To download the webinar slides. To view the recording.   Try out BizLibrary's Online Library! BizLibrary provides 10,000+ training videos and eLearning courses in various business training topics, with new courses added every day.   Coaching Skills for Managers and Leaders In this eBook we’ll discuss emerging principles in employee coaching for managers and the objective of coaching in organizations. BizLibrary's Mobile Learning App meets the needs of today's digital learners. Employees no longer wait for training departments to push learning content to them. Employees are used to pulling information to themselves, when they need it, on their own terms and conditions, and on their own devices.

by Jennie Ruby  Suppose you have hired voiceover talent to record the audio for your Adobe Presenter project. You give the voiceover artist the script. The script is organized by which slide in your PowerPoint presentation each audio segment belongs to. When you get the voiceover recordings back, you just import each segment to the slide it belongs to. When you preview your presentation, everything plays smooth as silk until--there is a click-activated animation on slide 12. Now, as the pre-recorded audio plays, the slide just sits there, and the animation is never activated. Uh-oh. That's where synchronization comes in. In Adobe Presenter, you can synchronize slide animation with the imported audio in just a few mouse clicks. Start with the animated slide active in PowerPoint's Normal view. The animation in my example slide is a simple text build, with each bullet point appearing on mouse click. From the Presenter tab on the Ribbon, go to the Audio group and click the Sync button. The presentation opens in Slideshow view, and the Synchronize dialog box opens. At the left, click the green Sync-change timings button.    The audio begins to play, and the Next animation tool becomes available.    When the audio mentions the next bullet point, click the Next animation tool to cue the animation. Click through the remaining animations on the slide, then click the square Stop button. Now that you have synchronized the audio with the animations, click the Play button to review your work. The slide audio plays, and the animations occur at the points where you clicked. If you are satisfied with the results, click Save. Otherwise, click Discard and try again. Close the Synchronize dialog box and you'll find that your project now sports perfectly synchronized audio and animations. Note: You could synchronize a longer audio clip across multiple slides. However, for ease of corrections and updates, the best practice is to have a separate audio clip for each slide. *** Check out my mini courses on Adobe Presenter. To attend my class, all you need is access to the Internet, Microsoft PowerPoint, and a trial version of Presenter. Find out how easy it is to transform your existing PowerPoint decks into fully functioning eLearning.

I personally believe that one of the areas where learning professionals need the most help is how communities and networks impact learning and building individual and facilitation skills around these: Knowing how to individually leverage Network Skills and Communities to help with work and learning tasks Community and Network Facilitation Skills to help others learn and work using networks and communities In my post Networks and Learning Communities, I looked a bit at this topic.  But, I by no means consider myself an expert and find that I spend quite a bit of my time building my network skills so I can do this more effectively.   So I was super excited when I saw that Nancy White, who helps me learn about all things communities and networks, posted a response to the New Skills for Learning Professionals Big Question for July 2009.   When I looked at her first post, I was actually disappointed because it wasn't really about networks and communities.  My disappointment was purely my own making.  But Nancy came through and posted her follow-up pieces and especially Part 3 and the Online Facilitation Wiki that was a great launch point for me to read a bit more.  I also used both the Communities and Networks Connection and Work Literacy to source additional reading. So, starting with her post I've spent the past few hours going through a lot of material, processing the information and writing this post. I've come to few realizations from the process. My Focus is on Networks There were great definitions of communities, groups, networks, facilitation, management, etc.  I realized during the process that I mostly focus on networks and less on actual communities. Community - a group of people with bounded membership who have some shared, congruent interest and interact with each other over time. Network - a constellation of individuals associated via fuzzy, unbounded membership and overlapping … not fully congruent … interests For me a couple of examples: LA CTO Forum - definitely a community.  Meet once a month.  Invite only.  Learning and peer support.  Somewhat a classic community or practice. Learn Trends - not quite sure this fits Nancy's definition of a community - it looks like one, but my sense is that it's somewhere in between a community and a network Where I spend most of my time is with the blogging network and various other networks.  In some ways, Learn Trends is just part of this network allowing us to meet at various points and act a bit more community like.  We share our interest of learning.  There's quite a lot of discussion/debate whether blogs act as networks or community.  Probably don't want to kick that hornet's nest. And I'm not alone in my questioning / focus.  Take a look at: How relevant are communities of practice in a network age? My Community Facilitation Skills are Hopeless One thing I started to realize is that good community facilitation takes time, desire, skills and appropriate mentality.  For the LA CTO Forum, I have a couple of cohorts who help to organize things, but there's quite a bit more we could be doing. For Learn Trends, Jay, George and myself do not spend time on facilitation.  We should.  But we don't.  In fact, this is probably a great opportunity for someone to learn about facilitating an online community.  Does anyone want to jump in who does have time, desire, skills (or willing to learn) and appropriate mentality to help facilitate the Learn Trends community? I found this great piece - The Art of Hosting Good Conversations Online - I will go back to refer to this quite a bit to remind me of all the kinds of things I should be thinking about. But frankly, I will have to grow these skills over time based on specific situations.  It doesn't look good for me to become a really adept, willing community facilitator. Network Weaving I don't like the term, Network Weaving, but that's what Nancy calls it - although I don't think she likes it either.  In the eLearning space there's this very complex network of people, organizations, content that forms this amorphous thing where we all play.  The combination of blogs, sites like LinkedIn, various discussion groups, etc. weave us all together in a weird way.  We still have the core human desire to connect.  Many of us enjoy learning and discussion around these topics.  But we really don't act like a community.  And people vary widely in their connectedness and activity level. What I found on Network Weaving left me wanting something quite different … I would run into materials that talk about how you analyze and map networks.  Such as the advice: Improved connectivity starts with a map - knowing the complex human system you are embedded in. I'm sorry, but I'm simply are not going to try to really map out this incredibly complex network.  Of course, the folks who are writing this are networking mapping folks who come at it from that perspective.  I think it would be a really interesting picture and there's real value in it.  But it's only a starting point if it's relatively easy to do. Instead, what I'm asking about is: What could I do to get more from the network?  What can I do to help other people get more from the network? And when I say "Get more" … I think about the ability to tap a larger network of folks, get to them for help more quickly and easily, learn from them faster, more easily establish conversations, draw them together into ad hoc groups as needed, and ??? a lot of things I don't know even what they are yet ??? In fact, some of the nuggets I found helped me think a bit about this knowledge gap.  In What Networks Do?, they point to filter, amplify, convene among other things.  With Browse My Stuff I should have thought of social filtering a lot sooner.  I'm sure I'm missing a lot. And, I'm probably thinking about this more than most. Which leaves me with … Where's the help for Network Skills? Nancy talks about how community facilitation skills sound a lot like network skills.  After reading a lot of the material, I'm not convinced that the mapping is that easy and I certainly don't get the path from one set to specific actions in the other.  So, I know some of the materials I've produced such as the LinkedIn Guide for Knowledge Workers.   The ironic thing is that like network themselves - how to kinds of information around network skills seems to be missing.  Most of it is unfortunately more tool centric. So where's the help for building my / our / their Network Skills? eLearning Technology Subscribe to the Best of eLearning Learning for updates from this blog and other eLearning blogs.

