Tint and Shade Generator
Provide hex codes for colors and get tints (lighter) and shades (darker) of that color. Useful for staying within a color scheme while still providing some variety
Blog posts
Space invaders – E-Learning Provocateur
Ryan Tracey clarifies related and often confusingly overlapping terms related to the spacing effect for learning: spaced presentation, spaced practice, spaced retrieval, distributed practice, expanding practice, and more.
Introduction to the Zettelkasten Method • Zettelkasten Method
A method for taking notes where you can link ideas together. This was originally designed as a method for taking paper-based notes but with effectively a hyperlink between ideas. This isn't tagging per se, but a way to connect ideas and keep a large amount of notes organized over time.
Survive an Earthquake - INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN BY TRACY CARROLL
In this sample, Tracy used Storyline to simulate the look and feel of BranchTrack. The choices are styled with numbers and text like BranchTrack, and the push transition between slides mimics the effect between choices. If you don't have BranchTrack but like that style, this shows how you can accomplish the same effect in Storyline. This could be used for a lot of branching scenarios or short sims.
Gamasutra: Jon Ingold's Blog - Patching Conversations to Pin the Blame
Twine Resources
A collection of resources for Twine, including story formats, compilers, extensions, guides, and communities
E-learning templates and assets | Who's your ADDIE?
Marketplace for buying and selling elearning templates and assets. Think of this like a "teachers pay teachers" for IDs and elearning developers. If you have a few things you'd like to see but don't want to set up your own website to sell them, you can use this site.
Screenlight Video Review & Approval
A tool for collecting feedback on video, audio, or images. The free plan allows only 1 project, but that lets you try it out. $9/month for the first tier paid plan with unlimited reviewers.
Frame.io | Video Review and Collaboration Software
Tool for reviewing videos with comments. The free plan is limited to 2 projects but might be enough for some uses
Opinion | Your Friend Doesn’t Want the Vaccine. What Do You Say? - The New York Times
This is an example of a chatbot simulation to teach people how to persuade people to get vaccinated using motivational interviewing techniques. This includes immediate feedback after each choice, right or wrong (appropriate for an audience with zero background in motivational interviewing, even if it breaks up the conversation). The branching structure is a simple gauntlet. After each wrong choice, you get feedback and then are forced to pick the correct choice to continue the conversation.
VEED Online Video Editor
I haven't tried this tool, but it looks like a decent tool for creating or subtitling a quick video with a free tool. The free version has limits in video length and only exports to 780p, but that might be enough for a quick portfolio sample. As a paid tool, I think most elearning folks would probably be better off paying a little more to get Camtasia instead.
GitHub - bfritscher/carnac: A utility to give some insight into how you use your keyboard
Mark Weingarten used this utility in his advanced Storyline session at LSCon. It shows your keyboard shortcuts on screen so others can better understand what you're doing. Super useful for anyone doing software training or screencasts.
Decisions, Decisions! – Engage Brain and Train!
A humorous Choose Your Own Adventure branching scenario sample by Jonathan Hill. The look and feel matches the classic books. Jonathan includes a tip to consider adding decisions in the beginning that have no impact on the outcome (just a cosmetic change), but provide a tutorial or practice on using the controls.
The Power of Story: Highlights from TLDC's Community Day Spring 2021 | Scissortail Creative Services, LLC
Kayleen Holt summarizes takeaways from TLDC's community day focused on the theme of story (including notes from my session)
Instructional Design Hiring Manager Report 2021
Devlin Peck summarizes and analyzes responses from 101 hiring managers surveyed about what factors influence their decisions when evaluating instructional design and elearning candidates.
Scenario-Based Learning Experiences Podcast Interview - Experiencing eLearning
DDX - 1023 - Streamlining Branching Scenario Planning and Design_Trim from The Learning Guild on Vimeo
Recording of my session at DevLearn 2020
Pose - Easy Character Guidelines by Gal Shir
App for creating poses for characters. These are just outlines, which you'd have to illustrate yourself in another app. Kevin Thorn demonstrated this as a way to create custom characters for scenarios, which you can pose in exactly the way you need. This is a browser-based app, currently $19.
