Understanding a learners motivation and percieved importance of the content in designing course navigation.

A major discussion at the e-learning guild linkedin group has been around hiding a 'next' button with the intention of making the user complete some activity before being allowed to move on. The idea here is that users will be forced into focusing on the material rather than skipping through.

Lots of ideas for this have been brought up such as multiple choice questions, true / false, a timer, drag drop, and so on. Obviously whatever learning exercise that fits the content best will work in getting the user to stop for a second and take in the content. Do we need to do this? My opinion is that this technique should be used when we perceive our target learners motivation for the content to be low.

What situations fit this scenario:

• Internal Training for new company policies.
  
• Courses with no certification, or penalty for incompletion BUT the user is being forced to take.
  
• Online courses with multiple attempts at assessments where a user is more likely to attempt trial and error to get the completion. (I call this the 'Mastermind Learner')
  
• Courses with dry content that fail to engage the user
  

What situations do not fit:

• Courses that the user has willingly enrolled in
  
• Courses with a high cost/penalty to the user
  
• Courses that have been written and developed to engage the user through audio, video, animation, and well written content.
  

Not all courses have exciting topics, not all courses will have users that wanted to take them, and not all courses will be full of multimedia. It is the development teams responsibility understand a learner's motivation and more importantly their "Perceived Importance of the Content", and then implement a navigation strategy that fits the users willingness to absorb the material.

iPhone for education case study

Great Article discussing Abilene Christian University's implementation of the iPhone to enhance education.

In class the iPhone allows for anonymous student polling and quizzing. It also connects students with class notes or access to web resources so that students can look up anything they are not fulling understanding as they listen to the lecture.

Outside of class the iPhone has apps to "turn in homework, look up campus maps, watch lecture podcasts and check class schedules and grades".

It's ideas like this that really make me believe that the iPhone/iTouch is the next Personal Computer. What we have now is a smaller portable processor, with its own platform for application development, and constantly connected to the network. I would not be surprised that in five years, you'll walk into work or school, throw your iWhatever on your desk, turn on your wireless Monitors, start navigating using your wireless mouse and keyboard and when you're done pick up you iDevice and walk away.

Is your infrastructure planning for the future?

Games = Incentives for Learning

Was forwarded to eLearning Brothers this morning. A quick browse around, and one can see that these guys are on the right path.

Knowledge checks are an essential part of reviewing material, and putting a game 'shell' around simple question types will help keep the learner engaged. The elearning brothers have come up with some really creative game types.

I think the next step for the brothers, and they are probably already going this way, is to change their target end user from a flash developer to a SME or ID. Once they have their templates ironed out, they should spend time developing an authorware environment (or maybe partner with someone already in this field) so that knowledge of flash development is not always necessary.

Adobe Presenter Embedded swf appears choppy or twitchy

Problem:

When embedding a swf animation into adobe presenter, the final movie apears twitchy or 'stuttering'. This occurs because the "Control using presentation playbar" option is selected, and Presenter is doing odd playback control on your swf.

Basically, to keep the slide time synched with your swf time, it is either jumping ahead or backwards to keep them together, not ideal at all!

Solution:

1. Rob Rodes: http://www.connectusers.com/forums/cucbb/viewtopic.php?id=2523

I did not find this solution to work for me, but it might for you, it's pretty low effort to try and if it works great!

2. My Solution:

First I cut all of my main timeline and chucked it into a movieclip which then got thrown on frame 1 layer 1 of the main stage (make sure the main timeline is the same length as the new movieclip timeline), we'll name the new movieclip "allAnimations".

Now, the playback bar for presenter won't have access to this movieclip, so the stuttering effect is gone, but what if the user is jumping back and forward, how do we sync this animation up with the main timeline?

Here's the magic (Actionscript 2.0):

allAnimations.onEnterFrame = function()
{
if(this._currentFrame - this._parent._currentframe > 150)
allAnimations.gotoAndPlay(this._parent._currentframe)
else if(this._parent._currentframe - this._currentFrame > 150)
allAnimations.gotoAndPlay(this._parent._currentframe)
}

Basically if the animation's timeline differs from the main timeline by more than 5 seconds then sync them up!

This is a hack, i'm positive there is an unfound better solution, but for now this may work for you, if so enjoy!

Make photoshop run faster

One would assume that Academic institutions provide their learning technology departments with the finest machines from which to develop on. However, for those not so fortunate, here is a fantastic article on speeding up that sometimes machine chugging Photoshop:

How to make photoshop faster on slower computers

Also as a bonus for those who don't have photoshop, or just can't get it running fast enough for simple tasks. picnik is a fantastic web based app for photo editing.

A little perspective

Articulate Quizmaker Fill in the Blank Correct Response Not Appearing Bug and Solution

Ran into a situation with an test built in Articulate Quizmaker not showing some correct responses during "review".

The question with the problem was a fill in the blank type, and it's fill in the blank field was just about the size of one or two characters.

Well, apparently you have to be very careful when using small boxes in these questions, because if it's too small the correct answers just will not show up during a users review of the quiz.

I would recommend going with a four or 5 letter sized box, should do the trick until this is patched up one day ;)

Boring Long Technical Description (BLTD) to Follow:

For flash geeks, what I can only assume occurs is that Quizmaker determines the width of it's dynamically created correct answer text fields based on the initial input box, combine this with a kinda unstable text renderer in flash and you get the disappearing text....There's probably a width = width - 10 somewhere that needs to be removed ;)