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by Kevin Siegel    Using Captivate's Text to Speech feature allows you to quickly convert written text to voiceover audio. It's an awesome feature. However, we recently had a client who felt that Paul (that was the Speech Agent we used for the project) spoke too fast. The client wanted to know if we cloud slow him down a bit. While you might think that controlling the cadence used by the Speech Agent was beyond your control, it's actually really easy. Prior to converting a slide note to speech, just add a bit of code (known as Voice Text Markup Language or VTML) to the text.    For example, if you want a Speech Agent to say I am an awesome person, all that you would normally have to do is write the text in the Notes window, click the TTS check box and then click Text to Speech.         In the Speech Management dialog box, select a Speech Agent and then click Generate Audio.       If you feel like the resulting voiceover audio is too fast or too slow, you can change the speed. In the slide Note, add the following code in front of the text: <vtml_speed value="50">. At the end of the text, type </vtml_speed>.     Click the Text to Speech button and regenerate the audio (the existing audio will be replaced with the new audio file). You'll find that the agent's speed has been cut in half (thanks to the 50 you added as part of the VTML code). You can experiment with the speed values until you find a speed that works best for you and/or your client.   If you'd like to learn more about VTML or see more tags, review the users guide for the VTML Tag Set by clicking here.   *** If you'd like to learn more about eLearning, come hang out in my next eLearning basics mini course. And if you'd like to learn more Captivate, Presenter, or Storyline, we've got a great collection of live, online classes for you. 

