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…

4 Ways to Distribute eLearning

I recently had the opportunity to coach a colleague on the technical aspects of creating a sample eLearning course for a perspective employer. One of the challenges with eLearning is providing a work sample when you don’t personally have your own LMS. I came up with some suggestions that could help my colleague and I decided that I would share them with you as well.

One option that I frequently use is my Dropbox account. When I signed up for my Dropbox account it included a special folder called a public folder. This folder was open to the whole World Wide Web and anything I put in this folder was available for anyone to view. Essentially this is my own little web server. Unfortunately this type of free account is no longer available but you can sign up for a Dropbox Pro account for about $10 per month if you want the same functionality. It’s far less expensive than maintaining your own personal LMS. Below is a video where I instruct users with such an account on how to setup their eLearning work sample for access on the web.

Another way you can share your eLearning work sample is by publishing it as a standalone application. When you publish an eLearning course it normally packages a whole bunch of files into a ZIP package commonly known as a SCORM file. You can unpack these and sort of get your eLearning to work. You could also publish to a folder and then provide instructions to the end user on how to launch the course but this is messy and not always simple for the end user. Adobe Captivate maintains the ability to publish to either a Windows EXE file or an Apple App file. This allows you to publish a course as a standalone application that anyone with a Windows Machine or a Mac could then run. You can then simply copy the one file to a thumb drive and share with the person asking for the work submission. Incidentally you do not need a Mac to publish the Mac version or a Windows PC to publish the Windows version. Captivate can do both formats on either platform. Here is a video that explains how to do this for the Windows situation:

This next one is not my favourite solution but if either of the first two options are not open to you, you could publish to a PDF. There are some specific requirements that would be difficult to confirm before submitting a work sample this way, specifically this does require a certain version or higher of Adobe Reader. Of course there is no guarantee that the person you are giving the work submission to is using the correct version. In fact they may be using any number of third party PDF readers that won’t work with this solution. If you would like to try this out here is my video on that process:

As a final thought, if none of these solutions are a viable option for you, consider signing up for a trial account of Adobe Captivate Prime. Captivate Prime is Adobe’s cloud-based LMS solution. It’s fairly intuitive and in a pinch could be used as a temporary LMS for these purposes.

I hope that one of these solutions works for you and of course good luck in getting that new position in eLearning design and development: