Expand your horizons and explore these ways to learn this year.Post from: The eLearning Coach12 Ways To Learn In 2012

So we now have a ‘newish iPad’. But as I wrote in an earlier post Apple haven’t moved the tablet concept any further forward. The biggest improvement is the resolution of the display which now gives app developers considerably more pixels to play with. This potentially means more complex interfaces but we are limited on a touch device by the ‘resolution’ of a human finger. I have an iPad 1 so one of the things I am thinking about is how will the extra pixel real estate make a difference to my favourite apps and also to the web browsing experience. Will these extra pixels (four times as many in fact) make an appreciable difference? Disappointingly there was no major upgrade to the user interface. This is an issue because the simple ‘pages of buttons’ interface is looking outdated and clumsy. The new Android tablets have recognised this and developed UIs that don’t treat every function in the same way and plonk a button in the midst of hundreds of other buttons. The Apple UI still works well on the small screen iPhone but on the larger (and now much higher resolution) iPad screen the rows of endless buttons is a real drag. Want to add a new app? Once installed it appears on the last page (I currently have 6 pages and I’m a light user). Need to make that app more prominent by putting it on your primary home page? You have to slowly coax it through 5 pages. The multitasking is also a real pain to use and switching between apps using four finger gestures is not the most intuitive UX. If you haven’t experienced this then try switching on ‘Multitasking Gestures’ in ‘Settings>General’. Some comentators have suggested that Apple are less interested now in elegant interfaces and more in ensuring that the OS that runs their revenue generating apps stays simple and robust. I hope this isn’t the case. Recently I saw a demo of the tablet version of Windows 8. It was impressive. Microsoft have re-engineered the touch interface. It’s more complex than Apples’ but for most savvy tech users it appears to add a lot of extra power and functionality. Click on the above images to see in ‘gallery view’. Apple are currently way ahead in the tablet wars. Even if their UI is a bit outdated they still have the most comprehensive app store by far. But things don’t stay still in tech for long and I can’t wait to have a play with Windows 8 on a tablet. The question is do I hold back on buying an iPad 3 in the meantime?

New knowledge builds on existing knowledge.Post from: The eLearning CoachCan you read the minds of your learners?

On the BBC news last week there was some criticism of A Levels (the pre-university qualifications used in the UK). One university admissions spokesperson said that in some cases courses had become too ‘modular’. Some of the courses have become too modularised. The focus is on learning a chunk of content then testing that content immediately afterwards. This approach has resulted in an approach that encourages ‘learning to forget’. I think anyone involved in e-learning would recognise this behaviour of ‘learning to forget’ but instead of modules lasting three months ours last just 30 minutes! Of course taking a 30 minute e-learning module on Time Management or even a 3 month A Level Module on Oilfield Geology isn’t going to result in deep learning. It can only prepare the ground for true learning by application later - most learning interventions focus on this exposition phase with maybe a little activity in the instruction phase (see Clive Shepherd’s post). Only occasionally do we take it to the higher phases - guided discovery or exploration. Learning to forget is likely to characterise much of our ‘learning’ in today’s information rich environment. Increasingly we will be exposed to vast quantities of information and knowledge. Whether we simply scan that information or embed it deeper build on it and synthesise from it will depend upon our motivations, needs and preferences.

Review of a tool that builds interactions.Post from: The eLearning CoachHow to Create Interactions With Raptivity

Do you love your LMS? In my experience most people have a real love hate relationship with their LMS - with the balance generally tipping in hate’s favour. It looks horrible, has a clunky admin area and generally makes things harder to do than they should be. Why is this? Well an LMS is primarily a ‘management system’ rather that a ‘learning system’. Think little ‘l’ big ‘MS’ not big ‘L’ little ‘ms’. LMS are designed by techies for administrators to manage learning resources and learners. They don’t actually manage learning at all - only the evidence that some learning may have been done - in the sense that someone accessed a course, went through all the screens and then passed the test. The result is that the learner experience on most LMS’ is pretty dismal. This is a real problem because the LMS effectively provides the ecosystem which is supposed to facilitate learning. In practice it feels like a big repository of stuff. Things are changing however, with the rise of social media platforms, LMS’ are having to adapt and become more of a learning space rather than a repository of learning resources. What constitutes e-learning or online learning is also changing with video replacing conventional SCORM modules on some of the newer learning platforms. Add to this the increasing interest in social learning , performance support, curation, gamification and user generated content (UGC) and suddenly existing LMS’ look like a technology from the stone age. Of course most online learning is still directed and managed and requires the structure that a conventional LMS provides but if you are investigating a new online learning platform there are some interesting alternatives out there. Here are two new kids on the block that are worth a look: Fuse A ‘video-centric social learning’ platform from Fusion Universal. Fuse dispenses with the SCORM package and gets down and dirty with lots of videos and UGC YouTube style. It includes quiz functionality too so you get to test your users once they have watched the relevant videos. Learn more about Fuse Curatr This ‘social learning platform’ from Ben Betts and his team majors on curation rather than creation and includes elements of gamification that mean that additional content becomes available only when you get enough points. I love it’s visually rich interface and it also works well on an iPad. Learn more about Curatr I have demo admin accounts on both platforms and will be doing a review of both platforms over the coming weeks.

