Create a Digital Display Board using PowerPoint 2007

Given below is a demonstration video on how I created a Digital Display Board (as shown above) using PowerPoint 2007. Hope you like this.



You may download the PowerPoint file if required and use/share as you like.

Learning Theories in Instructional Design

I remember the poems and the rhymes I learnt when I was a kid. What about the Physics, Literature and History lessons I learnt later? Well...I remember some of them. In fact I remember the 'If' loops and the 'While' loops of C++ language which I studied when I was 16 years old. But I do not remember the integration and differentiation concepts of Maths, which I studied in the same year (even though Maths was one of my favorite subjects).

Looking back, its quite interesting to analyze how our memory works. What do we retain and what do we discard? Its probably related to the 'way' we learn. I am not sure if 'learn' is the right word. Because I never 'learnt' my birthday. But I would never ever forget it. Phew...!!! Learning is quite a complex process.

And to become an effective instructional designer, I believe we should put an effort to think about how people learn, how do they memorize and most importantly how do they practice what they learn. And that's what learning theories are all about. In psychology, learning theories are attempts to describe how people learn. In this article we will look at the three basic theories of learning viz. Behaviorism, Cognitivism & Constructivism, and their application to Instructional Designing.

Behaviorism and Instructional Design
The whole concept of Behaviorism is based on 'observable changes in behavior'. Pavlov, Thorndike, Watson and Skinner are some of the key players in the development of behaviorist theory. The concept of behaviorism probably has the biggest impact when we define the objectives of an e-learning course. A behavioral objective states learning objectives in 'specified, quantifiable, terminal behaviors'.
E.g.: After going through this course, you will be able to assemble a CPU with 100% accuracy.
Here, the learning task have been broken down into specific measurable tasks.

Cognitivism and Instructional Design
Cognitive theory takes into account some additional concepts like prior knowledge, information structure, mnemonic effects, etc. The Cognitive Instructional Designer would analyze a learning task, break it down into small steps and use that information to develop instruction that moves from simple to complex, building on the prior knowledge of the learners.
E.g.: If you building a soft skill course for the engineers, quote examples related to engineering. This is like building the new information based on the prior knowledge of the learners. And feed the content in the order of simple to complex, making it easier for them to grasp.
Jean Piaget, Saettler, Miller and Bruner, Good and Brophy, Bandura & Walters are some of the key players in Cognitive theory development.

Constructivism and Instructional Design
According to Constructive theory, methods of learning may not be the same for each learner and the results of learning are not easily measured. It promotes a more open-ended learning experience. A person's knowledge depends upon his prior experiences, mental structures & beliefs. While the other learning theories which are objective in nature, has a  predetermined outcome; constructive theory says that instructions should foster and not control the learning process. Instructions based on Constructive theory will have a lot of hyperlinks to different sources of information.
Jonassen and Mc Alleese who are pioneers in the study of Constructive learning theory suggests that this type of instruction is not advised for novice learners because they might get lost in the vast amount of information.

In general, an ideal instructional design should be a mix of both objective (behaviorism & cognitivism) & constructive theories. This will help them have a clear set of learning objectives and at the same time be able to think constructively, collaborate with fellow learners and acquire complete knowledge on the subject.

Reference: The History of American Educational Technology (Paul Saettler, 1990)

The Eureka Screams & The Apple Hit…!!!

How to retrieve Articulate Templates, Color Schemes, Logos and Presenters

How many times have you wondered about where you can find the Articulate template that you had created for an e-learning project you did months ago? The client wants some modifications and when you open the file, you see that you don’t have the same template inside Articulate. You have to create the template once again by editing the standard ones provided by Articulate.

Another common instance is when you work in a network: you create the template in one system and later on, if the same file is opened from a different system in the network, you will have trouble with the templates. Of course, it says that the template is ‘In Project’ but try to edit the template ‘In Project’ and you will be surprised. And the surprise will not be a pleasant one for sure.

I always wanted to know if we can save the template as a file so that we can retrieve it later. Even after being the author of the blog post titled Beg, Borrow or Google it never occurred to me that I should Google it out. I dig into my system folders to find any reference to the template files.

Obviously, I went into the Articulate folder in the program files section. “C:\Program Files\Articulate\Presenter\templates” – that was my first eureka scream. (But thankfully, I was all dressed up unlike Archimedes. ;-)) All the templates I have created are saved here as xml files. Inside “C:\Program Files\Articulate\Presenter”, I also saw a folder called Color Schemes. And yes, all the Standard and Custom made Color schemes were present in that folder. Eureka again!!!

Eager to find the Engage Color schemes, I looked into “C:\Program Files\Articulate\Articulate Engage\schemes”, but found only the standard ones. Right at that moment, the apple fell on my head. “Why the hell didn’t I Google for this? I was so dumb wasting time searching the system folders.” I did Google for it and found that the engage color schemes are saved here - C:\Users\sravind\AppData\Roaming\Articulate\Engage\2.0\schemes. (sravind is my system username. So you have to change it accordingly.)

