Iconography for Your eLearning

I’ve discovered a great resource for developing iconography for your eLearning and it’s a font! Yes I know, I’m amazed that something as simple as a font can be used to create hundreds of the icons, navigation controls and user interface elements for your eLearning – Wow!

The font is called Font Awesome and contains iconography for all kinds of elements that you might need to include in your eLearning course. To be clear, the people behind Font Awesome are not paying me to write this article or to tweet about it. I just think this is an amazing resource for eLearning developers and designers. I’ve certainly used wingding and webding fonts to do the same thing in the past, but Font Awesome is completely up to date with the types of iconography it includes. In fact this one single font includes over 600 icons, including popular interface elements like battery bars, Bluetooth symbols and even various web application brands like Google + and Facebook. Because fonts are essentially vector graphics, these icons will scale up to just about any size you need. Also, because it’s  a font it is totally compatible with Adobe Captivate, my eLearning authoring tool of choice, and I imagine many other eLearning authoring tools as well.

Here is the best part about Font Awesome. It is completely free (like the website says “as in free speech free”)! I’ve installed this font and created a whole series of custom navigation controls within Adobe Captivate for my latest round of templating. I’m very happy with the results and so are my clients. 

There are a couple of things you need to keep in mind.

Font Awesome will completely work with standard, sometimes called blank projects in Adobe Captivate. Since standard projects will publish either as SWF or HTML5, all blocks of text will be converted into a series of images. The only exception are text fields that are populated at runtime. For example, the empty fields on your quiz results slide. In the case of those fields, just stick with web safe fonts like Arial, or Times New Roman.

For responsive design projects you can still use Font Awesome, but you will need to make your buttons and other navigation elements within something like Photoshop.

Here is an example of the template I recently created with Font Awesome. As I’ve said, all the user interface elements were created using icons from this font. I can’t tell you how many hours this thing has probably saved me.

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Here is the link to check this out for yourself:
fontawesome.io

Breaking eLearning Problems into Small Solutions

I think my greatest strength as an eLearning developer is looking at what others might see as a large problem and breaking it down into small chunks that by themselves are much easier to solve. This video is an example of that. The person who asked the question on YouTube could only see the solution within the confines of the video she commented on. I sat for maybe ten minutes and realized that if I separated the feedback from the knowledge check, the solution would be relatively easy with no advanced actions required. Take a look at the video below. 

Choosing the Right Resolution for your eLearning

In this video I talk about the consideration you should make when choosing a screen resolution. This is not an entirely new concept. I’ve talked about this before when discussing making responsive design part of your needs analysis. Choosing specific resolutions for your break points is useful if you have a large percentage of the employees within your organization that use specific mobile devices, such as company provided smartphones or tablets. Watch the video for more details.

Make Your Own Table of Contents Slide

In this video, I help out Anar who is looking for a table of content slide that users can navigate to from any other slide in the course. This is a simple solution to the problem and as you get more advanced you can add features that allow users to see what modules they have visited and so on. But for right now here is a simple solution to the problem.

Other Ways of Doing Things

I recently was helping a client work on their Adobe Captivate eLearning project and she had a sequence question. I honestly can’t tell you the last time I used a sequence question. I believe the first time I attempted to use one I just felt that the user experience was so poor that I quickly figured out alternative ways to accomplish the same thing. Here is one of them.

When I first figured out how to add drag and drop questions to an Adobe Captivate project it was using the Drag and Drop widget by INFOsemantics. I no longer use the widget as Captivate now has drag and drop built in and the INFOsemantics widget will not publish to HTML5. Still, it served its purpose for me for many years.

Here is how I do sequence questions now...

On an unrelated note, INFOsemantics has been in the Captivate news recently with their CPExtra widget. I asked owner Rod Ward for a trial copy so I could review it on my YouTube channel. He didn't reply to my request so I have not created such a video. He seems to be getting testimonials from happy customers so I it seems that he and his son Tristan are on to something. I’ve watched several of the videos they have put together on the widget and I have to say I’m not entirely sure what problems this widget solves for me. I just don’t really understand what this thing does.

At present I’m very happy with all the capabilities of Adobe Captivate in version 9.0.1 and I suspect that the days of widgets are probably soon to be over.

Giving is Living

I had someone recently reach out to me from the internet and ask for assistance. This was the type of question that I knew would take more than a few minutes of my time to explain how to do it. When I suspect that I will need to have a conversation about compensation I recommend that the potential client reach out to me through something more private like email. When I got this guy’s email I saw his signature indicate that he worked for a very famous and wealthy imaging company from Japan. This in no way affected how much I would charge him for my services but it does tell me that if he successfully implements my solutions to his problems, his company will compensate him for his work. I responded to his email and pointed him to my website where he could purchase an hour of consulting. He never responded to my email.

