Tag Archives: eLearning SIG

Apologies I haven’t posted in a while; it’s been quite a busy year so far, and promises to remain busy through year end. We’ve had some great ATDNYC eLearning SIG sessions so far this year, and I want to let you know about the three remaining sessions coming up:

Wednesday, September 18th We’ll be offering a hands-on session on how easy it is to create your own background graphics for your eLearning using just your smartphone and a little savvy. No prior photography experience required! My co-chair David Truzman and I will share examples and coach you on creating simple images that will work well as backgrounds for your eLearning slides. We’ll also talk about using background visuals as metaphors for your project. You can read more and sign up here.

Friday, October 18th A Scavenger Hunt Outing! We’ll be meeting outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art at 5:45pm to start a scavenger hunt (we’ll enter the museum as individuals) for eLearning metaphor photo images in the museum’s regular collection. Then after two hours of image hunting, we’ll meet back outside the museum and relocate to a nearby restaurant to have dinner and share some of the images we’ve found. You can read more about the outing (and the Met’s admission and photography guidelines) and sign up here.

Wednesday, November 6th We’ll be back at CUNY for an end-of-year showcase. This is your chance to shine! Share a few slides from one of your projects inspired by topics we’ve covered this season, whether it includes some elements of gamification, some background images metaphors–whatever you’re most proud of and able to share with the group. Each presenter will have 5-10 minutes to show their slides, discuss them, and ask for feedback (if you want it). You can read more and sign up here.

You can attend any of these three sessions on its own. However, if you’re able to attend any two or more, you’ll reap that much more of the rewards. I hope we’ll see you there!

On July 26th, ATD NYC eLearning SIG co-chair Mark Cassetta and I gave a standing-room-only session on The Rise of Web-Based Development Tools.  Mark gave an excellent demo of the web-based tool Adapt.  And I followed up with a brief look at the Rise web-based tool included with the Articulate 360 suite.  There are of course other web-based eLearning development tools surfacing, but we felt these two were the strongest ones out of the gate.

Adapt has been around longer (since 2013), and as Mark demonstrated, is currently far more fully-featured than Articulate’s Rise tool.  The fact that Adapt is open source and offers a fully-functional free version should send you running to check it out.  Rise is not free; it’s only available with a subscription to the Articulate 360 suite.  But as I demonstrated, this new tool already has a great look and feel, and allows you to put together great-looking modules in a fraction of the time you’d need developing in Articulate’s Storyline, or Adobe’s Captivate or similar products.

Mark and I pointed out that in addition to providing for faster, cheaper development, web-based tools are also designed to create content that is fully responsive in design–the courseware will automatically adapt its layout depending on whether your learners access it from a laptop, a tablet, or a smartphone.  In this day of one-the-go, just-in-time training, this mobile-friendly element is huge.  And the learning curve for both tools is surprisingly low.

You can read more about Adapt here: https://www.adaptlearning.org

And you can read more about Rise here: https://articulate.com/360/rise

Our next ATD NYC eLearning SIG session will be on Wednesday, September 27th–put that date in your calendar now!

As you may know, I’m co-chair of ATD NYC’s eLearning SIG (special interest group).  Every other month, co-chair Enid Crystal and I put together a program exploring the challenges and rewards of including eLearning in your company’s blended learning solutions.  Sometimes we invite speakers, and other times we host roundtable discussions on hot topics.

On Wednesday, May 13th, at 5:30pm, we’ll be hosting a roundtable about how you can avoid making some of the most common eLearning design mistakes.  To add to the fun and participation, we’re presenting this roundtable with a bit of a “flipped classroom” approach, meaning you can do a little homework prior to the meeting, and then we’ll all share our ideas and discuss them together at the meeting.

If you’re an ATD NY member, we hope you’ll join us.  And even if you’re not, you’re allowed to participate in one ATD NY session for free.  Since our focus is on eLearning, we hold our meetings both in person and virtually, to allow as many people as possible to participate.

So, how will this all work?  Simple!  I’ve created a PowerPoint file showing six common eLearning design mistakes.  You can download it right here:  Common eLearning Mistakes Sample Slides

Pick at least one of the slides in this sample deck, and create your suggested revision that makes all the same points, but in a way that will deliver the message more effectively.

Then, email your slide(s) to me at andrew.sellon@atdnyc.org no later than Monday, May 11th at 12 noon Eastern Time.  

I’ll collate all the submissions so that we can review and discuss them together at Wednesday evening’s meeting.  And even if you don’t have time to revise a slide, feel free to join us for the discussion.  We all learn a lot from our peers every time we hold one of our roundtables.  And of course, after the event I’ll share the collated PowerPoint deck so that you can remind yourself of the great solutions you can apply to your next project.

We hope to “see” you there!