E-Learning Heroes - Advice and ideas from the Articulate Community

Like you, I spend a lot of my time cleaning up the prose provided by SMEs. In this Storyline presentation, I give a few tips (and a bit of practice) on revising bloated e-learning prose. Hope you find it helpful.

Revising Bloated E-Learning Prose

Brilliant!

That was a GREAT course, beautifully crafted, and useful to anyone who writes eLearning.

I was going to say:

After having a look at your eLearning course and doing al the exercises, I would like to tell you that, in my opinion, that was a great, excellent and brilliant course, which was crafted in a really beautiful way. Anybody (ID, use, learner etc.) who creates eLearning, e-Learning, ELearning etc. would, I believe, find this course really quite useful....

...but maybe I won't now.

Bruce

Hey, Daniel - 

This is great! A couple of minor points of feedback:

1. I'd add in an indicator that signals when a slide ends if it's waiting for the participant to advance it.

2. On the slide where you're having the participant click the hyperlinks for feedback, I managed to get all of the audio to play at once There are a few ways to fix that one. One way is to open a layer and prevent clicking on the base layer until the audio finishes playing.

Good work, man. I grabbed my Fifth Edition Lanham off the shelf to flip through and extend the experience. It's a great reference. Others I like include:

Sin and Syntax by Constance Hale
How to Write a Sentence by Stanley Fish

Constance isn't very complementary of Strunk and White:) I like her style.

Or maybe it was Fish that wasn't complementary of Strunk and White. Either way, thought of another one I think is great for prose development:

Clear and Simple as the Truth by Thomas and Turner

Glad you both found it interesting. And Steve, thanks for the pointers. Totally appreciated. I'll take a look at revising the variable exercise with layers that prevent clicking until the audio is finished.  --Daniel

Great job Daniel! I love how you share projects like this with the community. It's fun to see cool stuff built with Storyline, and it packs extra punch when it's such useful content. Nicely done!

Very nice way to finish off a Friday... thanks, and have a great weekend...!

This was fantastic. I was able to share it with colleagues and say: hey we have a tool that can do stuff like this so let it inspire you, AND oh by the way learn. Wonderful 2 for 1.

Nice job. 

This was fun and informative. 

I wish I could have seen my answers I typed in laid next to the correct revision. I'm not sure if I did them right or not. 

thanks for sharing!

Great job! Very useful information. Thanks!

Great job Daniel!

Well shucks Daniel! I was going too fast and would hit the enter key when I was done typing. Gotta learn to slow down!

That's funny, I'm a fairly quick typist, but get a sort of stage fright when I do screen recordings. Cool shot of you and your boy, by the way. Bet he's going to have PLENTY of photos to remember his youth by. --Daniel

Haha, yes! I think when I screen record is about the ONLY time my fingers slow down at the keyboard....or the mouse for that matter...I'm a bit of a crazy clicker.

And thanks! This photo is going on about 2 years old at this point, but I've never been able to give it up! He doesn't stay still enough for such a photo now (especially considering I took the photo with a timer).

Great reminders! No matter how concise I try to be, I always find more to delete when I re-read.

Very nice! Reminds me of this "Plain English Campaign"  guide: How to write in Plain English

http://www.plainenglish.co.uk/files/howto.pdf

Glad you liked it, Mike. I'll check out that link you posted.

Good job, Daniel, thanks a lot! Really useful tips.

Thanks, Annika. Glad you found it of some use. If you're interested, I've got a few more presentations related to writing for e-learning at www.brighamcommunications.com/blog  You might especially like the "tips for writing voiceover narration." Happy holidays. --Daniel

Excellent work as always, Daniel!

And I second what Jeanette said - I think it's awesome that you share these tips with everyone, and it is truly appreciated!

(I guess Neil was too busy on his motorcycle to help out Alex & Geddy with their presentation. )

Thanks, David. Glad someone commented on the Geddy reference.

And yes, last time I saw Neil, he had the

"wind in his hair, shifting and drifting, mechanical music, adrenaline suuuuuuuurrge..."

Hi Daniel,

What great timing.... I am working with one of our Technical SMEs at the moment, and I have forwarded the link to your DEMO. He has a lot of technical information (that needs simplifying) for inclusion in his PowerPoint presentation, and has almost finished all of the slides (including pictures and arrows etc).

He is about to get 'stuck into' creating the accompanying notes for each slide.

I have been explaining that it is important to simplify the notes for each slide, and to 'cut out' any unnecessary detail.

Your demo could not have been timed more perfectly..... and will be of great support.

Once he has completed all of the notes, he will narrate the presentation, then syncronise the slides with the notes in AP '09.

Finally I will take all of that and convert it to Storyline to produce the HTML5 and Flash versions (plus mobile version for iPad).

Thanks for sharing

Thanks, Keith:

It's takes a bit longer to create concise prose, but it saves your learners tons of time, so they can go on and do something more productive, like their jobs.

Happy holidays.

Cool! Always helpfull and nice use of Storyline!