Creating learning objects is a time-consuming process. Most learning objects have content that could be used across different courses and departments. However, many learning objects, such as videos, tutorials, instructional documentation, and online courses are created with identifying details that make them difficult to repurpose or share with other members of the organization.

In this session, you will learn guidelines for creating effective learning objects that are shareable, transferable, and easily updateable. You will learn to create a diverse learning object repository that can be utilized for many different needs. This session will also provide you the tools you need to increase the value of your work, by allowing you to share your learning object creations with your colleagues in a format that can be immediately utilized.

In this session, you will learn:

• How to create learning objects for a wider audience
• What makes a learning object shareable
• The best practices for creating shareable and transferable learning objects
• What information should not be included in learning objects

Audience:
Novice to intermediate designers and developers.

Technology discussed in this session:
The guidelines provided will be widely applicable to most technologies/platforms/devices.

Anyone with a camera can post learning content on YouTube, but television and other media have raised the expectations of viewers, who demand highly engaging, interactive content. If it isn’t immediately relevant to their task at hand, they’ll click onto something else. At the same time, corporate budgets are tight, so instructional designers have to find creative ways to produce high-quality, professional content on a budget.

In this session, you will learn 10 specific tips for creating professional-looking eLearning that is just as useful as content developed in a studio with several thousand dollars of equipment. Using low- or no-cost tools and equipment, subject matter experts can now get in front of the camera or mic and deliver a message that is authentic, relevant, and perhaps most importantly, keeps learners hooked. This session will show you how a team of computer geeks became famous YouTube stars by using best practices in eLearning and free or low-cost tools.

In this session, you will learn:

• How to create a recording studio in a home office
• How to help SMEs develop engaging scripts
• How to develop relevant visual articulations in slides
• How to mix it up and keep your learners engaged in video

Audience:
Novice and intermediate designers, developers, project managers, managers, and directors.

Technology discussed in this session:
PowerPoint, Camtasia, and/or ScreenFlow.

Do your eLearning courses need a punch of creativity? Have your users grown tired of the same drag and drop interactions? Would you like to add something new and exciting that will increase learner retention? With the brain processing visual information 60,000 times faster than text, it’s crucial to have visual impact in your courses. The good news is that design tools are more powerful than ever and provide developers with more options for creativity.

In this session, you will explore how to quickly create unique and engaging interactions, using the triggers, states, variables, and JavaScript in Articulate Storyline 2. You will see case study examples where the need for interactivity required new, innovative ideas to improve learning. The interactions used in this session will help you to implement exciting learning that is customizable to your needs and has more of an impact on changing the behaviors of learners to meet business goals.

In this session, you will learn:

• How to address the 65 percent of learner population that are visual learners
• How using visuals are more effective in retention
• How visuals in eLearning provide context for learners
• How to incorporate the use of visuals into any style of eLearning

Audience:
Novice to advanced designers, developers, and managers.

Technology discussed in this session:
Articulate Storyline 1 and Storyline 2.

Most corporate and adult continuing education eLearning courses include audio tracks, mostly as voiceover, but also for animated characters. As a result, many eLearning professionals find themselves writing audio scripts as part of their work. What are the skills needed to produce better audio?

In this session, you will learn 10 tips for producing better eLearning audio. Each tip aims to make your eLearning course much more engaging, improving retention. You will learn the science behind the methods that will help you improve your script writing, recording, and editing to better ensure improved learner performance after completing your courses.

In this session, you will learn:

• Seven tips for writing better scripts
• The cognitive psychology behind why these seven methods work
• Three tips for recording and editing audio tracks
• How to use aural techniques to capture and retain the attention of learners

Audience:
Novice and intermediate designers and developers.

Technology discussed in this session:
Adobe Audition, Audacity, recorders, and other audio recording and editing software and hardware.

Intellectual property law affects every stage of the development process. Yet it is daunting and complex. Trying to gain a working knowledge can be overwhelming. As a result, decision making is rooted in ignorance, fear, or frustration, none of which contributes to project goals. The continuing struggle to quickly develop content may lead you to infringe on someone else’s work, expose your work to an unpleasant legal action, or miss out on using free media to enhance your projects.

In this session, you will learn about copyright essentials through an entertaining snapshot of the law and recent cases. Learn how to protect your own work and apply legal concepts, such as the fair use doctrine, to everyday scenarios. You’ll become more confident finding sites that offer public domain, Creative Commons, and open access licensed works. Developing an applied understanding of copyright law and learning how to find media you can use will help you become more productive and focused as you maximize your financial and creative resources.

