Make the Most of Your eLearning Review

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Every month, B Online Learning facilitates Articulate and eLearning workshops around Australia. Lately, some of our participants have been asking questions around the review process and how to make it more efficient. For some people this can be a difficult, frustrating and time consuming process.

During the review phases it’s important that we check for:

AccuracyConsistencyFunctionality

Whatever instructional design model you use, it’s crucial that reviews/evaluations are a regular feature. This ensures that there are no nasty surprises at the end for the client or other key stakeholders.

Some of the advice I give to the Master eLearning Course includes:

Decide on how many reviews will be at each stage of the projectDecide on what the desired outcome is after each review cycle e.g. upon completion of the storyboard, you will need to proofread everything and check that all your content is accurate and up to date. If it’s at the end of the chunking/storyboarding stage, do you get your Subject Matter Expert into confirm that content meets the learning objectives.Who will participate in each review phase? During the User Trial in the LMS, do you get a potential/past learner to review the course? It’s useful to get this clarified during the Definition phase of the project to make sure that all trial participants will be available.How long will these reviews take? I always feel the shorter the better. If users have a long extended period to provide feedback, chances are they’ll forget and it will go to the bottom of the email pile. It’s worthwhile having a Project Planning document that covers key milestones and dates. This should be completed during the Definition phase of the project.How will you prepare and support the participants with these reviews? Will you follow up with a phone call or will all the feedback be gathered online. Some of our recent Master eLearning students preferred the option of meeting their trial group face to face and gathering feedback that way.Will you use a structured list of questions to gather feedback or a template so that the trial group can add their own comments? An example of both options has been added below. Does the course launch OK? (Y/N) Does the course navigation work OK? (Y/N) Are all links within the course working? (Y/N) Are graphics appearing in the right place? Are there any typos? (if Yes, please give description and location of error) Accessibility compliance (Y/N) Are bullets, numbers, and capitals in line with style guide? (Y/N) Does the sound/video work properly? Y/N (if applicable) Does the bookmarking work (if applicable)? Y/N Is the feedback to question options appearing for all correct and in corrects? Y/N (If No, please give description and location of error) Do branching questions arrive at the correct destination? Is the number of question attempts set correctly? Is the scoring in tests/quizzes/assessments correctly recorded? (Y/N) Are all hotspots working? (Y/N) If Download option available, does the course download successfully? (Y/N)Does the downloaded course launch offline correctly? (Y/N)

In conclusion, it’s worthwhile taking some time in the ‘Definition Phase’ of the project to plan your review cycles. Reviewing and trialling your eLearning resource is an important part of the development process. Effective reviews and user trials can identify areas requiring improvement and help to ensure that your eLearning resource will provide a meaningful learning experience for your leaners.

About Ruth McElhone
Ruth is the Learning Director, B Online Learning. She holds a MEd. and is an Articulate Certified Trainer. Ruth has a passion for new technologies, social collaboration strategies and the impact they have on learning. Her extensive role at B Online Learning includes managing and facilitating the Master eLearning Course. This course instructs learning professionals how to design, develop and deliver eLearning courses effectively and efficiently in the workplace, whilst engaging them in a social community of eLearning best practice. She manages the Certified Articulate training programs in the Asia-Pacific region and was recently awarded BEST ONLINE FACILITATOR at the LearnX 2013.

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E-Learning Manager

E-Learning Manager Dartford

Laing O'Rourke is a leading international engineering enterprise with world class capabilities. With revenues of £4.4bn, a forward order book of £8.2bn and over 15,000 employees their focus on continuous improvement coupled with a cultural philosophy framed around 'Excellence Plus', every aspect of client partnering, innovation, safety and investing in people is given the focus it truly deserves. With a track record of delivering many complex high profile UK and international construction and engineering projects, such as the Olympic Park, Laing O'Rourke continuously demonstrates just how agile and collaborative it is.

Laing O'Rourke holds the reputation of being the company most committed to people development within its sector. To continue to lead the field in the complex engineering sector, new challenges constantly appear and new capabilities need to be built and enhanced. A critical area of focus in delivering competitive advantage is in building technical capability. To that end Laing O'Rourke are building an L&D Academy that across some 15 functions will ensure each employee will have robust, accessible Career Toolkits in which competency frameworks and career corridors are housed. The Technical Capability function will build and fine tune a development program curricula aligned to the needs the Toolkits highlight. These will be industry leading blended solutions, either e-learning accessible through a learning portal or classroom based. Laing O'Rourke now wish to make the key appointment of e-Learning Manager to work closely with the Head of Technical Capability and Talent in driving towards this goal of an accessible, branded, technical learning offering of consistently high quality.