I've done a few posts in the past that take a look at the topics that are Hot Topics in Training.  In each case, these are crude in that they look only at what terms people are using in a given content set.  Back in 2007, I pointed out various aspects of what I was seeing: strategy/strategic and performance are back as topics after dropping way down in 2006 surprisingly trainer is also back, you would think in the age of eLearning 2.0 this would be down notable dropping topics: games, simulations, knowledge, interactive and blended Karyn Romeis commented: Hmm. I have doubts about the validity of these data. Perhaps some topics are on the wane because they have become so integrated as to be invisible and no longer a topic to remark about. Just a thought. And she's absolutely correct, that these are only general indications of what people are talking about.   Also, it only indicates what the presenters and conference organizers (for that data set) thought that the audience would be interested in and was worth presenting at the conference. I still maintain that it's helpful to keep an eye on these things. And now, because of eLearning Learning, I have a much better way to track these things over a much more interesting content sets. Background Explanation By selecting LMS, I've selected content that is the latest and best stuff that's associated with the term LMS.   The keywords on left side are changed to keywords which are more closely associated with that term.  For example, we see terms now at the top like Learning Management System, AICC, SCORM. Take a look at the companies: Saba (28) GeoLearning (17) SumTotal (22) Meridian (9) Cornerstone (19) You notice the counts are out of order (not descending).  That's because they are ordered according to how closely the system thinks the companies are associated with the selected term within the content set. This works across any subset of the content including sources, keywords and arbitrary searches. For example, when I view my blog's content through the eLearning Learning lens, it shows me that relative to other sources of content in the system, I tend to talk about: eLearning 2.0 (130) Work Skills (26) PWLE (16) Flash Quiz (8) Knowledge Work (40) That's a pretty fair representation of topics that I talk about. Topics by Year By selecting 2009, I've selected a subset of the content, but in this case it's basically content associated with this year.  When you look at the keywords on the left you see things like: Social Learning (356) Social Media (411) Twitter (725) Google Wave (22) Camtasia (76) Adobe Captivate (71) Social Network (460) Now, the content set in this case are highly skewed towards innovators as compared to the topic sets being used by my past analysis (training conferences).  But still, this gives a general indication and it's especially interesting when you compare it to 2007: Corporate Blog (20) Personal Learning (23) eLearning Tools (323) Software Simulation (21) Qarbon (6) Second Life (135) PowerPoint (148) Google Scholar (9) Authorware (16) Ah the good old days of 2007.  Seems so long ago. :) How about 2005? Folksonomy (11) Knowledge (233) Off-shore (7) Leadership (44) Creative Commons (16) Back when we still had hope that folksonomy (tagging) would make sense of the flood of content.  Year by Topic You can also go the other way to see things like selecting Twitter and you can see that the associated years are: 2009 2020  2008  2020?  That indicates that someone is talking about that year and about twitter in the same content.  So, predictions for the future and how twitter might relate.  This stuff is definitely not exact, but it gives a general indication.  Twitter is a hot topic right now as compared to some others. The years associated with Wiki suggest it was more discussed a couple years ago and now is discussed less. 2006 2010 2007 Does the associated years for SharePoint suggest it's a technology for the future? 2010  2015  2011  2013  You can pretty much do this endlessly. I often will use this technique when I run into a new company to see if anyone is blogging about it and generally what is associated with it. Looking Back So when I go back to Hot Topics in Training, the topics that were hot then and by looking at the associated years I can get a sense that: assessment - not discussed as much now (e.g., 2001 2002 2000 2003 2004 are associated years) virtual classroom - still current strategy - old flash - still current performance - old - not sure why - shouldn't this be a perennial topic? roi - old enterprise - future and old games - still popular This is definitely something that I'll be using as I go forward.  eLearning Technology Subscribe to the Best of eLearning Learning for updates from this blog and other eLearning blogs.

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by Jennie Ruby  When you add a sidebar to your project in Adobe Presenter, you have the option of displaying a table of contents (TOC), which in Presenter is called the Outline. The Outline automatically lists the title of each slide, and viewers can click any title to navigate to that slide. Sweet! But let's say you preview your project, and one or more slides turns up in the Outline as "Slide x," where x = the slide number. Not quite as sweet. A slide title like "Slide 5" tells your viewer nothing, making navigation using the Outline a matter of guesswork. The solution to this problem is not difficult, but it does require visiting a number of places in your presentation and in Presenter. First, you need to know how Presenter got the titles for the slides that are listed correctly in your Outline. If your slide has a Title placeholder in PowerPoint, Adobe Presenter picks up that title automatically. So one solution is simply to give every slide in your presentation a title. However, you may not want a title to appear on every slide. Some slides might be images or graphics only. No problem. You can still assign the slide a title in Presenter that will only be displayed in the Outline. On the Adobe Presenter tab of the Ribbon, from the Tools group, click Slide Manager. The Slide Manager dialog box lists all of the slides in your project. Notice in my example below that slides 1 and 2 have titles (in quotes after the slide numbers), but slides 3 and 4 do not.    Among the options for each slide is Navigation Name. Click the word None, replace it with the title you want to have displayed in the sidebar Outline, click the OK button, and you are done. However, in my case, since these slides are just images, I decided not to give each a unique name. Instead, I want it to be clear from the sidebar Outline that these are merely continuations of the previous titled topic. For each, I want the navigation name to be (Continued). Now, I could give each one that navigation name right here in the Slide Manager, but there is a way to cover all unnamed slides at once. After closing the Slide Manager, click the Theme tool on the Ribbon.   At the bottom of the Adobe Presenter Theme Editor, click the Modify Text Labels button.    Scroll to the bottom of the list of labels, and the second to last one is Unnamed slide title.   Double-click the text Slide %n and replace it with (Continued).      Click the OK button to save your change. Click the OK button on the Theme Editor to close it. Now, when you preview your project, all of the unnamed slides show up as (Continued) in the Outline. As a bonus, this word also appears in the list of Thumbnails. *** Check out my mini courses on Adobe Presenter. To attend my class, all you need is access to the Internet, Microsoft PowerPoint, and a trial version of Presenter. Find out how easy it is to transform your existing PowerPoint decks into fully functioning eLearning.

