Free Download — Useful Legal Documents For Designers (PDF/DOC) | Smashing Magazine
Free sample contracts and legal documents for web and graphic designers. These could be adopted for instructional designers and e-learning developers.
Blog posts
8 Things You Should Include In Your Terms of Service Agreement
Contract elements for freelance designers. This is more for graphic/web designers, but it's all relevant to instructional designers too. The suggested interim charge cap is way too low for e-learning projects, but the principle is valid.
Freelance Heroes - E-Learning Heroes
Discussion for Articulate freelancers with lots of shared tips and resources. Questions for potential clients, things to include in a terms of service agreement, when and how to say no to clients, managing risk, etc.
Cometdocs
Online tool for converting PDF files to Word, Excel, PPT, etc. It does a good job of making text editable, but converts SmartArt as static graphics. It would work for small text edits in a presentation where you don't have the original PPT file, but if you had a lot of SmartArt to rebuild it wouldn't save much time. It might work better for Excel spreadsheets than the PPT I tested.
Optimal Video Length for Student Engagement | edX
In edX courses, about 6 minutes is the maximum length students will watch. In traditional online graduate courses for credit, the length could be longer, but this is a good reminder to keep things short.
The optimal video length is 6 minutes or shorter -- students watched most of the way through these short videos. In fact, the average engagement time of any video maxes out at 6 minutes, regardless of its length. And engagement times decrease as videos lengthen: For instance, on average students spent around 3 minutes on videos that are longer than 12 minutes, which means that they engaged with less than a quarter of the content.
5 Cost drivers of E-learning projects
The answer to "how much does a course cost" is "it depends." Here's 5 factors affecting pricing for e-learning projects: project management, instructional design, multimedia development, interactivity, and SME availability.
Section 508 Authoring Tool: CourseAvenue
Tool for creating Section 508-compliant e-learning. More accessibility features here than the standard rapid development tools.
Designers for Learning | matching nonprofits with instructional design students in service-learning
ID students can volunteer their services for nonprofits and gain valuable experience
8 Effective Scenario Ideas for Instructional Designers - eLearning Brothers | eLearning Brothers
Visual structures and story structures for scenario-based learning
Thoughts on pricing — Stuff & Nonsense, And All That Malarkey
An interesting model for freelance pricing. Instead of doing either fixed price or hourly/daily rates, he bills on weekly rate. For small projects with a clear scope, fixed price works fine, but this method might work better for complex projects with fluid requirements.
Educational Jargon Generator
Automatically generate educational jargon like "We will triangulate visionary presentations in data-driven schools."
Boring to Brilliant: 5 Tips to Convert Your E-Learning to a Story-based Approach
Diane Senffner on using storytelling for learning
The Science of Storytelling: Why Telling a Story is the Most Powerful Way to Activate Our Brains
Hearing stories activates areas of our brains as if we were experiencing the elements of the story ourselves, not just language processing areas.
11 iGoogle Alternatives for Teachers
I've been using iGoogle as my home page. igHome looks like a good alternative with a good gadget selection, but there are several other choices here to check out.
Make your Moodle courses load faster without fiddling with the server | I Teach With Moodle | Sharing good practice using Moodle in and out of the classroom
Tips on making courses load faster in Moodle
The Open Source eLearning Blog: Why Your Moodle Site is Slow: Five Simple Settings
Settings to change to improve the speed of a Moodle site
5 Essential Qualifications to Look for in an Instructional Designer | WPLMS
Justin Ferriman's list of ID qualifications. I disagree with almost everything on his list. Justin misunderstands the role of IDs and thinks we need to be mini-SMEs with industry experience so we don't "annoy" SMEs with our questions. I've written a lengthy comment rebutting his arguments.
Unprotect a Word form easily, even without the password | Examiner.com
Great tip for unprotecting a Word form when you don't have the password, by inserting the text of the file into a new blank document. This gives you the form but without protection turned on. Useful if you need to clear out all form fields at once to reset a form to blank. Once you get the form unprotected, you can use the Reset Form Fields button on the Developer toolbar.
Excuses for Not Having a Portfolio | Ileighanne's Blog
List of common excuses IDs give for not having a portfolio, with responses and solutions. There's a list of portfolio resources at the end of the post.
Video: Website Evaluation - Explained by Common Craft | Common Craft
Common Craft video on how to evaluate and review websites to find trustworthy information
Copyright Information and Resources | University of Minnesota Libraries
University of Minnesota information on copyright, starting with two questions: "Can I use this?" and "What do I own?"
Youtube Video Gallery for Moodle Database Preset
Template for using the Moodle database as a gallery of YouTube videos
Articulate - Word of Mouth Blog - Troubleshooting LMS Issues
Ways to troubleshoot Articulate publishing to the LMS, grouped by 3 major symptoms (content won't upload to the LMS, course doesn't play as expected, or tracking/reporting/resuming problems).
Articulate - Word of Mouth Blog - 9 Ways to Troubleshoot Articulate & LMS Issues
This is from 2008, so it only references Presenter and Quizmaker, but these steps would apply to Storyline too.
Bookshelf Tour
Bookshelf course created in Articulate Storyline. Basically a wrapper that lets people see multiple e-learning courses to show off what others have done for Storyline. You can download the template and you could use this for a portfolio or gallery of other work.
Pipetting | Learning Solutions
Comic book style course on pipetting. Lets you choose your own avatar. Best of show (non-vendor) from Solution Fest 2013
StoryImpacts: 10 models of interactive stories
Examples of different types of interactive stories from Vignettes Learning. Free registration required.
Going beyond Google Reader, RIP | Bryan Alexander
Alternatives to Google Reader
The Old Reader
RSS reader inspired by Google Reader. No mobile app yet but they say they are working on it.
Google Reader is dying, but we have five worthy alternatives | CNET Reviews
Google Reader has been one of my primary tools for personal learning for years. I'm disappointed that it's going to be shut down. Hopefully one of these alternatives will meet my needs.