Gather | A better way to meet online.
A tool for creating online communities that feel more like a game. I saw a fun example with a scavenger hunt within this virtual environment.
What to Charge for Your Workshop, Training or Webinar — The Counselor's Coach
This article has pricing breakdowns for three different workshops, including one virtual one. I appreciate seeing the numbers here for both expenses and profits, even though this is for a different audience.
My tips on how to formulate a price for your workshop
One person's breakdown of how much time is required to deliver a 6-hour workshop. This includes 9 hours for creating slides and materials, which clearly only includes adapting existing materials and not creating them from scratch.
How much to charge for a training workshop - the pricing essentials
This article walks through some of the different factors in determining pricing for a training workshop
Tiiny Host – The Easiest Way To Host Your E-Learning Course
Need a quick way to share an elearning course? This looks like a very simple way to do so, much simpler than setting up an Amazon S3 account. This might work as an option for students in my branching scenario course to host their scenarios. However, on a free account, the uploaded content is deleted after 7 days--this is meant for quick reviews of sites, not for long-term hosting. You can do a paid account, but there are probably better options for the cost at that point.
Hack: How to Add Custom Characters to Scenario Blocks - Overview
While the Rise scenario block doesn't have a way to add your own customer characters, you can use this trick from Tom Kuhlmann. It's a bit of a kludge, but you can swap out the images in the published file. The image file names aren't obvious, but Tom shows how he uses PPT to keep track of which label goes with each image.
Fancy Font Generator
Generate text with different fonts to paste in other places like LinkedIn. This is one way to make a large block of text easier to read by adding headings and dividers, like in your About Me section on LinkedIn
Raindrop.io — All-in-one bookmark manager
Bookmark manager that takes screenshots and allows highlights like Diigo. Although I have relied on Diigo for a long time for saving and tagging bookmarks, the site hasn't been actively developed in several years. This might be a viable alternative.
I Created This Prototype For The Play To Learn Book Tour | Mel Milloway
Mel Milloway created a game prototype in Twine that tracks in xAPI in 2017. She says she would do some things differently now, but I want to take a look at how this was done.
Body Liberation Stock: Body-Positive & Size-Diverse Stock Photos for Commercial Use - Body liberation boudoir, portraits, stock, HAES & more | Seattle
If you need more diversity in stock images, this site has a range of body sizes and people with visible and invisible disabilities. Images start around $5 each, which seems pretty reasonable (and much better than the $40/image I have seen on some other specialty sites).
How to Determine if an Individual Is a Volunteer or an Employee
This article explains the difference between volunteers and employees, as well as listing the 7 factors for determining if an intern can be unpaid or not. (The quick answer is that it's likely cheaper and easier to pay an intern than to legally offer an unpaid internship.)
There are no general regulations that permit volunteering of services to an employer in the private sector. All hours worked must be paid.
Can You Accept Volunteer Labor? - HR Daily Advisor
Volunteering can be a great way to get some experience when you're first getting started in a field. However, you should volunteer for a nonprofit. You can't volunteer for a for-profit company.
Asking a company if you can do free work for them tells that company that you believe they will violate federal law to take advantage of you. You're not doing them a favor. You're asking them to do an enormous amount of work by having an attorney help them create an unpaid internship program just for you.
Most for-profit organizations cannot accept volunteer, unpaid labor without running afoul of the FLSA.
Even interns must be paid in most circumstances—if they’re performing tasks that benefit the employer (as opposed to just learning and observing), they’re completing work that is entitled to pay. This is true even if the intern <em>offers</em> his or her services for free just to get started with the organization.
Will training help? Ask the flowchart from Cathy Moore
Cathy Moore has created a new interactive online version of her flowchart to decide if a problem is best addressed through a job aid, better tools, training, or something else.
GuidedTrack – Home
A no code tool for building web apps and interactive surveys. I haven't tried it yet, but it looks like you could use this for building branching scenarios. In the info for educators, it says you can make CYOA lessons that adapt content and grade automatically. You can start with a free plan to try it out.
