I’ve been creating videos for quite some time now. I’ve started making public video tutorials about 5 years ago in screenr but [...]

Hi folks, I created a simple animated menu that a user can open via the ‘sandwich’ icon which you see more and [...]

This post is a translation from the article that was published by the Dutch re-seller of Articulate software: The Courseware Company. In [...]

Hi folks, Here’s a new interaction I put together. This one is based on the Bulletin Board interaction you can find in [...]

In a recent Articulate e-learning challenge we were asked to create interactive charts, graphs and tables as these are easily the most overlooked [...]

How to increase the traffic to my personal blog? That was the question that had me going for quite some time. I [...]

Today I bumped into a featured Articulate Storyline2 template that Nicole Legault created. It’s a really nice and simple way so share [...]

The past month I’ve been participating in a twitter draw-a-thon organized by Blair Rorani. Every day, for 15 days, Blair gave an [...]

Last year we faced a horrible Ebola outbreak. The Articulate community responded with an awesome challenge: Design a learning interaction around the [...]

As part of the ongoing Articulate e-Learning Heroes challenges David Anderson asked to record a Podcast or Vodcast explaining how we we [...]

When you’re creating courses using Articulate Studio or Storyline you’ve got a very effective and highly customizable pre-built player available. It allows [...]

A little while ago Blair Rorani started a Twitter drawathon to get people excited about his new book Everybody draw now in which [...]

Have you ever watched a screencast video where you where thinking "What the heck am I looking at?!". The items on the [...]

Today I’ve uploaded my first entry to the 2015 Articulate Guru awards. The Guru awards are hosted by Articulate and are open [...]

Hey Everyone, In this post I’ll share how you can add that little extra to your project by animating your buttons. In [...]

Inspire and Motivate with Video The two areas that most organizations use video in the talent management life cycle is to educate and teach. While these are great things to do and we fully support them, there’s a couple other areas I think organizations can use video to get more out of their people: 1. Inspiration There’s a unbelievable example from Dove about "real dad moments" that has received over 11 million hits on YouTube  the video says nothing about their products or services, they just inspire dads to be thankful for the gift that we’ve been given and it makes us want to be a better dads.  If I am an employee that works for Dove, there is no question I am more inspired to work for the company that employs me. Check out the video below and feel free to share it within your organization. 2. Motivation There’s Tony Robbins and a plethora of other motivational speakers out there who speak at conferences or sign books for employees.   Of course these men and women can be a little corny at times but they are great at what they do and people need motivation.  Even the best athletes in the world need jolts of motivation when they don’t feel like practicing.  Employees need the same thing! Some days we need a bolt of energy and passion from someone other than our boss. (they might even have the opposite effect) Get someone in your organization a curate motivational content from places like Youtube or Vimeo. Then share a daily, weekly or monthly motivational video across the organization.  I promise it will help move the needle for a short period of time.   Check out an example motivational video below you could share within your organization. Keep the use of video in mind what you are looking to inspire and motivate your employees in the future.

The Changing Face of eLearning: Model Restaurants There’s no doubt about it - corporate HR and Training managers are focused on training.  According to Josh Bersin the training industry as a whole grew 15% this year and it will continue to grow even more in the coming years.  With all the focus on training, the question we most often get is:  "How do we make sure our eLearning initiatives are successful?"  I compare successful eLearning initiatives to restaurants. 9 out of 10 restaurants fail in their first year. We can model the behaviors of the 10 percent of successful restaurants when looking at ways to improve our eLearning initiatives. I’ve pinpointed these three areas:  Location, Location, Location. Location is vitally important.  There isn’t a successful restaurant owner in the world who doesn’t scope out real estate locations. Many chain restaurants spend millions of dollars to find the right locations to increase the probably of success.  eLearning is no different.  You must have a GREAT location to house eLearning that invites the learner in, makes it easy to get to, and doesn’t recall bad eLearning experiences, because we have all had them. According to Bersin 61% of companies plan to replace their Learning Management System (LMS) in the next 18 months. Why? Because technology is a huge factor in the success or failure of corporate learning in the future.  Content- The quickest way to ensure people don’t come back to your restaurant is to serve bad food.  The restaurants I frequent serve food that makes my mouth water just thinking about it. The same goes with creating eLearning. If content is created with the best tools (ingredients), by great chefs (content developers and contributors), the probability of engagement becomes exponentially higher.  As a best practice, use video to align with todays trends and technology.  Service. In order for a restaurant to have long-term success, the staff is a critical component.  Even the best meals in the world can be ruined by bad service.  eLearning needs company executives, managers, and employees to engage and promote to ensure its success.  This can come in the form of executive sponsorship, social interaction at the end of courses, video feedback, or user generated success examples. Putting these Ideas to Work Don’t let your next training initiative be like the 90 percent of restaurants that fail. Before you build or rebuild eLearning, consider your location, the quality of your content, and how you’re going to get support from your team members.

