I’ve done a lot of software training.  Many times the elearning part of the course is to introduce the software and give an overview of its features or basic uses.  I like to call it "show and tell" training.

There are many ways to approach software training.  You can make it as complex or simple as you want.  It really depends on your needs and the software.  I’m not going to go into great detail about how to design software training.  However, I will show you some simple tips and tricks that are effective and generally easy to do.  Using them has saved me a lot of time.

Some Quick Thoughts on Screencasting

It seems that the default for software training is to do a screencast where you make a movie that shows the mouse movement and walks through the steps.  In fact, I’ve used them in previous posts, when I do my own tutorials.  For example, here’s one I did for the Word of Mouth blog that shows how to insert web objects.

Click here to view the tutorial.

I love screencasting.  It works great when you want to do some of those "over the shoulder" tutorials that have a lot of complex steps like breaking apart clip art.

However, what I don’t love about screencasting is the time it can take to get it right.  Anyone who has done them knows that there’s a lot that goes into making a good one.  It’s definitely more than just plug and play. 

Besides, I’m a little dimwitted so I always start by trying to wing it.  That doesn’t work well because I end up stopping and starting over again and again.  Some will say, "So what.  You can always edit it out later."  And that gets to my point.  Unless you really plan your screencast well, you end up doing a lot of time-consuming edits later.  This is what I don’t want to do.  And even if you do plan it well, you still end up doing some edits and tweaking.

So here’s what I do: for the more complex "show and tell" courses, I’ll do a screencast.  However, for those where the steps are simple, I’ll avoid a screencast and try a different approach, which I detail below.

The following tips will help you the next time you have to do a "show and tell" elearning course.  It’ll save you time and help keep your file size down.  And for those of you who don’t own screencasting software, you’ll learn some simple ways to mimic the "show and tell" effect.

Keep it Simple

Typically when we focus on software, we show the entire software application.  So we print the entire screen, which might be 1024×768, and then put it on the slide which is only 720×540.   Anytime you alter the original image and make it smaller, you’ll get some image degradation and lose the crispness that you started with.

I’ll show some tricks to maintain decent image quality and still effectively teach people to use the software.  For this example, I’ll use the task of inserting a picture into a PowerPoint slide.

Don’t discount text and simple graphics.  It might not be as cool as a movie, but it can be just as effective and whole lot easier to edit.  I don’t need a movie to figure out how to follow the image below.  For simple instructions, this is more than adequate and it only took me about 2 minutes to build this.

You don’t need the whole screen.  A lot of people capture the entire screen and only focus on one small part of it.  You end up with a lot of wasted space and the worst image quality because you have to compress the image to fit it on the slide.  Here are two easy ways to avoid focusing on the entire screen to show just part of it.

• Create simple callouts.  Start with a full screen image to establish the overall screen layout and then use call outs to draw attention to certain parts of the screen.
• Just focus on the area that you want to show.  Your learners aren’t stupid, with a few visual clues (like the numbers in the image above) they can figure out what they’re looking at.  You can spice it up with some simple PowerPoint animation.  Or if your software has an annotations feature, just use those.  They’ll save you a lot of time.

Leverage PowerPoint’s hyperlinking to create a virtual simulation that doesn’t require a screencast.  You’ll get a similar feel but need less time and fewer edits. 

Here’s a quick demo where I show you the various steps in action.  As you can see, they are all viable solutions and can make building your demos a lot easier and take less time.

 

Click to see the demo.

How Much Motion Do You Need?

When you break down a show and tell course, a lot of the time is spent watching the mouse move around.  Recording the mouse movement makes your movie longer and increases the file size.  Some people will edit out the unnecessary mouse movement, but that goes back to the issue of extra time spent editing.

I had an IT manager who was always making changes to his software.  Then he’d call me and want my team to redo his demos.  We didn’t have the resources to support him, so what I did was get him some screencasting software and then showed him how to use it.  This way he could make the changes he needed.

While the software worked for him, I was soon getting calls asking how to do this or that with the screencasting software.  His problem was similar to what many of you experience: he wasn’t doing screencasts often enough to develop expert skills.  So it cost him a lot of time and money to get them right.

