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

Marti

It sounds like you have a lot of fun with the tool, and are using it in interesting ways.  I believe that the Articulate forums have shown that you're not limited to just adding narration to existing slides.  With Articulate, I really believe that you are only limited by your own imagination and ID skills.

I am interested in hearing from anyone who uses 'games' in Higher Ed. and how you use/create them and what the response is to them. I almost hate using the term GAME because it implies a more childish pursuit. But we are wanting to pursue this and wondered what others were doing in this genre.

Personally, I don't care for them, and don't believe that I've ever voluntarily used them in a class.  They were a hot item a few years ago on our campus, but I can honestly say that I don't remember the last time that a faculty member asked for one.  We are really trying to steer faculty to interactions that simulate real-world application.

That's probably a better description of what I mean anyway. I am not looking to create Angry Birds for a History course. But more interactivity that requires input from the student, more so than typing in an answer to a question.

Not every course can be adapted to such thinking but types such as accounting, math, business where decision making and problems that need to be solved are possibilities.

Hello Michael,

Could you share your experience on Raptivity?

My boss asked me to try the software, and it does not work on my Captivate 5.5.

Raptivity is based on ActionScript 2.0. That is why I guess.

But I think it will work in Articulate 09 because both are Action Script 2.0 based.

Their customer support is not as good as Articulate team. That is for sure.

Ok, got it.  Well, I guess it would depend on the course and learning objectives, but if you have some specifics that you'd like to share, I'm certain that you'll get lots of ideas/feedback from the group.  I'm going to mention Curatr again, only because there is a gamification element to the software.

Scenarios  built in Quiz Maker are a great tool for most any class They can be fancy or plain. 

I actually have some video "situations" created that students can watch and then pick the best "behavior" for a manager in a certain situation.  You can get fellow teachers to provide the acting, but you will want to get releases.  You can also create the Scenarios using graphic art instead.   There have been some great examples of this process in Articulate blogs. 

I agree with Marti.  I've created tons of scenario-based learning in PowerPoint and Quizmaker, and as he said, there are many posts that address innovative ways in which to create them. 

I am excited that you are starting a higher education discussion! I am a technology coordinator in one college and an adjunct instructor at another. I am having trouble getting faculty in the one college to break away from boring online learning and cannot get approval to use Articulate or any other diversified technology inside of Blackboard in the other. It has been very frustrating for me as I have seen and practiced creating all the cool ideas that I find on eLearning Heroes. The folks that I work with seem stuck on boring PPTs, uninteresting videos and formats that have remained static for several years. I would love to be able to use what I have learned to make our offerings more interactive and exciting, but whatever I create never gets used. I cannot advance in my ID skills by using all the great programs that are out there because my colleges won't buy into the technology. From what I have read here, it seems that other colleges are using rapid authoring tools. Is anyone else have the same problems that I am ? Any advice that is out there would be most appreciated! 

On another note, I have done some reading about the Quality Matters program. I know that the University of Northern Colorado uses this program and they seem to be doing a fantastic job in their instructional design and curriculum design. 

Welcome Robin!

I understand your frustration, and the best advice that I can give you, is to start at the top.  At our University, every online course is required to contain a multimedia/interactive element that supplements and or helps the student apply the information covered in a given week.

This was a decision made by the University president and Deans, so my recommendation would be to work on obtaining buy in at that level as well.. Perhaps write a document that addresses the current state, your recommendations for change (supported by research) advantages to your university, and plans for implementation.

Hopefully this helps, and good luck.

p.s.

Maybe include links in your document to ways in which other Universities are using multimedia to enhance their classes.  Mike Enders has a great example from last years Guru competition, and I have tons of examples if you need them.

Hi Donna,

My name's Michelle and I work at Pima Medical Institute in Tucson, AZ. (We also have campuses in TX, CA, WA, and NV.) My colleagues here and I have also been talking about how small the e-learning community in higher education is, especially in regards to health care. I've been working with Articulate since 2007 and am always learning so much.

I was interested in going to this conference: http://www.aace.org/conf/elearn/

If anyone knows of any other helpful conferences for e-learning in higher education or the health care field, please let me know!