I also found out that the folder where the templates, color schemes etc are stored might actually depend on many things like the operating system you use, whether you are in a network or not, etc. Like I mentioned at the end of my Beg, Borrow or Google post, Google might give us something better. And this is what I got: http://www.articulate.com/support/presenter09/kb/?p=914 . This article here, lists the folder locations of Articulate templates, color schemes, logos and presenters in your hard drive; and it took me two eureka screams and an apple hit to reach this.

Does your e-Learning course have an identity?

I completely agree with Tom Kuhlman on what he wrote about Corporate Branding in e-Learning courses. You cannot simply tax upon the space you have, to include the company logo in every screen. Instructional Designers should be able to utilize the screen space fully. It is frustrating when you have a wonderful idea and you cannot use it just because there is no space in the screen.

My team called the Content Solutions is into developing e-Learning courses for employees of our own company (FCI, which is a connector manufacturing firm). We really don’t brand the courses that we make. In fact, very rarely do we keep our company logo in our courses. So we have full freedom to decide the layout, navigation and the templates. It doesn’t really matter because we use these courses to train the employees of our own firm. They would have already seen the company logo a zillion times in every other PowerPoint presentation and in the posters on the office walls. So ultimately, each of the courses we make is different from one another.

But on a second thought, isn’t it actually nice to have your company logo just in the beginning of the course at least? I think it gives an identity to the course and makes it look more professional. You need not repeat the logo in every other slide, but you can show some basic details just in the beginning like Company logo, Name of the Course, division or department for which the course is meant for, time duration of the course, and an icon to indicate whether the course is audio enabled or not. In fact it will be great if the company logo can be shown as an animation. The courses might look similar in the first screen, but after that, the instructional designers have full freedom to design the layout and contents.

Our team is a part of a unit called Global Business Services (GBS) which provides many cross functional support to FCI. So it is equally important to let the learners know that this course was made by GBS. Today’s learners might become tomorrow’s client. ;-) You never know. Keeping this in mind, I would add a slide at the end which gives credit to the people who made the course. Name of the SME, a Contact e-mail ID, Name of the Client, Month and Year in which this was made (or updated), copyrights mention of any web site, artist or other resources, etc are some of the things that could be added in the end slide.

Things like these are more relevant for us now since we are in the initial stages of moving into a third party support service. Next week, I am starting to work on a new e-Learning project. And I will definitely include some of the things mentioned here. Is there anything that I am missing out here? Let me know through the comments section...

The Need for Needs Analysis..!!!

Last week, I stumped upon an old e-learning course that our team had built. It was a Captivate demo on how to fill the 'My Info' page of our company's intranet. Back then, when we received the request, our team was kind of excited. Because our making this demo would mean that our service would be known for a lot more people, and this would bring in a lot of new requests. And that was all we thought about.

We created a user manual in PDF and an interactive demo using Captivate. We would have spend close to two weeks for the whole project and I must say we did a good job. 

But thinking about it now, I am not really very sure on how much value it brought for any one who used 'My Info'.

The question here is about the Needs Analysis.

Why Needs Analysis?

- To find out the actual necessity of an 'e-learning' course for training

- To understand the target audience, and finally

- To build a better course

How to conduct a Needs Analysis?

Most customers want the course to be ready by tomorrow. So we really dont have much time to send a survey form to some sample learners and consolidate their feedback. But we can always ask the customer for some basic details.

- How often do the learners use a computer?

- Do they have a speaker / audio set up?

- How fast would their internet connection be?

- What are the expected changes in the learners' behaviour or skills, after going through the course?

The answers to such questions will help you make a lot of decisions in the process of developing the course. It may not always be possible to conduct a formal Needs Analysis. But try to answer the questions above (and frame more of such questions) before you start developing your course. In fact the output of the Needs Analysis is a part of the input for the Course Design.

LEAN ID

I got this food for thought on ‘LEAN ID’ when I saw one of the Articulate Presenter slides used by my team mate (ironically for a course on LEAN Manufacturing) and I saw too many objects in them. Some of them could be grouped and used as a single picture file which would reduce publishing time and also create less confusion when you open the selection pane. “Why don’t you make the module LEAN?” I asked her.

In this post, let me try to share a few LEAN techniques and practices that can be used in Instructional Designing.

Be Organized

If you are using Articulate Presenter,

- Slide Title: Give title to the slides using the Outline feature. It will help you later, if not in the beginning.

- Grouped Image vs png: Use a separate PowerPoint file to build your graphics. Finally take only a single png file to your ‘course’ file rather than taking a grouped image with 5 shapes. Remember that Presenter gives individual attention to each of the shapes in your slide when you preview or publish. So its an additional 4 shapes with each grouped image you have.

