A guest post by @CraigTaylor74.
Ask most people within your workforce to describe what ‘elearning’ looks like and it’s a fairly safe bet that what they’ll describe is a series of screens/pages that they access from a computer that may include text, video or images and that they navigate through, usually via a ‘next button’.
How many of them do you think would consider the following?
‘Talking head’ style videos are great for storytelling and providing ‘background’ context.
Audio interviews can be useful for conducting interviews with key stakeholders or Subject Matter Experts or for achieving the ‘talking head’ outcomes above but for the camera-shy!
Screencasts – talk to your IT Helpdesk and identify what their top 5 enquiries are in relation to. Consider producing short screencasts to minimise the number of calls the IT team receive – they’ll thank you for it!
QR codes (included on internal posters, flyers, welcome letters etc linking to any of the above resources to add personal context) – Traditional print media is useful, but there’s only so much information you can place onto it and there always the danger of it becoming out of date. A QR code will allow you to incorporate a range of media and using a tool such as delivr.com will even allow you to change the QR codes destination without changing the poster/flyer/letter etc
Survey tools such as SurveyMonkey can be used in a variety of ways including the use of response logic to create branching assessments.
Interactive PDF documents are a great way of providing FAQ documents and checklists. Checklists are an incredibly powerful, yet under-utilised tool. What better way of providing workflow support than in a checklists format. For anybody who wants to find out more about the power of them I strongly recommend reading The Checklist Manifesto.
Animations are very easy to create using products such as Powtoon and Sparkol. These cheap (often free) tools can be used to produce short-form animations to tell a story, outline a process or provide additional context to any of your learning activities or corporate communications.
Online classrooms can be used to deliver content, as part of a blended solution, or even as ‘drop in’ clinics to allow Subject Matter Experts to keep in touch with people around various subjects.
All of this and not a next button in sight!
If you’d like any assistance with moving beyond the next button and would like to chat about how you can go about that, please contact us.
Posted: 03 November 2013
Tags: Learning design