5 Ways to Use Animated GIFs in Your E-Learning
Animated GIFs—or image files that act like a short video that loops endlessly—are everywhere these days, on social media, in blogs, and even in e-learning courses! That’s right, instructional designers are using these eye-catching multimedia assets to grab their learners’ attention—and you can too. Check out these ideas to get inspiration on how to incorporate animated GIFs in your courses. 1. As Course Header Images If your learners have a ton of courses in their dashboard and you want yours to stand out, try using an animated GIF in the course header, like in this example: Mars Curiosity Rover. It’s a surefire way to get your course noticed. 2. As Attention Getters GIFs are eye-catching. Have you noticed how hard it is to look away even when you’ve already seen the same animation loop 10 times over? That’s what’s so great about them. Their movement naturally draws your learners in and incites them to pay attention. Not convinced? Take a look at this Rise 360 course: Space Travel–Themed Interactive Infographic See how the GIFs draw you in and make you want to click on the interactive parts? I thought so. 3. To Illustrate Key Messages But GIFs can do more than just catch your learners’ eye. They can actually help learners better understand the concepts you’re teaching them. Check out the GIFs in this course, for example: An American’s Guide to Driving in France. See how the GIFs support the key messages? 4. To Lay Out the Steps in a Process If you’re creating a how-to course, you might be tempted to make a video. And that’s definitely one way of doing it! But if people need to replicate the steps one by one, they might need to rewind each step and watch it over and over again. What a pain! Instead of creating a lengthy video or screencast, why not create a GIF of each step, making it easy for people to rewatch the steps as needed, like in this article on how to make coffee? 5. For Comic Relief If the topic of your course is particularly dry, it might be a good idea to work in some humor to make sure your learners don’t fall asleep. GIFs are a great way to do that! However, be careful to not overdo it. A humorous GIF here and there is one thing; peppering every section of your course with them is another. Here's an example that uses humorous GIFs effectively. Another thing to keep in mind with humor is that it’s subjective. Test your course out on a trusted coworker or two and make sure they find the GIFs to be both work-appropriate and funny. The Bottom Line As with anything, it’s important to keep in mind that too much of a good thing is bad. When using animated GIFs, make sure they’re helping and not hindering the learning process. After all, the goal is to get your learners to focus on the content and retain the key messages. If you’re sold on using animated GIFs in your courses but aren’t sure how to go about creating your own, check out this tutorial. Like this article? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the latest e-learning inspiration and insights directly in your inbox. You can also find us on LinkedIn and X (Formerly Twitter).3 Steps for Creating Your First Rise 360 Course
Everything you need to create modern, engaging e-learning is at your fingertips with Rise 360. Not sure where to start? This handy guide will help you create your very first microlearning or full-length course in three easy steps. Let’s get started! 1. Choose the type of learning experience you want to create: microlearning or a full-length course Start by choosing whether you want microlearning or a full-length course. Your choice will depend on the content you want to share with learners. Microlearning courses aren’t just short courses. They’re bite-size pieces of content focused on a single learning objective. They’re approachable, bingeable, and easy for users to review and apply. Microlearning courses are also great for learners on the go because they’re easy to consume on phones or tablets. Full-length courses give you the opportunity to go in-depth on a certain topic. Made up of multiple lessons and knowledge checks, courses may include multiple learning objectives and, as a result, take longer for the learner to experience. Learners almost always use a computer to access full-length courses. So how do you know which format to use for your course? When choosing between the two, ask yourself: How many learning objectives do I have? If you only have one, a microlearning course is the clear option. If you have more than one, could each one stand alone or are they interdependent? If they could be split up, you could create a series of microlearning courses. If they’re interdependent, then a full-length course is the best option. Once you’ve made your decision, go to your Rise 360 dashboard. Click Create New and choose Course or Microlearning. 2. Search for a template or start from scratch It's always a good idea to look at templates and see if there’s already material you can use or adapt to your learning objectives. Articulate offers two types of templates: placeholder and real content: Placeholder templates include guidance and ideas to help you create a fully customized course. Real content templates have pre-written content you can adapt to fit your learning objectives. After choosing the type of e-learning you’d like to develop, you’ll see all available templates. Select Preview to explore a template before you choose it. You can use the search bar to find templates by keyword. And for full-length courses, you can use the left-hand panel to explore templates by category. When you’re ready to use a template, click Select This Course. If you don’t find exactly what you need, don’t worry: You can always customize a template or even start from scratch. Just click +Blank Course/Microlearning to begin. 