our functionality. We’re building everything from the ground up, and we’re very conscious about what additional things we’re going to integrate with. Two examples. One of them would be WooCommerce. We know WooCommerce is really popular. Lifter LMS has its own e-commerce system that’s really amazing and designed specifically for WordPress LMS, but we know a lot of people use WooCommerce and like it and want to integrate with it, so we did add to our plugin to allow that to happen. Same thing with BuddyPress, which is a social networking plugin for WordPress, but really at the end of the day when you’re building a WordPress management system, you don’t want to get to a point where you have 10 or 20 or 30 or even 50 plugins going, because the opportunity for conflict and the complexity involved in opening up just the door to plugins not getting updated or whatever, it’s just not a road worth going down, and at the end of the day, if you need like 40 different plugins, you might actually be putting too much functionality in your site because at the end of the day it’s about learning, and Lifter LMS has the core foundational pieces you need, and of course if you want to integrate something unique to your situation, go for it. Use gravity forms to do a survey or use other plugins, but make sure they’re well respected. joshua millage: I just want to speak out to anyone who’s like me out there, it’s like sometimes I get plugin mania, like just because I can install a plugin I want to. It’s not that it’s a good idea, but I’m like ohh, that sounds fun, boom, I plug that in, plug that in, plug that in, I’m like 40 plugins in deep and all of a sudden something crashes, I’ve got the white screen of death, I can’t even log in, and then I’m paying somebody to help me go figure out a PHP area in some random line. It’s just because I got plugin crazy, you know? If anyone resonates with that story, my suggestion is have a separate WordPress install to have your plugin craziness on, but don’t do that to your main site, and so what I’ve learned is that you want to have the minimum viable plugin setup. Having more is not better at all. You’re adding, like you said Chris, complexity to the site, and you want it to run as lean and efficiently as possible, and sometimes there is reasons to install more, different plugins but for the most part you want to look for a system that takes care of all of it. I would echo your statement about Yost, I think Yost is phenomenal, as well as, is it Akismet? chris badgett: Yeah, Akismet. I’m not even sure how to say it and I’ve been using it for a decade it feels like. joshua millage: Me too, and that one does save you a lot of pain and stress with the stand box and what not. Those two are pretty bullet proof. I love what those guys are doing at Automatic and then the Yost group, but I would say when it comes to LMS systems, just be conscious of what you want to do, whether you’re on WP courseware with Sensei, the Academy, well I guess that’s a theme, but still, you want to make sure that you’re not bogging down your server setup with a bunch of different plugins because some of these systems have e-commerce, some of them don’t. Some of them have just course structuring no quiz, so you’ve got to maybe figure out how you’re going to integrate that. You want to be conscious of what you need and then go look for a system that meets that. Obviously you’re not going to … Full disclosure, we developed Lifter LMS, so we’re going to pretty much pitch you on that one all the time. I’m kind of sorry that I’m not sorry about that, but we’re passionate about it. That’s why we stepped out into this space. We wanted to do things differently. We saw a gap in the market and we wanted to create an end to end system. We think we’re approaching it in a very new and different way with getting this incredibly amazing test group of people and listening to their feedback and iterating and moving in directions that they think we should move in. chris badgett: Absolutely. Just to give a really specific WordPress LMS plugin example, we’ve gotten a lot of feedback from people who have been using the WP LMS theme, which I’ve used before and helped people set up. When you install that, that WordPress learning management system, you have to, at the moment of installation, install something like 12 other plugins. Now the end result is it makes a nice learning management system but people start getting confused, and there’s just a lot of like moving parts there that we’ve heard a lot of people say when we reached out to the WordPress LMS community that they want an experience not like that. That was really the community help shaped our vision for a more minimalist approach. Something that’s simple, that does the core functionality, that we’re going to continue to evolve over time, but isn’t locked into all these other dependencies to all these other plugins. joshua millage: Right. Right. I love it. Well this is a great foundation episode for anyone who’s just starting out with their WordPress LMS system and looking at WordPress LMS plugins, or if they already have one, maybe looking to the future and how to refine and make things much more efficient and lean. Good work, Chris, thanks, I feel really educated now, and that was … I needed that. Any closing thoughts for us today? chris badgett: Yeah, I would just take the counterpoint real quick and say plugins aren’t bad. If you find a plugin and it works well with Lifter LMS or with your learning management system theme and you’re like wow, this is really awesome, it works, and not getting any conflict, let us know about it. We want to hear from you. Leave a comment, and let us know what you find out, and in some cases, I mean we’re a web development shop so we actually build our own plugins sometimes just for specific projects, but maybe you see something that a plugin is doing that you want included in Lifter LMS or you just want to share that hey, what this plugin does is important to the needs of the learning management system community, I just wanted to let you guys know about it. That’s my closing thought. They’re not all bad, but I would encourage minimalism whenever you can. joshua millage: Absolutely. That’s a great point, Chris. All right guys, until next week, we will see you soon. The post WordPress LMS Plugin Dos and Donts appeared first on LMScast.

In April 16th the next Basque GAFE meeting will be hosted in Donostia (Basque Country, Spain). I'll be presenting Screencasting & P2P review (T2). So excited!For more information: https://sites.google.com/site/educacioneuskadigapps/iv-encuentro-topaketa

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Prefer a Transcript on "How to Create Courses for Various Learning Styles" Joshua: Hello everyone! We’re back with another episode of LMS Cast. I am Joshua Millage, and I’m joined here today with Christopher Badgett. Today is going to be a little bit different because we’re talking about Learning Styles and why they’re important to consider when you’re building an online course. Everyone learns differently. Some people are visual. Some people are kinesthetic. Some people are auditory. Some people are some combination of a little bit of all of it, and so you need to keep this in mind if you want to have a truly impactful course. If it’s just all text, you might be missing out on someone who learns visually. Chris, with that, let me throw the ball in your court. What do you think about this? How do you take these all things into consideration? Chris: First, let’s talk about those styles. You’ve mentioned about visual versus auditory and tactical and tactile or whatever. Then we can end with, later in this episode, about people who take a big picture top-down approach and others who take a bottom-up step-by-step roots approach. If we get into visual versus auditory and kinesthetic, the way you can do that in an online format is visually, obviously, you could use video in your content. You can have that same lesson, also, be an audio and it could be a recording of the same thing, which is great for the person. Let say they’re a kinesthetic learner and like to be moving, they could plug that audio into their ear buds and go for a run. Some people learn better while they’re moving. Joshua: I totally do. Chris: Yeah. Joshua: Yeah. It’s a podcast. That’s why I have a podcast. When I’m running, I soak up that information. A little caveat story, but my mom was a teacher. She had a gift with kids that had learning disabilities and things, and people that had ADD, she would just recognize that excess energy, so she would have the workaround. I actually definitely fit into that category. In college, I would go to the gym and read my textbook when I was on the treadmill and I would retain so much more information than if I was sitting, kind of like, pent up. It doesn’t work for me. Yeah, I agree. I think it’s good to have that ability. Give your course that ability for that segment of student that learns that way. Chris: Absolutely! Some people are more cerebral. If your main course content is a video, you make an audio version and now you have an audio format of it without the distraction of the video. Then, some people just like to read. You can have a transcript or a right out of what the video is all about or have a download version where someone can download it and then not be online to consume that content. Yeah, there are just so many different ways you can go. As a general rule, whenever possible, I would just encourage people building a WordPress Learning Management System to deliver your lessons in multimedia format like that. Joshua: One of the things that I’ve learned and this is just a simple way of doing it, is if you can record a video, have that recording available in audio, and then also give them a transcript so that they can read it. That’s just a very simple way of putting all of those pieces of the puzzle together immediately. Now, one of the things too is you can find, this is like another little trick or hack. I have a group of writers that I can tap. I give them a transcript and then they actually make it into a real language because I don’t write how I speak to you. I’m using slang and things, but they’ll actually take it, flush it out, and make it into a lesson. You can find these people on oDesk or Elance and type in "Editor," or you find some amazing grad students who just need some extra cash. They’re really good at writing, a little pro-tip there. Look for people that are English majors. Chris: Yeah. Joshua: They’re perfect. It helps them out and they enjoy helping you because they’re actually doing something that helps the business grow or helps a course spread, but it’s not that difficult. It just takes a little bit of time finessing the systems. I record the video, then I have my editor give me the MP3, I put that on SoundCloud or someplace to host it, put the video into YouTube and host it there. I go to Rev and get a transcript, then I take the transcript and put it out to the oDesk person to make it into something that’s readable. Put it all together in the backend of your Lifter LMS plug-in, it’s what we would recommend, of course. There you go. You take one form of content and you put it in all these different forms, and that works really, really well. Of course, the more time you spend considering those learning styles, the better too. Chris: Yeah. Let’s also touch on a big picture versus a bottom-up approach. This is actually true for the teacher and the student. For the student, I would encourage you when you think about designing your online course, you can use prerequisites and lock down the progress through your material. You can even put in quizzes in the way of that progress and that sort of thing. That’s like the traditional ways of doing things, but I think there’s a large segment of the population who doesn’t learn that way. They actually like to jump around or maybe even start with the last lesson and then they’ll go to the middle and then the back and then they’ll fill in the gaps. Their learning experience, that’s just how they like to learn. I think it’s important to think before you lock it down in a more waterfall step-by-step approach. If somebody is more in that step-by-step preference, they can just go through it the way as well, so you give people the option. Joshua: Yeah. I think it’s true. It comes back to course design too, and is it a linear style or is it more of bits and pieces and chunks and things. It’s all strategy. In future episodes, it would be cool for us to just dial in different strategies and explain. The course design, I think, is a really interesting topic area that … as we’re recording this right now, I’m like, "Yes, that would be interesting," but, of course, we want to hear what people want to learn too. You can always reach out to us at joshua@lmscast.com or chris@lmscast.com. We want to hear from you, but I think this is a really good episode to get people to consider these learning styles and not to just go into … there’s no reason to be one-dimensional. Chris: Absolutely! It’s true for the teacher too when they’re creating a course. We actually designed our Lifter LMS software around this concept where, if you’re a teacher … some people might want to … let’s say, this is their first time creating a course and it’s all just in their head. You can start with Lesson 1 and not even know where you’re going, "I’m just going to do Lesson 1, then I’m ready to Listen 2, and by the time I get the end, I’ll figure it out." Some people think that way. Other people, it’s all done in their head. They create the course first, then they create the lessons and the sections, they write all the titles and there, and then they go back and they add the content. The software can adapt to different ways. That’s more of a course creation style, but it perfectly mirrors their learning styles. The same is true, maybe a lot of people are intimidated by video, so they prefer to do an audio. So, you do your audio first and if you do want bulk out your multimedia format, you can then hire somebody to get on video and teach your material and put that in your course. It doesn’t always have to be you, and like we talked about in the before is you can do the same thing with transcripts and getting the written format. You can start with any one of those and where you’re strong and then figure out how to do the rest either yourself or outsource it. Joshua: I completely agree. That’s a huge negative wisdom that people can take and imply right now in whatever system they’re using, so I hope that people enjoy that and use that and start considering the different ways people learn. It’s really out of respect for their students. Cool, so any final thoughts for the crew? Chris: Yeah. I would just close it out and say we’re talking about learning styles and engagement with different styles is really important to us at our core. If you need a little motivation to do the extra work to factor all these learning styles, it’s very true that having a multimedia format increases the perceived value of your material. You can often charge more money at that point. If you need a little motivation to do that work considering raising the price of the course because of that value you’re adding is a great little side-effect of accommodating learning styles. Joshua: Awesome idea man! You’re always giving these last-minute takeaways. That’s so true. You can raise the price there and the value because you’re giving more value, so awesome. All right, well, that is it for today and we will see everyone next week. The post How to Create Courses for Various Learning Styles appeared first on LMScast.