The e-Learning Manager will work across a range of key functions to identify and work with key technical stakeholders to understand ongoing and future technical capability needs. Then using their knowledge of how adults learn, build effective learning solutions. These will be created using both in-house and external resources, so a good knowledge of instructional design would be a distinct advantage as would be knowledge of on line training content development tools such as Articulate or Moodle. As Laing O'Rourke rapidly increase the numbers of entry level technical talent they are hiring, the e-Learning Manager will also play a key role in building the technical development aspects of their structured programs and will play a support role in how Laing O'Rourke attracts that sought after talent to join them.

You will need genuine energy and passion to make a difference and the credibility to develop a network with Subject Matter Experts across the business to enable your work. You might be an e-learning manager or instructional designer currently or a Learning and Development Business Partner with a potential interest in a broad technical e-Learning development role. Either way there is real scope to create a legacy within this role for both yourself and Laing O'Rourke, and with a well structured Learning and Talent function Laing O'Rourke presents significant opportunity for personal career growth. Whilst the role will be based in Dartford, there will be some need for travel across Laing O'Rourke's operations and some scope for remote working.

To apply, please e-mail your CV and covering letter, detailing your current remuneration package to our retained recruitment partners Paul Tanton & Michelle Lawton, Directors at Consult HR by clicking the "Apply Now" button below. All direct and third party CV's will be forwarded onto Consult.

LocationDartfordSalary£45000 - £55000 per annum + car and excellent benefits packageReferencePTML5944Contact NamePaul Tanton

Laing O'Rourke is a leading international engineering enterprise with world class capabilities. With revenues of £4.4bn, a forward order book of £8.2bn and over 15,000 employees their focus on continuous improvement coupled with a cultural philosophy framed around 'Excellence Plus', every aspect of client partnering, innovation, safety and investing in people is given the focus it truly deserves. With a track record of delivering many complex high profile UK and international construction and engineering projects, such as the Olympic Park, Laing O'Rourke continuously demonstrates just how agile and collaborative it is.

Laing O'Rourke holds the reputation of being the company most committed to people development within its sector. To continue to lead the field in the complex engineering sector, new challenges constantly appear and new capabilities need to be built and enhanced. A critical area of focus in delivering competitive advantage is in building technical capability. To that end Laing O'Rourke are building an L&D Academy that across some 15 functions will ensure each employee will have robust, accessible Career Toolkits in which competency frameworks and career corridors are housed. The Technical Capability function will build and fine tune a development program curricula aligned to the needs the Toolkits highlight. These will be industry leading blended solutions, either e-learning accessible through a learning portal or classroom based. Laing O'Rourke now wish to make the key appointment of e-Learning Manager to work closely with the Head of Technical Capability and Talent in driving towards this goal of an accessible, branded, technical learning offering of consistently high quality.

The e-Learning Manager will work across a range of key functions to identify and work with key technical stakeholders to understand ongoing and future technical capability needs. Then using their knowledge of how adults learn, build effective learning solutions. These will be created using both in-house and external resources, so a good knowledge of instructional design would be a distinct advantage as would be knowledge of on line training content development tools such as Articulate or Moodle. As Laing O'Rourke rapidly increase the numbers of entry level technical talent they are hiring, the e-Learning Manager will also play a key role in building the technical development aspects of their structured programs and will play a support role in how Laing O'Rourke attracts that sought after talent to join them.

You will need genuine energy and passion to make a difference and the credibility to develop a network with Subject Matter Experts across the business to enable your work. You might be an e-learning manager or instructional designer currently or a Learning and Development Business Partner with a potential interest in a broad technical e-Learning development role. Either way there is real scope to create a legacy within this role for both yourself and Laing O'Rourke, and with a well structured Learning and Talent function Laing O'Rourke presents significant opportunity for personal career growth. Whilst the role will be based in Dartford, there will be some need for travel across Laing O'Rourke's operations and some scope for remote working.

To apply, please e-mail your CV and covering letter, detailing your current remuneration package to our retained recruitment partners Paul Tanton & Michelle Lawton, Directors at Consult HR by clicking the "Apply Now" button below. All direct and third party CV's will be forwarded onto Consult.

Apply now

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Homework time… Rapid eLearning Design Text Assignments

Regular readers will be aware that I am currently undertaking an online Rapid eLearning Development programme which is being facilitated by @robhubbard. One of the assignments this week relates to the use of text within elearning and requires a number of assignment to be undertaken and then posted to the blog section of the Ning site that acts as the portal to all the other brilliant content. However, as I have my own blog I prefer to post my assignments here as it:

a) provides more opportunities for wider feedback

b) helps to promote what is a fantastic online learning programme.