3. Add your content Once you’ve chosen a template or started from scratch, you can add in your content using blocks. Blocks give you different ways of formatting your content in a lesson or microlesson. There are many types of blocks: text blocks, image blocks, interactive blocks, knowledge check blocks, and more. You can use different block types to make your content unique and engaging. Clicking All Blocks or the + sign in your lesson or microlesson will open a list of block types in a left-hand panel. If you change your mind about the type of block, you can easily choose a different block from the same category by clicking the dropdown menu in the top-left corner of the block. For example, the paragraph block gives you the option of reformatting your content into different types of paragraphs, headings, statements, and a note. Not sure how to pick the right block? Think about what your learner needs. For example, if you have a lot of content that may be overwhelming as a text block, consider using a tabs block to break up the text. Or, if you want learners to compare and contrast different chunks of information, consider using an accordion or flashcard block. As the course author, this is your opportunity to get creative! Here are some articles for inspiration: 6 Rise 360 Blocks to Use Instead of Bullet Points 7 Creative Ways to Use Images in Rise 360 Courses 6 Rise 360 Block Types to Use to Compare and Contrast Concepts 5 Different Ways to Create Scenarios in Rise 360 3 Creative Ways to Incorporate Your Logo into a Rise 360 Course More Resources Creating microlearning or full-length courses in Rise 360 is superfast and easy. In just three steps, you’ve already started putting together an elegant course customized for your learners. And when you’re done drafting your course, you can share and review your content with stakeholders easily thanks to Review 360. Here’s more information on how to use Review 360: Getting Started with Review 360 Rise 360: Publish Content to Review 360 Your Most Asked Review 360 Questions Once they’ve been approved, you can easily publish from your Articulate 360 dashboard. Here are some guides to get you started: Rise 360: Share Content with Learners How to Share E-Learning Courses with Learners Want to try creating your first course in Rise 360, but don’t have Articulate 360? Start a free 30-day trial. And subscribe to our newsletter to stay up-to-date on the latest e-learning examples.5 Mental Health Resources You Can Share With Your Learners Today
Did you know that May is Mental Health Awareness Month? Individuals aren’t the only ones impacted by mental health challenges—businesses can feel the effects, too. Polling from Gallup indicates that employees with mental health challenges miss four times more work than those who rate their mental health positively. This lost productivity costs the economy some $47.6 billion annually. As an e-learning designer, you can help employees feel supported by providing resources that raise awareness of the importance of mental health and outline helpful tips for improving it. If you’re an Articulate 360 subscriber or trialer, you can get the ball rolling quickly by using the ready-to-use mental health training materials in Rise 360—just in time for Mental Health Awareness Month. Curious what’s available? Check out some of the new releases below. You can learn how to customize these templates for your own company and training needs at the end of this article. 1. Stress Busters Microlearning Course Encourage employees to feel more relaxed with the 9 Simple Stress Busters You Can Do Today microlearning course. Moving through this quick learning exercise reveals proven strategies for relieving stress and activating feel-good endorphins. 2. Breathing Exercises Microlearning Course Anyone feeling tense can benefit from the Melt Away Stress With a 3-Minute Breathing Exercise microlearning course. With each successive swipe through a guided breathing exercise and accompanying graphics, learners will feel more peaceful and serene. 3. Feel Your Feelings Microlearning Course Reinforce the message that it’s OK not to be OK with the Feel Your Feelings microlearning course. This quick activity helps people process difficult emotions by prompting them to name and explore their feelings from a place of compassion and understanding. 4. Get Grounded Microlearning Course Support employees through worry spirals and mental fog with the Escape Anxiety With a 5-Minute Grounding Practice microlearning course. Moving through this 5-minute practice roots learners in the here and now as they engage their senses of taste, touch, smell, sight, and hearing. 5. Day-by-Day Challenge Course To offer access to a more in-depth daily challenge, check out the 5-Day Challenge To Improve Mental Health course. Each day, learners can refer to this course, explore a different facet of mental health, and follow simple exercises for putting concepts into practice. Wrap-Up Providing mental health resources as part of your business training is a win-win. Employees have access to support at work, and businesses benefit from employees who are less stressed and anxious. The examples above can help you get started, but the sky’s the limit for how you can use Articulate’s creator tools to achieve your business training objectives. Interested in sharing one of the supportive resources with your team? If you’re an Articulate 360 subscriber or trialer, you can access and edit all the examples linked throughout this post directly from your Rise 360 dashboard. Simply click Create New, choose Microlearning and select the template you want to use, as shown in the video below: Looking for even more ready-to-use, customizable mental health content? You'll find those in your Rise 360 dashboard too. Just click Create New, choose Course, and then select Mix & Match Lessons. Here are some relevant topic categories to check out: Stress Management: covers stress management fundamentals, stress and work performance, and strategies to relieve stress. Health and Wellness: includes dealing with difficult emotions and life events, exercise, forming healthy habits, mental health awareness in the workplace, positive psychology fundamentals, and positive psychology in the workplace. Resilience: features content on resilience fundamentals, building career resilience, leadership and resilience, emotional and physical resilience, and thriving through challenges. Be sure to also follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn and come back to E-Learning Heroes for more advice on everything related to e-learning. If you have any questions, please share them in the comments.Free Webinar: Secrets to 95% Safety Training Satisfaction
It’s here, it’s free, and now, it’s on demand! Our best-of webinar replay is here: Discover how a leader in safety training achieved 95% learner satisfaction and adeptly handles shifting compliance needs. We think you’ll love this guest’s tips for getting real results with e-learning. About the guest: Irish Rugby Football Union This fan-favorite interview features Colin Moran, National Training and Education Manager at the Irish Rugby Football Union (IRFU). The IRFU is the national governing body for rugby in Ireland. Colin’s team creates training for hundreds of teams across the country. Their learning audience includes everyone from elite and recreational athletes to volunteers, medics, coaches, and referees. Managing such a diverse audience makes it challenging to ensure that training is relevant and engaging for all. Learning Luminaries: On-demand webinar In this webinar, you can expect to learn how the IRFU training team reduces administrative work and adapts their training to different learner needs. You’ll also discover: Why and how the IRFU got stakeholder buy-in to transform their paper- and slide-based training into interactive e-learning. Online training tips and tools the IRFU uses to quickly deliver vital regulatory updates to game staff, volunteers, and players. A needs-based, learner-centered approach to training design that’s led to 95% learner satisfaction. You’ll also get a sneak peek of a microlearning course Colin’s team created to prevent head injuries and quickly respond to regulatory changes. Ready to tackle your training challenges and get inspiration from a fellow e-learning pro? Watch the free on-demand webinar here.What You Need to Know About Encouraging Your Learners to Pay Attention
You’re in a meeting with some stakeholders discussing a new e-learning course on a really dull topic. Obviously, you have questions for them and ideas to share, but you quickly realize that all they want you to do is to take a Subject Matter Expert’s 200-slide PowerPoint and put it on the LMS. No attempt to pare down the content or align it with the training goal. No reimagining the source material to add interest or engagement. You want to object to this approach because you know it’s dull and pointless. Learners aren’t going to pay attention to, let alone learn from, four hours of auto-advance lecture material. So maybe, in the interest of gaining more control and creative leeway, this is a good time to share the rather shocking claim that human attention spans are rapidly decreasing, down from twelve seconds in the year 2000 to just eight seconds today. That means our attention spans are even shorter than that of a goldfish! Holy cow! Well, now you have everyone’s attention. While I’m no expert on brain science or attention span, this claim has always struck me as being a little … pardon the pun … fishy. And sure enough, a few minutes of internet sleuthing confirms that not only is human attention span not fully understood—neither are goldfish attention spans! So it seems the oft-cited claim that humans only have an eight-second attention span isn’t actually backed up by evidence. It’s a myth, and it’s one that learning professionals have relied upon for years, usually with the honorable intent of winning the battle against dull e-learning. Unfortunately, perpetuating this hyperbolic claim—one that drips of confirmation bias and oversimplifies some pretty complex topics—can also paint you and your training team into a credibility corner over time, as your organization realizes that: 1) they drove themselves to work in an hour of traffic today, so they must have more than an eight-second attention span, and 2) simply making something shorter doesn’t mean people will pay attention to it or learn anything from it. So that leaves us with two big questions: What can you say to your stakeholders? And what are some credible, evidence-backed techniques you can use to help your learners pay attention? I decided to pose these questions to an expert in this area, so I sat down with Julie Dirksen, founder of Usable Learning and author of Design for How People Learn and Talk to the Elephant. The rest of this article is the highlights reel of our decidedly nerdy conversation. On the Topic of Attention Spans Me: Obviously, we can’t really process or recall information we haven’t paid attention to, therefore attention must be important for learning. Can you talk a little more about that? Julie: Attention is an important factor for many kinds of learning—but not all. Take learning to play the guitar, for instance. It involves skill-based practice and you need to focus while you are first learning a skill, but your mind can wander while you’re doing ongoing practice—for example, scales—to build your muscle memory. People can learn certain tasks through repetition, automating their behaviors and movements so they become unconscious. But at first, you need to pay close attention. After a while, you’re good. Me: So if there are different kinds of learning, does that also mean there are different degrees of attention? Julie: Patti Shank has written some really useful articles on attention, and she points out that there are five different kinds of attention spans, each requiring a different level of effort. Focused attention is involuntary—like reacting to a loud noise or a touch—so it’s a no-brainer. But as willpower becomes a bigger factor, the level of effort increases. Once you’re asking learners to pay attention to two things at once (i.e., divided attention), the level of effort becomes more difficult. On the Topic of Immediacy Me: I know there are lots of ways to get people’s attention, but which ones work the best? Julie: One of the most powerful ways to get people to pay attention is to create a sense of immediacy. So, if I ask how interested you are in watching a five-minute video about printer repair right now, your interest is probably zero. But if I asked you that same question when your printer is broken and it’s 5 o’clock on a Friday and you need to print out your timesheet and turn it in before you can leave work, you’re going to be much more interested in watching that printer repair video. That’s because it’s relevant to your current situation and there’s a sense of urgency to it. People don’t pay attention to the video because it’s flashier—they pay attention because it’s immediately useful. Me: So how can I create that same sense of urgency in a typical e-learning course? Julie: Well, one thing you can do is give people a scenario they need to solve by using the information you’re giving them. This creates an immediate need for that information. On Interest and Engagement Me: Okay, so I get how needing to solve something would make paying attention to that information feel more urgent. But the topic of printer repair brings up another important factor for me: interest. Julie: Yeah, it may seem ridiculously obvious to say this, but it’s just a whole lot easier to pay attention to things that are interesting. And if you’re interested in something, your capacity to pay attention to it is almost unlimited, Me: But what about when the content you’re sharing is really boring? Julie: People can force themselves to pay attention to things that aren’t interesting. But I don’t think it’s an accident that we put attention into monetary terms—paying attention. Basically, when you’re asking people to spend their willpower on something boring, that comes at a price. Most of the limits we talk about aren’t about how long people can pay attention, but that’s probably almost unlimited. The limits are more about how long people will force themselves to pay attention to something they don’t find interesting. I wouldn’t bet on that being longer than twenty minutes, and it might only be a minute or even a few seconds. If your training is always about delivering information—rattling off dos and don’ts or dictating policies and procedures—rather than giving folks a chance to get