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Prefer to read "Don’t Make these Top 4 Mistakes When Creating a WordPress LMS site" Joshua: Hello, everyone.  We are back today with another episode of LMSCast.  I’m Joshua Millage, and I’m joined with Christopher Badgett.  Today, it’s going to be a really fun episode because it’s going to help you avoid some landmines when you’re creating your WordPress LMS course.  Chris, we’ve got four topics, four things you should avoid doing when you’re creating your WordPress LMS course.  Kick it off, man.  What’s the first one? Christopher: All right.  Awesome.  One mistake that we see happening in the industry is, in general, I would just call it feature creep.  What that means for a WordPress LMS course is that you’re just … You have a lot … The thing is education entrepreneurs, they’re creative.  They’re smart.  They’re intelligent.  They want to like do all these different things with their courses.  The way we built the Lifter LMS plugin is we’re making it, so they can do a lot of the core things that you need to do when you want to touch online and there’s various functionality there that you can turn. Almost always with a WordPress-powered Learning Management System, people want to extend and go further which is great and totally possible.  That’s one of the beautiful things about the WordPress framework as a development base for additional functionality, additional plugins like we talked about in the previous episode.  What ends up happening a lot of times is if someone is like, "Wouldn’t it be nice if we could also do X, Y, and Z?  It’s not an option in the plugin." That kind of thing, I’ve seen it delay a lot of people for launching, and getting to revenue, and getting to impacting lives, and getting their business launched or jus their course platform launched as quickly as they really could.  They get bogged down in feature creep. Joshua: Yeah.  I think it’s a great point, man.  It means like people are coming for the content that’s in your one course.  Maybe in time, they’re coming for multiple courses, but it’s like focus on the absolute essentials out of the gate and make sure you’re getting those right.  I had a call today with someone that … He’s a good friend of both of ours, Charles Gaudet.  Charles is just a brilliant marketer, teacher in his own right, and he said something that really struck me. He said, "If these marketers could just understand that if their course …" He’s talking about marketers, so you got to apply this to your own life, but he’s like, "If the marketers can understand if their course actually helped people like if the content of the course actually helped people," he’s like, "They would have more business, more leads, and more profit than they would know what to do with because the course itself changed that person." Christopher: It’s like the old outage, "Form follows function."  We would modify that slightly to say that additional functionality follows the course content.  That’s the … Yeah. Joshua: Exactly, but the lie that we tell ourselves is, "Oh, I don’t have that X, Y, or Z," things that we talked about.  One of the things I think is great is we have a system that gives you Swiss Army knife of all the essential tools that you need to build your course with Lifter LMS.  At the same time, even if you’re using LearnDash, WP Courseware, or ZP Courses for the … More of the marketers or even if you’re trying to put this in a membership, it applies to everybody. It’s like create killer content right out of the gate and don’t get so focused on all the whiz-bangs that go around it.  That stuff is nice as time goes on.  I would just say engage, engage, engage, and engage some more, and he who engages the most will win.  That’s the quotable, I think, for today. Christopher: Absolutely.  Just to piggyback on that, I’d come into the mistake number two that we see happening.  This is especially for someone who’s just starting their first online course platform is too many courses, and that you can always rollout your WordPress LMS platform with just one course, and now you’re on the market if you’re selling your courses and you’re up and running.  If you’re like, "Oh, wait.  I need to get a course ready for this.  I need to get a course ready for this." If you’re starting from scratch, that can like really delay and also demotivates you because you don’t feel like you’re getting any closer to launching and actually connecting with students and impacting lives.  Especially for the complete beginner.  If you don’t already have all these course content created, just focus on just one course. Joshua: Yeah.  I think that’s huge.  I think the best online schools, especially the independent ones, they have courses that fall logical sequence that build on each other which I think is really a unique opportunity.  Like you go to college, you have all of these different degrees, right?  You have all of these different pathways, these different journeys you could take, and things build on each other.  Prerequisites build on each other.  I think it’s important to do that instead of just having a course on everything. Christopher: Yeah. Joshua: It’s like someone … You got to build that power line and that power band.  It makes sense, and you can have a much greater impact I think from a learning standpoint as well as it’s just so much easier to market and sell something that plays into the next thing, in the next … 101 to 201, et cetera.  That’s a really good tip.  What else, Chris? Christopher: The mistake number three that we see a lot is actually piggybacking on both those things, and it’s creating other offers that you want to launch with in addition to your courses.  It’s just … Overall, it’s a tendency to overcomplicate things.  What I mean by that is if you’re going to sell a course and then you’re like, "Oh, I should … I need to make or also sell this complementary product I have with it that’s not ready or already for sale on my website.  I need to get that ready too."  Now, you’re juggling a different kind of ecommerce with your LMS. It just interjected a lot of complexity in the mix.  Of course, it’s important to have courses.  Then if your business model supports it, they have other things like physical products, eBooks, coaching opportunities, one-on-one or group.  All these other things can be added in, but if you’re just trying to launch, just launch with the course first before you start trying to build all these pieces and like launch it all at the same time.  Building a WordPress Learning Management System is more of a process than like there’s one event that only happens once. Joshua: I think it’s a … It’s the marathon mindset. Christopher: Yeah. Joshua: I don’t think we have ever said or I know we will never say that this is a get-rich-quick thing. Christopher: Yeah. Joshua: It’s not.  