Characters for eLearning

I am working on an eLearning project where I will be using a character that will be the learners tutor throughout the module. I am toying with the idea of creating a cartoonish character and in my research I came across SP Studio which is a very cool site that makes it easy to create custom south park cartoon characters. That's me as a South Park character by the way, yes I am addicted to my Blackberry. I won't be able to use the South Park characters for my eLearning project because there is not enough flexiblity to move the arms around but I will definitely keep this in mind for future projects. It's a great way to add a little fun to an eLearning course.

At this point I am leaning towards using vector clip art to create the character. Although it can be rather time consuming to edit the points of the vector to get it just the way you want it but it's quicker than drawing the images in Photoshop, Illustrator, or Flash, at least for me it is. Tom Kuhlmans post on the Rapid eLearning Blog inspired me to go the vector route.

The other option I am considering is going away from the cartoonish look and taking photos of an employee of the company. I have done this in the past and it was nice to have the flexiblity of asking the person to pose any way you wish rather than struggling with editing points in vector images.

The plan from here is to play around a little more with vector images and if that ends up not working out I will go the route of taking pictures. Unless of course myself or somebody else out there comes up with a much better idea...

Captivate and Moodle play well with others

I finished up my first project developed with Captivate and decided to take the opportunity to dive into SCORM with Moodle. Until now, I have only experimented with moodle and have never had to worry about SCORM when publishing courses. We are now taking our eLearning programs to a larger scale and Moodle will sure save us a lot of headaches as opposed to using MS Sharepoint as we have been doing. So, I decided to take the leap and try and figure out what this whole SCORM thing was about.

At first I had a hard time finding specific instructions of how to make a SCORM class work in Moodle. Forgive my ignorance but I had no idea that you were supposed to upload the entire zipped package intact. I think this is beneath the regulars in the Moodle forums which is why I had a tough time finding anything on it.

Once I figured that out everything went surprisingly well. The scores from assesments within the Captivate eLearning module were recorded in the Moodle gradebook flawlessly. Now that I have this hurdle out of the way I am ready to dive into Moodle and make it my companies full time eLearning university. This comes in perfect timing for the eLearning courses I am working on for a management training program. I am just about ready to run a pilot test of the courses so I will also be able to use this opportunity for a pilot run of Moodle.

Brain Based Learning

I read an interesting article titled "Behavioral, Cognitive, or Brain Based Learning" by Paul G. Whitmore and it gave me a whole new perspective in analyzing performance problems. The article discusses how when you are conducting an analysis, not only do you want to look at how the task is completed, but you also want to analyze what the audience is thinking while they are completing the task. What is going through their head while they are getting the job done? What mental cues help them complete the task without error? How does the audience mentally process how the task needs to be completed?

This opened my eyes to some things that I may be missing in performance analysis. I always conduct a thorough task analysis but I have never taken the audiences thoughts into consideration. By taking "Brain Based Learning" into consideration during the performance analysis, it is likely there may be unexpected outcomes discovered.

This "Brain Based Learning" approach highlights the importance of experiencing the performance first hand. Without completing the performance yourself it can be very difficult to understand what mental cues assist in executing the task at hand. I look forward to applying this lesson in my next performance analysis.

Behavioral, Cognitive, or Brain Based Training?

Hello Captivate!

My Adobe creative suite and Captivate arrived and I have already dove into a project in Captivate. While I was waiting for the software to arrive, I designed and storyboarded a soft skill scenario simulation for management training courses that I am working on. Now I am knee deep in developing it in Captivate and I am kicking myself for not pushing harder for this purchase a year ago. Now I would love to go back and re do several of the eLearning courses I developed using Power Point and a Flash converter. Unfortunately I have too many projects on my to do list to spend the time going back and re developing courses. Some day.

I have also been improving my skills in Photoshop with this project. I am using employees of the company as characters in the eLearning module which is requiring quite a bit of work extracting images from their background in Photoshop.

I've been stoked about work now that I have all of these cool tools to play with. I'm looking forward to learning more.

Custom Reports in Moodle

This week I had some time to moodle around in Moodle. I really haven't dug too deep until now so this was definitely an eye opener. I didn't realize how easy it was to set up. One thing that did trip me up though is customizing reports.

Moodle has some great standard reports but it doesn't appear to be too easy to customize them. I'm looking to make the simple modification of adding a column of information and from my small amount of research, it looks like you have to get into the root folders and edit the PHP. Is this true? Is there an easier way? I have a work around for what I need to do now but I will definitely need to do more research on this as I am sure we will have a need for customized reports in the future.

joedeegan.com

I took a big step in my web development skills by moving my portfolio web site to a new web host and domain name that I purchased. Last semesters web design class held my hand through FTP'ing the files to the university web server so I was a little nervous to go out into the big scary Internet all on my own.

Everity was recommended to me as a web host and everything went well minus a small password problem. Everity handled the problem brilliantly and actually responded to my support ticket within minutes. Support like that will keep me with them.

Now that joedeegan.com is up and running I am eager to put some more work into it. At this point it is very rough and needs a lot of work which I hope will bring future opportunities. Suggestions are very welcome.

Software Shopping

Jackpot! Finally got the buy in from the boss to spend some money on Adobe software, mainly for developing eLearning and printed training materials. Thanks to the good ol' educational discount I can really make the most out of a $1000 budget.

Obviously, I need the Creative Suite 3 but that's where things get sticky. I am looking at 2 different packages and the only difference between the 2 packages is that one includes InDesign and the other includes Fireworks. I have never used either of these products and I'm not sure which I could use more.

Fireworks appears to be very similar to Photoshop with some extra features that will come in handy for web development. InDesign looks like a great tool for developing printed materials which I do often. I am tempted to go with InDesign because it is far more robust than the program I currently use (MS Publisher) for printed materials and it seems like all of Fireworks perks can be had in other programs if not Photoshop.

So, I am off to do more research on Fireworks and InDesign. I would just go with the Master suite because with the educational discount it comes in under $1000 but does not include Captivate which I consider a must have. It sure would make my life easier if Adobe would come out with an Instructional Design Creative Suite!