hands-on, make decisions, and practice their skills—there’s nothing interesting about that. You’re missing out on an opportunity to engage them. Engagement with your material helps people pay attention. On Importance Me: When I think about training that tends to lack engagement, I also think about things like compliance training that’s designed to address “what if” scenarios—things that could put the operation at great risk but happen relatively rarely. These types of courses are important for many reasons, but that sense of immediacy and interest isn’t really there. Julie: A lot of folks work in orgs where they’re told that everything they’re given is important. This course is mission-critical. Understanding this information over here is vital. Fatigue just settles in and people eventually find none of it worth their attention. Think about ways we can signal importance. Social proof—what others in the organization are doing with the information you’ve given them, how it’s made them better at their job—things like that definitely grab people’s attention and demonstrate that the information you’re sharing is important. However, text-heavy screens lacking visual design, learning objectives that are written in instructional design jargon—these are ways of signaling that the information you’re sharing isn’t important or useful. People instinctively know that if it was really important and useful, you would’ve made some effort to make it easier, more professional-looking, more relevant and personal. If something is genuinely useful or interesting, people probably won’t have to struggle to pay attention to it. Summary For those of you who’ve read Julie’s book or attended her sessions at industry events, you might be familiar with one of her favorite catchphrases, “One of the primary responsibilities of instructional design is the ruthless management of cognitive load.” It strikes me that encouraging your learners to pay attention requires some pretty ruthless management. Not only does the content you’re sharing and how you’re sharing it need to respect the demands on your learner’s time and attention, but that content also needs to be useful and engaging in a way that signals its importance. If you enjoyed this topic, there are lots of industry pros in addition to Julie who are talking about the science behind attention span, memory, and so much more. Check out folks like Clark Quinn and Patti Shank, to name two. You can also learn more about the backstory behind the goldfish/attention span myth in this video from Julie or by visiting her site, Designbetterlearning.com. What are you doing to encourage your learners to pay attention? Share your thoughts with me in a comment, below. I’d love to hear what’s working for you! New to e-learning? Sign up for our E-Learning 101 email course, a series of expertly-curated articles that'll get you up to speed with course development.Basic Elements of an E-Learning Course
When something’s new, it can feel complex and difficult. And when you’re first getting into e-learning and you view a finalized course, it’s hard to imagine what all the moving pieces are. However, when you pull back the curtain and look at the most basic elements of an e-learning course, you’ll realize that most courses are made up of the same fundamental components. If you’ve taken or designed at least one online course, you should recognize most of these course building blocks. While there’s no rule saying you must include these components in every course, it’s helpful for new e-learning designers to be familiar with the basic elements and where they fit into the overall course structure. Course Welcome or Opening This is the first thing your learners see when they open your course. In addition to welcoming learners visually, it usually provides options for navigating the different sections of the course. Remember that the welcome content sets the tone for your course, so it’s important to start off strong! Here’s an example of a welcome screen created in Rise: Here’s an example of a Content Library welcome template you can insert into your Storyline 360 project: Instructions Depending on the type of course you’re creating, you may want to include instructions to help learners understand how to navigate through the course. If you’ve built your own custom navigation using a slide-based authoring app, you could use arrows, callouts, and text to point out the important features of the course player. Noteworthy features include navigation buttons, resource tabs, a transcript menu, and help buttons. If you’re using the built-in course player that comes with your authoring app, you may not need to go into that level of detail. But even if you’re using standard navigation, it’s still helpful to let your learners know if they need to turn on their speakers, whether there’ll be a quiz at the end, and how much time they should set aside to complete the course. If you’re using a web-based app, like Rise, it might look something like this: If you’re using a slide-based app like Storyline, a simple instructions slide could look more like this, for example: Learning Objectives Objectives give learners an overview of the course goals. Usually presented in bullet point format, the list shows actionable tasks the learner should be able to do after completing the course. However, objectives don’t have to be listed in bullet point format. Often, it’s the client, business partner, or organizational style guide that requires objectives to be presented that way. There’s a trend in the e-learning industry to find creative alternatives to the bulleted format. For example, you could create an accordion interaction in Rise so your learners can explore the different objectives at their own pace, like in the screenshot below: Or, if you’re using a slide-based tool like Storyline, you can create a stylized objectives layout to catch your learner’s eye: Here are some additional resources and discussions on making bullet points more engaging: Convert Your Bullet Points to Interactive E-Learning with Video Five Surefire Ways to Get Rid of Bullet Points Ideas on Getting Rid of Bullet Points to State Course Objectives Reducing Bullet Points and On-Screen Text Animating Bullet Points — Is It Possible to Animate More Than One? Content This section is the meat of your course, where all the learning happens. Here you can include text, images, charts, tabs or timeline interactions, scenarios, screencasts, videos, and much more. There are many different ways to present your content, but here are a couple of ideas to get you started. Text and Images Example created in Rise Content Library template available in Storyline 360 Scenarios Example created in Rise Content Library template available in Storyline 360 Timeline Interactions Example created in Rise Content Library template available in