It’s just … It’s not going to be that.  If anyone is listening who thinks that building an online course is like the lottery ticket, I would suggest shutting off our podcast and not listening to it because that’s not at all what we teach, and that’s not how it works.  It’s an iterative process.  It’s really focusing on value from course to course, to course and making things roll out in a way that makes sense.  I love that. Christopher: Absolute … Joshua: Number four? Christopher: Number four and the final mistake that we see a trend that we’d like to bring to your attention is just not outsourcing when you need to.  What happens is, especially with educational entrepreneurs, is often times, there’s a lot of like knowledge in like the course material, but then they get bogged down in the tech or they get bogged down in graphic or other custom development. If you’re running into issues with your course, instead of just like just trying to teach yourself how to program or trying to teach yourself how to do graphic design on Pixlr or something like that, sometimes it’s just so much more worth it and so much more profitable in the long run and get better results by going to someone who’s specializes in that thing.  To give a few examples of what that could be, courses tend to have like a featured image that represents the course. Designing that image is like really important to grabbing attention like we talked about in our episode about creating a sales letter and selling your course.  If you’re not a graphic designer, you can spend $5 on a website like Fiber and see what someone comes up with as an idea to represent your course. Joshua: Yeah. Christopher: The same is true for development.  If you run into some issue with the theme you changed and you want to change some sizes and colors that aren’t really part of the Lifter LMS plugin or whatever you’re using or your WordPress theme and you can’t figure it out, you probably need a developer to help you with it and something that may take them like, "Oh," just like 60 seconds.  You might waste two hours like trying to figure that out on your own or more, so things like that, development, design. We did the episode about multimedia and learning styles.  If you need help with like creating the video part of your online course material, maybe grab some help, throwing out on Craigslist and see what you can get for a local video person to come help you out or audio person and that kind of thing.  The same for the written word.  You can get back up on the writing part if you’re doing downloadable PDFs and so on. Joshua: Let me give a real good example.  This podcast as well as the other podcasts I run in FusionCast, it’s a lot of work, man.  Six episodes a week, I can’t handle it.  I recently brought on a phenomenal assistant named Kara.  She’s going to help with the syndication process of this.  I got a guy down in Arizona who’s going to help me with actually … We give him the transcript.  He’s going to help us with creating the actual post.  We’re bringing people into the fold as time goes on.  Does it cost money?  Yes, it cost money, but it’s investing in the business. It’s also the innovation and suggestions that come from people like our writers and producers like Kara is huge because they’re going to see things that we don’t see, and that’s another added benefit of outsourcing.  I don’t think a lot of people consider or even put on their radar.  I know that like one of the things that people say about CodeBOX which is the company where you and I are partners is that we innovate with people. They’ll come to us for a project, but in the progression of that project, we come up with ideas for them, different ways of structuring their LMS system if that’s what they’re coming to building, or traditionally where we’ve come from is Infusionsoft, coming up with new marketing campaigns and things where … It’s another value add.  We don’t need a charge for that, but was just part of our culture.  I think that’s the thing. If you build a culture of that in your eLearning system where you’re bringing on contractors and you’re encouraging them to give you ideas, for one, they’re going to love working with you because they have ideas, but no one ever gives them the platform to share those.  That’s really fulfilling because a lot of times, people look at these contractors, their outsourcers, as hired guns.  "I’m going to pay you money.  You give me a product."  Yeah, that’s like very … That’s not very human like allow them to suggest things and build that platform.  It’s only going to help you. I think it’s really a hidden benefit of spreading the work out.  The biggest thing is it gives you more time and energy to be creative and do what you do best too.  Let’s not forget the primary reason here either, but there’s a lot of secondary really good reasons to get comfortable with that.  One book I want to suggest is by Chris Ducker, "Virtual Freedom."  If you’ve been in the internet marketing world, I’m sure you’ve heard this book mentioned. It is a truly phenomenal book.  I don’t say that very often because I read about a book a week, and I’d say half the books I read every year, I just can’t suggest, but his book is really good.  It has a lot of ways of looking at outsourcing, so check that out when you get a chance. Christopher: Awesome.  I would just close it out with one more book recommendation in line of what we’re talking about here with outsourcing, and building systems, and keeping as education entrepreneur whether you’re marketer, teacher, an artist, or some kind of subject matter expert is to focus on your … Stuff that you can be in your zone of genius, and that book is called "Work the System" by Sam Carpenter.  It had a huge impact on my life, so there’s another one. Joshua: Yeah.  I actually think that if you’re going to make a decision whether to read a book about systemization whether it’s getting things done … I can’t really put "The 4-Hour Work Week" in there, but that’s a pretty good book too, but "Work the System" lays it out.  It’s very straightforward on how to do this and how to build processes.  I think it’s a really, really, really good book to … It’s like foundational learning, so I would suggest checking that out too. With that, we’re going to close up today’s episode.  We’ve got another one right around the corner for you, so stay tuned.  If you haven’t already, go to LMSCast.com and hit the "Subscribe" button, and we will email you every time we have a new episode available.  Thank you so much, and have a great day. The post Don’t Make these Top 4 Mistakes When Creating a WordPress LMS site appeared first on LMScast.

