I read a great blog recently by Ethan Edward of Allen Interactions,  Improving Your e-Learning Designs: What I Learned from a Flower . In the article Ethan focuses on a story from his youth about a night-blooming cactus. He compares the lessons learned from that cactus to how we can create effective learning events with the elearning courses we design and build.

He focuses on three main principles:

Distinctiveness – Our elearning courses must have meaning and be a memorable experience for our learners.

Concrete, Real-World Context – Our content needs to focus on our learner’s performance.

Just-In-Time – Our elearning needs to be timely…not weeks in advance. The learners who complete our training need to be able to apply it as soon as possible.

Ultimately, it is our responsibility as elearning designers, to create courses that are applicable and timely for our learners. Our courses should not be an information dump of facts, figures, processes, etc. If the content is meaningful and concrete, our learners will find the learning experience beneficial.

We receive many questions regarding viewing Flash on iPads and iPhones. iSpring recently published a great blog with a comparison of different tools available to view Flash on iPads . They spent some time testing Puffin, Appsverse Photon, iSwifter, and Cloud Browse, listing the pros and cons of each application.

I decided to give Puffin a try and was able to successfully view a published Flash course that included imbedded videos and various interactions. I also tested a few of our Flash games, and they too worked well. The only update to the iSpring blog I would add is, the free version of Puffin only offers a 14-day trial of the Flash plugin. You need to purchase the app for $2.99 to maintain the Flash plugin option.

The iSpring team also explored using remote desktop software that would allow you to access your computer and view Flash files. They tested the TeamViewer software and have detailed the pros and cons of this option as well.

So if you are looking for an app that will allow you to view Flash on your iPad/iPhone, check out this blog post for more information: Can I Play Flash on iPad? Yes!

Have you ever been challenged with the task of quickly converting a PowerPoint Presentation to Flash? iSpring has a cool product, Free PowerPoint to Flash Converter  that makes converting your PPT to Flash a very quick and easy process. Check it out…it’s FREE…and who doesn’t like free?

Also, today they announced an upgrade to their suite of products with new advanced features. So, while you are visiting their website investigating the free product, check out their other stellar Rapid eLearning products: iSpring Pro, iSpring Kinetics, and iSpring QuizMaker.

We want to let you all know that we will be at ASTD ICE , May 6 – 9. If you’re at the conference, stop by and say hello, we would love to chat with you!

See us at booth #1619, generating lots of fun and excitement. If you ask nicely…we might even demonstrate some of our finest eLearning ninja moves!

We thought it would be cool to try and create some people cutouts (transparent background .pngs) that looked like they were hand sketched by pencil. Since no one here in the office was any good at drawing, we took some of our current photo files and ran them through a series of filters. Magic happened and we came up with Sketch People Cutouts! We whipped up a few example layouts of how you might use them in your next elearning course. We hope you enjoy them.

This new product is current available in the eLearning Template Library.

We are excited to announce the launch of our new eLearning Template Library . This new library gives subscribers an “All You Can Buffet” of templates, images, and assets.

Here’s some of the grub available on our Buffet:

• Flash Games, Quizzes, and Interactions
• PowerPoint Slide Layouts
• PowerPoint Classroom Games
• Articulate Player Skins
• Captivate Templates
• CutOut People Images
• Branded Themes
• Speech Bubbles and tons of other graphics

You may be wondering, what are the benefits of being a subscriber? Well, here are a few:

• Unlimited Access to the Buffet – you can come back for seconds, thirds…
• Immediate Access to New Products
• Product Upgrades and Enhancements immediately available
• Access to Exclusive Content not available for individual sale

Subscribe now and get Everything!

It’s time to pull up a chair and begin the feast!

Get unlimited access to ALL of the templates from eLearning Brothers! We now offer an eLearning Template Library subscription and provide access to tons of templates and assets.

Let me start out by saying that online training is not better than classroom training. It’s different! Both are effective ways of motivating and transferring information. You need to determine your training goals, to determine which training method is best for your organization. Here are a few factors to consider when deciding which training methods will work best for your organization:

Geography

How dispersed is your target audience? Are they in clusters or spread out individually? How much travel would be involved? Would the trainer go to them or would they come to the trainer? eLearning has an advantage in this area because geography doesn’t matter….they just need a computer.

Trainer Resources

Do you have team members that can spend time as trainers? Do they have the presentation skills and subject matter expertise to train the course? How many trainers would you need to deliver your course content? A good training can have an amazing impact however it can be expensive to send out trainers and to ensure they have the proper skills.

Maintenance

How often will the course change? Are you expecting system, policy, and/or process changes? An eLearning course can be changed in one central area and sent out to everyone. Paper classroom materials become nearly impossible to keep updated.

Technology

Does your target audience have computers, audio, network connections? Are they comfortable using them? Can they view video or hear audio? How’s your network bandwidth? Do you have the software needed to build the course? eLearning does have “technology” expenses and may need an initial investment.

Design/Development Team

What skill set does your design/development team need to have? What design software will you use to build your training? You will need to find someone with “eLearning authoring skills” or the ability to learn them.

Facilities

Do you have training rooms? Are they equipped with the needed equipment such as PCs, projectors, whiteboards, etc.? Classroom training may require the build-out of classrooms. That can get expensive.

Scale

How many people need to be trained? How quickly does the course need to roll out? Online training can train tons of people at once.

As you think about the questions above you’ll start to better understand how classroom and online training may fit into your organization. Many organizations decide that a blended approach is the best. Some of the pre-work may be online and followed by classroom training. At times the basics may be online and followed by more advanced classroom training. There are many ways to blend the two.

Greetings from Hawaii. Do you want to build amazing training? Do you want to engage your learners? Well we have just the answer for you. We just launched some cool new Flash Games! These new games will help you build, to use a local term, ”mo’ bettah” training courses. Our new games include some exciting new features like: new audio sound effects, timed activies, and sports challenges, just to name a few.

Check out these cool new games:

Wheel Spin – In this game, your learners spin the big wheel, answer the question correctly, and earn the points from the spin.

Line It Up – Line It Up is a sequence type game where you have to put all of the options on the screen in the correct order. It is great for quizzing someone regarding memory order.

Try Your Luck – In this fun game, you get to “buzz in” to stop the bouncing game piece, answer the question correctly, and earn points for each correct answer.

Word Guess – The Word Guess game presents your learners with a question and they are given an opportunity to guess the answer by selecting different letters and filling in the blanks.

Jump Shot – Are you ready for a little sports action? In Jump Shot, as your learners answer questions correctly, they earn time to shoot jump shots at the end of your quiz.

Field Goal – Field Goal is very similar to Jump Shot, in that your learners earn time to kick Field Goals for each correct answer in the quiz questions.

Board Game – The Board Game challenge is similar to playing a classic board game. Learners roll the dice, move the game piece, and answer questions.

Card Stack – Sort through a stack of cards to identify the correct answer.

Fishing – Well, it’s just like it sounds…learners get to cast their line, catch a fish, and answer a question.

Come check out our new Flash Games and see for yourself how much fun elearning can be!