Articles by Patti Shank, PhD, CPT
Beginning Instructional Authoring: Who's Looking Out for YOUR Skills? Part Three
(2/9/12)In Part Three of her series on Professional Development for 2012, Patti offers links to meetings, conferences, online sessions, and other places where you can acquire new skills or update what you already know.
Beginning Instructional Authoring: Are You Looking Out for Your Skills? Part Two
(1/12/12)Don’t leave your skills development to chance! Consider where your skills will need to be at the end of 2012, and start planning now to create a path to that level. Patti shows you some guideposts that will help you get there!
Beginning Instructional Authoring: Are You Looking Out for YOUR Skills? Pep Talk, Part One
(12/15/11)Professional development is vital in any career, and especially so in those careers that move as fast as ours in eLearning does. But the task can seem overwhelming: what should be in your professional development plan, and where do you start? It’s not all technical skills. Here is some excellent advice on creating your own plan for 2012 – and for starting on it today!
Beginning Instructional Authoring: Learning How to Author
(11/10/11)How do you learn to use authoring tools? This is the question that stops many would-be eLearning creators cold, yet the answer is deceptively simple. Patti offers a step-by-step approach to using the plentiful resources that will get you started on your way to success.
Beginning Instructional Authoring: Selecting Self-Paced Authoring Tools (Part 2)
(10/13/11)Last month, Patti offered tips to help you get started choosing the right tools for your authoring needs. This month, she gives you the final secrets to making an excellent selection!
Beginning Instructional Authoring: Selecting Self-Paced Authoring Tools (Part 1)
(9/15/11)The number of available authoring tools can bewilder even experienced eLearning producers who are trying to choose just the right one for their needs. This is Part 1 of a two-part series designed to help you with tool selection if you are brand-new to eLearning.
Beginning Instructional Authoring: Why C.R.A.P. Is Exactly What's Needed (Part 2)
(8/11/11)The quality of visual design in your eLearning product can contribute to or detract from its effectiveness — and its credibility! Concluding the discussion started last month, Patti shows you how to use alignment and proximity to solidify your visual design, and how to use all four principles of visual design together.
Beginning Instructional Authoring: Why C.R.A.P. Is Exactly What's Needed (Part 1)
(7/12/11)Expanding on last month’s column about alignment of graphics, here are the first two of four overarching principles of visual design. Try them – they make a real difference in the appearance and effectiveness of your content!
Beginning Instructional Authoring: Line ‘Em Up
(6/16/11)How can you tell a professional’s screen design from a rookie design? The professional makes sure all the elements on the screen align with each other. This is an important point, and it is easy to do. Patti shows you how.
Beginning Instructional Authoring: Color Me Matching, Part 2
(5/12/11)Clip art presents designers with some important challenges. On the one hand, it’s convenient and generally free. On the other hand, it is obviously clip art and it often doesn’t fit the other graphic design elements in the content. This month’s column shows you how to get rid of clip art backgrounds that don’t quite work for your design.
Beginning Instructional Authoring: Color Me Matching, Part 1
(4/14/11)Clip art has a bad image, if you will pardon the pun, among instructional designers and those who review their products. Yet it is possible to use clip art in ways that are consistent with a professional approach. Begin by matching image types and by recoloring images to match your color scheme. This month's column shows you how easy this is to do!
Beginning Instructional Authoring: Get Clipped
(3/10/11)Is clip art always a terrible thing to use in e-Learning? Not if you use it the right way. It all depends on selection, style, placement, and scale. Here are pointers on each of these factors.
Make the Complex Understandable: Show, Don't Tell
(2/14/11)Infographics are visuals specifically created to represent, instruct, or to disseminate information in a visual format. These visuals have many potential uses, but many instructional designers overlook the format and we seldom see them in e-Learning. Here’s how to create and use visualizations effectively.
Beginning Instructional Authoring: Decide What to Leave Out
(2/10/11)Creating effective, PowerPoint-based e-Learning requires thinking in some new ways. Often, the most important part of creating PowerPoint slides is deciding what to leave out. In this month’s column, Patti gives you some tips on thinking about content.
Beginning Instructional Authoring: Say What? Explaining Images
(1/13/11)Are you just beginning to learn how to author e-Learning? This column is meant for you! Patti Shank serves up some tool-independent and tool-specific tips in this series that will help you work better and faster, and develop a better product. This month, Patti shows you four tips for avoiding cognitive overload.
The MOST Crucial Learning Activities and Media
(11/15/10)There is a simple process that will help you figure out what learners need to be able to do in the real world and then make sure they get adequate practice doing it during instruction. Here’s a “play along” article that shows you the process.
When a Rapid Approach Makes the Most Sense
(2/10/10)When does rapid e-Learning work best? What types of rapid authoring tools are there? Which rapid authoring tools do Guild members favor? Here are the answers from The eLearning Guild Research Getting Started in e-Learning Report on Rapid e-Learning, published February 10, 2010.
Make Sure Your Media Makes Sense and Cents
(2/11/08)It is now absurdly easy to add media – especially video – to e-Learning, but a designer still needs to exercise judgment about when to use media, which media to use, and how best to match media and learning outcomes. After reading this article, you will have an outstanding set of guidelines from a top e-Learning designer to help you liven up your e-Learning and increase learner engagement.
Avoiding Assessment Mistakes That Compromise Competence and Quality
(12/19/05)Assessment of learning is one of those elements of design that many practitioners talk about but find difficult to do well, or to do at all. Yet there are ethical and even legal reasons why doing assessment properly is critically important. Fortunately, designing good assessments is simple, given some basic principles. An expert designer walks you through these basics and shows you how to succeed.
Can They Do It in the Real World? Designing for Transfer of Learning
(9/7/04)The purpose of e-Learning is to improve the accomplishment of real tasks in the real world. Transfer is the key to achieving this purpose, and designers should focus on interactions that help learners gain the desired level of mastery and then apply it on the job. Here are six basic, proven strategies that will improve transfer from e-Learning to the job.
Unsticking Hands-on Activities: How to think outside the monitor
(6/29/04)Practice is critical to learning many skills. While practice is relatively easy to arrange in classroom instruction or OJT, it is not always so simple in e-Learning. Furthermore, this is also true of the activities we require learners to perform when we evaluate whether they learned. This article discusses strategies for thinking about how to solve this problem.
Interaction, Activities, and Learning: Engage learners meaningfully to develop mastery
(5/3/04)"If interactivity is considered an important measure of good online learning, the dilemma is that we often don’t know what we’re measuring, and that’s a pretty slippery slope. To answer that question we first have to ask: Interaction for what? That’s easy... Interaction that supports the desired learning." Read this article to begin exploring how to arrange this result.
Complex Interventions for Complex Problems: Expanded Context for e-Learning Tools
(1/13/04)Our jobs in e-Learning are all about solving performance problems, but most of the time e-Learning is not enough and organizations are nervous about exposing systemic shortcomings. The solution is Human Performance Technology (HPT), based on analysis and tailored solutions. Read this article to find out what is involved in HPT and to get ideas you can use immediately in your work.