Make a HUGE Impact with Microlearning Microlearning is quickly becoming a trend in the training industry. At WeSkill, we built our new Learning Engagement Platform around video-based microlearning. Microlearning videos and mobile learning go together like chocolate and peanut butter, peas and carrots, Hoda and Kathie Lee, Zach and Screech… you get the point. By our definition, microlearning is bite-sized content a learner can consume in 5 minutes or less. Added video to the mix and you get learning that engages and can be taken at the pivotal moment when the learner actually needs it. Here are 3 tips that will help you make a huge impact with microlearning videos: 1. Limit yourself to one learning objective per video. We like to focus on the WHY or the HOW or answering one specific question. Often times course creators want to add more and more content. People are smart and we need to start thinking of them that way. If they want more information, they will seek it out. Microlearning is about discovery and self-paced learning. It’s not a check-the-box type of solution. 2. Keep your scripts under 500 words. As a rule of thumb, every 120 words equals one minute of video. If you can achieve your learning objective in 300 words, even better. If you find yourself going over 500 words, go back to your learning objective and ask yourself if you could break the objective down even further. If it’s not the learning objective, get an editor to help you trim the fat. 3. Be Visual. No matter how engaging your content may be, if your video is just a talking head, you will loose your audience way before the one-minute mark. If you’re not demonstrating something in front of the camera, use cutaway shots or b-roll, build graphics, use still images, and add text to create visual interest and support learning. You don’t want to overly stimulate learners, so make sure your visuals are well thought out and enhance to the learning experience. Microlearning may be new to your organization, but it certainly is the future of corporate training. Email me at christina@weskill.com if you have a question about creating microlearning videos or to request a free consultation.

Microlearning Experiences: The Future of Professional Education The world of professional education is in the midst of the biggest transition in MY lifetime. We’re moving from a world of highly produced (costly), time-consuming, top-down, check the box training and towards Microlearning. We define Microlearning as quick, short educational experiences driven by the learner. What’s powering this movement? It’s a cheaper, faster, more effective way to produce the desired results. The top three things that drive successful Microlearning experiences are: 1. Alignment. Today’s professional learner have an average attention span of approximately 10 minutes. With this knowledge, we can see what’s currently going on in most organizations isn’t going to stick. An average webinar is 6 times the average attention span. Not to mention, an eLearning course that clocks in at 24 times longer and then there’s the multi-day in-person courses. I’ll let you do the math on that one. The point is, it’s critical to keep the length of content within a learner’s attention span. If you can get your content across in under half the time (5 minutes or less), you’ll have the highest potential for success. 2. Engagement. Engagement is a huge part of the learner experience. My favorite way to get learners engaged is through social learning. What’s interesting is you don’t have to recreate Facebook to be a part of social learning. It’s as simple as allowing learners to see who has taken a course and sharing how they’ve put ideas from the educational material into action in the real world. All of a sudden you have knowledge transfer taking place from the content and their peers! 3. Results.  I know it’s all about the results so the question is "Did anyone really learn?" To answer this question, learners need to be able to do or apply what was taught. And they need to be able to show how they do it. Microlearning experiences are the future (or the now) of professional education because those great experiences allow for new ways to measure results. Think about a learner uploading a video of themselves (right from their mobile device) doing a task to prove they’re able to apply concepts.  Certainly every piece of educational content won’t have this potential payoff at the end so it’s critical that the learner be able to get back to this content right when they need it. Going 10 clicks deep into an LMS or CRM just isn’t going to cut it. When you bring alignment, engagement and results together with amazing Microlearning experiences, everyone wins. Want to check out Microlearning experiences at no cost? Email us at social@weskill.com    

