I don't know how many e-learning prediction lists you've seen in the past month or so, but one definite trend has been a re-emphasizing of the potential for mobile learning – whether it's iPhone, Blackberry, Android, Palm or even non-smart phone focused – to surge ahead in use.

I say re-emphasizing, because it's a prediction that's been made for several years past. So what's the hold up?

Well, probably true need. Delivering learning (or even just information) to everyone's pocket seems like a no brainer – it's accessible, convenient, and pretty cool to think about, too.

But necessity, for organizations, is the mother of investment -- and for many organizations mobile learning just doesn't seem necessary yet.

Still, that time will come for many – and it's always good to be prepared. So, if you (or your organization) are thinking about mobile learning, here are some recent resources that would be a wise investment of your time.

Case (study) in point
It's always good to learn from others, and a recent case study from Brandon Hall Research is a great place to start. Called Accenture's myLearning Mobile, it outlines how Accenture used mobile to solve its need to get training into the hands of a sales team that is constantly on the move. This case study is a freebie for anyone who signs up for the Brandon Hall Research Newsletter – if you haven't already, go ahead and sign up.

Design best practices for mobile web
One of the challenges of mobile learning is the sheer quantity of devices available. Even with specific phone brands, things like browser version and screen resolution can really have an impact on, well, the visual impact of your mobile learning. The W3C Mobile Web Initiative has published its Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0 - Basic Guidelines, a set of design best practices for creating web-based content for mobile devices.

Thinking outside the (organizational training) box
It's always valuable for those of us in the world of organizational training to look beyond our own communities of practice to see what's going on in other areas of education. New technologies, new pedagogies: Mobile learning in higher education is a recent e-book from the University of Wollongong's Faculty of Education that covers a number of really neat mobile learning initiatives from early childhood education to adult education.

Books are mobile, too!
If you want a more low-tech approach to mobile learning, check out Mohamed Ally's Mobile Learning: Transforming the Delivery of Education and Training. No need to worry about battery life with this mobile learning option!

And another take on the idea of mobile learning...
Blackberry maker Research in Motion (RIM) has released the Blackberry Presenter, a wireless projector that allows slides presentations to be projected from a Blackberry device. Gives a whole new meaning to "mobile in the classroom"!

One-stop mlearning learning
Information on mobile learning is scattered across the interweb, so it's great to have a place like mlearnopedia to help you keep tabs on developments in this area across all varieties of education and training.

Oldies, but goodies
Lastly, here are a couple of older resources listed in a previous blog post here. They're still good!

Chris Van Wingerden is Vice President Learning Solutions at dominKnow Learning Systems.

Say the word video at the start of an e-learning project, and many of us will enthusiastically call out, "Lights, Camera, Action!" And then we'll pause, as we start thinking of the Hollywood budgets often required for projects using video.

But the success of YouTube should give us all inspiration that creativity can count for more than budget when it comes to adding video to a learning experience.

The Authoring Tool in our dominKnow LCMS includes a video capture feature that allows video to be recorded from a web cam directly to a page in your e-learning course. The first idea that most people think of when they discover this feature is that it's a quick and easy way to record a talking head video clip, like an introduction to a topic or a welcome greeting at the start of a course. But flex your creative muscles a little further, and you'll see there are far more engaging learning experiences that can be created with this tool.

Here's an example. Last week I was asked by a client to show them what a video-capture screen can look like in the LCMS. I didn't have an example readily at hand, so I quickly put one together. Instead of just recording myself doing an introduction, though, I took a few minutes and developed a bit of a back story to use as part of a scenario, in this case a phone sales call. In the example, the learner watches the video to hear and see my responses to the conversation so far, and then makes a decision on what action to take next. Creating the page only took about 10 minutes, including recording time. Here's a screen cap (and yes, that's my mug in the video).

An approach like this takes advantage of video's ability to help us tell a story, and stories can bring powerful engagement advantages to the learning experience. And almost as importantly, it doesn't take a Hollywood budget to carry out. In fact, the nature of the scenario even turned the limited quality of my computer's mic into a contextually-relevant production feature for this clip. Since the scenario is based around a phone sales call, no one will expect big budget editing or foley effects in the soundtrack. A little mic and background noise is just what you'd expect in a phone call.