Since the screencasting software wasn’t the right solution, I got him a copy of Engage.  He was excited because it was easy for him to use and we ended up getting fewer calls.  Usually, he just called to show off what he was doing.  It saved our organization tens of thousands of dollars because we didn’t have to commit our resources to his projects and he was able to self-serve and get his needs met a lot faster.

So, if you’re using Engage, let me show you a few ways to leverage the tool for software demos.  You can use any of the interactions, but I typically use either the labeled graphic or process interactions.  They give the most space and seem to be a good logical fit for software training.

In the demo below, I inserted three labels all using slightly different ways to show parts of the software.  What’s nice with this approach is that you can use a number of ways to teach.  Include only text and images where the steps are simple.  And when you need to show more, insert a screencast if you want.  You’ll be able to keep them smaller and easier to edit.

Click to view demo.

As you can see, there are some effective ways to do demos without spending too much time building screencasts.  It all depends on what you have to do and how much time you have.  I don’t just consider the time it takes to produce.  I also consider how much time it takes to maintain or do future edits.  I find that for most demos the tips above work.  And when they don’t I’ll invest my time in other options.

Feel free to share comments or feedback in the comments section.

One way to save money on your elearning project is to create custom graphics using the clip art that comes with Microsoft PowerPoint.  You do this by ungrouping, editing, and regrouping the clip art.  It’s a technique I use a lot especially when I want to create characters for my elearning scenarios. 

Based on the feedback I’ve gotten from previous posts, there’s a love/hate relationship with clip art.  You love ungrouping it to create the graphics you need.  But, you hate the hassle of working with all of the bits and pieces that are part of the ungrouped clip art.  It takes too much time and causes a lot of frustration.  You can’t sleep, you’ve got irritable bowel syndrome, and you haven’t showered in days! 

If that describes you, then keep on reading.  As I share my tips and tricks on working with grouped clip art, you’ll not only save time building custom images, you’ll also restore the order of your day-to-day existence.  You’ll be happy and so will your family.  So let’s get started.

Some Clip Art Ungroups, Some Doesn’t

The first step in the process is to know when you can and can’t ungroup clip art.  Basically, there are two ways to determine this.  The first option is to whip out your calculator and solve the formula below. 

If you don’t happen to have a calculator handy, try this simple shortcut.  Just right click on the clip art.  If you can ungroup it, it will say "ungroup."  If you can’t, then it will be grayed out.  Not being a math whiz, I prefer the second option, myself.

Bitmap versus Vector

There are a number of image formats and not all images are created equal.  I won’t go into a bunch of detail about the various formats.  Instead I want to highlight what happens when you scale an image by making it larger or smaller.

 

A bitmap image is made up of a grid of pixels.  When you increase the size, the pixels get bigger.  That’s why you’ll notice the degradation (or pixelation) of the image.

A vector image is different because instead of using a grid of pixels, it uses mathematical equations to render the image.  In a layman’s terms that means you can scale it without losing any of the image’s clarity.

Clip Art Anatomy 101

Most clip art images are made up of vectors.  This makes sense because if you couldn’t scale your clip art, you’d need 20 versions of the image to account for every possible size option.  Scaling one image sure is a lot easier.

Generally, clip art is a series of grouped images.  Sometimes everything in the image is grouped into one image.  However, it is common that the images are made up of a number of grouped images.  So you can have groups within groups.

If you look at the example below, the first image is the original and everything is grouped together.  The second image is ungrouped but the image is still made up of sub-groups.  That’s why you see fewer boxes.  The third image shows everything ungrouped. 

Working with ungrouped images can be a challenge, especially when you first start.  I’ve gotten a lot of emails asking for some tips when working with clip art, so in the following demo, I’ve detailed some of my tips and tricks and best practices.

Here’s what I show you:

• Quickly select, duplicate, and scale your images
• Use the grid and guide options to align objects
• Work with duplicate slides and a scrub area to avoid messing up your real slides
• How to work with all of the ungrouped objects
• Save your creations as bitmap or vector images

Click here to view tutorials.

Here’s one last important point.  When you’re all done, you need to regroup your image.  You’ll find it easier to work with when you need to move it around.  And, if you publish it to Flash, the grouped image will render a lot faster than if it is ungrouped.

The secret when working with grouped clip art is to select areas you want to edit, copy them, and move them away from the main image.  This allows you to quickly make the edits you want to make.  Once you get used to this process and develop your own best practices, it really does become second nature.

