Scaling feedback?
Do you have any way of providing feedback to your learners? If so, how do you think about scaling it? Hey all! I recently had a coffee chat with JulieDirksen and she said something that got me thinking (well, she said a lot of things that got me thinking but this was one I wanted to share!). She was talking about how for a long time, feedback was one of the last things in learning that you couldn't scale. But, she noted that with AI that is now changing—it's now more possible to scale the experience of receiving feedback on your work. As a community professional, scaling feedback is something I've long thought about doing via nominating experts from the community to help spread the expertise of an "instructor" beyond one single person—I'm actually going to be giving a session at Articuland next week in Orlando that touches on this! But, all of this got me thinking about different forms of providing feedback and how they have the potential to scale, and I wanted to pitch this question to the community and get your thoughts.Recruiting for an Instructional Designer
We're looking for an Instructional Designer for a full time position. Interviews starting 14 Sept 26. Hybrid working (3 x office days): Can be based at any of our UK locations. We have over 500 sites from as far north as Aberdeen to as far south as Cornwall, so most of the UK will be in commuter distance of one of our offices. Salary: ~ £38,000 - £41,000 depending on experience. Company car or car allowance up to £7,500. Up to 10% annual bonus. What will I be Doing? As one of our Instructional Designers, you will: Work alongside two other Instructional Designers within a larger L&D team. Design, develop and deliver high-quality digital learning and e-learning solutions aligned to business priorities. Conduct training needs analysis and collaborate with subject matter experts, project teams and stakeholders to create engaging learning experiences. Create storyboards, multimedia content and learning materials using tools such as Articulate 360, Vyond, Camtasia and LMS platforms. Manage multiple projects, ensuring quality, accuracy and on-time delivery while continuously evaluating and improving learning effectiveness. Support the creation, publication and maintenance of digital learning content, providing guidance on best practice where content is developed collaboratively. What are the Requirements? We're looking for someone who brings a blend of instructional design expertise, creativity and stakeholder engagement skills: Bachelor's or Master's degree in Instructional Design, Educational Technology, Computer Science, or a related field, or equivalent experience, with 3-5 years' experience in e-learning content development. Proven experience designing and delivering self-guided digital learning programmes, with strong knowledge of learning principles, learner engagement and instructional design methodologies. Proficiency in Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel, together with Articulate 360, LMS platforms, Photoshop, Vyond and Camtasia. Strong communication and project management skills, with the ability to work independently and collaboratively across a range of stakeholders. Full UK Driving Licence. If you are interested or know of a suitable candidate please let me know...An eLearning Course May Be Teaching More Than You Intended
After many years in instructional design and eLearning, I’ve come to question something we often take for granted about learning. We tend to think of it in simple terms: The learner learned it. The learner didn’t. The course worked. The course failed. But I don’t think learning works that way. People always learn something. The more important question is: What are they learning? Consider a poorly designed eLearning course. An employee attends a course because they genuinely want to learn. But the content is difficult to follow, the activities feel disconnected, and the experience becomes frustrating. The course doesn’t help with the problems they actually face at work. We might conclude that the learner simply didn’t get much out of it. But they may have learned something very different from what we intended: “I could have spent this time getting my work done.” Or “eLearning is a waste of time.” That is still learning. It’s just not the learning outcome we intended. And if that happens repeatedly, something else happens. We spend a great deal of effort trying to motivate learners, get them interested, and hook them into the learning experience. But several poor learning experiences can work in the opposite direction. Learners may become more guarded and less receptive, even when they are later required to learn. There is an interesting example in Taiwan. The government has invested heavily in eLearning for public servants, offering a large number of courses across different topics and allowing employees to choose based on their needs and interests. There are many good courses among them, but the quality is mixed. In 2018, a proposal was submitted on Taiwan’s Public Policy Participation Platform calling for the abolition of the eLearning program for public servants. One of the complaints was that requiring 20 to 40 hours of eLearning each year was a waste of time with little effect. The proposal received nearly 8,000 endorsements in just three days. What interests me is not whether the program was good or bad. It’s this: If people repeatedly experience learning that feels ineffective, what are they learning about learning itself? Maybe: “This isn’t worth my time.” And that may be a bigger problem than one ineffective course. A poor course doesn’t simply fail to teach what we intended. It may teach learners to distrust the learning experience itself. So perhaps we need to ask a different question when we talk about learning effectiveness: Not just, “Did they learn what we wanted them to learn?” But: “What else did they learn from the experience?”ID Toolbox
Practical tools for e-learning developers… Over the past several months I've built a set of browser tools for the bits of Storyline and Rise that used to cost me hours. Eleven of them, all completely free, no signup, no accounts, nothing to install. They run entirely in your browser. Nothing is uploaded anywhere, which for me was the whole point, I wasn't keen on posting client content to a website just to check something… ID ToolboxThe Red Pen
AI drafts fast, confidently, and about half of it is wallpaper. This course teaches you to edit it, spot the six tells, fix them without swapping one kind of slop for another, and check the numbers a model will invent with a straight face. The Red Pen | Rise Tools used: Canva, Gemini and Rise CanvasWhat Is One Small Course Design Change That Improved Learner Engagement?
