Free e-book: E-Learning Survival Guide

Whether you’re currently enrolled in an online course, or have employees signed up for e-learning opportunities, there’s a new free guide available online to check out.

Susan Smith Nash (aka. the E-Learning Queen) is offering a free pdf download of her E-Learner Survival Guide, “everything you need to know to succeed in the wild and wooly world of mobile learning, elearning, and hybrid college, K-12, and career courses.” (Thanks to those at Workplace Learning Today for sharing the good news.)

The book contains hundreds of essays on a broad list of topics from student engagement and institutional leadership, to mobile learning and corporate training.

Nash writes that the book is especially focused on creating successful outcomes for students and educational programs. Her essays also explain how to handle “often-overlooked” niches of learners, including generational differences and training.

Take a quick trip over to the E-Learning Queen to download your free copy of the E-Learner Survival Guide.

Using PowerPoint for training: Top 5 tips

In most offices it’s rare to get through the day without attending at least one meeting where you were the lucky viewer of a not-so-interesting or helpful PowerPoint presentation.

Since Microsoft released the tool in more than 20 years ago, we’ve been using it as a crutch for any and every presentation we’ve ever delivered.

Unfortunately, we’ve been using it the same way for so long that everyone is tired of seeing the same old presentation and over and over again. We’ve been dying a slow death by PowerPoint and are ready for a change.

When you’re using PowerPoint for training or any other kind of workplace presentation, keep your audience alive with an interesting slideshow and review these top five PowerPoint tips:

1. Prepare. Develop your presentation with a clear goal in mind. What is it that you want your audience to understand? Mapping out the presentation by hand before getting on the computer will help you create a more focused and concise presentation.


2. Make note cards. Write down all of your main talking points on notecards, don’t depend on the screen. People like it when you talk to them, not to the screen.


3. Reinforce, don’t repeat. Use your slides to reinforce the points you’re delivering in your presentation or training seminar, not repeat what you’re saying. Instead of repeating your words, use the slides to add detail and paint a clear picture of each topic.


4. Send a copy. At the beginning of your presentation, let your audience know that you will be sending them copies of your slides along with supplemental information. This way, they’ll be paying attention to what you’re saying rather than reading a handout or copying every slide you put up.


5. Keep it short. Keep the amount of words on each slide to a minimum. Every presentation will have a different number, but concise writing will keep your audience’s attention and keep them interested in what you’re saying.

Oh, and watch this slideshow from Lifehacker for even more great PowerPoint ideas:

Death by PowerPoint

View more presentations from Alexei Kapterev.

On hugs, stimulus packages and shoes: This week’s must-reads

There’s a ton of great information out there this week, so much that breaking it up and discussing it all separately would take months. Instead, we’ll just direct you strait to the sources of all it. Here’s some of the best HR and training related information posted on the Web this week:


Try to give hugs to more people at work. After just four sips of wine, read how Brazen Careerist Penelope Trunk made an amazing discovery - hugging in the workplace can make you happier. If President Barack Obama can bring hugging into the White House, you can find a way to bring it into your workplace.


While we’re talking about Obama, he just signed the $787 billion stimulus package that included some important HR action items. The team at G.Neil’s HR Forum put together a quick overview of how the stimulus plan will impact HR and U.S. businesses.


Obama signed the billion dollar stimulus package yesterday and now is the time for the Leadership Development Economic Stimulus Package, according to Dan McCarthy at Great Leadership. The total cost of Dan’s plan is only a fraction of that Obama signed, but the impact on business leadership would be huge.


Put yourself in their shoes. Knowing your audience will put you on the road to success when designing your next training program. Take some advice from Chris Morgan at Learn2Develop, put yourself in the shoes of your trainees and look at your training from a new perspective.


Is the traditional training course dead? If so, technology is the killer. Technology gives us the power to learn what we need to know, when we need to know it and most of what we learn is through informal methods. Learn more about the potential death of the instructor-led training course by reading this Training Zone article by Vaughan Waller.

Improve elearning retention, keep it short

The next time you're thinking about adding more text to your learning materials, you may want to stop and think again.

While you think you may be adding pages and pages full of valuable learning materials, adding more information can actually hurt learning retention, according to a study on Efficiency in Learning in the Journal of Educational Psychology.

The study compared three lessons on the same weather process. Each lesson used the same illustrations, but varied in the number of words - 50, 100 and 600.

Students scored higher on the lesson with the fewest words.

Though the study may have not been conducted last week (it's actually more than a decade old), its findings are still relevant today, especially when it comes to elearning.

When you're writing for the web or creating new elearning materials, remember that people want clear, concise, simple instruction.

Web readers have a short attention span who like text to be short, scannable and broken up into small bites they can digest quickly. Eye-tracking studies show that online readers skip over large blocks of text and shorter paragraphs perform better.

On the Internet, readers hunt for facts, asses online material quickly and move on if there is nothing worth sticking around for.

Keep your online training programs short and to the point. This may mean having to break a long lesson into a few shorter sessions, but you’ll keep your trainees’ attention and they’ll retain more information.

Take the advice from a recent Copyblogger post: "Nobody wants to speculate how to start a lawnmower. All they want to do is cut the grass."