content design – Memorable Learning

Talking about narration

This is the first of a series of posts on computer-generated narration in elearning.

Back at the turn of the century when I was getting started with online training, there was a debate among designers about whether courseware should be seen and not heard. At the time, broadband was not widely available, so the burden of the extra soundtrack on transmission speeds was something to consider. For my client who was sending courses to affiliate stores in twenty states across a 9600 baud dial-up modem, the answer was easy: no audio. people-1099804_1280

Today the bandwidth issues are largely gone, and the discussion is more likely to be when to use narration than if. Based on my experience, there are times for narration and times for silence.

Do use narration when:

You have a very short, highly technical lesson for a technical audience. Show the graphic on the screen, and explain the fine points of what they are seeing.
You have a highly graphical subject and narration adds to the graphics. An example of this might be a module on filling out a complex form: show the form on the screen and use the narration to explain how to fill it out.
You have a moderately complex subject and narration expands on the key points shown on the screen. This could be considered the “SME with PowerPoint™” model – the screen shows the bones of the subject, but it’s the experienced speaker that puts meat on the bones.
Your course design allows learners to easily stop and replay audio. This prevents one of my personal pet peeves about online learning, which I call the “YouTube™ effect”: there’s a video teaching a skill you want to learn, but the speaker talks so fast that you have to stop and rewind every few seconds to keep up. Your course should allow the learner to pause, reflect on the content, and replay the audio as needed to clarify a point.

Do not use narration when:

Physical delivery will be an issue. There are still places where bandwidth is not sufficient to support rich media (this goes for video as well as audio).
Narration reads the content on the screen. Learners never read and hear content at exactly the same speed, and having the same information coming at two different speeds will cause confusion and reduce learning effectiveness.
The client doesn’t want you to include narration. Clients may have any number of reasons for not wanting audio in their elearning, and you have to respect that.

There are a lot of discussion points around narration, but for now let’s just say that there are times you should use it, and times you should not, depending on the content, the audience, and the purpose of the course. But that brings us to the next question: what type of narration? Do you need an expensive voice-over artist to be able to include good narration in your course?

In the last few years, a large number of text-to-speech (TTS) products have appeared that let the computer read a script aloud. These are not new – the Talking Moose™ appeared on the 1986 Macintosh™. But more recent versions do two things the Moose could never do: first, they can capture their narration in a file that can be inserted into an elearning module in products like Storyline™ or Lectora™, and second, they sound roughly like live human beings.

There are dozens of products that include TTS features, and in another post, I’ll review a few of the major ones. TTS is part of both the Mac and Windows operating systems, which would seem to eliminate the need for external applications. However, the built-in applications are limited in the voices you can use. External products such as those by Nuance™, Natural Reader™ and iSpeech™, have a wider range of more naturalistic voices (iPhone’s Siri for example, is in part powered by Nuance technology). Some of them allow you to tweak the output so that it sounds more natural. (By the way, I am not endorsing any of these products, just saying that they exist.)

At the end of the day, none of them are (yet) as good as a human voice. But TTS has a definite place in the online designer’s toolbox. Here are four good uses for low-cost computer voices:

Proofing your narration script. No matter how many times you review a script before sending it to the voice-over artist, you will miss something. For me, it’s usually punctuation or pronunciation of an acronym. Listening to a computer generated draft of your script lets you find those places and correct them, saving you time and rework.
Timing your narration to the activities on the screen. Animations and page builds of all sorts are more effective when timed to the narration.
Reviewing draft courses. When you are building on a budget, this lets you and your clients review the courses before sending the scripts to the voice-over artist. While the effect won’t be as smooth as a human voice, you can get a draft out for review and feedback quickly.
Converting screen content into narration for specialized purposes. The most common use for TTS allows sight-impaired or dyslexic learners to “hear” the text on the screen. While technically not the same as voice-over narration, TTS can fill the gap when you provide no other narration.

I want to thank my Storyline user group, who got me to thinking about narration in elearning. Next time, I’ll talk a bit about how to get computer-generated narration for free.

Building a portfolio – episode 4

Visual design

Medieval_writing_desk_after — After writing the content

The next step after developing the storyboards and writing the extra content was to create the visual design. I could have gone to Storyline™ at this point, but I stayed with PowerPoint™ for the overall design. Because I was more familiar with PPT than Storyline, and slide masters can be imported from PPT to Storyline, I assumed that I would save a little design time.

I had already decided on a tabbed design, and wanted to work in the flat design model that has been popular recently. My next step was to pick a color palette. Typically, I am sort of a subdued-color person. While I am not fond of the grey-infused colors I see on a lot of business websites, the highly-saturated crayon-colors used on a number of elearning products is great for learning, but not formal enough to represent me. So I chose a black-red-grey-blue palette and set about creating a prototype.