Why Microlearning is "Hot" in Professional Education I hate to admit it but I am one of the majority of Americans that now spend approximately 14 hours of their day consuming media. I check social media and catch up on email in the morning, read educational articles on LinkedIn, tweet and watch videos throughout the day at work, and catch a little TV at night. But I have noticed an emerging trend in my media consumption - I want my content in small, bite-sized pieces that get to the point quickly.  This is exactly why "Microlearning" is hot in the professional education world. Microlearning is all about aligning with today’s short attention span learner. For those of you who aren’t familiar Microlearning is defined as "Small, specific bursts of content that ensure knowledge is transferred in a visible, tangible, and/or measurable way." Since most scientist agree that 75% of learning happens visually here is an example of what effective Microlearning looks like:     If you want to make great Microlearning, ensure your initiative has: A Hook. Creating a hook is an excellent way to position the learning objectives and drum up interest. For some subjects this can be done through something as simple as a catchy title and a description that sells the content. The most important part about a hook is your ability to understand your learners and their "why" for taking your training. A Microlearning Asset that Accomplishes 3 Keys. Regardless of what your learning objective is, these components will ensure knowledge is transferred. (At WeSkill, our medium of choice is video.) One learning objective per asset Stories, mnemonic devices, and/or lists that make content relatable and memorable A time limit of 5 minutes of less. If you’re writing a video script, use our baseline measure of 600 or less words. (The average person delivers 120 words per minute on video.) The Ability to Measure Knowledge Transfer. Effective Microlearning ensures knowledge is transferred in a visible, tangible, or measurable way. You can use traditional ways of measuring knowledge transfer (multiple-choice questions) or more advanced methods, like requiring learners to respond with video, pictures, completed documents or engage with the content. Try these 3 ideas out when making your own microlearning or reach out to us and we will see how we can help!  You can see the steps we go though at WeSkill in this quick 1 minute video.

Be Innovative in the Way You Educate and Engage Talent There is a big black cloud quickly moving in on companies all over the world.  As most would expect, it has something to do with the device you have pulled out of your pocket 150 times already today.  Organizations may think that they can avoid the storm moving in their direction by going mobile with their technologies.  Unfortunately, that is not enough to keep this force of nature at bay.  This storm consists of millions of millennials moving into the workforce, and they are coming in big waves.  "Over 75 percent of the global workforce will be millennials by 2025…" Projections of the labor workforce 2050 These talented people are more comfortable with technology than any generation before them.  The smartphone has evolved with them through childhood; the tablet is a tool used not just for recreation but required for education; and social networking is the number one way that these millennials know how to communicate. However, along with their highly sought-after technology skills, Millennials tend to be loyal to brands, not companies. The thought of staying with the same company for 35 years is as foreign to them as sourcing information from a printed encyclopedia or buying a CD at Best Buy. This way of thinking presents a new problem for organizations - high turnover. "91% expect to stay in a job for less than three years…the average cost to replace each millennial employee is $24,000." Job-hopping… Forbes Adding to this problem is the fact that high performing Generation X and Baby Boomers with years of experience have either already retired or are quickly moving in that direction. The reality is organizations aren’t going to move the needle by putting stale Power Point presentations or instructor-led training materials in a Learning Management System, on SharePoint, or on the Wiki. It’s important to remember when thinking about the way content is presented and created: The human brain can process 275 words per minute in written form, and it can only hear 150 words per minute The average attention span of the Millennial generation is 90 seconds, so the first 7 seconds is critical At the end of the day we are in a results-driven world where the people want to feel as though the content they consume is improving them professionally.  Think of our personal lives…we seek and consume information not just to educate ourselves, but also to entertain and enhance our minds. In order to keep up, organizations must be innovative in the way they educate and engage talent.