There are many other inexpensive ways to bring video into your next e-learning project. Try sending your SMEs out with video cameras to record clips that explain important topics or demonstrate critical skills. Hey, the budget could be very tight on this, since so many of us now carry a video recorder -- also known as a cell phone -- in our pocket every day.

Your SMEs won't likely be expert videographers or even professional actors or voice-over talents. But their in-depth knowledge of the topic or task and the personal experience they speak from can give the video clips an authenticity no actor could ever reach, either. And authenticity is another great way to create engagement in a learning experience. You'll be surprised at how much usable video you get in a hurry, and if anything needs to be reshot, you'll already have a working prototype of it for use during storyboarding.

What's the lesson here? Don't let your ears hear "video" and your mind automatically think "Hollywood budget". Daring to think differently can hep take your next e-learning course to a new level of learning engagement -- and that really is the goal, after all.

Chris Van Wingerden is Vice President Learning Solutions at dominKnow Learning Systems.

One of the first major e-learning projects I worked on (way back near the beginning of this century) was aimed at training oil sands personnel to run a plant that didn't exist.

The facility was under construction and every day several thousand trades people added new parts and pieces to the multi-acre project. As soon as everything was completed, the operations team had to be ready to start turning everything on.

Yep, the operators had to learn how to run the plant before they could put their hands on much of it.

Enter our team and the e-learning project, including proposed 3-D models of the facility so operators could see the finished system as part of their training. This was the best way, it was reasoned, to deal with training on a structure that didn't exist yet.

Beginning with introductory-level learning topics we started creating 3-D models for almost every learning experience we designed, from sky-high viewpoints for locating fire equipment locations to inside looks at the various reactions taking place as heavy oil was converted into product ready for the refinery.

About a third of the way into the project, we started crafting the process operations modules, the real meat of how the plant was going to run. I was reviewing design notes (one of the collaboration features of the dominKnow LCMS) submitted by the client team leader as part of an early module review. One particular note caught my eye; it said something like "These pipes don't look anything like this. Let's get rid of the 3-D."

I called the client to catch up on this. He said the 3-D model we had created in this case looked more like household plumbing than the piping found at an oil processing plant to him. If the images didn't look right, the learners – in this case, experienced operators – would be skeptical of the validity of the information overall. So, let's just get rid of the 3-D images.

Ummm, okay. But how are your learners going to understand how the oil product moves through the unit? Why don't we just use the P&ID diagrams?

What?

In the earliest stages of the project's design, a set of Piping and Instrumentation Diagrams had been created. These were line and symbol-based diagrams, like a logic diagram or a flow chart, that outlined the design specs for the project, such as how different pumps were to be connected in sequence, what the operating pressures and temperatures were expected to be, and which types of valves were needed along the way, for example. The P&ID diagrams had almost no direct relation to the physical layout of the facility or actual dimensions or distances or practically anything relating to the eventual physical appearance of the facility – but they were a visual language that made sense to the operations team. The P&ID diagrams were a very precise way of explaining how product moved from point a to point b.

I won't even begin to explain why we could have made it several months into the project without understanding this critical piece of the client's culture. But the upshot was that for process operations we were able to use simple line drawing approaches instead of 3-D models. And although the visual design was no where near as cool as the 3-D models in the other modules, the learning still happened because it used a visual language the learners were comfortable with and trusted.

The lesson? Not everyone "sees" the same way, especially when it comes to making sense of information in a visual medium like e-learning.

Needless to say, our needs analysis process was quickly adjusted to include identifying such issues when we start working with a client on a new e-learning project.

And our clients get to "see" better learning results.

Chris Van Wingerden is Vice President Learning Solutions at dominKnow Learning Systems.

Over the past few posts we've covered a lot of ground in design principles and foundation ideas like color theory. And we've only begun to scratch the surface!

The truth is, design is a field that is part science, part craft and part art form. And one of best aspects of design work is that you are never finished learning. There are always new ideas to introduce, and new aspects of design to study up on and bring into your own work.