- Master Slides: Use Master Slides if you have 2 or more slides with same background. Presenter needs to publish the master slide elements only once then.

- Compress Pictures: Just before you publish, compress the pictures in your file. Choosing ‘Screen’ quality is a good method to obtain optimum clarity. Make sure that you select ‘Delete cropped areas of pictures’. Basically you are cleaning your file by keeping just what you will need. It’s all about eliminating the MUDA. ;-)

- Name the Objects: Give a name to each object in your slide. Especially when you have a lot of custom animations, it’s easier to work with named objects rather than with a set of “Right Arrow 9, Rectangle 5, Picture 3 and Rectangle 4”. And if you use the Audio Editor interface, to adjust the timing of custom animations, its going to be of great use. I have always found it really helpful.

If you are using Adobe Captivate,

- Give the right settings before you start recording. If you don’t want a clickbox to be automatically created, you can disable it before recording. Or else you will waste time deleting that from each slide.

If you have a specific format required for the text captions, you can set it as the default style instead of having to format each caption later.

- Delete unused items from the Library to reduce the file size and thereby improve performance speed.

- If you are scared that you will delete a few slide backgrounds which you might require later, use a copy of the record file as your working file.

- Group your slides: Let’s say you have a Captivate file of a software demo with 125 slides. You clean up and finish 70 slides today. Group these slides and name it as ‘Complete’. So the next day when you work, you need not scroll down these 70 slides to figure out where you stopped yesterday.

- Use Captivate Reviewer: It’s an excellent tool to manage review comments.

Some of these might seem to be trivial, but trust me – once you practise this and make it a habit you will notice the difference.

Social Bookmarking:

I had always felt it difficult to manage my bookmarks. When I want to launch that page which talks about inserting Engage file as swf in Presenter, I don’t know which one to choose from the long list of bookmarks.

Moreover, if I bookmarked something during my work at office, it’s difficult for me to have it launched when I work from home later. So I searched for an online bookmark service provider and ended up choosing Diigo from the many options I had.

The thing I like about Diigo is that when you save a bookmark, you don’t put it under a folder (like I did for Articulate). Instead, you add tags or keywords with each bookmark. So if I know that the page I am looking for is a screenr on any Articulate product, I would click on the tags – Articulate and Screenr. This will list all the bookmarks with these tags.

You also have options to have a network within the Diigo interface and share your selected bookmarks in the network. But I have not looked into these options yet.

Some other options are that you can highlight a part of a web page and save it so that next time you don’t have to read the whole article to get your key points. You may also save images and write notes with tags attached to them.

Quicklaunch:

Another way to implement Lean in your workstyle is to use Quicklaunch. I always launch the internet explorer using the quick launch. It saves a few clicks for me. I have also given a short cut key to launch Photoshop in my office desktop. You can infact assign customized shortcut keys to launch applications in your computer.

FastStone Capture which is a screen capture device we use, has a minimize mode, in which you can launch it using shortcuts. The software WordWeb is also really helpful to find meanings. All you need to do is select the word (from your word document, webpage, etc) and type Ctrl+Alt+W. And it will launch the application with the meaning of the selected word.

RSS Feeds / Subscribe:

Don’t search for the information. Let it come to you. Subscribe for some of the good blogs and you will have the information in your inbox every time the author writes a new post. You can even subscribe for a discussion in the forums, so that you will be notified when someone enters a comment in the discussion.

I think there are still a lot more LEAN techniques which we use in our daily life. And it becomes all the more important in instructional designing because it’s a mix bag. We do a little bit of scripting, a little bit of designing, a little bit of writing, a little bit of editing and a little bit of everything. And at the end of the day we really become fat with a small pile of everything. So let us burn the fat and keep just what we need. Let us start getting LEAN…!!!

Beg, Borrow or Google...!!!

I always thought it would be impossible to insert Articulate Engage output to Adobe Captivate. Someone here proved me wrong.

http://daveperso.mediaenglishonline.com/2010/06/21/publishing-articulate-to-captivate/

I always thought we could not reduce the speed of narration we get from Captivate 4.0’s Neo Text to Speech. This Adobe blog -
http://blogs.adobe.com/captivate/2009/04/vtml_tags_in_text_to_speech_1.html - proved me wrong and taught me that you could actually modify not just the speed, but its pitch, voice, and what not!!!

The other day, I received a letter from an anonymous Xmas friend in my office and it was written in Hindi. As I was investigating for people who knew Hindi, my colleague Googled the text and there you go – that’s a common SMS.

Every time I think something is not possible, some one or the other proves me wrong. Trust me; you can Google for almost anything under the universe. And it applies to Instructional Designers more than anyone else. So the next time you have a query, I would say – Ask your colleague first and if he/she doesn’t have the answer, just Google it. In fact, I would recommend that even if your colleague comes to your rescue, just Google the topic and who knows, you might end up with a better option.