Make sense of rounded corners on buttons | by Shan Shen | UX Collective
Rounded corners on cards and buttons can be helpful to users for differentiating between items and recognizing what is clickable.
Rounded corners are easier on the eyes. When we align cards in a row, it’s easier to count the total number of cards when they have rounded corners.
<mark class="xl xm if">Fully rounded buttons are excellent in interfaces that have adequate space.</mark>
7 Articles To Help You Improve Your eLearning Designs
A curated list of UX resources from Mel Milloway with relevance for elearning development
GitHub - anthkris/budget-game: An xAPI Enabled Twine Game
Kristin Anthony made this City Budget game in Twine and tracked with xAPI.
Using Twine for building branching scenario activities - Learning and Teaching: Teach HQ
A guide to getting started in Twine. This shows a different process than my getting started, using the Link macro in the Harlowe toolbar. It also includes directions for embedding Twine in Moodle.
GitHub - ChapelR/tw-analytics: Quickly add Google analytics to Twine games (and other web apps) from the command line.
This hasn't been updated in 2 years, but it's a tool for adding Google Analytics tracking to Twine games. While getting xAPI to work with Twine is still probably the ideal option for most learning applications, analytics data would provide a lot of useful info too.
How to Create Branching Scenarios (5 Instructional Design Tips) — The Interactive Story
Kimberly Goh shares tips on branching scenario structure, comparing the time cave vs. branch and bottleneck structure. She recommends skipping both of those and using a gauntlet structure, which she calls a "mastery loop." This is her "optimized branching structure." She builds on to it a little more by showing more consequences for bad choices, but it's still ultimately a friendly gauntlet that always forces you back to the right path. I'm part of the "some people" who often discourage the limited gauntlet structure; I don't think this is a true branching scenario. But, it is an interactive story.
<p class="" style="white-space:pre-wrap;">In a Mastery Loop, every time you make a poor decision, you see the poor consequence play out, then you automatically get to make the decision again. Once you make the right decision, the story continues. There’s really only one way to get to the ending, and it’s always the best ending.</p><p class="" style="white-space:pre-wrap;">Some people discourage the use of Mastery Loops because they feel it’s overly controlling to “force” people to eventually choose the right path. </p><p class="" style="white-space:pre-wrap;">But if your business problem is relatively simple, and doesn’t require a lot of nuanced decisions, a Mastery Loop might be the best format to use. </p>
Top 35 Instructional Design Blogs and Websites in 2022
How did Feedspot determine who was on their list of 31 (not quite 35) ID blogs and websites? It's not quite clear; it's based on reach and domain authority rather than quality, supposedly. But one of those blogs only posts 5 times a year? A number of these are organizational blogs. A few of these blogs are new to me, so you might find something new too. You'll have to search for the blog by name, since the links are to subscriptions in Feedspot rather than actually to the blog. Still, it's good to potentially find some new sources.
Systems Thinking
Julie Dirksen's curated resources on systems thinking, including book recommendations and videos
Spaced Learning Resources
Resources from Sarah Mercier's session on Spaced Learning for the Learning Guild OLC on 4/6/22. This includes an Airtable plan for a spaced learning campaign.
Slido - Audience Interaction Made Easy
Tool for creating live polls, Q&A etc. during meetings. The free account would be enough for many events. h/t Matt Pierce (who used it in a recent session)
Storyline 360: Adding Accessibility to 360° Images - E-Learning Heroes
360 images can be accessible in Articulate Storyline, according to the documentation (but I'd want to test this with a screen reader to make sure everything was clear in the flow of the activity)
WebAIM: Alternative Text
Longer guide to writing alt text, paying attention to the differences in the context for the image
How To: Write Good Alt Text | Supercool
Examples of bad, okay, and good alt text
Alt Text - Moz
Guidelines for writing good alt text.
Share a secret - One Time
Need to securely send a password or other sensitive information? This site lets you create a secret link that can only be used once, and then disappears.
{placekitten} - Placeholder kitten images for developers
Need a URL for a placeholder image? Get a kitten in the size you want by adding the width and height in the URL