View and download the webinar slides. View the webinar recording.   Try out BizLibrary's Online Library! BizLibrary provides 10,000+ training videos and eLearning courses in various business training topics, with new courses added every day.   Closing the Skills Gap: a Framework for Future Success In this eBook, we will ignore the political and social static that dominates a lot of the conversation about "skills gap." What we want to do instead is focus on the data about where organizations are struggling to find talent, and then offer some practical advice, best practices, and tips to help find or nurture talent to fill both current and future skill gaps. BizLibrary's Mobile Learning App meets the needs of today's digital learners. Employees no longer wait for training departments to push learning content to them. Employees are used to pulling information to themselves, when they need it, on their own terms and conditions, and on their own devices.

There are a wide variety of local events in the Los Angeles area that I periodically attend. I must say that I go through phases where I attend more events for a while and then I pull back and only attend a few. Right now, I'm in a fairly selective mode. So, when I go to an event, I want to make sure that I get the most I can from the time. Generally, it's a commitment of 3-4 hours between driving, networking, program. I have to make sure that I get at least as much value from that 3-4 hours as I would from spending the same time using LinkedIn for Networking - and that's tough competition. Over the years, I've somewhat changed what I'm looking for when I attend a local event. It used to be that I first looked for good content. A program that had interesting speakers and where I expected to learn a lot. Now, unless its someone really great, I don't go because of the program. Most often I can spend 30 minutes on my own to get a better result in terms of content than I get from 60 minutes at an event. And most in-person events do not give you a back-channel or much opportunity for Q&A. Side note: I very much enjoy local events where I'm the moderator because then I do get to shape the topic to my interests. Obviously, if it's not content, then the key ingredient is who else is going to be in the room. Quick Decision Process I spend about 5-10 minutes deciding if I'm going to attend. The way I do this is simple. I try to find a list of people who are attending the event. Many events now publish the list such as the following: If they don't have a similar list and I can't find the event on Facebook or LinkedIn or somewhere else, then likely I won't attend. I've found that it suggests that it's not going to be a good group and I definitely won't be able to pre-network so even if it's a good group, it will be hard for me to get much value from the group. Using the list of attendees, I randomly sample 5-10 people. Actually, it's most often not random, I choose more people who have Profile Photos (but don't get me started on that). I choose people with names that are a bit more unique so that it will be more likely to find them on LinkedIn. I have the LinkedIn Browser Toolbar installed which gives me a right click action … So I can see a few mini-profiles: Okay, I won't be spending more time on this list and I won't be attending. No offense to attorneys and investment advisors, but the attendee list suggests this is general networking mixer and not likely worth the time investment. Side note: there generally is a high correlation between the people who have profile pictures on the site and the people who have profile photos on LinkedIn. If the results had been better, then I would have spent time drilling down on people like Lee: I don't know Lee, but by scrolling through his profile I can see some possibly interesting things to discuss. Does Browse My Stuff make sense from a channel marketing standpoint? What is happening from an eLearning 2.0 perspective around channel training? So, Lee and I could have a very nice conversation. Gee - maybe I should change my mind and plan to attend. I could go back and look for 4 or 5 other Lee quality people and decide to attend after all. Alternatively, I can reach out to Lee directly through LinkedIn and just set up a quick 30 minute call. In fact, that's what I will do after I'm done writing this post. And 95% likely that we'll talk within a few days. That's what makes it harder to convince me to go to a local event. But, let's assume that I was going to the event after all, then I would spend time on what I discussed on my Socal CTO blog in my post on Prenetworking. Pre-network the Event Assuming that I am seeing a few different Lee-quality people, then my next step is that I'm going to pre-network with them prior to the event. I try to do this roughly about 2-3 days ahead of the event. That way the list of people attending is fairly complete and there's still time for back and forth with the person. I will go through the list of attendees more thoroughly on this pass looking for anyone who I want to meet at the event. I look to find 5-8 people. You want to have a large enough list of people because some won't end up going and if you've committed to meeting someone at the event, you will end up going. And you could find yourself at an event waiting for that one person talking to attorneys and wealth planners. For each of those people on your pre-network list, you simply send a "Get Introduced Through a Connection" to them: It's nice that I have multiple people who can introduce us. It gives me a nice touch point with someone I already know. And they can vouch for me in the introduction. You don't get that when you are at the event. Then you compose your message. The nice thing is that the subject is easy - name the local event. My message to Lee would be very similar to what I'd say when I would meet him in person. Maybe something like: Hi Lee, I saw you on the attendee list for the upcoming event. I'm planning on going as well and it looks like we might have some good things to discuss. It looks like you have a background in eLearning and I'm going to be curious to hear how you are applying it for channel sales. I also have a technology that I think might apply in an interesting way. I just wanted to make the connection so that I'd be sure to meet up with you at the event. Tony You generally will get a very positive response to this kind of message and your time at the event will be much better because of the pre-network effort that you've put in. This technique equally applies to conferences and other kinds of events. Unfortunately, few conferences provide attendee lists. eLearning Technology Subscribe to the Best of eLearning Learning for updates from this blog and other eLearning blogs.