Teaching coding in schools is a growing effervescent trend. The late Steve Jobs of Apple stated, "Everybody in the country should learn how to program a computer... because it teaches you how to think." But not only Mr Jobs had something to say; the supporters of this phenomenon are increasing endlessly. The BBC, among others, has launched a campaign in favour of learning coding (http://goo.gl/AHvVpV @Wired). In the same way, many governments have made up their minds to follow the lead; for instance, in Spain’s capital city, Madrid, the Education Department (@educamadrid) decided to include one hour a week to teach it as a mandatory subject last year, having achieved the initiative a great impact (http://goo.gl/Jp3qg6 @elpais_espana). In the USA, political parties joined to support the Hour of Code some months ago http://goo.gl/THaKfi @theverge). Even the world of fashion has been spreading the word actively with the help of some top models, like Karlie Kloss (@karliekloss), encouraging girls to learn coding (#‎KodeWithKarlie‬). And recently, the giant Microsoft has partnered with the CoderDojo Foundation.Read the whole article in Edtechreview.in

Comic Strip - Digital Citizenship Scenarios. Please create a comic strip on some aspect of Digital Citizenship utilizing Pixton! Keep in mind all the different scenarios you could create: social media safety, cyberbullying, gossip, posting "too much" information, and/or plagiarism!! Please embed your Comic Strip Scenerio on YOUR blog by Friday, February 6, 2015 by 5:00 pm. Student Example:

When designing an online course, one element to consider is the inclusion of quizzes or tests. You may choose to include them for a grade, or as an option to aid self-study. You may not need to include them at all. But you do have to make a decision about them. A test can be used as a lesson summary, a gateway to the next lesson, or an assessment of student progress. In order to function in your course design, including quizzes and tests should: Be a positive, anxiety-free experience for students Reinforce learning for each assignment Be necessary to your course architecture Support your learning philosophies Keeping the quiz short helps reduce test anxiety for students. One solution is to have a large test battery, but only show a few questions at a time. Questions should be challenging, but not unnecessarily difficult. Consider calling the assessment a "challenge" instead of a quiz or test. You can also gamify the quiz and make it fun. An optional quiz at the end of an assignment can aid in quick assimilation and learning retention by reinforcing what has been studied. Thinking about it in a different context helps to internalize the subject matter. Of course, for professional accreditations such as medical, technical and legal professions, testing is a requirement for certification. In some other applications, however, quizzes and tests may not be necessary at all. The point is to help the student progress through the lessons and achieve the skills and knowledge they expected as well as be prepared to purchase the next level of coursework. Assessment results can also help designers improve future versions of course offerings. If students are having trouble with the quizzes, don’t assume the students are the problem. Be willing to reevaluate the course design and measure success by how well students do on the next set of tests. Getting direct feedback from students upon course completion is also an excellent way to improve future course offerings. In designing online courses with a system like Lifter LMS there are far more options available than ever before. For continuing improvement, always be thinking in terms of, "What if I could…" and then find a way to do that. Here is the transcript for the "How to Design Effective Quizzes and Assignments" episode: Joshua: Hello everyone! We are back today with another episode of LMS Cast. My name is Joshua Millage and I am joined with Christopher Badgett. Today is going to be exciting because we’re going to be talking about something that is highly requested in our Lifter LMS plug-in. We’re not really going to talk about the plug-in specifically more of the philosophical ideas behind quizzes and tests. How we should think about quizzes and tests when we’re designing an online course. Chris, the mike is on you man. You have a lot of great ideas on how we should look about this particular area of an online course and the importance of placing it as, I guess you would say, gate to other pieces of the course or to actually gauge the acumen of your student. Chris: Absolutely! I think if you’re building a word press learning management system, the first question when it comes to quizzes and assignments is, "Do you even need that?" If you’re, there’s a lot of instances where you don’t really need quizzes. If your lessons just stand on their own, there’s lots of situations where you don’t need it. If you do need it, the real function of a quiz, and we have to help our students get over the psychological baggage that comes from memory of not liking quizzes or not liking tests. I think it’s really important as an education entrepreneur to approach quizzes without bringing any baggage of what it used to be like when you’re in school as a kid, anything like that. Joshua: That’s such a good point because I didn’t even want to do this but I can’t [inaudible 00:01:41]. Chris: Yes. Joshua: I was like, "I don’t want to talk about quizzes and tests, but I think it’s different with online education because we can gather so much more data. It’s also it’s not always about just memorization. I think that’s something that’s different about online courses, at least the ones I have taken. Sometimes, especially if it’s a technical program I’m allowed it’s something I’m doing as the course is telling me what to do, which is really fun. I think the quiz in that scenario should be totally different than … you say quiz I automatically think SAT. It bums me up. Chris: Yes, that’s the thing! As the education entrepreneurs, we need to get over that and we need to help in our approach with it with our customers or our students to not feel that way. You know what? I think the big philosophy there is that quizzes should be there to reinforce learning. That is the number one thing of why they are buttoned. Joshua: I think that’s the quotable is it should reinforce. How do you do that? You’ve run a lot of online courses and on a lot of different platforms from Udemy to doing your own. You’ve had a course on the academy theme. Prior to Lifter LMS you’ve been all over the place. What have you seen is a good way to use quizzes to engage your students? Chris: That’s really an "it depends" question. I think it’s one thing. It’s making that reinforced learning, and then it’s another thing which is making it fun. Let’s start with just making it fun. With Lifter LMS and other platforms, sometimes you can get a badge or you hear that word "gamification". If you pass this quiz you get a badge. If someone has a challenge it’s fun. They want to see their profile page fill up with badges. Joshua: Yes. Chris: A quiz is just a part of that journey. That’s one way we can make it fun. The other way to make it fun is to get away from that negative mindset where quizzes sometimes if they are designed poorly in a multiple-choice situation, it’s like they’re trying to trick you. You