Feel free to share ideas or comments by clicking the comments link.

Since 20,000+ people read this weekly blog, odds are you weren’t one of the 100 or so who attended my recent presentation at the Elearning Guild conference called, "Becoming a Rapid E-Learning Pro…Rapidly!"

I’ve recapped the session for everyone in the form of a snazzy blog post.  It’s a combination of how to think about rapid elearning and then how to get the most out of your tools. So, here they are.

   

1. Rapid = Smart 

Rapid elearning is a misleading concept.  You’re not a rapid traveler because you use the Internet to book travel.  You’re just a person who uses technology to make booking travel easy.

The same goes for me as I write my blog posts.  I’m sure that I could hand code my blog with HTML, but I don’t.  Instead, I use Windows Live Writer, a WYSIWYG editor.  Do you know why?  It saves a lot of time. 

 

I shouldn’t have to be a programmer to write a blog post. Since the software takes care of the HTML code, I’m free to focus on creating the content.  This doesn’t make me a rapid blogger.  It makes me a smart blogger.

The same can be said for rapid elearning.  There’s no reason why you should have to be a programmer to build elearning, especially when there are tools to help you build your courses. Rapid elearning is less about being rapid, and more about being smart.

2. E-Learning is Just One Brick in a Very Big Wall

Learning is a complex process.  And, elearning is just one piece of that process.  Think of it like a brick in a wall.   As you go through life learning, you keep adding more bricks.

Each experience in the real world provides context to what you learn and is like the mortar that holds all the bricks together.

3. Your Learners Don’t Care How You Authored Your Course

Your learners are staring at a blank computer screen and could care less how you authored the content to fill it. If that screen has text on it, they don’t care if the text was hand coded HTML, created in PowerPoint slide, or developed in Flash.  That goes for animation, as well.

The same goes with watching a video.  You think they care if it’s an .FLV, .SWF, .MPG, .AVI, or .MOV?  Heck, no!  All they care is that when they click the play button it plays.

In that sense, think less about how you’re authoring the course and more about how to build great content.  And then choose the tools that will help you build it.

4. Let’s Keep It Real

I used to come back from the training conferences and tell my Flash programmers about all of the cool courses I saw and how I wanted us to build ours like that.  Then reality set in.

To build some of those highly interactive courses requires a lot of money and time.  In fact, some of those courses cost well over $100,000.  I’ve worked on a lot of elearning projects and I can’t ever recall getting the budget for a $100,000 course.  I usually have to fight tooth and nail just to get $40 for some stock photos, let alone $100,000.

The only places I’ve seen with the resources to build elearning like that are vendors who build custom elearning.  So it makes sense that they go to conferences and show off what their talent and your bags of money can build.

The reality for a lot of those who build elearning courses is that they have to fend for themselves, and elearning is just one of their many responsibilities.  In fact, the last three places I’ve worked were multibillion dollar organizations and I was lucky if it was more than me doing the bulk of the work.

I’m glad I had access to rapid elearning tools to do my job effectively and save my organization time and money.

5. If You’re Just Getting Started, Don’t Listen to the Experts

Many of you are just getting started.  Your first task is to get used to using the tools.  Don’t worry about what the experts say about engaging elearning.  I’ll let you in on a secret.  Those same experts are the ones who created boring elearning to start with.  Only they charged a lot more money back then.

You just focus on the basics and then build from there.

• Download one of those simple PowerPoint training templates and use that to get started.  Focus on clear objectives and finding a way to meet them in your course.
• Create a consistent and clean look. Nice colors.  Same graphic style.
• Don’t crowd the screen with text and graphics. Maximize the screen’s white space. 
• Use consistent fonts. No more than two styles.
• Use the same animation effects.  Something subtle like Fade. Make it look professional.

You can create a nice looking and effective course that doesn’t need to be overly complicated with just a little practice.

6. Make the Content Human by Telling a Story

Once you get a handle on using the tools and building basic courses, start to present the content in a different manner.  For example, people always like a good story.  Find a way to relate it to the learner’s world.

Here’s a quick example from a conversation I had with someone at a previous conference.  The first set of images is typical of a lot of elearning.  It’s just information and it looks like a PowerPoint slide.  The second set of images takes the essence of the course and starts to build a story.