So, if the last few posts have whet your design learning appetite, here are some great websites to help you continue on your learning journey.

Color, Typography, and Design Resources

Worqx.com
This site, the brainchild of Web designer/developer and self-proclaimed 'color enthusiast' Janet Lynn Ford, is a great place to begin learning about color. The website gives a general overview of color theory and provides an in-depth color tutorial. More specifically, it explains how color is communicated, and provides information about color application. There is also a wonderful little palette picker tool for trying out your own color combinations. Be sure to check out Peter Piper's Palette Picker.

Adobe Labs Kuler
This site is created by and for designers--to explore, create, and save color themes following the principles of color theory. You will need an Adobe ID. These swatches can be saved to your Adobe Creative Suite applications.

Val Casey's Notes on Visual and Interaction Design
Designer Val Casey's site on color and design for the web is spare and image-free, but has many links to other sites illustrating the points she makes.

The Principles of Beautiful Web Design
This article by designer Jason Beaird illustrates the design process, defines design elements, and offers tips for inspiration (available as a book too).

A List Apart
A List Apart Magazine explores the design, development, and meaning of web content, with a special focus on web standards and best practices.

Graphic Tools Tutorials and Articles

Here are some great places to go for information, tips, tutorials and other help when using specific graphic and web design tools.

Web Design Library: Designer's One-Stop Resource
This site contains articles and tutorials to help you learn more about using Flash, Swish, Photoshop, HTML, CSS and other tools for web design.

Entheos
This site includes tutorials on using Flash, Fireworks, Dreamweaver, Photoshop and more tools for web design.

Flash Kit: A Flash Developer's Resource Site
Flash Kit includes lots of tools and tips for Flash developers, including tutorials.

HotScripts.com
This site contains scripts, components, menus, and other tools that can be downloaded and used in your work.

HTML Goodies: The Ultimate HTML Resource
This site is full of information about HTML, including tutorials.

Know of any other great web sites that deal with design? Share them using the comments.

Happy learning!

Chris Van Wingerden is Vice President Learning Solutions at dominKnow Learning Systems

In our previous post we looked at the basics of color theory.

In this post we'll look at ways to put that theory to use in our designs, by understanding how to combine colors effectively and how to use color to help us communicate ideas to our learners.

Color Combinations
Good design is about choosing the right colors to represent what you are trying to convey.

Colors are often used in combination, so understanding how people perceive color combinations is important.

Successful color combinations can be represented through an extended color wheel which includes shades and tints.

Color relationships can be:

In general, you will pick one of these color relationship types and use it as the basis of your overall design, from the big picture aspects such as background color and navigation layer color to the more subtle course visual elements such as button colors and the use of color for some text elements such as page headers, for example.

Color and Contrast in Design
Contrast is the most important element in design: you can achieve contrast through color, scale, texture, shape, and weight.

The ability to clearly see the subject or words in a design is good legibility, and legibility is a function of contrast. Light type can be placed over dark backgrounds between 35 and 100 per cent in contrast, and dark type can be placed on a light background between 0 and 35 per cent contrast.

Itten's Color Contrasts
In his book The Art of Color, Johannes Itten describes methods for color combinations using contrasting properties of hue.

Itten's color star did not recognize magenta or cyan as primaries, but his book summarizes most other color knowledge to date.

Through his research he developed seven color contrasts for coordinating colors by using the hue's contrasting properties.

He learned that contrasts may be obtained by light, moderate, or dark values.

This image shows Itten's seven color contrasts.

Of course, there is one other aspect of designing with color that should always be considered, and that is how color can affect your audience. This is a huge subject to begin understanding, but here's a good place to start.

Next post: Web resources to help you learn more about visual design

Chris Van Wingerden is Vice President Learning Solutions at dominKnow Learning Systems.

In our previous post we looked at some critical issues to keep in mind when thinking about image and animation use in an online learning project.

The old saying might be that a picture is worth a thousand words, but in e-learning you really can't get away from words completely.