by Jennie Ruby    I often point out in my classes on writing eLearning voiceover scripts that a script is necessary so that when you record the audio you don't skip anything, don't stumble, and don't say "um." However, using a voiceover script for eLearning is way more useful than just that. Let's say for example that your eLearning project will be developed in Adobe Captivate. Captivate allows you to type--or copy and paste--the script into Slide Notes, similar to the slide notes you might be familiar with in PowerPoint. From there, you can use the notes in several different ways.  First, just as in PowerPoint, you can create handouts that print the Slide Notes along with an image of each slide, like this:  Second, if you are going to record the voiceover yourself, you can display the notes in the recording dialog box, like a miniature teleprompter, for your ease in recording the audio. At the bottom of the recording window, click the Captions & Slide Notes button to display the notes.   Third, if you are hiring voiceover talent to record the audio, you can provide the script to that professional, slide by slide, so that he or she can record the audio for each slide separately.  Then, fourth, once you either record the audio yourself or import the recordings from your voiceover talent, you may need closed captioning. Once you have pasted the voiceover script phrase by phrase into the Slide Notes pane, you can create the closed captioning just by clicking a check box.  And if you have accurately divided the script into phrases as shown above, it will automatically be synchronized with the audio. Below, you can see the yellow markers indicating the closed caption that goes with each audio segment.  Fifth, suppose instead of hiring voiceover talent and instead of recording the audio yourself, you decide to go with Text to Speech. Since Captivate comes with several high-quality computerized voices from NeoSpeech, this is a viable option. Just as with the closed captioning, creating the Text to Speech from the Slide Notes is very easy. In the Slide Notes pane, you click the TTS check box. Then you open the Speech Management dialog box, where the Slide Notes are automatically imported, click the Generate Text button at the bottom, and you've got your voiceover audio.  And as before, to get closed captions with that, you just click the Audio CC check box. Sixth, and finally, if you are creating accessible eLearning that is 508 compliant, then the final thing you can do from that one voiceover script is automatically import the Slide Notes to the Slide Accessibility dialog box. This contains the text to be read by screen readers, for those accessing the training through audio only.  So, let me count them up--yep, that would be six (6) ways to use a voiceover script to help in the development of eLearning with Adobe Captivate. By starting with a good voiceover script, you not only create a clear and well-planned audio, but you also save tons of work by using the script to automatically generate any or all of these aspects of your eLearning project. Are your scripts up to the task? Join me for my afternoon mini course on how to write a good voiceover script. ***Need more help with your script? Look for our hourly consulting service. We'll help you evaluate, substantively edit, or rewrite your voiceover script to make sure it is up to par.

by Kevin Siegel After producing your Camtasia projects, the net result is a collection of independent web files, scripts, videos and other assets. If you are looking to group multiple Camtasia projects together to create a single course, you'll need to upload the lessons to Screencast.com, YouTube, or a Learning Management System. But if you want to create a website that includes a menu of your lessons, you will need to get a webmaster involved... someone who can create a website that links to all of the produced files that make up your course.   If you don't have access to a webmaster, Camtasia MenuMaker will prove invaluable. MenuMaker packages documents, graphics, multimedia files and videos all into a single menu intended to be placed onto a CD-ROM, DVD or other type of drive.   Before creating a menu, produce two or more Camtasia projects as videos. To create a menu, open a Camtasia project and choose Tools > Studio tools > Camtasia MenuMaker. From within the MenuMaker Wizard, select Create a new project using the Wizard and click the OK button. Next you can choose a Template for your menu. After selecting a Template, click Next. Find and open your produced videos (in the image below, I've added three videos to my menu). On the final screen, give your menu a title and click Finish to create the menu. And that's it! Of course, if you want to control the look of the menu, there are plenty of things you can do to customize it... but that's a story for next week. *** If you'd like to learn more about eLearning, come hang out in my next eLearning basics mini course. And if you'd like to learn more Captivate, Presenter, or Storyline, we've got a great collection of live, online classes for you.