After creating the splash page and a few mockups of interior pages, I asked a friend whose judgment I trust to look them over. She came back with the same concerns I had: too dark, too bland, too wordy, too much text. Back, literally, to the drawing board.

As Oscar Wilde supposedly said, experience is simply the name we give to our mistakes. This time I chose a brighter palette, and simplified everything. The prominent tabs became menus; the bars on the inside pages became buttons.

I imported the redesigned PPT file into Storyline. As those of you who have worked with this program know, importing is quick and easy. The colors transferred flawlessly, as did the master layouts.

As part of the redesign, I took the opportunity to revisit the amount of text I had created. By writing in the slide spaces, I was able to keep the stories short and to the point. But as I contemplated reducing the number of pages in the overall project, I wondered whether I had created too many examples. Were the stories redundant? The stories were good, but did they tell a good overall story?

I fortified myself with another glass of iced tea and faced the little stories. Ruthlessly, I pared away stories that had already been told elsewhere, or which didn’t contribute to what I wanted to say.

Finally, I had the design I wanted: four pages, clean and colorful. Navigation was easy, and the stories were on target. I was ready to build the project.

Lesson learned: Even if you don’t consider yourself a graphic designer, trust your intuition on the visuals. If it looks boring, intimidating, or wordy to you, it’ll probably look boring, intimidating and wordy to someone who doesn’t know you as well as you do.

Side note: Did you know that ruthless comes from Middle English, and probably comes from the verb rue, meaning feeling sorrow or regret. Rue is even older, and probably comes from Old English or Old Germanic terms for regret. Today we use the terms rue (usually as a verb), and ruthless (as an adjective), but rarely do we use the positive adjective ruthful, meaning full of empathy for the suffering of others. Source: http://www.word-detective.com/2010/12/ruthless/

Building a portfolio – episode 2

I become my client

It’s been about three weeks since I wrote the first episode of this saga, and about a week since I posted it. In the intervening time, I’ve approached the as I would if I were a client. This may complicate the telling of the story.

If I were a client, this is how I would work with me:

find out what my goals are, and what I want to accomplish in the project
establish the key messages I want to get across and identify my priorities
locate and structure the content to create those messages
build up storyboards with content (episode 3)
design the project for optimal visual impact (episode 4)
build and test the project (episodes 5 and 6)
launch the final, approved product (episode 6)

So there’s a lot to cover today. Of course, if I were a new client, there would be more I would want to know: sponsorship, communication, company culture, meeting the SMEs, doing a needs analysis, and so forth. But I think I know this client reasonably well.

My goals are two-fold: improve my skills with Storyline 2™, and create an online portfolio showcasing my skills and experience. The end product will be posted on my web site at www.memorable-learning.com.

Notice that nowhere did I use the term training? Once I recognized that I was creating a marketing piece rather than a training piece, the framework for the project began to appear.

As I put details on my goals, it became clear that I wanted the reader to get four things out of the project:

Understand the services I offer: I am an instructional designer and elearning developer, with deep experience in collecting and structuring content, and in looking at the overall needs of an organization in change.
Walk the path that got me to where I am today: the experience I have had in a variety of industries.
Appreciate a well-crafted Storyline project that tells my stories.
Learn about my background and how to contact me.

That sounds like a pretty firm structure. I am ready to move on to the content.

Over time, I have built a lot of resumes, each one either an update of a previous one, or a presentation of a specific set of skills. There was no master document with descriptions of each project I’ve done over the years. Well, there was one – I had started a CV (curriculum vitae, the resume of academe) when I was in grad school, and until a few years ago, I had dutifully added a bullet point about each new project as it was completed. It ran to 12 pages, and had not been updated since 2003.

Have you ever tried to remember everything of note you’ve done in the last 12 years?

Fortunately, I had kept copies of my timesheets for that period (no, I don’t know why I kept them, just never deleted them) so I could identify which projects were done when. I captured these in a small Word template and tried to fill in as much detail as possible. There were 27 projects.