Storyline 360 Depending on your content and course objectives, your course could include just one or two of these elements, or all of the above and much more! Let your objectives guide you through the creation process and help you decide how to best present your content to help your learners reach their target. Practice Activities The purpose of practice activities is to help learners strengthen their skills and knowledge. As such, they should include content presented earlier in the module so learners can apply what they just learned. Here’s an example of a practice activity you can create in Rise: And here’s another example created in Storyline 360: Knowledge Checks & Assessments Knowledge checks and assessments are quizzes at the end of each topic, module, or course, where learners can test their progress during a module. The main difference between the two types of quizzes is that knowledge checks do not generally count toward the final score, while assessments do. They might look like typical quizzes (i.e., true/false, multiple choice, etc.), or take on a more casual format, such as a scenario in which learners must make decisions about what to do in a real-life situation. Check out this example of a quiz question created in Rise: And this one created in Storyline 360 : Summary At the end of each topic, module, and course you’ll often find a summary of the key points from that section. They can include links to additional resources to help highly motivated learners take their knowledge to the next level. In Rise, that could look something like this, for example: Or if you’re working in Storyline or another slide-based app, you could create a slide like this one: Contact Info & Resources At the end of each course you’ll usually find contact information for the trainer or subject matter expert (SME) as well as some additional resources to help support learners as they apply the skills they’ve learned in the course to their jobs. Typically they include one or more of the following: Contact information: People to contact for help or questions about the course Continued learning: Additional resources beyond what was in the course Job aids: Handouts from the course that can be used as performance support In Rise, you could create something that looks like this, for example: Or you could build a slide like this in Storyline or another slide-based app: Final Thoughts As a course designer, you have unlimited options for combining e-learning elements in your courses. Your experience level, combined with expectations for your course and learners, will influence many of your choices. If you’re a new e-learning designer, try covering these common elements to start. Good luck! Leave a comment or post in the forums if you have any other questions about these e-learning elements or want to share ideas for combining them in unique ways. Follow us on Twitter and come back to E-Learning Heroes regularly for more helpful advice on everything related to e-learning.When Is Blended Learning the Right Strategy?
I’ve been taking a LinkedIn Learning course to develop my creative writing skills. The course consists of a series of short video lessons followed by exercises that let me practice what I’ve just learned. It’s self-directed, convenient, and, well, just plain fun. I’ve enjoyed the course so much that it got me thinking: Why shouldn’t every learning experience be like this? Why would anyone drag themselves into a classroom setting with a droning instructor when they could sit at home in their stretchy pants and Star Wars tee learning at their own pace how to be an amazing writer? This is learning done right! But then a visit to my dental hygienist made me rethink my ideas. As she scraped away at my gums, she told me about a course she’s taking to get certified in new torture laser technology and techniques. To pass the course, she’s completing several hours of e-learning and attending hands-on clinics. She must also pass a written exam and get certified by an instructor who will observe her technique while she’s using the device. As a patient, I have to say I feel a whole lot better knowing that she gets lots of training and practice before she starts poking around in my mouth with a lightsaber. But just imagine if she’d told me she's learning how to use this new laser technology by simply watching a few videos—no practice, no feedback from an expert? Just her winging it … with a laser … in my mouth. That’s a big ol’ nope! Blended Learning Considerations The beauty of using a simple, self-directed approach to learn creative writing is clear: It’s empowering to tackle topics when and where I want to learn them. No one is supervising me or checking up on my work. The self-directed approach works for this topic because the consequences of screwing up a creative writing assignment are pretty low. But if I’d been trying to learn a higher-risk skill like, say, how to laser people’s gums, relying entirely on a self-directed approach, without any guidance or feedback from an instructor or peers, probably would’ve left me feeling frustrated, intimidated, and unsupported, even with a good foundation of prior knowledge. That’s where my dental hygienist’s blended learning strategy makes much more sense. By using independent study activities (like e-learning) she’s empowered to learn at her own pace. And the hands-on clinics give her opportunities to practice and get feedback on her actual performance, making her feel supported. It’s that combo of empowerment and support that can make blended learning a winning strategy for driving learning AND performance outcomes. So, how can you tell if a blended strategy is the right way to go? Here are a few things to consider: Are you addressing a critical performance gap? Let’s say your factory was just fined for safety violations after an employee was injured in a preventable forklift accident. Not only do you have a high-risk, high-profile safety concern, you’ve got a critical performance gap you need to address—pronto. Taking a blended approach to this challenge might look like a mixture of videos or e-learning to increase awareness; hands-on practice and targeted feedback to help build skills; and ongoing coaching, refresher training, or other periodic interventions to foster a sustained focus on safety. Such a robust response could empower and support your learners and demonstrate renewed operational rigor to regulators. Are you trying to develop your learners in multiple areas and help them grow their skills over time? In today’s competitive employment environment, attracting and developing future leaders is a high priority for many organizations. But all of the nuanced behaviors that make someone a skilled, effective leader take time to develop. When you’re trying to support learners as they grow into new, more complex and demanding