Finally, a storyboard master reveals his techniques.Post from: The eLearning CoachRevealed: Shocking Secrets of a Storyboard Pro

Social learning is the shiny new toy of the e-learning world. But what exactly is social learning and why has it become so popular? Interestingly the first of these questions is hard to answer since it’s effectively an emergent label - in other words lots of people are using it to mean slightly different things. More of what those things are in a moment. Why has it become so popular? Because it somehow injects some of the buzz around social media into boring old online learning. Think learning on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube and you get the idea why it seems like the obvious next place for e-learning to go. Forget the dreaded corporate LMS - welcome to the world where learning online will be social and fun! But before we get carried away let’s establish exactly what social learning means. Well there appear to be two main views on this. One is that it is simply any learning that is somehow facilitated by or uses tools from the world of social media. So microblogs, screencasts or wikis are social media tools that can be used in a variety of ways to help people learn. In addition to providing tools to create learning content these tools or platforms can also be used to share learning with others. Think watching a video about time management on YouTube and tweeting about it to your co-learners. Lurking deeper in this viewpoint is the idea that learners will be encouraged to create learning content themselves - what is known on the web as User Generated Content (UGC). The second seems to suggest that social learning is the fashionable new term for ‘informal learning’ and ‘knowledge management’ (KM) - in other words learning from each other rather than from a teacher or trainer. By informal learning I mean all those myriad ways in which we learn in the workplace outside of the formal training course (either F2F or e-learning). According to the 70/20/10 rule, 70% of all learning in organisations happens outside of formal learning interventions. Jay Cross’ excellent book is a good overview of what sort of things happen in this largely hidden domain. Most people will also have heard about knowledge management. Ten years ago it reached its apogee and though the concept is sound - people sharing what they know within an organisation - in practice it never really delivered. Why? Because people don’t really have the time or often the motivation to share, and even if they do share it isn’t always in a form that is digestible by others. Of course one could argue that the most ‘social’ form of learning occurs in a face-to-face workshop.  The term social learning however is being used primarily in the context of online learning  though one could happily make the case for blending online and offline ‘social’ elements. Maybe social learning will sweeten the pill for those traditionalist L&D people who still see e-learning as the route to mindless boredom. So is social learning just a phase or is it here to stay? Well some respected voices in the online learning world have become almost evangelical in their pursuit of the social learning agenda (see some key viewpoints below). In addition most e-learning companies are jumping on the social learning bandwagon, if only to appear innovative. This is especially true of platform vendors who are all busy ‘transforming’ their LMS’ into social learning platforms. For content developers the social learning camp represents a bit of a challenge. Will organisations continue to spend upwards of £10k an hour on e-courses when they can simply tap into all that free informal stuff that’s already washing around in the business? I recognise the attraction of social learning. And its true that there is tremendous potential in encouraging and facilitating learning from each other. However having worked in the knowledge management space for over 10 years I’m sceptical that social learning will bring about the revolution that it promises. Does social learning give us a unique opportunity to re-invent KM? I think it might do, but we must learn the lessons from KM - which as can be expected - were more about people that about processes or technologies. In the next article I will look at social learning and how it compares with KM, and draw some conclusions about the lessons we learnt. For those who are unfamiliar with KM I am also planning on a guide to KM for the unitiated. The social learning evangelists: Jay Cross on social learning Harold Jarche on social learning in the enterprise Jane Hart’s social learning centre

Now that social is more accepted, this might be the time to build a wiki.Post from: The eLearning CoachUsing Wikis for Learning and Collaboration

All you wanted to know about positive and negative space.Post from: The eLearning CoachSix Quick Ways To Design Like A Pro