Great dialog between Harold Jarche and Stephen Downes around Harold's PKM process … Stephen Downes wrote in response: … what does the concept of a ‘method’ here imply? That there is a ‘best’ way to manage knowledge an information? Isn’t that what we’ve learned there isn’t? It’s a pick-and-choose sort of thing: the way we manage information has a lot to do with the information, and a lot to do with who we are and what we want the information for … Harold responded with Other PKM processes where he shows some other models and states: To be clear, my intention is to show what works for me and perhaps some part of this may work others. All of my articles on PKM are descriptive, not prescriptive. Take what you need, as there are no "best practices" for complex and personal learning processes. Harold and I have discussed this exact issue before and we are both on the same page that Personal is really important word in Personal Knowledge Management.  Studies of Personal Information Management say that what works is often highly personal.  However, a lot can be gained from sharing approaches and practices. Anyone who has seen me present know that I give a big caveat with the word Personal on the slide.  While I use the words, "you should" … what I mean is that "you should consider and maybe try" … not necessarily "you should adopt" …  What works for me, may or may not work for you. However, there are some people who take that to mean that they can be successful continuing to use the same approaches without being aware of, considering or trying alternatives.  That's a real mistake.  And Harold and Stephen are great at trying to provide ways to think about and think through these alternatives. So, while I push a lot around tools and methods for work and learning: Tool Set 2009 Work Skills Keeping Up Top-Down Strategy Better Memory Information Radar Processing Pages with Links Networks and Learning Communities Collaborate Twitter as Personal Work and Learning Tool Search Browser Short Cuts Pre-network with LinkedIn Network Skills LinkedIn Guide for Knowledge Workers Blog Learning and the list goes on. ( In fact, Work Literacy is pretty much this topic. ) This is a good opportunity to add the same caveat: The real intent is to provide context, alternatives and suggestions of where things might apply.  Your mileage will vary. eLearning Technology Subscribe to the Best of eLearning Learning for updates from this blog and other eLearning blogs.

View and download the webinar slides. View the webinar recording.   Try out BizLibrary's Online Library! BizLibrary provides 10,000+ training videos and eLearning courses in various business training topics, with new courses added every day.   How to Measure the Impact of Employee Soft Skills Training We know great "people skills" when we see them or experience them. However, soft skills don’t always lend themselves to easy measurement for excellence. Measure the business impact . . . Well, that’s just not something the ROI and traditional approaches to training investment don’t really help us do very effectively unless we dig deeper. Start measuring your soft skills training and download this eBook today.

I'm doing a free webinar in a few weeks where I will be discussing some of the major trends that are affecting models of learning.  I think this will be an interesting discussion and I welcome your participation. Models for Learning in a New World This is a very interesting time to be a learning professional. Fragmentation of jobs, increasing concept work, and constant change all put a premium on learning. At the same time, we are seeing an explosion of information sources, greatly increased accessibility of experts and expertise around the world, and new tools emerging every day. This environment means that workplace learning is changing. We have to look beyond formal learning solutions towards solutions that support self-directed and social learning. In this session, Dr. Karrer will discuss the big picture trends that are impacting workplace learning. He will present how learning solutions are evolving in organizations to meet changing needs. Holly and Monika will discuss a model for learning that integrates various learning strategies that combine formal, performance support and informal learning. Come join this interesting presentation and discussion around models for learning in a new world of learning. Presenters: Dr. Tony Karrer, TechEmpower, Inc. Holly St. John Peck, Peck Training Group, LLC Monika Ebert, Different Lens, LLC Date/Time: Tuesday, August 25th 10-11 AM Pacific, 1-2 PM Eastern, 5 PM GMT Register for the Webinar eLearning Technology Subscribe to the Best of eLearning Learning for updates from this blog and other eLearning blogs.

View and download the webinar slides. View the webinar recording.     Try out BizLibrary's Online Library! BizLibrary provides 10,000+ training videos and eLearning courses in various business training topics, with new courses added every day.   Succession Planning and the Development of Your High Potentials In this eBook we’ll cover both aspects and provide some practical suggestions for selecting the right participants and the development your high potential employees.

by Willam van Weelden   Merged help is the process of combining outputs from multiple RoboHelp projects into a single help system. While the content is created from multiple projects, your users see a single, integrated help system.Over the next couple of weeks I will teach you how to create merged help for several output formats. Since RoboHelp's layouts work differently, I will go over each layout in turn.  Why Merge Help? Generally speaking, if any of the following items are true in your environment, merging may be for you: You have a very large project (thousands of topics). Splitting the project into smaller projects may make maintenance easier. Multiple writers work on separate parts of the documentation and you don't have source control. Without source control, only a single author can work in a project at the same time. Having multiple smaller projects makes collaboration without source control easier. You need to update parts of the help separately from other parts. If you have a single project, you create an output for the entire project. You can publish only changed files, but you can't update only a single part. With merged help, you can. You have modules that are reused in different products. With merged help you maintain a single version, and reuse that. Which Outputs can I Merge? You can merge the following outputs: Adobe AIR Microsoft HTML Help (CHM) FlashHelp Multiscreen HTML5 Responsive HTML5 WebHelp Master Project and Child Projects When you merge help, you always have one master project and any number of child projects. The master project is the glue that holds everything together. When you generate your output, the master project makes sure that your help system is shown as an integrated whole. Your master project is a regular RoboHelp project. You can use any features you want in the master project. Merged Microsoft HTML Help Generate a CHM file for every child project. (Using the Single Source Layouts pod, generate Microsoft HTML Help.) Then open the project that is to be the master project.Open the layout's table of contents and click New Merged Project. On the HTML Help tab, click the browse button (the yellow folder) and open the CHM file of the child project you published. Click Yes when prompted. Click the OK button to merge the CHM file. The child project will appear in the Master project's TOC.  Save your project and generate the layout.     All that's left to do is deliver both CHM files as your help system.Whenever the child project changes, generate the CHM from the child project. Replace the CHM in the master project directory and generate your master project. You can also replace the child project CHM in the output directly.   *** Looking to learn RoboHelp? We offer a live, two-day online RoboHelp class once a month. Feel free to contact us to learn other ways to meet your RoboHelp training requirements.