Michelle

mleon@pmi.edu

Welcome Michelle!

I had not heard about this conference, but would love to hear about it when you return. It sounds like it will be great.  I will be presenting at the Learning Solutions conference in a few weeks, and am really looking forward to it.

We develop a lot of multimedia on our team for the health care programs that we have on our campus, and I believe that I saw some others in this forum who work in health care as well.  Make sure to let us know if you want to discuss ideas.

Looks like it'll be a great one, Donna! "Break a leg" and have fun at Disney World for me

Will do, thanks.  I look forward to hearing about your conference when you get back, I like that it appears to be more targeted to higher education, which is what I've been looking for.

Thanks, Donna! I'm going to try and submit a proposal for a Best Practices Session.

Feel free to email me if you want to chat and bounce ideas off of me: mleon@pmi.edu

Here's something I just created this week that I'm super duper proud of. It was originally a LONG boring table.

Nine Phyla within Kingdom Animalia

Michelle you do great work.  What a great way to transform a table into a more intersting, readable (and probably more informative) format.  Good luck on your proposal, I'm sure you'll do well.

Michelle,  Your "table" looks great, but it was a little slow to process.  I am not sure if it is because I am looking at it mid day on Friday and the "net" is slow or if it is Articulate processing the components slowly.  There was a blog that addressed making things process faster that really helped me,  I was putting a lot of seperate things on each slide,  you might check this out. 

I am a "mavrick" instructor, and sometimes you are fighting fear of change from other instructors,  If you can make the differences appear easy for them, you may get buyin sooner.  Good luck.   And again, good job.

Robin,

I fear this is pretty endemic to most institutions.  There are so many variables in play with faculty (inertia, distrust of administrative motives for wanting online courses, belief that face to face courses are the only way, genuine fatigue with changing technologies, etc.) that it can be difficult to gain traction.

For the past few years, I've been granted release time from a portion of my course load to run a "boot camp" for my fellow faculty where I teach them the tools and theories to create better online courses.  What I've found is that those who sign up (we even offer stipends for participation) tend to be the newer and younger faculty.  This is where I'd suggest you start.  Because they then become the evangelizers for the "new" way of doing things.  And then once the student body starts experiencing the "new" way, they (the students) start pressing the rest of the faculty to follow suit.  I can't tell you how many times I've had older faculty come up to me and curse me (in a good hearted manner!) for introducing this "new fangled stuff."  But many of them do come along for the ride as well.  Especially once they see how easy it can be, and how they can also apply it to their personal lives.

Marti I was able to click right right through Michelle's piece without any problems at all, which is saying something, because my computer is always slow.  Do you have that link that you could share?  What I have been having problems with is how long it takes to publish my work in Articulate.  Does anyone have any tips regarding that? 

Excellent idea Mike...make sure to let us know how things progress Robin.

Mike, 

That is good advice. I have tried giving/showing the younger faculty some of my ideas, generally they like the ideas but still do not incorporate them into their courses. I have had workshops to teach them new things, offer my services to help them with new technology or creating new lessons/PPTs, etc. None of it has worked so far. Your comments are encouraging though!

Michelle, 

Your table looks great, much better than a list! I didn't have any trouble loading it. It went very smoothly.

our institution is quite different from almost any other in regards to how the courses are built. Faculty only has to personalize the course they are given because it's built by a team beforehand. Which puts how the courses look and feel in my hands completely. I don't write the content of course but the entire design of that content is up to me. And I working to get time to push the envelope on this even further and move to HTML5 and eliminating FLASH completely except for older browsers.

I want to start going to some of these conferences but I only know of very few. So I would love a list of those that might benefit someone in my position as a eLearning Multimedia Developer in Higher Ed. I'd even offer to post the list on one of my blogs for easy access. And any other list that we might find useful. Like software for interactivity, of which this list has provided many already that I was unaware of.

Donna, (and Michelle), this is often a difficult time of day day for speed here, so that is why I started with that possibility.  :&lt

I know that one of the blogs was Nov 2010   I believe that they all were from Tom's Rapid E-learning Blogs.