roles in the org, using a blended strategy is a natural fit. With blended learning, it’s about looking beyond individual training events and exploring a full range of complementary training options that give learners plenty of time and space to practice and learn from their mistakes. A blended strategy for future leaders might look like a carefully crafted combination of mentoring and job shadowing with current leaders, along with more structured interventions like online and instructor-led courses designed to build critical skills. Is it a topic you’ve already trained them on? Sometimes new training projects stem from an old training need that wasn’t fully understood or adequately addressed in the first place. Maybe you’ve given your sales team a robust e-learning curriculum on selling skills, but later analysis of key performance indicators (KPIs) points to them not being very good at actually closing the sale. This information could be your clue that using a blended approach like e-learning as pre-work to a facilitated classroom experience, along with incorporating more frequent spot-coaching from managers, might be a better way to close this performance gap—and increase sales. Summary At this point, it may sound like you should almost always use a blended strategy. But before you reinvent the training wheel, keep in mind that it’s a good instructional design rule of thumb to start with learning outcomes, rather than specific modalities or technologies. In other words, focus on getting a full understanding of the needs of the project, your organization’s goals, and the needs of the training audience, and then figure out what strategies will get you the desired outcomes. A solid needs analysis is the starting point for identifying effective strategies. To learn more tips for conducting an effective needs analysis, check out this article from Nicole Legault. And while you’re digging into the topic of training needs analysis, don’t miss this free, exhaustive list of needs analysis questions you can use for your next project. What are your experiences with blended learning? When and how did you know it was the right approach? Leave me a comment or post your story in our Building Better Courses forum to strike up a conversation with even more e-learning pros. Subscribe to our newsletter to get the latest e-learning inspiration and insights directly in your inbox. You can also find us on LinkedIn and X (formerly Twitter). And if you have questions, please share them in the comments.8 Business Use Cases for Microlearning
Are you excited to try out microlearning, but unsure when to use it? Below, we outline eight common workplace situations that benefit from a short-form course. Each situation includes a sample microlearning. At the end, learn how you can customize these templates for your own company and training needs. 1. Create Organizational Alignment To hit a business target, everyone needs to be moving in the same direction. Creating that alignment starts with clear, frequent communication of the shared mission, vision, and values. Microlearning can help. The following editable template shows how you can align employees through regular executive “micro” updates: Executive Update 2. Highlight HR Information, Notices, or Reminders Educating employees about annual events like open enrollment, tax season, and compliance training is a critical function of HR teams. The problem? Important announcements often get missed when they’re embedded in long paragraphs or endless emails. Grab the following templates to see how microlearning makes HR communications more digestible and engaging: A Quick Guide To Open Enrollment Internal Company Newsletter 3. Strengthen Company Culture and DEI Initiatives Fostering an inclusive company culture is a continuous process—not a one-time effort. A series of microlearnings can support your larger culture-building and DEI efforts. Check out the following examples for ideas on how to get started: Are You an Ally? Try Taking on These 5 Roles How To Identify and Stop Using Ableist Language Gossip-Proof Your Workplace 4. Streamline Business Processes You can also use microlearning to document and streamline business processes or workflows—such as employee onboarding or performance management. Notice how the following examples make it easy for employees to work through the steps of a process independently: New Hire Pre-Hire Checklist Performance Review and Feedback 5. Increase Security Awareness Most successful data breaches, phishing attacks, and other cybersecurity incidents are caused by human error. Adding refresher microlearnings throughout the year can fortify your defenses. See an example for safeguarding against phishing attacks below: Spot the Phish 6. Enhance Employee Wellness A successful business needs thriving employees. But employee wellness training often ends up buried under competing priorities. Microlearning makes it easy for employees to fit in short breaks for self-care throughout the workday. Check out these two wellness-related microlearning examples: 3 Desk Stretches to Instantly Improve Your Day 5 Tips for Better Naps 7. Provide Quick-Reference Guides Microlearning is the perfect resource for one-off training questions: Employees can quickly find the answers they need—when they need them. Below, we’ve created templates for product and software training. But you could easily create quick-reference guides for sales, customer service, and other teams. Get To Know [Name of Product] Software Training 8. Reinforce and Assess Key Takeaways Finally, who says you have to choose between a more sizable course and microlearning? Repetition aids retention. Consider following up longer training sessions with a microlearning quiz, scenario, or summary. The examples listed below demonstrate how you might do this: Can You Recover From a Workplace Mistake? Training Refresher Wrap-Up There’s no shortage of creative ways you can use microlearning to achieve your business training objectives. The examples above are just a starter list. You might also check out submissions to one of our weekly community challenges, 40+ Microlearning Examples Created in Rise 360 #407. Interested in customizing one of these examples for your team? If you’re an Articulate 360 subscriber or trialer, you can edit all of the examples linked throughout this post by choosing the course from our Rise 360 microlearning content templates. Here’s a short video showing how to do that: What’s the latest microlearning course you’ve created? Tell us about it in the comments—and feel free to ask any questions you might have! Like this article? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the latest e-learning inspiration and insights directly in your inbox. You can also find us on LinkedIn and Twitter.What's the PADDIE Model of Instructional Design?
