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Archives for February 2015

Applied Instructional Design – The 4-Door Model

February 20, 2015 Barry Nadler 1 Comment

Have you ever been told your eLearning courses were engaging, fun, approachable, or fresh? It finally happened to me and I owe it to the 4-Door design model.

Currently, my primary employer (for about a decade) has been a financial services software company. For them, I almost exclusively create eLearning content using various media to train our clients how to use our software – large, enterprise-systems that run their financial institutions. This is important because it identifies the type of training we do – external clients, software training, for profit, etc.

In the past, similar to most eLearning development teams, we developed very linear courses. These courses may have included some basic branching situations, there may have been basic simulations, but it was all essentially glorified “Next” buttons and a skill check at the end. They start at the beginning and work their way to the end, module by module.

We were ready for a shift because we could sense the change in the industry starting to occur. We had been looking at the concept of “flipping the classroom” as a way to rethink what we were doing. I intend to spend a good deal of time discussing that model in several other posts – this is not that discussion though.

One day, I was looking through some blog posts that I receive through various blog feed tools and I saw one about a new Instructional Design model called the “4-Door” model.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Instructional Design Tagged With: 4-Door, Connie Malamed, design model, elearning coach, instructional design, Thiagi

Visual Design – Create A Color Scheme From An Image

February 18, 2015 Barry Nadler Leave a Comment

You have been asked to come up with a new course and you need a starting point. That starting point may be one of a few things:

  • An image
  • A web site you like
  • The company web site
  • A pre-defined color scheme

If you have a pre-defined color scheme, you already have your answer, so you know what to do. This discussion is about the other three choices. In this post we will discuss starting from an image.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Visual Design Tagged With: color scheme, eye dropper, Eyedropper Fill, PowerPoint, RGB

PowerPoint Skills – Grouping Tips

February 14, 2015 Barry Nadler Leave a Comment

Do you find that you tend to have a lot of items on your screen and it is a pain trying to move them around in a way that they are synchronized with each other? How many times have you had to move one item, then another to line it up, and then another, etc. only to later add an element to the screen and have to move everything again?

You have several options:

  1. You can select each element individually each time – colossal waste of time – especially if your design has a lot of elements.
  2. You can perform a drag-select movement, in which you click on the screen and drag around all the elements you want to select. This can be inefficient because you sometimes will select unexpected items and then have to deselect them or you may not grab everything you thought you were grabbing. Then, you have to hold SHIFT and try to add the missing elements or press CTRL to remove unwanted elements. It is even more complex when items are on multiple layers.
  3. You can group the elements and click once to select all the items and move them together.
    Without grouping your screen items, the selection process can be a true pain and time waster if you are designing screens.

This is where grouping comes in.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: PowerPoint Skills Tagged With: buttons, colors, Grouping, PowerPoint, selection pane

PowerPoint Design – Transparency – What is it and how can you use it?

February 14, 2015 Barry Nadler Leave a Comment

One of the challenges of being proficient with a software tool is that you forget that many of the things you take for granted, others are not familiar with and it is totally a new way of thinking. Today, I had a situation occur that was just this topic.

A group of our classroom instructors have been working on a series of what I would term “base PowerPoint” files. Essentially, they lay out concepts, ideas, and content. Then, it is my role on this project to clean them up and put them into Adobe Captivate, where I would add audio and interaction.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: PowerPoint Skills Tagged With: gate screens, PowerPoint, process diagrams, title screens, Transparency

Visual Design Inspiration – See What’s Around You

February 13, 2015 Barry Nadler Leave a Comment

One of the most interesting rules about creativity that I had to learn is that there are very few truly new things when it comes to creativity. There are new ways of looking at things and there are new ways to combine things, but it is really rare to create something that is completely new.

And, this is a really good thing for us eLearning designers.

Typically, our industries and courses we create are not at the forefront of the media, and therefore are not scrutinized in the same manner that special effects in a movie or video game might be.

If you want to be a real rock star when you start designing your next course, look to different mediums for your inspiration because they will be familiar to your learners and the biggest secret…

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Visual Design Tagged With: David Anderson, Google, infographics, Inspiration, iStock, pop culture, Windows 8, YouTube

Recent Posts

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  • #1 Mistake I See Course Creators Do – Putting Content Before Objectives
  • Adobe Captivate 8 – Using Standard and Conditional Advanced Actions
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  • Visual Design Trend – Letterbox to Tell a Different Story

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  • Bill King on Applied Instructional Design – The 4-Door Model
  • E-learning - leprof | Pearltrees on PowerPoint – Transitions vs Animations
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