4 Reasons the Modern Learner Hates Your Training I remember a time when I thought social networking was a fad and smartphones would never get better than the Palm Pilot Treo. How great was that phone? As things do, technology evolved since then. Technology has and will continue to impact the way people learn - and ultimately, the way we teach them. Out of the primordial ooze of web-based and Flash-based training has emerged a new, more advanced learner, something we’re calling (insert booming voice a la James Earl Jones) the MODERN LEARNER. There are many new evolutionary differences you’ll see in today’s modern learner, but here are the top 4 reasons they hate your current training: They are Social. Social in terms of communicating and collaborating with each other - online, more than in-person. Social networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and Periscope have changed the game when it comes to the way people learn, consume content, and share ideas. Learners are accessing these networks not only be connect with others, but also to improve job performance. At Google, 55% of training courses are delivered by an ecosystem of 200+ peer learners. They are Extremely Visual. My world was rocked by Tesia Marsik in her recent TedX talk titled "Learning Styles and the Important of Self Reflection" Tesia makes a strong case for the fact that learning styles don’t even exist and we have been fooled for years. While I am mostly convinced, the boom of video and that fact that only 10% of Heard Information is retained after 3 days, and as much as 65% is retained when visuals are added makes for a powerful case that visuals improve knowledge retention regardless if you believe in learning styles or not. They are Impatient. Today’s learners are accustomed to getting the knowledge they need in an instant with a quick search on Google or Wikipedia. A recent study shows that in 1985 an employee needed as much as 75% of knowledge in their brain in order to do their job. Today it’s below 8%. Today’s learner doesn’t necessarily have to master a skill (as they would in the past) but they just need to be able to pull applicable information right at the time they need it. They are Mobile. For the first time in world history, the #1 device people used to access the Internet was mobile. 51% of Internet access was made from a mobile device and this stat is only going to increase! People want to and MUST to be able to learn from the devices they carry with them. Since 37% of the global workforce is going to be mobile by the end of this year, delivering training content to mobile is no longer optional, it’s a requirement. If your organization wants to align with today’s modern learner, you too must evolve the way you think about and deliver training. Change is difficult, but the impact of not evolving could have catastrophic results. The most important thing to remember is the learner. If you can transfer knowledge to them the way they want to learn, everyone wins! If you want to stay in the loop about innovative online learning ideas, specifically Microlearning. Sign up for our weekly newsletter CLICK HERE.

Content from the nowcomms.com: the B2B marketing company for tech busineses in education, sports, security & ID. See the full story here How to win a business Oscar Eddie Redmayne, Michael Keaton and Julianne Moore might have make the business of award winning look easy, but as the marketers amongst us know too well, the media machines behind the big studios they work for have been beavering away in the background for months to make sure it was their talent that was treading the red carpet at Sunday night’s Oscars ceremony. The rules in Hollywood are exactly the same as the rules in business, so as the movie world’s rich and famous recover post the infamous awards parties, we’re taking a behind the scenes look at how to play the recognition game in your industry. You’ve got to be in it to win it: most companies don’t win awards because most companies don’t enter them Reese Witherspoon didn’t get nominated for best actress by being coy and anyone who’s actually seen Wild (right to the end) is unlikely to need any convincing that some kind of marketing magic must be going on in the background when it comes to getting shortlisted for the Oscars. In business, just like in the movies, it pays to airbrush out the negatives and accentuate the positives. Truth is, most companies don’t win awards because most companies don’t enter. And even if they do, most entries fall at the first hurdle because they’ve been put together too hastily by insiders with too little commitment. After all, even the most exceptional business achievements look a little ragged round the edges when you’re working on them 9 to 5 day after day, month after month. Playing to win at the awards game Over lengthy applications offering every minute detail of a company’s achievement without actually panning out to look at the big picture is the most frequently voiced gripe of the judges we talk to about the businesses they evaluate for awards and recognition. Rather than being crisp and to the point, complex difficult to read applications quickly force judges to adopt tight elimination processes before actually getting down to the real work of evaluation. Applications so "innovative" that the allotted space on the form needs to be supplemented with reams of additional (un-requested) support material are unlikely to dazzle. Similarly submissions littered with footnotes promising that the case study, product examples or customer endorsements necessary for consideration will be" mailed under separate cover ASAP" will find their way to the shredder in minutes. Here’s our top tips list for getting on the shortlist See yourself on the podium: Rule number one is easy. Before you even start your application, use the sports psychology tactics that got Lizzy Yarnold Britian’s first Olympic medal on snow this winter. If you visualise your company as an award winning business before you pick up the pen, your application will be streets ahead of most of the competition. Get a bid team together: The best applications take time and effort. To treat the task with the respect it deserves you’ll need a crack team of committed colleagues. Allocate key aspects of the application process to key players, making sure that all the bases are covered. If case studies are to support the bid, make sure you submit the best freshest examples available. If sales statistics or business growth evidence is required make sure you’re delivering exactly what was asked for by the award organisers. And put one of your best administrators on the case too. You won’t believe how may awards are lost because the application is lost under in the CEO’s "to do" tray! Track your progress: Completing your paperwork and getting it in the mail is the beginning, not the end, of an award winning application strategy. Calling the organisers to see how your bid is progressing will make you look keen rather pushy and, if you’re not short listed you’ll at least deserve some personal help and advice that’s likely to become invaluable next time round. Play the numbers game: Ever noticed how companies either win lots of awards all the time or never win any? Putting together winning bids is a major resource outlay and putting all your eggs in one basket just doesn’t justify the effort. A good bid team will pull together a hot list of awards they want on to see in the corporate trophy cabinet and repurpose materials to suit multiple applications. As Helen Mirren will testify, having an Oscar on the living room mantelpiece might be the holy grail of movie making achievement, but a BAFTA still makes a pretty respectable table feature. See the full story How to win a business Oscar