You just landed a consulting job helping a company ramp up their new-hire training. You’ll be the one-stop shop for creating onboarding materials. How exciting! It’s a big-name client and you’re eager to start. You sit down to begin your needs analysis and you freeze—not only are you missing a project budget, but there’s no timeline or list of stakeholders. You don’t even have a style guide, much less contact information for someone in the marketing department to get one. Where did you go wrong? You’re positive the analysis stage of ADDIE is the right place to start. But if that’s right, why are you missing key information? If you’ve ever reached for the ADDIE model and found it’s not enough, you know the scenario I described intimately. Although it’s a tried-and-true method, the ADDIE model is lacking a core piece of any project—planning. Enter PADDIE, the ADDIE model with planning! But why PADDIE? And what are some of the key things that should happen in the planning stage? This article will discuss just that. Why PADDIE I’ve always thought ADDIE was the weak link in an otherwise robust group of instructional design methodologies. Over the course of my career I’ve found its linear stages restrictive and its lack of planning frustrating. I’ve never been able to successfully launch a project straight from the analysis phase. At a minimum, you need to know what you’re analyzing and your basic project parameters before kicking off! As a new instructional designer, there were a few times I ended up in hot water because I didn’t realize how crucial planning was. No one told me to do a deeper dive into the project background before starting the analysis. Learn from my mistakes and include a robust planning stage up front. What to Include in the Planning Stage When you first kick off a project, there are certain things you need in order to be successful. Without this information, you’ll miss project milestones, blow your budget, and probably frustrate your stakeholders. Let’s take a look at key items to nail down in the planning stages of your project to ensure everything goes smoothly. Agree on a project timeline and deliverables. Once you get your deadline from the client and agree on key delivery dates, you’ll commit to what will be delivered on those dates and who to send the deliverables to. You can also use this to solicit buy-in from subject matter experts and get everyone involved to commit to the timeline. Review your project budget and plan accordingly. Compare the amount of money the client can spend to the time it’ll take to complete the project. If the hours to complete the project exceed their budget, go back to the client and negotiate course features—such as length. Looking at this up front is a great way to ensure the project is feasible. Talk to your stakeholders or reviewers and agree on a chain of command. It’s not always clear who should review your project deliverables —like scripts and storyboards—or in what order. By defining the order in which people will review—and who gets final say—you’ll save time in the review stages and ensure you prioritize the right feedback. Identify additional resources and where to get them. Do you need to use a course template the client provides? Is there a style guide to follow? Who provides this information? Knowing what additional information you need and requesting it from the right person is key to staying on track! While these are all great considerations for the planning stage, there are definitely other things to keep in mind. I’ve found the more I know, the smoother my project goes. So make sure to keep an eye out for additional information that can help you. Wrap-Up Hopefully you’re feeling confident about your course design process and see the value of including a planning phase up front! If you’d like additional information on ADDIE or other instructional design methodologies and theories, check out the links below: An Introduction to the ADDIE Model for Instructional Designers 26 E-Learning Examples to Help Course Designers Learn About the ADDIE Model An Introduction to SAM for Instructional Designers An Introduction to Bloom’s Taxonomy for Instructional Designers E-Learning Project Plan Subscribe to our newsletter to get the latest e-learning inspiration and insights directly in your inbox. You can also find us on LinkedIn and X (Formerly Twitter).A Quick Introduction to LMS and LRS Standards
There are a few common reasons why folx go looking for information on Learning Management System (LMS) or Learning Record Store (LRS) standards. If you’re one of them, maybe you’re doing your due diligence to make sure your course will work with a specific LMS or LRS. Or maybe you’ve come across some cryptic references to e-learning standards (cmi5 is what exactly?) and want an easy-to-understand explanation. No matter what brought you here, you’re in the right place. This article is all about giving you the plainspoken lowdown on LMS/LRS standards and why they’re important. Along the way we’ll unpack a few acronyms (specifically, AICC, SCORM, xAPI, and cmi5) and give you a little history lesson, too. Ready? Let’s get to it! What are LMS/LRS standards and why do we need them? Organizations use LMSs and LRSs mainly to track learner data like course completions and quiz scores. As you can imagine, there are lots of different ways to share data between digital systems. Without an agreed-upon process, your course could end up sharing data in a way that your LMS or LRS can’t understand. This is where LMS/LRS standards come in. Each standard (AICC, SCORM, xAPI, cmi5) is essentially a shared language for communicating with an LMS or LRS. Having standards ensures that, no matter the authoring app or LMS/LRS you’re using, information can be shared without any fuss or complicated coding. If you’re using an LMS that’s integrated