So back to the structure. I had identified four services: instructional designer, content developer / editor, elearning developer, and change mThe four are interrelated, but there are some specific aspects of each that I wanted to talk about. Once I laid out these topics, my structure began to look like this:

ID	Content	Elearning	Change
Analyzing needs Defining goals Designing for best effect Working with experts Delivering and coaching Evaluating outcomes	Multinational experts Regulated environment Technologists Thought leaders Public service experts	Blended curricula Repurposing to elearning Regulated environment Dedicated elearns Virtual classrooms	Change strategy Needs analysis Communication planning Teaming for success Workforce alignment Change training

And the same analysis for the experience in industries yielded this table:

Life Sciences	Technology	Finance	Retail	Public Service
Scientist Process alignment Risk management Change strategy Technology	Training new processes Distributing expert knowledge Enabling public utilities Training custom systems	Enabling across divisions Merging accounts payable Training IM auditors Training bank auditors Implementing financial ERP Automating advertising	Restaurant financials Transformed stores Cosmetics supply chain Retail consultant training	County government Federal change managers Federal consultants

It’s still a lot of topics, and I had to write a short description of each of them. More on that next week.

Lesson learned: Never throw away anything. You might need it some day.

Training the invisible person

Regardless whether you subscribe to ADDIE, SAM, Kemp, rapid prototyping, or all-of-the-above instructional design methodologies, you probably approach a new training project the same way: who is the audience, and what are their needs? But what do you do when your audience is invisible – either too large and diverse to adequately characterize, or unavailable to you?

No, that cannot happen, you say. Modern training is targeted to the specific needs of our audience. Really? What about the company who has been training the same group of people for 10 years, updating their training every year for new technology, but never checking to see whether their people have changed? Or the development firm developing or updating a system for another client, giving you (the subcontractor) no access to the ultimate audience? Or maybe, just maybe, you find yourself working with an IT department head who says (as a client of mine a few years back did) “the users will take whatever we give them”.

We all know why we do audience analyses. Learning is more effective when it is targeted to the needs, preferences, and capabilities of those being trained. By learning who the primary and secondary audience(s) are, what their demographics look like, how much they already know about the subject being trained, how they are most effectively taught, their technology experience, and their expectations about the training, we can make a picture of the “current state” of the audience.

We then create the “future state snapshot” – what the audience should look like if your training is successful – from the project vision and requirements. The difference between the two is the change you are training. Regardless whether it’s an updated computer system, new processes, or a wholesale reorganization of the enterprise, it’s always a change.

But sometimes all you have is the future state. Think about the last software you got from Microsoft, Oracle, or Apple. Their training has to be adequate for anybody, anywhere. The only common denominator is that they have MS-Word (for example) and have to know how to use it. Now we’re in the world of training the invisible person.

Is it important? Commercial product companies make assumptions about their products all the time. Yet when someone is making the investment in training, hitting the wrong mark can be costly and even counter-productive.

The truth is that even when you have no direct access to the audience, information is not completely unavailable:

Read any background material you can lay your hands on (specs, scoping documents, strategy documents, etc.). Sometimes someone has done a stakeholder analysis or made a list of assumptions about the audience.
Identify assumptions made about the project. Why the change is needed tells you something about how things are now. And it will tell you a whole lot about the expectations for the future.
Review the results of the last big change made. What went right, and what went wrong? What can you learn about your audience from this?
Look for larger trends. For example, 10 years ago, a 3^rd-year accountant would have been spending a lot of time supervising the actions of younger accountants, who were collecting and categorizing information. Today, many large accounting firms outsource this first step, so the 3^rd-year and younger accountants are doing more analytical work, and need to be trained accordingly.
Talk to your team. They may be more helpful than you expect.

With imperfect data about the audience and its needs, you can still create excellent training. The key is to emphasize what you do know, not what you don’t know.

Establish a voice and an image. Create a mental image of your audience or user, and keep that image in mind while you’re designing. It may at first be a hazy image, but use it to guide your work.
Be consistent. Your audience image may be hazy, but you need to write as though that audience were reviewing your every word.
Work backwards from your known future state to establish principles and competencies. When you don’t know what your audience has, figure out what they need, and apologize to those who already have it. Even experts need to brush up on skills occasionally, and when you find you have such an expert, turn them into an ally who can reinforce (or even help deliver) the training.
Keep it simple.

So even if you cannot do a formal audience needs analysis, you can successfully create training. What tips do you have for training the invisible audience? Share them with us in the comments, and happy training!

Learning Storyline™

One of my goals for 2015 was to regain my skills as an elearning developer. I had developed a number of courses in Lectora™ and Articulate™, but over the last few years, my work had tended to be more content design and project management, with the development left to others. However, I believe that understanding how an online course is created expands my creative options as a designer. The world of online training has changed rapidly in the last 5 years, and I felt the need to learn and refresh. So I am learning to use Storyline 2™ by Articulate. There are a number of excellent learning development platforms available, but Storyline has a number of features I have not seen elsewhere, plus a robust, supportive user community, which makes all the difference for a new user. So check out my first Storyline course: Catproofing your house.