Story View in Articulate Storyline (click to enlarge) Without warning Articulate launched Storyline yesterday (2 May 2012). I’ve been on the beta programme, and there was no indication that we were so close to an actual launch, but now we can all have a play with the new software. Overall Storyline is a big step up from Studio. It’s now a standalone product - no more messing about with PowerPoint plug-ins but also no more messing about with PowerPoint. However, Articulate have replicated the key functionality of PowerPoint within the tool so any PowerPoint users will be able to get up to speed pretty quickly. Probably my favourite feature in Storyline is the ‘story view’. It shows all the slides in your project in the order in which they will be viewed (indicated by a path identified by arrows). The power of this view is evident when you start using branching (which Storyline handles particularly well). Unlike branching in PowerPoint you can easily see the different branched routes and manage them effectively. This overall ‘storyboard’ view is really helpful when developing e-learning that unlike a presentation is usually not completely linear. It some respects it seems similar to Authorware - the original tool developed by Macromedia all those years back (don’t tell Michael Allen). Interactions using Layers, Triggers, States and Variables Powerful interactions can be created on each slide using a combination of layers, triggers, states and variables. I saw one example from the beta testing where there were literally hundreds of layers each with its own set of triggers all on one slide! Storyline also enables the use of variables so that some simple data can be entered and stored for use later (e.g. the learner’s name). If you have ever done any programming you will be familiar with some of these terms and one of the biggest achievements of the new Storyline product is its ability to put programming power in the hands of non-programmers. However, even with the intuitive interface it’s still going to take some effort in order to get the reward. Powerful it may be but all that interaction DESIGN is going to make Storyline a much less ‘rapid’ tool than Studio. Built-in Clip Art Storyline is designed with scenarios in mind and so to make it easy to build people interactions there is a built-in character library with both photographic images and Articulate style illustrations (which I personally don’t love very much). In addition to the bundled art you will also be able to buy additional packages or create your own in-house. The first ‘bolt-on’ character pack is $599 - according to Articulate’s web site it’s a bargain because if you were to purchase the characters separately it would cost you $2,392)! Built-in Screen Recorder Storyline has its own built-in screen recorder which looks just like the Screenr online tool but there is a lot more functionality under the bonnet (hood for you US folks). You can publish the capture in either view mode, try mode or test mode (just like in Captivate).  This gives you much more power when using screen walkthroughs as a training tool. Storyline also automatically adds callouts and does its best to annotate them automatically. You can also add your own callouts manually and adjust the zoom level. Integrated Quizzes Quizmaker functionality is now fully integrated into Storyline which makes it much easier to integrate question and answer interactions. There is also built in support for graphical drag and drop type questions and interactions. Engage is not integrated - I guess because you can build Engage type interactions using the slide layer and triggers. HTML5 and m-Learning Storyline defaults to publishing to Flash but you also have the option to include HTML5 output (primarily so that it will play on the iPad). On the iPad you also have the option of using the Articulate Player App. This allows you to download a Storyline course and view it offline - it acts like a sort of iBooks for e-learning content. Desktop and laptop PCs and most Android tablets will play Storyline in good old fashioned Flash (at least for now). Storyline output won’t really work well on smartphones because of the small screen size but there doesn’t seem to be any technical reason why you can’t give it a go. Downsides Storyline is undoubtedly a more complex product and will involve a steeper learning curve. If you are already an Articulate power user it will be great to make that step up but if you are completely new to e-learning authoring then Storyline will feel a little scary. True you can ignore some of the complexities and just use it like Studio but if that’s the case you may as well stick to Studio (the 2012 version of course which coincidentally gets a preview on the same day that Storyline launched). There is still only one player skin in Storyline. It’s a lot cleaner than the old Articulate player but it’s still pretty limited, and because there is only one, EVERY Storyline project is going to look the same! Of course because there is so much more power in developing in-slide navigation lots of authors are going to create their own navigation - and lots of the cool beta examples have done this. However this adds a lot of extra effort and is much trickier than relying on a standard player. My guess is that third party player skins will become available pretty soon. Storyline is a landmark product and it really does massively extend the potential of an instructional designer who is up to speed with interaction design (and hopefully graphic design too). However I would question its label as a ‘rapid’ tool. Some of the things I have been playing with in Storyline could have been done much faster by a competent Flash developer and I feel that we have to recognise that sometimes two heads are better than one when it comes to creating professional and engaging e-learning content. Nevertheless the e-Learning Heroes community is likely to be buzzing with activity as new users get to grips with layers, triggers, states, markers and variables. At some point someone may even think - "I now recognise how hard it is to get all this interactive stuff working properly!". Storyline Pricing Happily you get all that power for precisely the same price as Studio - at the time of writing Storyline is £860 ($1,398). That’s not cheap but if you are a serious e-learning developer it has to represent excellent value for money. Download the FREE trial of Articulate Storyline Related: RJ Jacquez’s Storyline Post  Review by the good folks at Kineo