with your authoring app—like Reach 360 is with Storyline 360 and Rise 360—you don’t have to worry about these standards because your course files and LMS all work together automatically. And if you have an Articulate 360 subscription, don’t forget that it now includes the Reach 360 Starter plan, so you can use it to share training with up to 300 learners a year at no additional cost! However, if you’re using an LMS/LRS that isn't integrated with your authoring app, you need to know which standard to publish to. In the world of e-learning, there are four common standards: AICC, SCORM, xAPI, and cmi5. Let’s take a closer look at each one. AICC The oldest e-learning standard, AICC (which stands for Aviation Industry Computer-based Training Committee), was created in 1988 to ensure that aviation training could be designed, delivered, and evaluated across various computer-based training platforms. Eventually, the specs in the AICC standard became popular outside the aviation industry. The AICC dissolved in 2014 due to declining membership and the rise of other e-learning standards. Although the AICC standard is no longer evolving, it’s still fairly common for authoring apps and hosting platforms to be AICC-compliant. Many organizations have useful legacy training content that was originally published as AICC, so they look for LMS platforms that allow them to host that content and authoring apps that allow them to maintain that content. Before the AICC dissolved, the committee started working on a new standard called cmi5, which I’ll highlight in just a bit. SCORM SCORM, which stands for Shareable Content Object Reference Model, was released in 2001. Despite its age, it’s still an industry standard that defines how to package course content so that LMSs can recognize it and extract information about learner activity. The SCORM standard in all its iterations has proven to be a catalyst for broad adoption of e-learning. However, as we saw with AICC, standards need to continuously evolve to meet the ever-changing landscape of modern technology—like cloud computing and mobile devices. While SCORM specifies how courses and LMSs should communicate, it does so in ways that are a bit out of date. Another common complaint about SCORM is that it only tracks a limited amount of information about learner activity—like completion, scoring, and quiz interactions. If authors want to track more detailed information about the learner experience—like which links learners clicked or if they tend to get stuck in a specific part of the course—they can’t. Ultimately, these limitations gave rise to the creation of xAPI. Learn more: A Quick Introduction to SCORM xAPI When xAPI came out in 2013, it was billed by many as a replacement for SCORM. Unlike SCORM, which only tracks how learners interact with courses on an LMS, xAPI tracks a broader array of learning activities and experiences across a wide variety of platforms—from mobile apps, video games, and Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality training simulators to enterprise systems like talent management and help desk applications—using an LRS. In theory, this allows e-learning pros to track almost anything, anywhere, opening up tons of possibilities for gathering and analyzing more meaningful and performance-oriented data. However, in practice it can be complicated to implement, since you have to manually define everything you want to track and how. Not to mention that very few systems outside of the Learning and Development (L&D) industry have adopted this standard or are even aware of it, so the tracking possibilities aren’t quite as extensive as you might think. Learn more: An Introduction to xAPI cmi5 Although cmi5 sounds like the name of a Star Wars droid or a top-secret espionage organization, it’s far less exotic. Cmi5 is the most recent e-learning standard, released by ADL after the AICC dissolved. To create cmi5, they basically took xAPI and added rules specific to e-learning content to make it easier for course authors to set up. In short, like xAPI, cmi5 tracks and records learning experiences wherever and whenever they happen—course creators just don’t have to do as much mental gymnastics to get it to work. For this reason, many e-learning pros tout it as the preferred option for tracking, calling it the best of both worlds. More Learning Does all of this sound like an L&D version of Goldilocks and the Three Bears? If AICC is out of date, SCORM is too constrained, and xAPI lacks definition, does that mean the cmi5 standard is just right? In case your head is spinning, here’s a table that recaps the basic use cases for each of the four standards: Standard LMS or LRS? Use Case AICC LMS Legacy e-learning courses with basic tracking needs like completion, scoring, and quiz interactions. SCORM LMS E-learning courses that don’t require tracking beyond completion, scoring, and quiz interactions. xAPI LMS and LRS Learning experiences that extend beyond e-learning courses and require highly detailed, customized tracking—via an LRS. Note that xAPI was designed to record general experiences, with a light focus on e-learning content. cmi5 LMS Learning experiences that extend beyond e-learning courses and require highly detailed, customized tracking—via an LMS. Note that cmi5 includes special functions specifically tailored to e-learning content. I don’t know about you, but I take comfort in knowing that our industry has a rich history of evolving standards. For almost thirty years, L&D folks have been working hard to create and iterate standards that give practitioners the tools they need to help their orgs keep pace with today’s learners. Want to learn more about the hosting platforms that use these standards? Here are a few resources to check out: All About Learning Management Systems (LMSs) An Introduction to LRSs