Probably the hardest thing I do in balancing my free YouTube channel and my actual day job of designing eLearning for my clients is managing the transition of free subscribers asking for help and converting them into paying customers. Don’t get me wrong. I love helping people out. If you post a question that I happen to have the answer to on the tip of my tongue, you will very likely get it for free. I really try to live my professional life using Tony Robbins’ motto “Giving is living.”

Sometimes people get annoyed when I attempt to transition from free advice to paying customer but in the end I have had more positive experiences recognizing where the "ask of me" is going and dealing with the matter of compensation up front. If you're like me, don’t get caught in the trap of giving too much away for free. In the end you have to be compensated for your work, but don’t be afraid to give of yourself as well; sometimes it can be its own reward.

Everything I Want In an LMS

Last month I attended the Adobe eLearning conference in Washington D.C. as a presenter. My topic was about testing and tracking. Adobe asked me to include some details around reporting in their new LMS tool Adobe Captivate Prime. I did an initial preview when this LMS was first launched but I didn't think much more about it until this week.

You see Adobe reactivated my trial and I've had to actually do some things in the LMS in preparation for my presentation. After playing around with it for three days I thought I should document my experience. 

Integration with Adobe Captivate

First of all, I had to publish my Captivate project to the LMS and for this process you can't imagine a more seamless process. In fact until I completed the process I wasn't even aware that I had not selected a reporting options in Captivate. Regardless though, this just works. It seemed to be taking my course as HTML5 rather than the original SWF format that this course was originally designed for. I know this because there were several flash based movies embedded that got converted to MP4 during the process. It accepted my Captivate project with no hassles and even began the configuring process for me by scraping the information from the preferences window. My title and description were populated for me.

Once your module was uploaded, the next step was to put that module, along with any other modules, into a course. This was easy and intuitive as Prime walks you though the process and warns you if you have missed anything.

Testing & Tracking

Watch the following video to see a shorter version of what I presented in Washington. I think you'll agree the reporting capabilities are exactly what a designer needs to see to determine the effectiveness of their eLearning.

Responsive Learning

When designing for mobile I find you need to rethink learning. I always try to imagine what my learner needs from each project. For example, if an employee wanted to access my lesson while commuting on the train, what needs to be on their screen? Do I need just the basics or should I try to cram my desktop design onto their tiny screen?

Another colleague and I have coined the phrase responsive learning. This is not to be confused with responsive design. No, responsive learning is a theory that I have that true mobile learning should not only know what screen size you have and accommodate for that, but to also understand the environment your learner is in and adjust the learning to be suitable for that environment. Adobe Captivate has begun this process by integrating location based information into your course. For example you could design a course in Adobe Captivate that not only adjusts the on-screen content based on the size of screen you are using but also adjust the content based on where you are. One of the eLearning evangelists at Adobe designed a sample course that would act as a tour guide within a theme park. When users would change their physical location the Captivate project would present new information based on where the learner was located within the theme park. Here is a link if you want to see this in action.

Making of an Award-winning Location-aware App!

I think we are in early days of this type of technology. In fact I would like to see location aware technology go even further than just pinpointing where you are located on the planet but to gather enough information as to determine what type of activity you are currently engaged using sensors that can determine how fast you are moving and so on. For example, it wouldn't be appropriate to have text on screen for a course while you are driving. In such circumstances perhaps the learning switches to podcast mode and presents the material in a radio show format. Perhaps this is done through a combination of GPS location, speed of travel, or maybe it just asks you what you are doing at the present and adjusts the learning based on the answers you give.

In other words, I think mobile is just getting started and we can expect that the most successful instructional designers and developers are those that take advantage of each new mobile technology as they come out. It will no longer be acceptable to just pump out a series of PowerPoint slides any more. I think we are about to see some really cool technology implemented in some really original and different ways. Stay tuned…

Get All Your Information on Adobe Captivate 9.0.1 Here

There is a lot of information out there on the new Adobe Captivate 9.0.1 Update and I thought it might be helpful if I put all the resources that I'm aware of in one place.

First of all here is my introductory video on the update...

Here are the associated release notes for the update. Please make sure you familiarize yourself with these before proceeding with the update.

https://helpx.adobe.com/captivate/release-note/captivate-9-0-1-release-notes.html

I also have several videos that discuss the new features in depth. Please watch them below...

Adobe Captivate 9.0.1

In this video I cover some important steps to perform after you install Adobe Captivate 9.0.1.