Consider these mobile strategies for your workplace.Post from: The eLearning CoachIt’s Not eLearning On A Phone

Here’s a very quick tour of the Articulate Storyline interface.

One of the best kept secrets in our industry.Post from: The eLearning CoachiSpring Pro Authoring Tool Review

In all the excitement over the launch of Articulate Storyline you may have missed the ‘preview’ of the updated version of Articulate Studio. Labelled Studio 12 it will be available ‘sometime this year’. It includes some things from Storyline including the new player, character libraries and crucially the ability to publish to both Flash and HTML5. Articulate Studio 12 also adds accessibility support based on the requirements of the US 508 standard. There are also lots of improvements to Quizmaker and Engage too. Quizmaker gets drag and drop interactions and also a question/answer import via Excel feature (that will really help in creating and managing assessments). Engage gets 10 new interactions. The $64k question is do you stick with Articulate Studio 09 and wait until Studio 12 becomes available later in the year OR do you cut and run with Storyline? Me, I’d probably want both in my e-learning developer’s toolkit (better start talking to the bank manager)! Related: Articulate Studio 12 Preview  

We need to give learners better feedback. Here's how.Post from: The eLearning CoachAlternatives To ‘Correct’ and ‘Incorrect’

Image from: http://d.lib.ncsu.edu/collections/catalog/0008398 Towards the close of a recent E-learning Network (ELN) event the discussion got around to whether organisations need learning in the shape and form in which it is currently supplied by the L&D department. The point is that learning feels like an activity that is disconnected from the business. Very few organisations would place L&D in the mission critical category. Often it’s seen as a cost which should be minimised wherever possible. The question was asked - ‘Would the organisation survive if L&D was axed?’ And the answer is probably a resounding yes! Learning would still go on of course but it would be self directed, informal (even social). This disconnect from the business is a big problem for L&D and it always has been. Would the organisation survive if L&D were axed? The name learning and development is in itself an issue because when we use the term development we are referring to the individual. We put people through learning interventions to develop them but we struggle to check whether this ‘development’ provides value to the business as well as to the learner’s themselves. If I send an employee on a management development course they may learn a lot but does what they learn make a difference to the business or are we just using L&D opportunities simply as an employee benefit. During the discussion we suggested that a name change might be appropriate. What about going back to ‘training’ which somehow seems closer to the coal face. More popular was the idea to use the word ‘performance’ to make the link between learning and performance. Most organisations will happily allocate resources to activities that improve performance - especially if those improvements can be measured in some way. There is increasing pressure on people these days to do more and to perform better but L&D seems increasingly disconnected from this competitive imperative. New approaches are being explored with the emphasis on the learning that really goes on in an organisation - the 70:20:10 framework and the focus on informal learning and social learning. It’s not really possible to manage social/informal learning - only support or encourage it and provide tools that improve it’s effectiveness. Maybe this is where L&D needs to go? Trainers should become ‘Performance Support Consultants’ and instead of delivering programmes to those who happen to turn up they should be facilitating performance improvements in specific areas of the business. This would place learning at the heart of the business and turn L&D from a cost centre into a profit centre - a potentially powerful one if we could get the metrics right. But it also needs L&D to be closer to the operational coal face and to really engage with the DNA of the business. In an increasingly competitive global knowledge economy learning (in all its guises) is way too important for it to fall between the organisational silos. A case in point…I have been involved in a number of sales training e-learning programmes over the last couple of years. In all cases the learning need came from the recognition by management that sales people were ‘resting on their laurels’ and that now the marketplace was much tougher they would need to ‘up their game’. The solution - some extra training. Now I wasn’t involved in any of the post learning evaluation (if it happened) but I’m sure that although the training would have been ‘useful’ it wouldn’t have solved the underlying problem (not enough sales). The reason is that training is a top down solution that is very rarely targeted effectively. Think  ’Bomber Harris’ not ‘Stealth Bomber’. What would have worked better would have been localised performance support initiatives. What might these have looked like? Well that’s a question for another post! Coming SoonLearning Metrics - Kirkpatrick in 2012The ROI of LearningWhat we can learn from KM?Performance Support and the Five Moments of Need

You can change the way learners and designers think about eLearning.Post from: The eLearning Coach10 Ways to Occupy eLearning

How to create an organized shot list and schedule.Post from: The eLearning CoachPlanning A Photo Shoot For eLearning? Make it smooth.