There were 3 assignments this week, the first being:

Find some text that is difficult to understand and that contains jargon and or acronyms. Ideally this should be some of the source written content for your final assignment. Alternatively Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page is a great source of content written by experts for experts. Click on the ‘Random article’ link on the left-hand side until you find some content that would benefit from rewriting.Follow the Plain English guidelines to rewrite about 200 words of it in Plain English.

Here is my submission for assignment 1:

The original article is below:

Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to organize, store, manage and search for bookmarks of resources online. Unlike file sharing, the resources themselves aren’t shared, merely bookmarks that reference them.

Descriptions may be added to these bookmarks in the form of metadata, so users may understand the content of the resource without first needing to download it for themselves. Such descriptions may be free text comments, votes in favour of or against its quality, or tags that collectively or collaboratively become a folksonomy. Folksonomy is also called social tagging, “the process by which many users add metadata in the form of keywords to shared content”.[1]

In a social bookmarking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks are usually public, and can be saved privately, shared only with specified people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private domains. The allowed people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, or via a search engine.

Most social bookmark services encourage users to organize their bookmarks with informal tags instead of the traditional browser-based system of folders, although some services feature categories/folders or a combination of folders and tags. They also enable viewing bookmarks associated with a chosen tag, and include information about the number of users who have bookmarked them. Some social bookmarking services also draw inferences from the relationship of tags to create clusters of tags or bookmarks.

Many social bookmarking services provide web feeds for their lists of bookmarks, including lists organized by tags. This allows subscribers to become aware of new bookmarks as they are saved, shared, and tagged by other users.

As these services have matured and grown more popular, they have added extra features such as ratings and comments on bookmarks, the ability to import and export bookmarks from browsers, emailing of bookmarks, web annotation, and groups or other social network features.[2]

My reworked article:

Social bookmarking is a method for you to store, manage and search for bookmarks of online resources. Unlike file sharing, it isn’t the resources themselves that are shared, just the bookmarks that reference them.

You can add descriptions to these bookmarks so that other users can understand the content of the resource without having to download it for themselves. These descriptions could be free text comments, votes in favour of or against its quality, or tags which are words or phrases that generally describe the resource.

i.e. a bookmarked website on ‘implemeting social media policies within Blue-Chip organisations’ would probably be tagged with the following

By adding tags both you and other users can search for different websites, all on the same subject just by selecting a tag of interest.

In a social bookmarking system, you would save links to web pages that you want to remember and/or share with others. You could make these bookmarks open to the public, save them privately, share them with specific people, shared them only inside certain networks, or a combination of public and private areas.

Many social bookmarking sites have added extra features such as being able to import and export bookmarks from directly from a web browsers and the emailing of bookmarks to other.

The 2nd assignment asked us to:

write two SMART learning outcomes for your final assignment.

One of the many elements of the ReD programme that I have found to be quite innovative is the way in which Rob has used the Mindmeister mind-mapping tool to visually portray the learning outcomes, but to also use the linking features of it to link to the various resources that are in place to help achieve that outcome.

So here is my attempt at writing the learning objectives. (quite blatantly borrowing Rob’s idea!)

The 3rd and final assignment required us to:

write two multiple-choice assessment questions based on your learning outcomes

I’m still not sure whether these questions will be pitched as a stand-alone multiple choice assessment (not my preferred option) or as part of a scenario (my preference), but either way they will look a little something like this:

1. Which of the following is the correct web address for the Diigo homepage?

a)     www.diigo.co.uk

b)    www.diigo.net

c)     www.diigo.com

d)    www.diigo.gov.uk

2. What is the user name which you will need to log into the Diigo account?

a)     Tayloring.it

b)    Tailoringit

c)     Tayloringit

d)    Tayloring it

So over to you Dear Reader, what are your thoughts?

Was the reworking on the Wikipedia article clear enough?

Were the objectives SMART enough?

Were the multiple choice questions relevant and challenging?

As always, any and all feedback is greatly appreciated…

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HP LIFE e-Learning

The Hewlett-Packard Learning Initiative for Entrepreneurs (HP LIFE)is a global program that helps students, potential entrepreneurs, and small business owners establish and grow their businesses by providing online and face-to-face training in IT and business skills. EDC has developed an online modular curriculum for HP LIFE that covers the topics of finance, marketing, operations, and communication.

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