I spent a few enlightening hours recently at the, Omniplex organized, eLearning Community event.
The event was arranged with various demonstrations in the room, with attendees given fifteen minute at each, rotating around the demos that interested them. Most of the stalls looked at Articulate solutions, including a couple directly from Omniplex staff on their work. Highlights included:
- Pizza Hut’s Batman themed course. The course showed how high quality visuals can really make a difference to the learning storytelling. The comic style similar to some of the training I have seen delivered by other organizations, including the US Army. Each Pizza Hut store had an internal competition for high scores on the learning – reminding me of McDonald’s gamified till training.
- Changing templates to break the back/next monotony. This was a relatively simple hack but it was a nice idea by Omniplex – have the navigation buttons at the top and bottom of the screen to create the artificial feel of a modern style scrolling webpage. Elsewhere, there was a database training module that avoided the navigation buttons by chunking content to avoid the need for them, with much material delivered via embedded Captivate videos.
- Course completion for visiting a specific slide. I’m pretty sure I’ve done some tinkering with this in the past but it was a useful example of using Articulate for something other than “you should read all the slides” or a “complete the quiz” format. The basic gist being that you can do a lot by changing the labels on buttons and hiding Articulate functionality off-slide, away from what the user sees.
- Another example of using Articulate for a different use case, away from the usual course, was where it had been used to setup a competency self assessment framework. I liked this as I’ve often reverted to Articulate as an authoring tool for non-SCORM items, it is a shame that people tend to always think about it just for back/next eLearning.
Perhaps the most interesting stall, however, was a non-Articulate orientated one. The CoachMaster Academy showed their software which can be used to support the coaching process. I really liked this idea – giving prompts and structure to a conversation, rather than relying on memory of best practice coaching approaches. I tend to agree with the sentiment from a previous CIPD Show that coaching can be made too unwieldy, the software shown here could really help at the point of need for coaching conversations to make an impact.
Whose Education Is It Anyway? 