But text in an online learning experience is more than just words on the screen. It is also a key element of visual design. It's especially important to especially ensure that the visual design of the text presentation best supports the learning that needs to take place.

Here are some key concepts to keep in mind when you think about using text in your online learning course.

Typography
Typography is the art and technique of setting written subject matter in type using a combination of fonts, font sizes, line lengths, leading (line spacing), and letter spacing. When dealing with typefaces, always limit yourself to full families of fonts, and only mix serif and sans serif fonts based on the structure of the project.

As a general rule:

Note: Typographic controls such as kerning and leading are often not available in applications meant for online display. They may be still used to good effect when preparing text as an image for online display, as in this example:

Here's a link to a good general overview of the subject of typography.

Fonts are the visual families that you choose to use to display your text. Microsoft has a great site to spend time at if you are new to typography and fonts. For example, it explains what TrueType fonts and ClearType fonts are. It also gives a great overview of typography in general.

General Font Information for Web-based Training
Since text will carry the bulk of your learning content, it will be very important that it display clearly. Here are some guidelines for text use:

When you transition from being a traditional trainer for instructor-led sessions to working on e-learning projects you find out quickly there are whole new worlds of knowledge you suddenly need to acquire.

A critical example is the realm of visual design, which can have a huge impact on the learning experience you are creating.

Our clients often need to become instant experts in visual design as they move into using the dominKnow LCMS, especially if they are transitioning from a more traditional training approach. Our creative services team has created a short overview document that highlights some key issues and concepts to help give clients a head start on this transition.

In this post, we'll highlight some important things to consider when using images and animations. Over the next few posts we'll look at typography and font use as well as color theory. We'll also post up a collection of web resources on these topics, to help anyone interested in learning more.

A thought to keep in mind: Rules are meant to be broken and there's an exception to every rule. Okay, that's two thoughts, but they point to the same thing. These are good guidelines to follow, but at some point you may need to ignore or break them. Just make sure whatever you do is in the best interest of your learmers!

Images and Animation Use

General Image Considerations
Ensure that images complement and support the content.

Images should be consistent in style, and should complement each other as well. The mood of the images should be appropriate to the subject and your audience. The image above shows three different visual styles - you'll quickly recognize that they aren't equally appropriate for every learning experience, that they each have their place.

Always create images at their final size. In other words, do not use your course authoring tool settings to resize an image's pixel height or width. Scaling an image to make it appear larger on screen (scaling up) will cause it to look pixilated. The image above shows an example of this effect. Scaling to make an image appear smaller (scaling down) will mean you are using a larger-than-necessary file size, adding unnecessary bulk to your course. You should always try to minimize file size to prevent bandwidth or loading issues for your learners.

You may also reduce the number of colors or quality in your image in order to reduce the file size, thereby decreasing the time the image takes to display in your course. For example, if you save the image as a JPG, you can usually reduce the image quality and still retain an image almost identical to the quality of the original.

Stock Images
If you do not produce your own photographs or images for a course and need to obtain some from an online (or other) source, make sure that you have proper authorization to use them. This may mean purchasing the rights to the image or getting permission from its creator for its use.

You can visit stock image websites to see thousands of images that are usually available for purchase (vector images, photographs, illustrations etc.). Well-known vendors include Jupiter Images, iStockPhoto and Getty Images.

Animations
Animations often play a critical part in illustrating a concept. When adding animations make sure you pay attention to how large the file is, as this can reduce a course's playability.

Any animations used in courseware should require a cue from the learner for startup; be aware that looping animations or videos that play automatically can be distracting to the learner.

Keep all animations and videos in the control of the user, so they can start and stop them as they wish.

Next post: Typography and font use

Chris Van Wingerden is Vice President Learning Solutions at dominknow Learning Systems.

Microsoft PowerPoint is far and away the most popular presentation software tool. In fact, it's really hit that level of status where the product name is synonymous with the generic product category, like Kleenex for facial tissues and Ski-Doo for snow machines.

PowerPoint really is the default, the standard, the go-to tool for almost everyone in the training and education space, and most trainers and training departments have invested a great deal of time and effort in creating PowerPoint slide decks to support instructor-led and face-to-face training.