If you are involved in e-learning then you will know that customers already have high expectations that any ‘courses’ or ‘courseware’ you develop will also be accessible on mobile devices. Now this sounds simple from the viewpoint of the customer  - a mobile device is simply another screen (even if it is sometimes short on pixel real estate). However as someone who has lived for a while with the web and the myriad of devices, operating systems, middleware and applications software it fills me with trepidation. Accessing learning content on mobile devices is ‘non-trivial’. In practice we can’t simply re-purpose existing learning content to run on a mobile device (see my previous post ‘M-learning or E-learning?‘). What we need to do is to consider the mobile device as a delivery channel in its own right. What is a mobile device? The vast majority of mobile devices are smartphones (some are smarter than others) but tablets such as the iPad are also classified as mobile devices. Paradoxically laptops or netbooks, no matter how ultra light and slim they are, are NOT classified as mobile devices. Why is this? Probably because they run a desktop OS and software that is designed primarily to be used in a static location either physically connected to a network or via a secure WiFi. In the context of e-learning the key difference is probably that mobile devices are always on and are used for shorter periods of activity. Recognising that we can’t simply re-package existing e-learning content for mobile devices we need to consider what content will be appropriate on a mobile device and then develop this as part of our ‘courseware’. What courseware will work well in m-learning? Quick and convenient access is key but the ability to handle audio and video seamlessly is also a big advantage of mobile devices. Here are some learning activities that work well on a mobile device: Quick reference guides Job aids Quick overviews/introductions Diagnostics (e.g. survey or questionnaire) Short videos Audio files Short quizzes Infographics I am focussing on courseware/content here. Mobile devices are also very good at collaborative/communication based learning activities (see ‘It’s Not Learning on a Phone‘ by Connie Malamed ) but this is trickier to implement and involves the idea of a ‘cohort’ of learners to be successful. I’ll look at this in more details in a future post. Developing Content for Mobile Devices Producing the stuff on the list above should be relatively straightforward but there are surprisingly few tools that do the job. Conventional e-learning authoring tools are aimed squarely at the big screen and use technologies that don’t work well on mobile devices (e.g. Flash). Existing tool vendors are rushing to fill the gap but in many cases the environment is so different that it’s a struggle to develop content for mobile devices that will also work on existing PCs. The idea of ‘single source’ publishing is a tough one to crack in view of the vast numbers of devices. Introducing GoMo The most successful approach so far is that taken by tools like GoMo which are designed specifically to develop content for mobile devices. GoMo is so far the ONLY authoring environment that really has been built from the ground-up to develop e-learning type content for mobile devices. GoMo is designed to deliver content on both smartphones and tablets. It adopts a cleverly simple solution for dealing with the extra pixel real estate of a tablet compared to a smartphone - it uses the left hand side of the screen on a tablet to display the content menu (see illustration below). Using a demo version of GoMo (thank you @craigtaylor74) I was able to build my first demo app in less than an hour. Of course like any e-learning development project all the real work is done in the storyboard - yes you do need to storyboard for m-learning. The GoMo user interface is reasonably user friendly with ‘smartphone’ sized screens helping you to think about the layout challenges of a small screen device. You can create main menus, with sub-topics and you can also create simple topic branching. GoMo’s most useful feature is its question and feedback capability. It includes either a ‘one answer is correct’ option or ‘many answers are correct’ and provides appropriate feedback depending upon whether the correct or incorrect answer is selected. You can also branch to topics based on the feedback so simple scenarios are possible. There is also an assessment mode enabling to you set a scored quiz and to capture the results via SCORM. GoMo also supports video and audio enabling you to easily incorporate video and audio podcasts into your learning content. GoMo can publish either as a native app or as a web app. If you publish to a native app then you will need to go through the publishing process to get your app onto an app store (Epic can do this for you at a charge of £595 per publish). In practice most e-learning users are likely to publish as a web app and provide access through an LMS. This option also provides SCORM tracking functionality. GoMo comes with three standard ‘skins’ but you can develop your own or get Epic to craft one for you. The skin is important because it gives your content some personality. I can see most customers wanting their own ‘branded’ skin which would then be re-used across a range of m-learning courses. I like GoMo. Hopefully other m-learning authoring tools will follow but for now GoMo does a good job of creating m-learning content. Related Links Learn more about GoMo