Which approach is more engaging?  Making this type of change isn’t difficult.  In this case, I changed the wording a little and used real people to make it seem less clinical.  Ask, "Why is this important to the learner?" and then build a story around it.

7. Make It Relevant

Here’s a common mistake.  When people complain about "boring" courses, by default we tend to think it needs to be more interactive.  However, the problem with a lot of courses isn’t the lack of interactivity.  Instead it’s that the course is meaningless and not very relevant to the learners.

I have yet to hear someone sit at the computer complaining that Google is "boring and there’s nothing on the screen but text."  There are no complaints about the lack of interactivity because what they’re looking at is relevant to the person at that time.

The more you can put the course content into a context that is relevant, the less you have to create interactive bells and whistles.  People would rather have a simple line of text on a plain white screen that gives them meaningful information, than play yet one more long and drawn out Jeopardy game. 

8. Become an E-learning Deconstructionist

I get a lot of emails asking how to do more advanced elearning using the rapid elearning tools.  The secret is practice.  One thing I do is see if I can replicate the courses and interactions I like.  Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.  Either way, I get good practice and develop new techniques.

Find courses you like and then try to replicate them.  At a minimum, find out what you like about the course and try to replicate just that part.  Here’s a challenge.  See if you can replicate the Building a Sod House course in nothing but PowerPoint.   I’ll do the same, and do a post on it later.

Click to view the demo.

The point is less about getting everything right and more about learning to use the tools in a new way.  You’ll come up with all types of ideas and get really fast at doing them.

9. PowerPoint is a Powerful Free-Form Authoring Tool

PowerPoint gets a bad rap.  You build a text-heavy bullet point elearning course and all the pundits will trash PowerPoint.  However, you do the same thing in Flash and the focus shifts to poor instructional design.  Don’t blame the tool for its misuse.

Repeat this three times: "PowerPoint as a presentation tool has nothing to do with elearning.  PowerPoint as a free-form authoring tool is great."

Just like Flash, PowerPoint is free-form authoring tool.  You start with a blank screen and build from there. For example, you can bring in all sorts of graphics and objects, animate them, create interactivity, and easily build branched scenarios.

There are two secrets to getting the most out of PowerPoint as an authoring tool.

• Drop the templates and start with a blank screen.
• See the slides as layers that stack information rather than a way to keep the content linear.

Here’s a quick example of how you can use slides as layers.  This is a simple demo and only took me about 5 minutes to build and publish.

Click here to view layers demo.

When you look at PowerPoint from this perspective you can see the power of its free-form authoring.  You get a blank screen that has layers and on each layer you can add layered animations.  That’s pretty powerful!  On top of that, once you learn some tricks, you can build some of your content in a fraction of the time it takes to build the same thing in Flash.  That will save you time and money.

10. Get the Most out of Your Tools

Rapid elearning tools empower you to build courses that just a few years ago would have required a lot of time, money, and specialized skill.  You can combine all sorts of multimedia, learning interactions, and even some of the new collaborative web technologies like a wiki or forum.  That’s something even Flash won’t give you easily.

In fact, even if you didn’t want to use PowerPoint to create content, the tools will still give you a SCORM-compliant player with built-in navigation and controls.  At that point you can drop in custom Flash pieces, interactions, or web objects and just use the player.

To get the most out of your rapid elearning tools, you’ve got to step outside of the PowerPoint slide box and think of the tools in a new way.  Here are some tips and tricks that I’ve covered in previous posts.

• See the rapid elearning tools in a new way.
• Build interactive branching scenarios.
• Create engaging elearning courses.
• Bring the web to your elearning.
• Create Flash movies without knowing Flash.

As you can see, the tools empower you to do build effective and engaging courses.  It provides the right blend between meeting your elearning goals and still working with your time and money resources.

I look forward to your thoughts on this.  Feel free to post them in the comments section.

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Tidbits:

By the way, if you use the Articulate tools there are two more additional resources.

• The Word of Mouth blog, has a series of posts on how to get started with the tools and includes some good tips and tricks.
• Dave Moxon has a great blog where he does some advanced tips and tricks and unofficial hacks to get even more out of the software.

Has this happened to you?  You’re building an elearning course on site safety and need a woman in a hard hat?  Yet when you search your clip art, all you can find is the same people you’ve used in your previous courses. 