What’s the difference between the people who access the online learning content you create and the people who visit your company website? It’s a pretty simple question really but it’s one that many marketers in eLearning, training and HR seem to sidestep. To illustrate the answer, we’d like you to imagine one stick and one carrot. Now, while most of the cool interactive stuff you use to create really compelling learning content certainly does need to be demonstrated on the company website, the key thing to remember is that your prospects and customers can’t be prodded with the stick, they need to be coaxed with the carrot. If we build it they will come - won’t they? Learning tech websites need to educate less and sell more. When we write this all out in black and white it looks painfully obvious, yet time and again, one of the main weaknesses we see in the company websites hovering on the wrong side of this industry’s top 100 highest rankers, is a misguided assumption that if you build a great looking site, customers and prospect will come. These sites can be compelling, engaging, rich in flash, video and other highly interactive content, but they fall down because they lack the essential inbound marketing tactics that online lead-nurturing and customer conversions depend on. But how can an industry so skilled in the art of educating people in the workplace via the internet, ever misfire when it comes to engaging with prospects via the company website? After all it’s just a case of educating customers about your products and services, right? Having put the marcomms tactics of the top 100 ranking websites under the microscope this January, we’ve come up with a theory on this (this is where you need the stick and the carrot). From the boardroom to the course designers, coders and developers that actually make eLearning, the vast majority of people in this industy really get the importance of compelling interactive content: these are the things that make learning immersive, enjoyable, effective and successful. But, outside of the marketing department, what many in this industry don’t get quite so readily, is the importance of the search, social and other inbound marketing basics that people like us depend on. Tactics that encourage inbound communications aren’t in the DNA of the wider business because the courses that training companies create are usually commissioned for a pre-defined, guaranteed audience. Almost inevitably, the audience for eLearning content can be effectively corralled. Whether it’s a gentle prod from the HR department or a sugar coated compliance condition in the job spec, your average audience for eLearning is ultimately coerced into engaging with online content using interruptive tactics that marketing people like us would kill for. Understanding this point is important for almost every marketer working in eLearning because rolling out promotional campaigns in today’s tough business environment usually means recruiting skills from internal designers, coders and developers who are much more familiar with what’s required for a successful eLearning product than they are with what’s required for a successful inbound marketing campaign. Over the course of the past months, projects like our eLearning, Training and HR Marketers Spending Review or the Top 100 Highest Rankers Chart have helped us gather the thoughts of marketers in this sector. As far as we can see, marketers in this industry do start out with well rounded campaign briefs that consider the need for inbound, search and social-based marcomms, but sustaining these elements becomes difficult if campaign briefs are fed into a web development machine that is, understandably, optimised to produce the great eLearning that is the lifeblood of the wider business. Here are some of the most likely casualties: 1. Meta tags that matter: It’s been ages since Google took any notice of meta "keywords" but that doesn’t mean that some of the other meta tags aren’t still important. The "title" (70 characters max) and "description" (160 characters max) tags are really important because they show up in Google search results, but in more than a quarter of the sites we’ve studied, one or both of these tags are either not present or they fail to adequately describe the products or services on offer. Since students don’t usually find the courses they need via Google, it would seem that meta tags are often extremely low priority for course designers. As a result, they are often