Have you ever wanted to have a single list of the various free webinars brought together in a single place?   In conjunction with eLearning Learning, we are working with Jon Udell (thanks Jon) to use his calendar aggregation technology to bring together a list of free webinars that we believe will be of interest to learning professionals. Free eLearning Webinars Let me know if you think this will be valuable.  Integrated with Best of eLearning Learning We are planning to include events that are coming up in the Best of eLearning Learning each week.  We just did exactly that for the post: Learning Management Systems Flash Technology - Best of eLearning Learning where we listed three upcoming webinars.  Hopefully another reason to subscribe to the best of eLearning Learning. Get the Word Out Hopefully this can grow to address both sides of this need - consumers and producers.  As a consumer, I seem to randomly run into webinars like you probably did when I just announced: Free Webinar - Models for Learning in a New World.  Because they hit me somewhat randomly, I most often don't schedule it into my calendar at that time.  I know that I'll make a decision later about the event. As a producer, I know that getting the word out on a webinar can be very difficult.  I will publish the information about the webinar I just mentioned on my blog, but that hits exactly the same audience.  I will tweet about it.  Hopefully a few people will Retweet.  But it doesn't reach all that wide.  I'm hoping that this will become a good way for producers to get the word out.  By the way, if you are producing events that will be of interest to a learning professionals audience, then drop me an email. Thoughts and Ideas We are just beginning this process.  We have some ideas on where this will go and how to make it better, but I would really like to get your input. Is this a good idea? What can we do to make this better? eLearning Technology Subscribe to the Best of eLearning Learning for updates from this blog and other eLearning blogs.

Download the webinar slides. View the webinar recording.   Try out BizLibrary's Online Library! BizLibrary provides 10,000+ training videos and eLearning courses in various business training topics, with new courses added every day.   Succession Planning and the Development of Your High Potentials In this eBook, we will provide some practical suggestions for selecting the right participants and the development of your high potential employees.

by Sally Cox   I create all my graphics for my eLearning courses in Adobe Illustrator. I try to draw everything myself but also refine stock vector art when I am in a rush. My Illustrator files have a lot of artboards and they can get out of order easily. Let me show you how to rearrange your Artboards to help keep you sane and organized.   When you create a New Document in Illustrator, there is an option to add more than one Artboard. Two or more Artboards gives you more options.   Next to the number of Artboards are four icons and an arrow. The four icons give you options to arrange your Artboards. I usually leave it on the first option, which will arrange them from left to right and add rows going down. I also recommend adding to the Spacing (area between Artboards).     Artboard Tool   When you want to edit or add new Artboards, use the Artboard Tool (Shift O).   Here's an example of what one of my files looks like. Okay, I admit I haphazardly add Artboards and they do get out of order. When you choose the Artboard Tool, the current Artboard gets a bold dashed line around it.     The Artboard I currently have selected with the Artboard Tool is highlighted with a bold dashed border. Drag the handles to resize the Artboard, select the Trash Can on the options (at the top of your screen) to delete an Artboard. There are icons to add new or rename Artboards, change x and y positioning, and adjust width and height, among others. Hover over the icon to learn its function.     One final step with Artboards is the Artboard Panel (which provides an easy way to reorder and rename Artboards). You will find the Artboards Panel in the Windows menu.        In the image above I am renaming my Artboards to make it easier to navigate through them.

The Business of Learning (see Free Online Conference - Future of Learning with Recordings Here) event went really well. One of the really interesting ideas came from Allessandria Polizzi who is Group Manager for Accountant Training & Relations at Intuit. Her role is to make sure that accountants are trained on the Quickbook products. You can see Allessandria at 21:30 of the following video: If you have problem seeing the video you can view them here as well.Intuit used to produce the content themselves, but they have transitioned to hiring their Accountants (their customers) to produce the training content for them. This includes a varied mix of solutions - webinars, seminars, self-paced eLearning. One of the examples of how they did this was to give the Accountants camcorders and software (along with training) so that they could produce small training pieces. One example that she mentions is a video piece on mobile access showing how they can access client information from the beach via a mobile device.There are 100 accountants who produce training for them as compared to 12 in her organization. These accountants are experts in using their software. They add legitimacy to the content. Many of these accountants already provided training to their end customers, so providing training to other accountants was an easy extension. It's an interesting idea and something that can be applied in many other domains. While this is similar to having SMEs produce the content - I think that Intuit takes it a bit further with how they are engaging and paying them. They also audition/test their customers. They spread the work pretty wide. eLearning Technology Subscribe to the Best of eLearning Learning for updates from this blog and other eLearning blogs.