Now you’re left with the only clip art you haven’t used–a man in a Zoot suit and a Cardinal.  You put them in your course and pray that no one notices the characters’ hats are not hard hats at all.

Building scenarios for your elearning courses is a good way to engage your learners and it helps place the course content in a real world context.  However, when using clip art to build your scenarios you run into a couple of challenges.  One is having enough characters and the other is having the right characters.

If you have the skills, you can draw your own characters.  But most of us don’t have those skills, and even if we did, we don’t have the time.  The next best step is to buy clip art packages.  But eventually you run into the same issue with limited characters and you most likely don’t have the budget to keep buying more clip art.  So what do you do? 

Create Custom Clip Art

That’s easy.  You can create your own characters.  In a previous post, I explained how to create your own clip art.  You start by inserting a clip art image and then you ungroup it.  Once it’s ungrouped, you can modify the clip art by taking away or adding to it.  When you’re done, you regroup it, and you’re all set with a custom image to meet your needs.

Today, I’m going to build on that technique and share how to create custom characters for use in your elearning courses and scenarios.

Start with Images in the Same Style

Go to the clip art available through PowerPoint and Microsoft Office Online.  Do a search for "people."  At this point, don’t worry about an exact image.  Instead, look for clean styles that have a variety of people. 

When you find an image you like, locate its style and then download all of the images from that style.  What I usually look for is body parts, facial expressions, and items that I can use in my scenarios.  I’m not really concerned if the image is an office worker or an Eskimo as long as there’s something in the image that I think I can use.

You’ll notice that in style 1280 above there are some images that are obviously good and some that appear to be useless, unless I’m doing a course on ancient Egypt.  Regardless, I download them all.  You never know what you’ll need and having the same style makes the custom images look like they belong together.

Save Your Clip Art in a PowerPoint File

Spread the clip art over a series of slides so that you can quickly scan the images.  Then save the file as style1280.ppt.  Now you have a basic repository of all images from that style.  It’s easy to open that file and quickly scan the slides for the images you like.

Create a Library of Spare Parts

Once you have all of the clip art saved, start to take them apart.  Separate the people from the backgrounds.  You can have whole people, or do like the Jacobins, and take their heads off. This way you always have bodies to which you can easily add heads.

 

You can go as far as pulling body parts from the characters.  Suppose you need a hand, just grab it from your hand slide.  Or an arm that’s pointing up?  Same thing.  A slide with just heads is good because you can quickly grab a head and put it on a different body to create variations of the same character, as I did in the blended example above.

I do the same thing with facial elements such as the eyes, mouth, and nose.  Then I can use them to create more expressive characters.  As you’ll notice, style 1280 has characters that all look like they’re sleeping or have some sort of personality defect that prevents them from looking the other clip art in the eyes.  I don’t want my clip art sleeping and not paying attention to what’s going on in the scenario.  So I quickly add eyes.

Here are the basic steps:

• Find a character you like
• Remove the facial features to create a blank face
• Add the facial features

If you need more facial features than the style provides, find other clip art images that are more expressive, ungroup them, and just pull the features you need.  They don’t always have to be from the same style since you’re only using a small part.

  

Create Your Characters

Using the approach above let’s you create hundreds of characters for your elearning courses.  You’re no longer constrained by the clip art and you have the freedom to position them in ways that work for you perfectly for your scenarios.  By having spare body parts, especially heads and facial expressions, you can create exactly what you need, when you need it.

In the image below, you can see a before and after example.  By cleaning up the character and getting rid of the purse and newspaper, I’m able to create a multi-use character for my scenarios. 

Here’s what I did with the character below:

• Added the facial expression from one of the faces above
• Repositioned the character’s head and arms
• Changed the color of the clothes

  

Now, if I am going to build a scenario and quickly need a character, I just copy and paste the woman from the slide into the scene. 

In the example below, the lady’s arm position was changed.  I also placed her head on another character’s body.  This allows me to use the same character in a different scene on a different day.  It’s like a virtual wardrobe, only without the cost or dry cleaning.

If you go through a clip art style and separate the characters, you can quickly create a character library for use in your elearning courses.  As a best practice, take some time to pre-build characters for future courses. 