little more than an afterthought for internal developers who are asked to assist in the production of online marketing. The worst examples we’ve seen are title tags like "Company XX: we have a catchy slogan but it doesn’t really capture what we do concisely", or "Company Y: we’re an awards winning company". Google’s index (usually) hates catchy slogans and customers rarely ever search for "award winning suppliers". Much better examples are things like Articulate’s "E-Learning Software and Authoring Tools" or (perhaps even better) Skillsoft’s "E-Learning for Business Skills & IT Certification", where the title includes lots of words that potential customers are likey to use in search. Jump over to our most recent Top 100 ranking websites in eLearning and learning technology and study the descriptions listed for each company under the "their place in the space" column.  This isn’t how we chose to categorise these companies, it’s how they describe themselves in their own description meta tags on their sites.  The best ones always take a simple "it says what it does on the tin" approach. 2. Keyword research: Another SEO basic that often falls down the void in eLearning, training and HR marketing is careful adoption and ongoing use of properly researched keywords and phrases. The search engines have sussed out all cheap tricks like keyword stuffing or cloaking and these days good keyword research is all about integrating key phrases sensitively into good, sharable content. Keyword research and implementation would normally occur sometime after the marketing department has created copy for a new product or service and before the web designer turns this copy into an online promotion. Its effect on the tone and message communicated in the copy may be minimal (for instance, good keyword research may ascertain that a company offer for "serious games" has much more chance of success if it opts to use the key phrase "business simulations") but its impact on a promotion’s success can be immense. Closing the skills gap on keyword research can be more difficult internally but if external help is not an option, there’s plenty of decent software available out there, and most of it goes some way towards sparking up a keyword strategy. Two really useful FireFox plug-ins to help with SEO are: KGEN - which displays the strongest keywords on any web page (IE: run competitors that you think are doing a decent job through KGEN to get an idea of the kind of vocab that works well for them) and Keyword Spy SEO/PCC - which allows you to search behind adwords on Google to see which keywords are driving the ads insertions. Basic versions of both of these are free. 3. Localisation: Typically, when a busines works out of several regions, marketers need to devise strategies that allow consumers in one country to access specific content (for instance, at the moment, it’s a good idea for a UK-based learning and training company to promote any credentials and products it has for the health sector or the NHS, but if the same company sells into the US market, it would probably want to promote any credentials it had in defence (see our SEO in elearning story if you’d like to know why). When search and social marketing experts think about doing this kind of localisation, they instinctively take into account the weak spots that may arise when a company’s web presence needs to be accessible to multiple cultures in multiple countries (Essentially all interactions from anyone anywhere should be leveraged to help build global authority online). This does not happen if a company’s site in, say, the UK, is hosted and managed independently of its sister site in, say, the US. This type of regionalised, but separate approach is currently the main reason why many Pan-European or global providers in eLearning, training and HR have high ranking websites in one country, but very low ranking sites in another. Staying the course can be tricky It’s not that marketers in this industry don’t set out to produce search and socially optimised company websites - they do. It’s just that staying the course can be tricky when the tune you’re asking folks to sing to is in a different key to the one they’re most used to. But since few of the companies we want to sell to are likely to make visiting our sites a compliance point for their training managers and directors anytime soon, we’re going to have to rely on the staples of content and relevance marketing to get us noticed for the foreseeable future.