How to Use Plain Language to Improve Learning Outcomes | Scissortail Creative Services, LLC
We all probably know we should use easier to understand language in instructional writing, but this article provides more specifics on how to actually do that. The before and after writing example shows what a significant difference it can make.
Identify your superpower and learn to leverage it - Chris Lema
What are the things you're good at, but take other people a lot of time and effort? What do people compliment you on, but you downplay it because it feels so easy to you? What can you do well that surprises other people? Chris Lema shares questions to reflect on your skills to identify your special strengths. This isn't about instructional design, but it seems relevant to our field where there's a wide range of skills under the general umbrella. Within that broad scope of L&D, what's your superpower? This is also another way to think about identifying a niche for freelancers and consulting businesses.
The 57 Best Project Management Software in 2020
An extensive list of project management software options, many of which have a free tier. Note that the list was compiled by nTask, who conveniently put their own tool on the top of the list. The feature comparisons and pricing summaries are still useful though.
How to Price Your Online Course (Complete Guide to Course Pricing)
Lengthy guide about considerations for pricing online courses from Thinkific. This is aimed at experts who are selling courses, but that also applies to many of us in the L&D field who are branching out into selling course products ourselves.
Plagiarized article
Stolen from my blog post on branching scenario layouts
Why Does a Design Look Good?
While these examples are all websites, the design principles apply to elearning too.
<strong>Summary:</strong> Visually aesthetic designs use consistent typography, establish a clear hierarchy, utilize a refined color palette, and align to a grid.
Scenario Writing: Top 5 Pitfalls | Scissortail Creative Services, LLC
Common mistakes and pitfalls for writing scenario-based learning.
- Not tying the story to the learning objectives.
- Getting preachy.
- Avoiding the gray areas.
- Writing robotic speech.
- Disguising info dumps as conversations.
How to Use RSS Feeds
Helen Blunden explains how to use RSS to subscribe to specific feeds, including filtering for specific topics on a blog or subscribing to a YouTube channel. While following folks on social media can be a good way to discover new things and to interact with others, RSS gives you control and customization over what you see. If you feel like there's too much noise on social media and want a way to focus on reading just what you're interested in, RSS helps you do that.
If you’re relying on social networks to serve you up the content you want to read – you’re not in control.
To many people, I’m may be a bit of an old fashioned kook because I still use them religiously but the truth is, I wouldn’t be finding great content and sharing it to you if I was just relying on my social networks such as Twitter and LinkedIn to serve this content up to me. After all, my networks are reading similar content, retweeting and sharing the same stuff. An RSS Reader allows me to control what is coming to me but also is flexible enough for me to add to or delete feeds as my interests change.
How Long Does It Take to Develop Training? New Question, New Answers.
Updated ATD research on the time to develop training
Does anyone design for an hour of training? Not really. The chart below shows how the 264 respondents identified which types of training products they develop and the minimum, maximum, and average times it took to create each.
The State and Future of Learning & Development in 2021: See What the Experts Think!
Jeffrey Dalto collected responses from a number of L&D professionals for insights on how COVID-19 has affected L&D and how this affects the future trends for the field.
We’d like to thank all of the contributors for sharing their time, knowledge, and insight. They include Connie Malamed, Arun Pradhan, Patti Shank, Cara North, Clark Quinn, Stella Lee, Zsolt Olah, Julie Dirksen, Mike Taylor, Jacinta Penn, Guy Wallace, Emily Wood, Kassy Laborie, Alexander Salas, Michelle Ockers, Shannon Tipton, Christy Tucker, Linda Berberich, and Richard (Dick) Clark.
How To Remember Anything Forever-ish
An interactive comic explaining the Leitner method of spaced repetition to learn and remember information.
What is instructional design? Examples and online courses - Business Insider
Basic overview of ID for those interested in the field. This article highlights a few online programs for learning about instructional design, plus 3 bloggers to read: Connie Malamed, Cathy Moore, and me.