For example, with the lady above, I might name her Cynthia and then create a "Cynthia" folder.  I’d make multiple versions of her on the PowerPoint slide.  To save her as an image, just right click on her and select "Save as Picture."  Over time, you’ll have a collection of clip art characters you can easily use in your courses.

While the techniques take a little practice, they are easy to do and it’s a quick process.  Once you master them, you’ll never be at a loss when it comes to any characters you might need for role playing, case studies, or elearning scenarios. 

If you have any ideas or would like to share some of your own experiments with the clip art, feel free to add your feedback to the comments section of the post.

A lot of people asked me how I built the little scenario in my recent post on not wasting your learner’s time. This post tells you how I did it and provides you with the PowerPoint files so you can learn to do it yourself.

A Quick Review

I’ve already shared some of the tips and tricks I use when designing elearning courses with PowerPoint. Here are three that are relevant to this post.

• Learn to build custom graphics.
• Create your own PowerPoint templates for elearning.
• Create branched scenarios.

Now, I’ll show you how to combine the tips from the posts above to create a complete scenario.

Create the Flow of Your Scenario

I start by mapping out the flow of the scenario.  Generally, it goes like this: 

• Present some information that challenges the learner to make a decision.
• The learner is presented with choices and selects one.
• The learner receives feedback based on the choice made and then moves on.

This branching process can be as simple or complex as you want it to be.  It all depends on your resources and the course’s subject matter.  But as you can see it’s basically just a flow chart where the learner is directed based on choices made.  How you create the flow is entirely up to you. 

There are number of ways to manage how you flow chart your scenario content.  I like to use a mind map.  I won’t go into all of the advantages of mind mapping, but I will tell you it is a quick way to organize your thoughts when building the flow for your scenarios.

There are a number of fine mind mapping tools.  Personally, I prefer MindManager for two reasons.  Because it’s integrated with Microsoft Office, I can easily link my course content from the subject matter experts to the mind map objects.  Also, MindManager quickly converts my mind map to PowerPoint slides which saves me a lot of time.  This is an especially nice feature if you have a complex scenario because once it’s mapped out, you’ll have all of your placeholder slides in just a few mouse clicks.

Gather the Content for the Scenario

Once you’ve mapped out the flow of the scenario, you’ll need to populate it with draft content to get a good sense of how it works.  The scenario and the subsequent decisions and feedback need to feel right to the learner.  It should also be challenging and not necessarily easy to guess, otherwise you run the risk of just wasting the learner’s time.

• Create the text-based content for the scenario, choices, and feedback.
• Determine the environment for the scene.  Will it be an office? Production floor?
• Collect the assets you need, such as images, graphics, and other multimedia.

At this point, you have your content, the flow of the scenarios, and the relevant assets.  Now you just start putting it together.  The great thing with building it in PowerPoint is that it’s easy to review and edit.

Build the Scenario

Now that you have a basic overview of the process, I’m going to show you how I built the scenario below.  I’m focused less on the content and more on the mechanics of working in PowerPoint.

If you haven’t already done so, review the scenario below.  As you go through it, pay attention to following elements; they’re the ones I get a lot of questions about.

• There’s a subtle back arrow in the lower right corner. This will take you to the beginning of the scenario.
• What happens when you make a choice and come back?  The first choice is grayed out.  Test it and try the other choice first.  Same thing.
• After you make a selection, the woman moves forward and then the scene changes.

You can also download the PowerPoint file for this scenario.

Click here to view demo scenario.

Now that you’ve viewed reviewed the scenario, let me show you how I built it and give you some quick pointers.  In the tutorial below I cover how I built the scenario above and I will actually walk through building one with you.

You can also download the PowerPoint file of the second scenario for reference as you practice building your own.

 

Click here to view the scenario building tutorial.

That’s basically it.  The process is generally easy:

1. Map out your scenario flow.
2. Create your slides with content.
3. Set your hyperlinks. 

Here’s a link to download the PowerPoint file for the missing dog scenario and here’s a link to see the published version of the scenario.

I hope that answers your questions and helps you build engaging scenarios for your own elearning courses.  Now that you see how it’s done, the secret is to practice it.  Once you’ve done a couple, you’ll feel like a pro.  Feel free to share your feedback and ideas in the comments section.

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Tidbits

• I’m at the eLearning Guild Annual Gathering 2008 in Orlando this week.  If you’re there, swing by the Articulate booth and say, "Hello."