In this session, you will learn:

• Copyright law and fair use basics
• About recent and relevant court cases
• How to protect your work
• How to find online media you can use
• About Creative Commons licenses and which are most accommodating
• How to correctly attribute media you use

Audience:
Novice to advanced designers, developers, project managers, managers, and directors.

Technology discussed in this session:
N/A

Participant technology requirements:
Portable device.

eLearning and instructional professionals often have questions surrounding design vision, which is the range of motion of creative design ideas that they can incorporate visually into learning projects. Many find themselves struggling to be more creative and seek to extend their visual approaches to type, images, and composition. For the designer, more methods mean more opportunities to create better visual solutions for learning materials and content-driven courses.

In this session, you will learn 10 useful design ideas that can enhance your design thinking and expand your design vision for better learning and education products. You will learn unique and creative visual design approaches, and the contextual design processing abilities that are part of the critical skillset instructional designers need. You will explore various strategies useful in developing better type, images, and compositions to exploit visual creativity. You will learn to build your conceptual utility belts and will find new ways to enhance your content.

In this session, you will learn:

• Basic design thinking approaches embedded across design disciplines
• Contextual design methods to build user-centered content
• Strategies to use to develop better type, images, and compositions that exploit visual creativity
• Creative techniques to help boost visual concepts and strategies
• How to expand your design vision by adding 10 new design techniques

Audience:
Novice to advanced designers, developers, project managers, managers, and directors.

Technology discussed in this session:
N/A

Have you ever wished you could wave a magic wand to make your narrated voice work sound clean and crisp? Well, there is no magic wand, but a digital audio workstation (DAW) comes close. Broadcast professionals spend hundreds if not thousands of dollars creating their ideal audio post-production environment, but with careful planning you won’t need to spend a penny.

In this session, you will discover techniques and technologies which will enable you to create clean, authoritative, professional-grade audio for online presentations with a minimal impact on your budget. You will learn about digital audio techniques such as basic editing, compression, de-essing, gating, noise removal, and normalization—all using robust digital editing software you can get for free or as part of a software bundle. You will see how easy it is to import your professional-sounding audio files directly into your authoring software, with a small price tag to make your manager smile.

In this session, you will learn:

• How to acquire DAW (digital audio workstation) software with robust features for little or no cost
• How a DAW can be used to minimize or eliminate background noise (even including the barking dog down the street)
• How a DAW can be used to move or remove sounds at the phrase, word, and phoneme levels
• How a DAW can be used to emphasize or deemphasize frequencies in your voice, resulting in a bold, professional sound
• The next steps and resources on learning, practicing, and perfecting these skills

Audience:
Intermediate designers, developers, and project managers.

Technology discussed in this session:
Adobe Audition and Audacity.

Shrinking budgets and accelerated production schedules can make it difficult to leave room for professional voiceover narration for eLearning projects, and it’s often one of the first things cut. Unfortunately, skimping on quality narration can leave learners confused or distracted, which has a direct negative impact on their attention and retention.

In this session, you will explore the problems of costly and time-consuming professional voiceover narration by teaching you the skills you need to improve your performance. You will be able to provide quality narration in-house. You will learn that switching to in-house production results in significant money and time savings. Whether you are doing the eLearning narration or your employees are, this session teaches essential skills to improve performance. And freelancers will gain the skills and knowledge to offer professional-quality narration, allowing them to provide an all-in-one product to clients with no outsourcing.

In this session, you will learn:

• About the importance of breathing and techniques to improve it
• The best ways to warm up
• About enunciation, volume, tone, and inflection, and how it affects the end result
• Exercises you can do for just a few minutes every day that will improve your narration
• Three simple secrets that practically guarantee you’ll see an improvement in your narration in just two to three weeks

Audience:
Novice and intermediate designers, developers, project managers, and managers.

Technology discussed in this session:
N/A

Animation is a powerful tool for creating engaging eLearning experiences. Sadly, most animations are used without purpose as a design embellishment. When this happens, the use of animation distracts the learner from the content, rather than helping to elevate the content.

In this session, you will explore how animation can be used with purpose to create meaningful and engaging eLearning experiences. This session will demonstrate multiple before and after examples, where you can learn how animation can be used to explain complex ideas and create valuable learning content. You will learn how to use animation with purpose to provide meaning to your learning content. You will learn how to elevate your eLearning content through the use of animation.

In this session, you will learn:

• How animation affects the learning process
• How to use animation with purpose to bring meaning to learning content
• The various types of animations used within eLearning
• How to explain complex ideas and processes through the use of animation

Audience:
Novice to advanced designers and developers.

Technology discussed in this session:
N/A