Helpful ideas. Squeaky value.
Helpful ideas. Squeaky value.
Everything about creating online training and courses, from the thinking behind good instruction to the tools and tricks used to build it.
The client approved the course, and it's ready to upload. But who's distributing it, who's checking if it works, and who's keeping it current six months from now? These questions are easier to answer before launch than after.
A lot of drag and drop problems come from decisions that weren't made before building started. Knowing your interaction type, how you'll mark targets, and how you'll give feedback will save you a lot of rework.
Most compliance training is designed around assumptions about what regulations require, not what the regulations actually say. Here's how to build something better.
Ask a client what "interactive" means and you'll get answers like hover effects and animated buttons. Those matter, but they're only half the picture. True interactivity happens in two places: on the screen and inside the learner's head.
Before you build another course, figure out the objective it's supposed to meet. Here's how to stop starting with the solution and get better training results.
Copying another developer's work and calling it your own can quietly damage your career. The good news is there's a better path. Here's a three-step process for turning inspiration into skills that belong to you.
Last week I had a kidney infection that almost put me out for good. Stuck in bed with nothing to do but think, I reflected on three things about how people learn. They changed how I approach every course I build.
When a course has nothing to do with what learners face at work, they disengage. Building engagement isn't about adding more interactivity. It's about making the content matter.
A well-designed course isn't enough on its own. Learning requires the person taking the course to actually want to engage. Here are three things you can do to build that motivation into your design.
Most compliance training is about certifying exposure to content, not changing behavior. But there's a performance angle buried in many of these courses. Knowing the difference shapes your design choices from the start.
A manager once told me the people who designed his company's e-learning were "e-learning fascists." He wasn't wrong. Locking navigation doesn't solve the underlying problem. Here's what does.
Most e-learning is built as a one-shot event. The problem is that people learn constantly, not just when they're in a course. Here's how to build a strategy that works with those 2000 learning hours.
Most e-learning problems start before anyone opens an authoring tool. The questions you ask at the beginning shape everything that follows. Here's a practical checklist for getting an e-learning project off on the right foot.
Not all images help learners. Some get in the way. Research shows that decorative images can actually make learning harder. Here's how to choose images that pull their weight.
After sharing a Rise interactive scenario demo, I got a lot of questions about how the graphics were built. The headers, flashcard images, and character graphics all came from PowerPoint. This post walks through the exact workflow, including how to set slide sizes and export images for Rise blocks.