can’t really tell what’s different between A and B. Don’t be like that! Do it in a way that really reinforces learning. Joshua: Yes. Chris: To talk about that a little bit, with the LMS plug-in we’re going to be putting a lot of focus on the quiz architecture. Right now we’re launching with the basic functionality of multiple-choice and assignments where a student can upload something and then the teacher gets it. It’s up to the teacher to manually approve it, that kind of thing. That’s the foundation. From there, there are so many different areas we can go. Another way that we’re making it fun and less intimidating is that we’re going to have the option to not list every single question on the page so that you have this long list. They can focus on one thing at a time. Joshua: It’s amazing! Chris: Then move on to the next one. That’s cool. The other thing is it’s really it depends, because maybe you really do need quizzes. If you’re in a medical certification or a legal profession, it’s important. Maybe you have a governing body that requires certain types of questions and also a passing percentage before you’re allowed to receive the certificate that then allows you to continue on your profession or have some credentials to get a job or that kind of thing. If you’re just using quizzes to reinforce learning, you can make them fun and also make them optional. Make it so that the student can even skip it if they don’t want it or they could take it and fail and still go on to the next one. That quiz was an opportunity to at least get people thinking about the ideas they’re trying to learn a second time. Joshua: Yes. One of the things that I think is cool is maybe a little bit of a heck. I like the word "heck". It’s taking the quiz architecture in LMS and actually using it as a feedback system so that you can continually improve your course. I think a lot of people don’t think of a quiz like utilizing a quiz that way, but there’s ways to ask questions to see whether or not people are actually learning with that piece of content that you put out there. I look at my father who is he is retiring this year, but he’s taught marketing principles and real estate and all sorts of different business classes for over 30 years. I think it’s 36 years. That is insane to me! Chris: Yes. Joshua: One of the things that he said is that the difference between good and bad teachers in his mind is that a good teacher never thinks that they are the expert. They are an expert but they don’t have that arrogance complex. What they’re doing with quizzes is they’re looking at, "A lot of students didn’t do so well here. I need to take that as feedback of what did I do in my teaching to help them see and connect the dots here?" I think it is. Chris: That’s a really great point. Joshua: Yes, it’s humble. You have to be humble about it. I think this is something that has to happen in the eLearning space online. It has to because there is so much noise. People put content up. I’m guilty of it. I put a lot of podcasts, I were almost 30 episodes in my other podcast in Fusion Cast. Even though that’s not a quiz, the concept is the same. It’s like going back. What was share well? What did I get a lot of comments on? Allowing that to inform my next step it takes a lot of energy, but I think it’s important. When I look at quizzes and tests I think like, "Let’s ask questions that are challenging. Let’s reinforce learning like you said, but let’s also decompress what the outcome is of that quiz or that test. Utilize that to follow up and engage the student to make sure that they’re learning. If they fail with our plug-in, but you don’t have to do this in the plug-in, you could see who failed." Take the time to email that person! Chris: Yes. Joshua: "I saw that you failed and I just want to reach out. Is there anything that I didn’t explain well?" You might actually learn that you’re completely missing something in your content. You actually may get go recreate that video or audio or add a paragraph if it’s text. I think it’s really important to look at it that way too. Cool! Chris: That’s great. That’s such a good point right there in the sense that we have had other episodes about the difference between a passive membership site that’s all about they’re on up okay, well. It’s more of the marketer mindset of, "I just need to get sales. I want to get conversions, get people in my members’ area. Then, boom! There’s my content. Joshua: Yes. Chris: We’re taking this whole other approach where yes, that is important. We’re also, once people get in here, we want to use quiz functionality to reinforce their learning and helping people get through the process of learning and achieving that skill or that desired outcome that they, "What’s their motivation for buying the course in the beginning?" Joshua: Yes, absolutely! Thanks, Chris. I’m not as nervous as I was talking about quizzes and tests. I’m a little bit more chilled out now. I think this is some shortened to the point, but there’s a lot of value here if people chew on it and think about their quizzes and tests as in. I want to bring in an idea too to close this out from a guy interviewed in Fusion Cast. His name is Jermaine Griggs. In the Fusion soft world he is someone who he is the Michael Jordan. He writes. He was telling me that he has this question that he writes down sometimes just to reinforce. "What if I could? What if I could? What if I could?" It’s this continuing improvement idea. I think with quizzes and tests it’s like, what if I could make this content more applicable in someone’s day-to-day life? What if I could? He starts to ask these questions. He gets these really innovative ideas by asking, "What if I could?" He doesn’t pressurize himself. I think when we’re creating quizzes and tests with a system like Lifter LMS that has the ability to expand and connect to other things, what if I could send an email after they answered a question correctly or wrong? What if I could start to get really creative? I think that’s what is going to breed such insane innovation in this online earning space. Actually, hopefully changes the way that people learn, makes it more. For me, I think one of the metrics I look at is knowledge retention and the speed to get the knowledge in your head to the knowledge in my head. What if I could make that happen? What would that look like? What would the system look like? What would it have to do? That’s one of them that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. Yes, I wanted to end with that. Do you have any final thoughts for people? Chris: Yes, I’m going to piggyback on what you said. That would be, "What if I could make quizzes and tests more appealing, more fun?" There’s a really simple thing you can do. Don’t call it a "test" or a "quiz"! Call it a "challenge". Joshua: Yes. Chris: Come up with your own name for it. Don’t call your lessons "lessons". Call them something else. Bring the fun factor up. Joshua: Yes, words are powerful. It’s really important that we use a vernacular that connects with people and is a little bit more energetic than the stodgy lessons and courses and quizzes and things. Awesome! All right man. We’ll close out on that as a good nugget of wisdom until Thursday. We’ll see you then! Awesome! That was good. Chris: Hang up and start over. The post How to Design Effective Quizes and Assignments appeared first on LMScast.

