This is a Part 1 of a guest blog series by James Anderson. Read below for his full bio.When I started writing this blog post, I had a lot of ideas in my head. I wanted to talk about some of the very cool new features in Version 1.1 of Snap! by Lectora, but then I lost focus a little, and this blog post is more of a generic blog post on developing rapid e-Learning with a very cool product – Snap! by Lectora.Why Snap! by Lectora?I’m not trying to sell you anything—I’m just a happy customer. Happy that there is an easy to use rapid e-Learning tool. Happy that this great tool comes at a fantastic price point. Happy that new features have been quickly added to make it even more robust.My Primary Authoring Platform: PowerPoint. Yes, I said it – PowerPoint.Let the PowerPoint haters come crawling out of the woodwork. People want to immediately criticize PowerPoint for many reasons (boring, everything looks alike, endless bullet points, etc...). PowerPoint is essentially an empty canvas—an empty canvas that you may either “do good” or “do evil” – that is 100% in your hands. With the integration of Snap! by Lectora in PowerPoint, we have the opportunity to use this powerful canvas to create non-linear (yes, I said non-linear), interactive, multi-media, and engaging rapid eLearning.My Primary Instructional Design Model: Four-Door eLearning by Thiagi.I typically use some variation of the Four-Door eLearning model developed by Thiagi. I don’t want to steal his work, so if you want to learn more about this approach, you can download a podcast and learn more about if from Dr. Sivasailam “Thiagi” Thiagarajan, the master himself.Essentially the Four-Door model breaks your eLearning down to four choices for the learner: library, café, playground, and torture chamber. The learner freely navigates the course and chooses the materials they need. In the library, the learner can obtain needed reference materials (either embedded or linked content) to learn and research the topic. The playground allows the learner to play with options and apply the material learned in the library. I like to make the playground into a scenario the learner works through. Café is a place for the learner to synthesize, ask questions, and expand on ideas learned. Finally, the torture chamber allows trainers to assess what the user has learned. You can of course rename any of these to better match the message or brand you want to convey. In Snap! by Lectora, you can drop web-windows into a slide, which can go to a discussion board, Twitter, Facebook group or other area where you can support collaborative learning for the topic, which makes it easy for trainers to follow the Thiagi model using this rapid e-learning authoring tool.Now that we’ve laid down the basic grounds for rapid e-Learning development, it’s time to dive into more specific content creation capabilities and features in Snap! by Lectora – to be continued in Part 2 of this series.
James Anderson
James Anderson is originally from Michigan, but will soon relocate to North Dakota. He brings common sense solutions to performance improvement, training and development and elearning. James offers over 10-years of experience in the learning and development field with a performance improvement bias. He brings improvement experience as an entrepreneurial coach and trainer to his learning and performance, which often provides a unique and simplified twist to training and performance.
.svg)
