Tuesday, April 1, 2014

My day out to My Learningworx

Today saw me attend the official launch of Learningworx which also doubled as a workshop centering on how to design online learning content.

Here’s a bit of the official blurb

Take a course. Make a course. Change the world.


As the UK’s first ‘crowd-sourced content’ learning centre, we want to help you join in and start creating your own learning content to share your knowledge and skills. But when it actually comes to making a course we understand you might not know where to start. You probably haven’t created any kind of online content before. You might even not be technologically minded. But we believe everyone has a course in them.

So here’s how we’re going to help you get started on making your course, whatever your area of interest, and earn some money out of your existing skills and knowledge. By the end of the day you’ll achieve level one of the mylearningworx expert status, meaning you are ready to rock and roll, and get cracking on creating your own learning content.

My reasons for attending were:

A colleague of mine @HayleyGordon was attending the event, who is a self confessed newbie to the world of learning technologies. Therefore I wanted to attend alongside her to provide some context between the workshop and what we are doing/plan to do within our Organisation.Despite Kate Graham’s concern (Kate is one of the founders of Learningworx)  that she didn’t want me to think I was being told how to ‘suck eggs’, I’m a firm believer that there’s always *something* to be taken away from workshops and events such as these, so I was still keen to attend and find out what that *something was*.

Readers of my blog will know that I long ago gave up trying to capture everything from every session/workshop I attend and much prefer to identify one or two ‘Monday morning, quick wins’.

Here’s a bit of background to each session along with my ‘key take aways’.

Track 1: Content Production

Gill Chester is the founder of the Little Man Project and has been involved in online learning for many years. Gill’s going to be taking us through the different tools and technologies you can use to create your learning content, many of which you’ll have already. Her tips and tricks are invaluable and will help even the least technical person get started. The session will include harnessing the power of Powerpoint, using simple PDFs for learning, screen capture tools, video and elearning authoring suites.

My key takeaways:

Look into Mozilla PopcornMakerSeriously challenge the next request for a screencast of a simple process. Let’s give our people some creditLook into the possibilities of using telephones to provide audio based performance support. (this may be difficult as many of our employees work in a call-centre and their ability to ‘dial out’ is restricted)

Track 2: Writing Great Content

One of the most important principles underpinning mylearningworx is to help our content creators write great courses. Tony Frascina of Objective Training and Chair of the annual Elearning Awards, will explore the theory of learning design, how to avoid common elearning pitfalls and how to engage your learners with your content. We’ll look at setting learning objectives and also consider how best to incorporate assessments and quizzes, or if they’re needed at all.

My key takeaways:

Tony’s session provided affirmation around the approach that I’ve taken recently and also provided some great tips for Hayley to act as a starting point for her journey into online learning design.

Track 3: Telling The World

Now once you’ve made your course, you’re going to want people to take it. But they’re not going to be able to take it if they don’t know it exists! So our communications director, Kate Graham, will be working through the different elements of how best to promote your course; from writing an attention grabbing yet appropriate course title, through to PR and promotion on social networking sites. Kate will also show you how the mylearningworx team will be working on your behalf to market your course to the world.

My key takeaways:

Think about the keywords that would be associated with your solution. More importantly get out and ask your employees what words they would use to describe the solution. Use these words to help you form your solution title, description etc

Well done to everybody involved in today’s launch and all those behind the scenes who have contributed to Learningworx, I’ll look forward to the next worxshop.


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