Check out these eLearning Books: social media and training, eLearning ideas and thoughts on eLearning.Post from: The eLearning Coach3 Books by eLearning Experts

I’m a serial note taker. Put me in a training event or a conference session and I’ll be scribbling away on my freeform unlined paper making notes - all sorts of notes. I write down key points, web links, book references, even make small diagrams. Sometimes I even mind map. I also run two ‘notebooks’ (well sheets if I’m honest) one that relates to the material being delivered and one to capture wider thoughts that may have been sparked off by that material. These notes are usually down to connections that pop-up in my big picture brain - so for example I might have a business development idea, a blog post idea or simply a useful concept that I will follow-up at some future time. You may have realised by now that I still prefer pen and paper for note taking. Others are happier tapping away on their laptops or more recently on their tablets (sometimes to the annoyance of others). What role does note taking play in learning? Now I’m not the only one who takes notes at ‘learning’ events so clearly note taking has a role to play in our processing and understanding of the material being presented. Even when the presenter/trainer tells us that the ‘slides’ will be available ‘at the end’ I still take notes - though I notice some people breathe a deep sigh of relief , put down their pen and relax a little in their seats. Sometimes a presenter will even handout slides at the start ready for us to make notes in the little lined area next to each slide. I hate this - that little lined area is way too constraining for my free range approach. For me taking notes is a key part of the learning process - the material is presented, some things seem particularly relevant or interesting so I write them down, other things cause some synapses in my brain to fire and a few new connections are made and these new insights are noted down too. At the end my notes are not always completely coherent but there is usually enough for me to take my learning further later even if it’s only looking up the web links and buying yet another book on Amazon. Of course sometimes I never look at my notes again but the act of making those notes in the first place signifies a deeper connection with the material than if I just sit there watching and listening. I guess that, in some small way, the act of note taking turns me from a passive learner into an active learner. So, if we find notes useful in a face-to-face environment why not also use them in e-learning? Most people don’t seem to. Maybe the fact that they have control over the speed of the delivery and because they can repeat bits notes are less relevant. Links and book references are even handled automatically - generally they are just one click away. A few years ago I worked on an e-learning programme for an NHS Trust and we discovered that nurses were much more likely to make notes compared to doctors. When I was working on e-learning projects back in 2001 one of the popular innovations was a live notepad which was built into the e-learning programme. The idea was that it would be pretty useful if the learner could make notes in the e-learning as they went along. In practice of course pretty much no one used the built-in notepad and it gradually became extinct - though you do occasionally still see it around. I note (sic) for example that iTunesU supports notes (it even has a special notes tab - see below). So is note taking in e-learning relevant or useful? Are we missing a trick by not considering how this relatively simple activity contributes to the overall learning experience? Is there any research on the benefits of note taking? A quick search on the web reveals lots of research on note taking and also on note taking systems (such as the Cornell System http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornell_Notes). Research, of university level students in particular identifies two key purposes of note taking. Encoding and external storage. With regards to learning, note-taking benefits have been placed in two categories: Encoding and External Storage (Carter & Van Matre, 1975). Encoding benefits are accrued through the act of note-taking. The act of recording an idea in notes facilitates learning, regardless of whether the notes are later reviewed. External Storage benefits are derived from students reviewing their notes. In this case, notes are useful as documents that can be reviewed prior to tests. For me the concept of encoding is the one that drives my note taking. The writing down and/or visualisation of ideas and concepts helps me to ‘see’ the material from my own experiential viewpoint. For me it’s about being able to connect the new material satisfactorily with the stuff I already know. So should note taking be encouraged in e-learning? So two questions to finish and hopefully to encourage some debate. Firstly, should we bother about whether our e-learners make notes or not? Secondly, if we do see the value in encouraging note taking what devices can we employ from a learning design perspective? This post originally appeared on the E-Learning Network’s Advent Blog series for Christmas 2011. See previous comments and notes.

How to make numerical facts and data more compelling.Post from: The eLearning CoachHow To Make Numbers Interesting

Via: OnlineEducation.net and @EdRels