Reading 11/16/2009

• Are Your Online Tests Reliable?

• Are Your Online Tests Valid?

By reading these two posts, although they are short and simple, Connie did a good job to give us an idea of how to make test questions correctly to achieve the instructional purposes. When it speaks of my experiences of studying instructional technology, since the program is very practice-oriented, I learned less concept of statisitcs than other Master students did, not to mention tests’ validity and reliability. These posts indeed give me some tips.

Sometimes, I overlooked the learning objectives and don’t go back to check the actions and knowledge items that the learners have to acquire from the course. With the instructions in these posts to ensure that the tests are valid and reliable, I understand how to make questions for the final assessment of the course. Honestly, in my current job, this part is easily neglected. My PM and client usually just pay more attention to the course content, but for the test/quiz part, they care about if the learners could pass. At this point, where is the validity and reliability? It is so ironic.

Reading 11/15/2009

• The eLearning Coach » User Interface Design For eLearning

I really agree with Connie Malamed that the user interface and design should be clear to reduce unnecessary mental processing. The designers and developers are supposed to follow the logical and obvious conventions and think more from the audience’s perspectives.

Recently, I have been designing the courses for the customers. The project manger put much emphasis on the user interface. However, I think she just tries to please the client, because she is the person to pay the money, instead of really thinking about the learners. For example, as needed in the course, I give two images of young and aging skin. Although I have been aware of the fact that the interface of smoothness and quality is a vital thing to pay attention to, in my opinion, to show the big difference that the learners are able to tell is also essential. Therefore, I pick up two images that are not very attractive, but I think they are instructional and meaningful for learners (retailers). Unexpectedly, my idea was severely rejected by the PM.

Since Chinese is composed of many different symbols, lots of things should be considered when doing the typesetting for an online couse. This is something that I found out when starting my work as an instructional designer in Taiwan. For example,  any punctuation cannot be put at the beginning of a sentence. Every symbol should be in alignment and consistent. A phrase could not be seperately arranged because it might influece learners’ reading and don’t look neat. Some types of font cannot recognize a certain number of Chinese symbols. I have spent a bunch of time adjusting these tiny problems.

There are so many different things problems that I should face in doing instructional design job in Taiwan.

Reading 08/09/2009

• Learning Visions: Designing for Articulate: A Newbie’s View

  • Keep variety. Don’t use an Engage Tab screen for every other page. Mix it up.
  • Intersperse questions throughout the content. Formative questions break the content up with momentary pauses for reflection and to reinforce the learning process.
  • Use Engage Labeled graphics as question pages. “Which of these widgets would you use to paint a monkey?” There’s no penalty for a wrong answer. Let the learner explore.
  • Spice it up with scenarios. This is true for any tool. Keep it interesting with a story. Compel the learner to want to find out what comes next.
  • Use interesting images. I’m lucky to have some graphic artists on my team who know how to turn a page into something quite lovely! That doesn’t hurt.

In the company that I work for, we also use Articulate tools to develop the courses for the clients. Through reading Cammy Bean’s post, I found out the variety of Articulate for using this tool. Speaking of myself, instead of just inserting the graphics, I am used to designing short Flash animation or video in Quizmaker and Engage to help visualize the problems happened in the real situations. I have been using Articulate for a short while, and I agree that this is a rapid and useful tool for designing and developing courses. I also consider it as a critical thing that we need to add more variety to the way that we use it and do the best instructional design to present the content.

tags: Articulate, design

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Reading 08/08/2009

• AACE Global U – Social Media Seminar Series

Although I will not be able to attend the live meetings, I still can gain the information and discussion result from their archives in the following website: http://EdITLib.org/GlobalU/
I hope that I can gain more insights into social media and the trend and the application of learning.

tags: online conference, news

• Jane’s E-Learning Pick of the Day: Aviary Screen Capture : Talon

tags: tools

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Reading 08/07/2009

• 3 Brainstorm Ideas for Your Next E-Learning Course – The Rapid eLearning Blog

  tags: elearning

  • The process of playing around and thinking about different ways to approach the course will ultimately help you come up with some pretty cool ideas.
  • Magazine Cover:
  1. Regardless of that article’s intent, they did a great job getting me interested in exploring more of the article.  In fact this is a common approach for magazine covers.  We could learn from that.  Why couldn’t you design your elearning course to have a similar look and feel?
  2. What you do is break all of your content into chunks.  Then design your course to look more like a magazine cover with enticing headlines.  The learner clicks a title and it takes them to that chunk of information.
  • Find a Cure
  • Panel Discussion
  1. Why not create your course as if it were a mock panel discussion with “experts.”  You can use the experts to share your course content and also deal with objections or potential issues.  Or instead of a panel discussion, make it look like a news talk show.
  2. Create a moderator and some characters.  The moderate moves the content along by asking questions.  And then you share the course content via the characters as they debate the subject.
  3. One of the characters could be a foil who throws a wrench in the conversation.  It’s a good way to deal with the objections learners might have to some of the information.  If you have the time, break out your video camera and use video clips instead of clip art or stock images.

Tom’s three suggestions stir me to think of more dynamic and appealing ideas for my current project. So far, our team have been working on a skin project for a cosmetics corporate. The company focuses on not only marketing their product, but also customers’ concept for daily skin protection. We have got our client’s feedback and multimedia designers’ modifying for visual effect; then, I need to go through the content to edit the words to have them presented in a concise way. The problem exactly happens on the several pages at the beginning of the course. Therefore, I think that using an eye-catching headline or topic with simple texts would be a good match in my case.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Reading 08/03/2009

• 10 Ways Universities Share Information Using Social Media

  tags: social media, web2.0, education

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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