Video Game Secrets - BIANCA WOODS
Slides from Bianca Woods's presentation on "The Secrets Video Games Can Teach L&D About Crafting Scenarios and Simulations That Work." I didn't attend the session, but the slides and references to the games used as inspiration are still useful.
Two Types of Diversity Training That Really Work
One training exercise that we analyzed, and that shows promise, is perspective-taking, which is essentially the process of mentally walking in someone else’s shoes. Results from our <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10869-014-9384-3" target="_blank">experiment</a> involving 118 undergraduate students showed that taking the perspective of LGBT individuals or racial minorities — by writing a few sentences imagining the distinct challenges a marginalized minority might face — can improve pro-diversity attitudes and behavioral intentions toward these groups. These effects persisted even when outcomes were measured eight months after training. Even more exciting is the fact that perspective-taking was shown to be capable of producing crossover effects. In our experiment, taking the perspective of LBGT individuals was shown to be associated with more positive attitudes and behaviors toward racial minorities, and vice versa.
Another activity that has empirical support is goal setting. <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10869-012-9264-7" target="_blank">Recent evidence</a> shows that this strategy — more broadly used to motivate improved aspects of someone’s job performance — can be successfully adapted by asking diversity training participants to set specific, measurable, and challenging (yet attainable) goals related to diversity in the workplace. For example, a trainee might set a goal to challenge inappropriate comments about marginalized groups when overhearing them in the future (in combination with receiving information about how best to handle such situations). Our experiment with 158 undergraduate students showed that goal setting within diversity training led to more pro-diversity behaviors three months after training and improved pro-diversity attitudes nine months after training. These long-lasting effects are notable, given that diversity training sessions in organizations are usually few and far between.
What to Charge for Your Workshop, Training or Webinar — The Counselor's Coach
This article has pricing breakdowns for three different workshops, including one virtual one. I appreciate seeing the numbers here for both expenses and profits, even though this is for a different audience.
My tips on how to formulate a price for your workshop
One person's breakdown of how much time is required to deliver a 6-hour workshop. This includes 9 hours for creating slides and materials, which clearly only includes adapting existing materials and not creating them from scratch.
Tiiny Host – The Easiest Way To Host Your E-Learning Course
Need a quick way to share an elearning course? This looks like a very simple way to do so, much simpler than setting up an Amazon S3 account. This might work as an option for students in my branching scenario course to host their scenarios. However, on a free account, the uploaded content is deleted after 7 days--this is meant for quick reviews of sites, not for long-term hosting. You can do a paid account, but there are probably better options for the cost at that point.
Hack: How to Add Custom Characters to Scenario Blocks - Overview
While the Rise scenario block doesn't have a way to add your own customer characters, you can use this trick from Tom Kuhlmann. It's a bit of a kludge, but you can swap out the images in the published file. The image file names aren't obvious, but Tom shows how he uses PPT to keep track of which label goes with each image.
Raindrop.io — All-in-one bookmark manager
Bookmark manager that takes screenshots and allows highlights like Diigo. Although I have relied on Diigo for a long time for saving and tagging bookmarks, the site hasn't been actively developed in several years. This might be a viable alternative.
Body Liberation Stock: Body-Positive & Size-Diverse Stock Photos for Commercial Use - Body liberation boudoir, portraits, stock, HAES & more | Seattle
If you need more diversity in stock images, this site has a range of body sizes and people with visible and invisible disabilities. Images start around $5 each, which seems pretty reasonable (and much better than the $40/image I have seen on some other specialty sites).
How to Determine if an Individual Is a Volunteer or an Employee
This article explains the difference between volunteers and employees, as well as listing the 7 factors for determining if an intern can be unpaid or not. (The quick answer is that it's likely cheaper and easier to pay an intern than to legally offer an unpaid internship.)
There are no general regulations that permit volunteering of services to an employer in the private sector. All hours worked must be paid.
Can You Accept Volunteer Labor? - HR Daily Advisor
Volunteering can be a great way to get some experience when you're first getting started in a field. However, you should volunteer for a nonprofit. You can't volunteer for a for-profit company.
Asking a company if you can do free work for them tells that company that you believe they will violate federal law to take advantage of you. You're not doing them a favor. You're asking them to do an enormous amount of work by having an attorney help them create an unpaid internship program just for you.
Most for-profit organizations cannot accept volunteer, unpaid labor without running afoul of the FLSA.
Even interns must be paid in most circumstances—if they’re performing tasks that benefit the employer (as opposed to just learning and observing), they’re completing work that is entitled to pay. This is true even if the intern <em>offers</em> his or her services for free just to get started with the organization.
GuidedTrack – Home
A no code tool for building web apps and interactive surveys. I haven't tried it yet, but it looks like you could use this for building branching scenarios. In the info for educators, it says you can make CYOA lessons that adapt content and grade automatically. You can start with a free plan to try it out.
Make sense of rounded corners on buttons | by Shan Shen | UX Collective
Rounded corners on cards and buttons can be helpful to users for differentiating between items and recognizing what is clickable.
Rounded corners are easier on the eyes. When we align cards in a row, it’s easier to count the total number of cards when they have rounded corners.
<mark class="xl xm if">Fully rounded buttons are excellent in interfaces that have adequate space.</mark>
GitHub - ChapelR/tw-analytics: Quickly add Google analytics to Twine games (and other web apps) from the command line.
This hasn't been updated in 2 years, but it's a tool for adding Google Analytics tracking to Twine games. While getting xAPI to work with Twine is still probably the ideal option for most learning applications, analytics data would provide a lot of useful info too.
How to Create Branching Scenarios (5 Instructional Design Tips) — The Interactive Story
Kimberly Goh shares tips on branching scenario structure, comparing the time cave vs. branch and bottleneck structure. She recommends skipping both of those and using a gauntlet structure, which she calls a "mastery loop." This is her "optimized branching structure." She builds on to it a little more by showing more consequences for bad choices, but it's still ultimately a friendly gauntlet that always forces you back to the right path. I'm part of the "some people" who often discourage the limited gauntlet structure; I don't think this is a true branching scenario. But, it is an interactive story.
<p class="" style="white-space:pre-wrap;">In a Mastery Loop, every time you make a poor decision, you see the poor consequence play out, then you automatically get to make the decision again. Once you make the right decision, the story continues. There’s really only one way to get to the ending, and it’s always the best ending.</p><p class="" style="white-space:pre-wrap;">Some people discourage the use of Mastery Loops because they feel it’s overly controlling to “force” people to eventually choose the right path. </p><p class="" style="white-space:pre-wrap;">But if your business problem is relatively simple, and doesn’t require a lot of nuanced decisions, a Mastery Loop might be the best format to use. </p>
Top 35 Instructional Design Blogs and Websites in 2022
How did Feedspot determine who was on their list of 31 (not quite 35) ID blogs and websites? It's not quite clear; it's based on reach and domain authority rather than quality, supposedly. But one of those blogs only posts 5 times a year? A number of these are organizational blogs. A few of these blogs are new to me, so you might find something new too. You'll have to search for the blog by name, since the links are to subscriptions in Feedspot rather than actually to the blog. Still, it's good to potentially find some new sources.