I save them in my e-mail archive and that was the first one that was produced a search with the word, "faster". 

Hope this helps.  Processing was definately a problem for me before Tom's blog helps..  Took forever... 

Just a note from experience as a liaison in the public high schools.  Older faculty won't call it fear, but often they fear new technology becasue it is not in their comfort zone, and avoid it.  Being 60 myself, I know that a lot of my peers are not computer "savy"  and it is an uphill battle to get them to look at things differently. 

PowerPoint is often in their comfort zone, because they have been using slides for a good while, either they created them or they got them from the publishers. (I had fellow faculty that fought slide rather than overhead projectors.)   If you can take some of the regular slides and start with some simple modifications,  they may get excited and on board more quickly.  Michelle's chart change was great, but it was a more complicated modification.  It might still be too much too soon for new converts.  :

Our college is trying to get on-line and regular class faculty to recognize the changes in communication that young people expect and thus learn more about social media and using it in our courses.  It is a difficult sell for some.  Like it or not, it is the way of the young. 

Good luck,  I believe you can make possitive changes even if it is one staff member at a time. 

You are extremely lucky Frederick.  That is exactly how we'd like to do things here.  I have a list of conferences somewhere, and will post after I find it, as well as software recommendations.

Thanks for the feedback, everyone! What I created was an OPTIONAL practice activity to chunk up the information and make it interactive. Oftentimes, when students are interacting with material, it gets them involved, gets them thinking and asking questions.

For our hybrid courses, PowerPoints work GREAT because there's a presenter around. However, for our online courses, we have stopped using PowerPoint completely. Without a presenter, they're basically reading just like they would a textbook except in short sentences and bullet points. We've noticed that our online courses have a very different dynamic in them. While the instructor isn't lecturing, the instructor IS there to guide students in their assigned reading and assignments and quizzes. They're there to provoke questions in the discussion boards and provide new insight on how the content material relates to the real world. And they're there to be available to answer questions via email.

In a physical classroom setting, many students, like myself, get nervous asking questions in front of the class so I wait until the end--well apparently so do 15 others and time ends up running out because the next class has to come in. In our online classes, we encourage any and all questions from the students and so they're not limited to office hours or the last 5 minutes of class.

In our most challenging math course, College Algebra, I've created very brief practice quizzes at the end of each topic. These are called Knowledge Checks and they're just designed to show the student whether or not they understood what they just read. If not, they can ask the teacher very specific questions based on the questions they answered wrong. Instead of "I don't understand this" they can say "On problem number X in the practice activity, I don't understand how it went from this step to this step."

Basically, our online classes don't work the same way that our physical classes do and that's okay. I think if instructors are thinking we want to run the class exactly the same except with a computer, then yeah, they're not on board. But if we can find the RIGHT instructors who have that VISION for an online interactive classroom setting, the class works! Our current College Algebra teachers get RAVE reviews. Because of the one-on-one interaction they can provide, students have successfully overcome their fears and frustrations with math.

As all good things, it will take time, but we will get everyone on board the online train Good luck everyone!

Hi Donna,

I'm a corporate trainer for a small company and I am also trying to land an adjunct job at a local college. The goal behind that is to fund a doctorate degree. I recently obtained a Masters in EdTech from Boise State in 09 but I never really discovered what is termed e-learning until about a year ago. Unlike most I have to do everything myself which includes graphic design, flash animation, photo editing, recording, and content creation.  Like most I have used Camtasia, Adobe CS3 Web Development Suite, Adobe Premiere Elements, Audacity, Captivate, Power Point and I have also took a year of computer programming. Currently I'm working on some e-learning courses I can use for an e-learning portfolio that I'm building and I hope to start playing with Articulate before too long. I would love to get my hands on a beta copy of storyline just to see what all they hype is about and to put it through it's paces.

Hi James...I don't know if they are still looking for testers, but here's the link I was given to sign up.

https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dHRVVXl0R1N3Q1czSldiRUFLaC1hM1E6MQ

Thanks Donna