This week dominKnow is releasing a set of feature enhancements that dramatically improve the process of importing PowerPoint files into the dominKnow LCMS. These enhancements really expand the flexibility of the imported content, making it simple to move from an instructor-led course to an online course - without losing the time, effort and cost you've already invested in your original training material.

The feature enhancements import each slide into the dominKnow LCMS's integrated Authoring Tool as a new page. And once the quick import is complete, the full range of Authoring Tool features is available to help you edit, update and improve every page. Want to add or create engaging and instructionally sound e-learning interactions? No problem. The Authoring Tool's full range of interaction support tools is right there for you.

Need to record narration? No problem. The narration wizard can walk you through that process.

Need to change text? No problem - the text editor is instantly available. Need to add an assessment? No problem. The dominKnow LCMS's test-question wizards let you add test questions in a matter of minutes.

Need your new e-learning course to run in a third-party LMS? No problem. The course is easily exportable as SCORM 1.2 or 2004 compliant, or as AICC and PENS compliant.

What's really impressive is how robust the import process is.

All media files are automatically imported into the Authoring Tool's asset manager. This means all images, all audio files and all video files are instantly available for re-use on other pages or in entirely different courses, with full usage tracking and the ability to assign metadata to help in searching.

All master slides are automatically used to create layout templates that can be used for adding new pages to your course or any other course. And all speaker notes are imported into the Authoring Tool's new developer notes feature as well.

New Ways to Work Together

The feature enhancements also open new ways for development teams to create e-learning. A subject matter expert or instructional designer can now use PowerPoint to create a storyboard for a course, with text in place and placeholders for any images or media files required. The instructional designer can use the speaker notes in PowerPoint to describe what's required on the page, such as outlining how an interaction needs to work.

The storyboard PowerPoint can be quickly imported into the dominKnow LCMS, where other members of the development team can move it forward. One developer might move through the course standardizing the look and feel. A graphic artist can come in and add images as required. A Flash developer can come in and add any required animations or complex interactions. You get the idea - everyone works to their strengths, together in the LCMS.

With PowerPoint having such a wide user base within the world of learning, it's only common sense to be able to take advantage of it when moving to e-learning. And the feature enhancements we're releasing this week really simplify the PowerPoint import process and increase the flexibility of the imported content, creating real advantage for e-learning development teams.

Chris Van Wingerden is Vice President Learning Solutions at dominKnow Learning Systems.

The recent Canadian Society for Training and Development (CSTD) newsletter includes an interesting article on promoting e-learning in the workplace written by Saul Carliner.

Carliner points out that e-learning isn't the Field of Dreams - just because you build doesn't mean they will come.

In Ten Tips for Getting Learners to Take E-Courses, Carliner notes that "Anyone who has experience with classroom courses knows that they require extensive promotion and a bit of arm-twisting to get people to use them, so why should e-learning require any less promotion and arm twisting?"

All too true.

The client lead for one of the earliest e-learning projects I worked on understood this well. The project was a series of online courses covering the features, benefits, etc. of a suite of banking products.

We had great fun on the project, and of course it was a natural assumption that learners would have great fun too - but she recognized several aspects of her corporate culture that might work against e-learning. The client lead planned out an extensive internal marketing campaign, since e-learning was pretty new to this organization.

One of the most interesting parts of the campaign was a special laminated card that read something like, "Sh! E-Learning taking place." Most of her learning audience worked in cubicles that were less than private. Officially, the cards - hung on the outside of the cubicle - were a way for those doing their learning to alert others to be on the quiet side. The cards were also a "covert" e-learning promotional tool - the more cards that were hung up, the greater day-today exposure the e-learning courses would receive. The cards also added a bit of peer pressure, if you will, to the e-learning, sort of a way to leverage the urge to "keep up with the Joneses."

I've always kept this project in mind when we start off working with a new client, making certain I always raise the question of promoting e-learning to ensure its success. It's such a crucial aspect of e-learning, but one that often doesn't get much though put to it - until the day the new course is rolled out.

Ten Tips for Getting Learners to Take E-Courses by Saul Carliner is available here.