View and download the webinar slides.     Try out BizLibrary's Online Library! BizLibrary provides 10,000+ training videos and eLearning courses in various business training topics, with new courses added every day.   How to Measure the Impact of Employee Soft Skills Training We know great "people skills" when we see them or experience them. However, soft skills don’t always lend themselves to easy measurement for excellence. Measure the business impact . . . Well, that’s just not something the ROI and traditional approaches to training investment don’t really help us do very effectively unless we dig deeper. Start measuring your soft skills training and download this eBook today.

by Jennie Ruby If you've tried Adobe Presenter with Video Express, you are probably aware that you can create a video of yourself as you present your PowerPoint slides, and then display either yourself, your slides, or both in the published project. However, a well-kept secret is that Video Express actually enables you to take a simultaneous video of yourself and anything you have on your computer screen--it doesn't have to be PowerPoint slides.Here's an example: I needed to show a few different functions in Word 2013. I'm creating an update lesson, not a full how-to video. I want to be able to list the changes in 2013 from the 2010 version of the software, and show just a quick mini-vid of things that have been changed.First, I turn on Video Express independently of PowerPoint and Presenter. (On my Windows 8 touch-screen machine, I went to the Start screen and tapped the Video Express icon. You can start your copy of Video Express just as you would start any application.)Next I created a script (you can't do anything without a step-by-step script, and possibly a voiceover script to go with it), and opened my target application, Word 2013, in maximized view. Video Express is automatically set to capture the entire screen.From the task bar, I retrieve Video Express, and hit the Create New Project button. I ignore the fact that my video camera is now showing my face--I'm not going to display that aspect of the video in my end product. No need for lighting, makeup, etc. on this one!I click the Record button. Video Express disappears, a count-down from 5 to 1 rolls, and consulting my script, I take a live video of some screen actions, narrating as I go. When I've finished the steps, I hit the stop recording short-cut key combo, Shift-End. My video opens in Editing view.At the bottom of the screen, I click the Presentation Only tool. Now the published output will display only the screen actions, and not my face, but my audio narration will play throughout.Since the video was shot with Word maximized, I click the Pan & Zoom tool at a crucial point along the timeline. Then I adjust the Pan and Zoom to focus on the part of the screen that is of interest. Later along the timeline, I could choose to zoom back out, but that is not needed for my project.Finished with editing, I go to the lower right corner of the Editing screen, and click Publish. From the options displayed, I choose Export to PowerPoint. I've decided to create a slide show of the Microsoft Word updates, with a mini-video of each change. After some processing, PowerPoint opens with my inserted video ready to go on a new slide. I'll add an intro slide and explanatory slides along with additional slides showing my other mini-videos. Now I can save my project, then use Adobe Presenter to publish it as one continuous movie, with my embedded videos playing automatically in between explanatory slides. Sweet!So okay, I did end up using PowerPoint and Adobe Presenter along with Video Express after all, but that combo was just what I needed for this hybrid project.Want more on Video Express? Sign up for my Video Express mini course for just $79, and you'll be ready to make expert videos after just one afternoon session!

by Kevin Siegel    Over the years I've had more than a few eLearning development clients ask us to create links to web resources on a slide. There's more than one way to accomplish the task. Over the next couple of weeks I'll discuss some of my favorite techniques. Up first, text hyperlinks. To create a text hyperlink, select some text (the text can be contained within a text caption or a smart shape). Then, on the Properties Inspector, select the Style tab. From the Character area, click the Insert Hyperlink tool.      From the Link To drop-down menu, choose Web Page. Next, type a web address into the field.   Prior to clicking the OK button, visit the drop-down menu to the right of the web address. I think it's a good idea to select New from the list of options. (This will ensure that the page that appears after the learner clicks is a new page or tab, rather than a page that replaces the current lesson.)       When previewed in a web browser, the text hyperlink will look similar to the image below. If clicked, the learner will be taken to the web address you specified in the Link To area.        Should you change your mind about the text hyperlink, removing the link is as simple as selecting the text and, back on the Properties Inspector, clicking the Remove Hyperlink tool.     *** If you'd like to learn more about eLearning, come hang out in my next eLearning basics mini course. And if you'd like to learn more Captivate, Presenter, or Storyline, we've got a great collection of live, online classes for you. See also: Object Hyperlinks