I'm always looking for practical ways to make e-learning courses more engaging. Recently, I've been experimenting with shorter content sections, knowledge checks, and interactive scenarios. For those who build courses regularly, what is one small change you've made that had a noticeable impact on learner engagement or completion rates? Was it related to course structure, visual design, interactions, accessibility, or something else? I'd love to hear about real-world experiences and lessons learned.What tools do you use?
What are your go to tools you use everyday and wouldn't be without in your authoring process? Here's mine. There's one thing they all have in common, and for me it's the important bit, nothing gets uploaded. They're plain HTML and JavaScript running in your browser. When you drop a .story file, an image or a SCORM zip on one of these, it gets read in memory on your own machine and that's the end of it. No server, no account, no sign up. Most of what I work on is client material and I'd rather not be posting it to a third party site. I suspect I'm not alone in that. They're all completely free, no trial, no limits, no nonsense! Story Auditor Variable health checks Storyline project files. Finds broken and at risk JavaScript references, unused variables and script issues before you ship. Story Documenter A complete written specification from a .story file. Every slide, every trigger in plain English, every quiz answer etc, ready to print or share with clients. Great for creating storyboards. Image Press Resize, compress and convert images in the browser. E-learning size presets, a target file size, batch zip download, and image metadata stripped on output. Great free tool for managing images for projects. SCORM Bench Run a SCORM package against a logging LMS runtime, without uploading it. Every API call visible, live data model, the manifest checked. Works with SCORM 1.2 and 2004. And a quick question; what's the thing in your workflow that still doesn't have a tool? These only existed because I moaned about something enough and then got annoyed enough to fix it!Storyline Theme Builder
Inspired by the work of randykepple and DShaw, I decided to take my internal theme builder to the next level and make it available to the entire community. It has been integrated and improved with Claude. This standalone, HTML-based tool allows you to create complete Storyline 360 color and font themes without needing Storyline to be installed or running. You can export your themes as .athmx files, share them with your team, and import them directly into Storyline whenever needed. For PowerPoint users, the tool also supports importing .thmx theme files. PowerPoint themes define 12 colors, including two hyperlink colors. During import, the Followed Hyperlink color is ignored, while the remaining colors are automatically mapped to their corresponding Storyline theme colors. The converted theme can then be exported as a valid Storyline .athmx file. The Storyline-specific colors that do not exist in PowerPoint such as Control 1, Question - Correct, Question - Incorrect, Custom 1, Custom 2, are initially assigned automatically. Before exporting the final theme, you can easily replace these defaults with any colors you prefer. In addition to theme creation, the app includes several utilities designed to streamline your workflow: A Color Contrast Checker to help you create more accessible color combinations. A Color Blindness Simulator to preview how your theme may appear to people with different types of color vision deficiency. An Image Color Extractor that samples colors from an image and automatically maps them to Storyline’s 16 theme color slots. Google Fonts integration (internet connection required), allowing you to enter a font’s exact name as it appears in Google Fonts for automatic recognition or simply paste the embed code generated by Google Fonts. Additional tools and widgets that simplify theme creation and help maintain a polished, consistent visual style across your projects. The goal of this application is to make creating, customizing, converting, and sharing Storyline themes faster, easier, and more consistent. Whether you are building a theme from scratch, converting an existing PowerPoint theme, or developing a color palette inspired by your brand, the tool is designed to save time while giving you complete control over the final result. I hope you find it useful, and I welcome any feedback or suggestions for future improvements. Storyline Theme StudioSwatch Library
A recent post by randykepple inspired me to share this. Randy's solution is also great so check that out! With Swatch Library you can create a palette per brand or project, and every swatch is one click to copy, in hex or RGB. Nothing to install, no sign-up, and nothing stored on a server. Your colours save automatically in your own browser. Type or paste a code, bulk-paste a whole list at once or, in Chrome/Edge, use the eyedropper to pick colours from anywhere on your screen, a client's website, a brand PDF, a Storyline slide. You can drop a logo or brand asset onto the tool and it will pull the dominant colours out and build a palette from them. Everything happens in the browser, nothing is uploaded anywhere. You untick any strays, name it, and it is done. I find this the quickest way to get a client palette in. Beyond that there is a WCAG 2.2 contrast checker built in, set a foreground and background colour, get the ratio, and see pass/fail for AA and AAA body text, large text and non-text elements like icons and focus indicators. That is useful enough on its own, but the thing I am most pleased with is the contrast grid. Each palette has a Grid button that opens a matrix of every colour pair in that palette, painted with the actual pair so you can see at a glance which combinations work for text and which do not. One click on any cell opens the full checker for that pair. If you have ever wondered whether your brand colours are actually safe to use together, this answers it quickly. There is also a colour vision preview. A Vision button on each palette shows it as it appears to people with protanopia, deuteranopia and tritanopia, plus a greyscale row for print. It automatically flags any pairs that become hard to tell apart, named with their perceptual distance score. Each swatch has a tints and shades button that opens a nine-step ramp from light to dark, and you can click any step to copy it or add it to the palette. Useful for hover states and backgrounds. You can drag swatches to reorder or move them between palettes, filter palettes once your library grows, and use Export/Import to back everything up or share a brand palette file with your team so everyone's working from the same set. There's a built-in guide for the full tour. It can be used directly in the linked Rise course, or used online via the link. All free, no downloads, no signup, no nonsense! Swatch Library - Rise Swatch Library Online