Content curation is the process of collecting, organizing and displaying information relevant to a particular topic. Teacher content curation can be used by students and students can be asked to sh… Source: coachpanther.wordpress.com See on Scoop.it - InformationCommunication (ICT)

A real challenge in online course design is achieving balance between an attractive theme and the learning core. People often get caught up in all of the exciting visual elements available to them with WordPress themes, but too many design elements, or a lack of visual continuity, can distract users from course content and make your course modules hard to use. Because of this potential for user distraction and confusion, a minimalist approach is generally the best way to design your online course offerings. Future episodes of LMScast will cover design subjects like flip classrooms and blended learning for WordPress based LMS in depth. Right now let’s start with the basics of choosing the best WordPress theme to support and enhance your online learning environment. The reason minimalism works well for elearning is because the focus of your course is the course content. Content includes audio, video, images and text. Content is what people really want to buy from you, so design should be clean and professional with the focus on learning. Creating simple design that works sounds easy, but it’s actually more challenging to make fewer design elements deliver more impact while making your content both attractive and accessible. You also want to make sure your design promotes your branding, makes navigation intuitive, and creates a cohesive look to your course offerings. Some of the ways this can be accomplished include: Choosing fonts and typography that are complimentary and easy to read Using a simple yet visually attractive color scheme Designing for multiple viewing platforms, including mobile devices Keeping your design visually engaging without being distracting The visual design of your online courses is crucial to how your customers and users will perceive the quality of your elearning products. Your users need to experience easy access to content in an online environment that keeps them engaged and helps them learn. Lifter LMS will offer you exceptional choices in minimalistic, focused theme options to make users want to interact with your courses. Prefer a transcript on Wordpress Based LMS Theme Design Ideas Joshua: Hello, everyone. We’re back with another episode of LMSCast. I am Joshua Millage and I’m joined today with my good friend Christopher Badgette. Today, we’re talking about something really, really, really important and it’s all about design. We’re going to give you some WordPress based LMS theme design ideas and I want to start it off because I think a lot of us think we have to add a lot of elements to our design to make it really, really important and flashy, and to get people interested. That’s just not the case. Actually, as Chris, you’re going to recommend. You suggest doing completely the opposite being a minimalist. What do you mean by that? How do you be a minimalist with your course, the visual design of your course? Christopher: Well, for a WordPress based LMS, we talk about design a lot. We’re going to do more episodes in the future about instructional design and this designing learning, and these things like flip classrooms, and all these other ways of looking at learning, and blended learning online. That’s not what we’re talking about today. What we’re talking about, which is also a rabbit hole we’ve seen people go down not just in LMS, but in the WordPress base in general is like, "Oh, my God. Which theme am I going to use for my WordPress website?" People spent a lot of time looking and shopping around for WordPress themes. In this episode, we’re going to talk specifically about a WordPress LMS theme and what you want to look for if you’re into minimalism. Let me start off by saying, the reason minimalism is really important in eLearning is because when you get somebody into your site either before they buy the course or sign-up and subscribe, or while they’re inside the course itself, minimalism is great because you’re not distracting people with bright colors and fancy images around the content. You want the focus to be on your actual course content which may include video, audio, and text. That’s why minimalism is so powerful just to keep the focus on the learning and not on the design. Joshua: Right. I think it’s huge. I think there’s a couple plugins that have recently been released that do a really good job of keeping the minimalist focus. My hat’s off to actually to a competitor of ours which is Derek Halpern in Zippy Courses because that theme that comes with that plugin is really, really beautiful in my mind. I think they did an incredible job of just making that really clean-cut and making the courses stand out on their own two feet which is huge, so hats off to those guys. I know that we have plans in the progression for a lifter to create a really minimalistic focused theme that people can use or choose not to. They can integrate it into their own sites, but I think the huge part about it is just keeping the focus on the course content and not distracting the course content. That’s why people buy. That’s why people are with you. That’s why they’re students is they want your content. They don’t want the crazy. If you’re thinking about the late 1990s, early 2000s, the arrow is here and the highlighted stuff. It’s like we don’t need that anymore. We just need the course content. What are some other ideas, Chris, that you would suggest for listeners? Christopher: Well, if you’re getting a minimalist design, it’s actually really challenging. It sounds like, "oh, I just put less on there," but it’s really an art to what to take away. But let me back into how you can do that and say that just because you’re a minimalist in taking things away or not putting some things there, you still have a huge opportunity for branding and injecting design into the user experience. A couple of key areas of that, I can just give two really great examples. One is typography which includes your font selection. That can be huge in the general vibe of your site. I never recommend using more than two, three maximum fonts on your site. Even in most cases, one font for everything is great. If you want to do two fonts in web design, and this comes through in learning management systems when you have a headline and then the actual body text or the paragraph text below that. You can have a different font for the headings they’re called and then a complimentary font for the actual body, but focus on making it readable. Don’t get too creative on it so that it’s hard to read. Think about the fact that someone may be experiencing your course on a smartphone, so that font needs to be really readable. If you want to look at some great Google web font combinations which Google web fonts are free to use, you can just Google that, Google web font combinations and you can find some great examples of complimentary fonts that go well together. Within fonts it’s also like the size you select. If you have an older audience, maybe you want to go to a bigger font like 16 or even 18 pixels … Go ahead. Joshua: I just want to jump in here, Chris. I just read an article about conversion which is not, I don’t think, the primary focus of people who are learning management systems, but one thing that we talk a lot about is engagement. Readability is a big part of that. It was suggesting that you should use a Sans Serif font for the headline and a Serif font for the body text, and create that variation between the two just for readability. The I sees the differentiation in the two fonts styles and it allows you to see the sections and the headers, and things a little bit easier. I do think that that’s important though to consider when you’re putting together the visual design because you want the I to be able to track through the content. You don’t want it to be fatigued. You don’t want it to look like a wall of text. You don’t want people to be like, "Ah! I get so …" You know? This is one of my biggest frustrations actually with a big player in the market, Blackboard, is they lock down these styles. It’s really frustrating because you can’t modify the look and feel. If you take a course from Phoenix, well, I think the University of Phoenix is on some other system now, but I’ve taken a lot of online courses in my day and they all look the same. Then your eye, you just get tired of it, man. You’re just like, "I want to do something else." I think it’s important to have some slight variation, but take into consideration that it is important to make things beautiful. You know? Christopher: Absolutely. That’s a great point about avoiding the wall of text. Another thing you can do is just focus on the spacing between the letters in addition to font size. Also, like Joshua is saying, to avoid a wall of text consider just using bullet points more and more headlines and sub-headlines to break it up because the reality is, online, even in WordPress based LMS online courses is people scan. If you want to capture them while they’re scanning and not intimidate them with walls of text, use those other things in your actual content and that comes through as a form of design and branding. The other big one I just want to bring to light is if you were only going to focus on two things for a minimalist design, I would say typography which we just discussed and then color. Really, when it comes down to color, keep your color palette simple. I like the idea of the action color for links and buttons. If somebody can click on something, make that just one color so that they know, OK, here is something that’s bright blue or here is something that’s green or pink, or whatever it is, but just use only that color for links and buttons, and things of that nature. Then the actual text content itself, go with something pretty plain like a gray. That’s, in minimalist design, a big mistake people make is they think in terms of black and white. But if you really open up your mind to the full spectrum of grays, you can create incredible design especially for just body fonts by using different shades of gray that look great and elegant, and high-end, and polished. Joshua: I love that. Well, I think we’ve given a lot of great design tips today. I hope people take this into consideration because I think the LMS community as a whole could use a little bit of a design upgrade, so I think there is some definite key takeaways here. Do you have any final thoughts for the audience, Chris? Christopher: That’s it. If you want to explore fonts, just go ahead and type in Google web fonts and there is a collection of 650 fonts there that you can play around with and start brainstorming ideas. That’s a great place to start. Joshua: That’s fantastic. Well, if you haven’t already, head over to lmscast.com and subscribe to our email newsletter so that we can update you every time there’s a new episode as well as some of the cool new developments that we’re seeing in the LMS space. I hope you have a great day and we’ll talk to you soon. The post WordPress Based LMS Theme Design Ideas appeared first on LMScast.

Today’s question for the Q: Skills for Success authors: Do you have any advice for teaching technical English? Tamara Jones responds. Do you have a question about teaching English to adults that you’d like to ask our Q author team? Comment below or email your question to qskills@oup.com. Related articles Should you give homework to students who only meet with the teacher once a week? (oupeltglobalblog.com) How do I motivate my students to speak English instead of their native language in class? (oupeltglobalblog.com) What do I do when I ask the class a question and no-one is speaking? (oupeltglobalblog.com) Filed under: Adults / Young Adults, Skills Tagged: Adult Learners, Business English, Q Skills for Success, Questions for Q authors, Tamara Jones, Technical English

After spending most of yesterday catching up on blogs, Facebook posts, twitter and linked in, I began to wonder if it was worth it and how I would I would measure the value (in academic terms) of my day. First of all I should note that the day was a pleasant one, with a few good articles uncovered, a joke or three, time wasted trying to find closed articles mentioned in open repositories, a few new slides for upcoming keynotes, updates on a number of colleagues, some interesting conference to keep in mind and a great of peripheral knowledge that I have no idea if it will ever have any use. But was it worth it?? Source: terrya.edublogs.org See on Scoop.it - InformationCommunication (ICT)

Rachel Appleby, co-author of two levels of the new International Express (publishing January 2014), will be offering a sneak preview of the course during her webinar on Wednesday 6th November. I wonder how you decide which coursebook you’re going to use with your adult professional learners. Not long ago, the choice seemed a lot easier, but there’s so much out there now that it’s much more difficult, not to mention the fact that contexts are changing, and learners are getting more demanding too! So, what can we do? Well, I’m always on the look-out for materials that offer flexibility: I don’t necessarily want to work through them page by page, although having a reliable coursebook structure is certainly comforting. What matters most to me is being able to respond to what my learners want, and what motivates them. So that means dealing with language they might need there and then - language they can use immediately after class - and also making sure that topics are up-to-date and inspiring, and will get them talking! I’m also keen to get my students using new language as much as possible, especially in speaking activities. I have lots of resource books at home, but quite often I find a task which fits their level, but is totally off-topic, or vice versa, and so not really appropriate. That sort of time-wasting can be incredibly frustrating! So let me tell you about the new edition of International Express. You probably know the earlier editions. I’ve used the different levels at a number of companies, but such a lot has changed since they came out. Learners these days expect to be able to do more in their own time, or at home, which means, I think, that language in coursebooks needs to be even more clearly presented, guiding learners through really carefully, and giving them plenty of practice too. The new 5-level International Express series is coming out in January 2014, so in fact no-one’s seen it yet (although I have a hunch the Beginner level might already have escaped!). Rest assured that if you were a fan of International Express before, as I was (for its reliability, clarity of language work, and meaningful practice for students), then you’ll find all this here - and more. The content is 100% new, so of course it’s up to date with contemporary global lifestyle topics, including travel and socializing, but it’s still for the professional. And it offers plenty of bite-sized chunks, and flexibility - music to my ears! But apart from addressing how students want to study, one of the other things I find especially tough these days is "keeping up with the Jones’s", in other words, other teachers! It’s happened to me a few times that a colleague has mentioned "a great video-clip" they used in class, and I simply don’t find it easy to select videos that are going to work with my students. I do think this is what learners are wanting, yet we still have to ensure that what we do in class will support and help their learning, and meet their needs. As luck would have it, one of the exciting new features of the new International Express is the add-on video for each unit, directly related to each unit topic. They’re handled in such a way that, by the end, the learners are really going to get a sense of achievement in watching the clips; and let’s face it, that’s one of the main confidence boosters I know of in language learning! So, if you want to be one of the first to look inside the third edition of International Express, perhaps check out a video clip, and see how it’s going to help you and your learners, join me for the webinar on Wednesday 6th November, and I’ll show you more. It would also be great to see you at the BESIG conference in Prague from Friday 8th - Sunday 10th November. On Saturday 9th, I’ll be using hot-off-the-press International Express materials during my talk entitled ‘Does the customer really know best? Getting the most out of in-company training’. Speak soon!Filed under: Adults / Young Adults, Business & English for Specific Purposes Tagged: Adult professional learners, BESIG, BESIG conference, Business English, Course book, International business, International Express, Rachel Appleby, Webinar

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Source: www.edudemic.com Great article!! Definitely need to incorporate w/ teacher supervision. Show students how to use social media the right way!!! See on Scoop.it - InformationCommunication (ICT)