Thursday, December 17, 2009

The Role of Emotion in Learning

When was the last time you cried, laughed, got angry, got happy or just plain felt anything while taking training or afterwards?

Probably not too often, if ever!

And yet, what is retained by our brains more than anything else?

EMOTIONS!!!

Memories trigger emotions and vice-versa.

Emotions create a strong impact in our cortex, where our memories are stored. Things that are stored in the cortex therefore are retained. If you can create training that is memorable, you need one or more key elements in order to ensure retention afterwards:

  • IMPACT - 
  • RELEVANCE - 
  • EMPATHY

IMPACT

Impact is when you have a strong emotional response. Someone laughs out loud, cries, gets angry or any other combination of emotions. When something is strong enough to be noticed and create a reaction that is emotional, it WILL be remembered. In training, retention is the single most important thing we can strive for (of course, retention without comprehension is somewhat useless, but it is a beginning)...

Remember, the key to impact is creating any kind of emotional response, preferably the one desired.


RELEVANCE

If something affects us directly, then it is relevant to our experience and needs. If the training being given is very relevant to the employee's job, there is more of a chance the concepts taught may be retained.

Relevance, while important, usually does not have the power of retention that IMPACT has. Combine IMPACT and RELEVANCE and you have doubled the retention potential.


EMPATHY

Empathy is the ability to feel for someone else and relate to that feeling.  This is a harder property to track and judge in training. It is highly dependent on the employee's emotional maturity and ability to feel for someone else (somehting  that is definitely generational as well).

If one can feel for a character in the training, or a situation, then that feeling combines impact, possibly relevance and almost a guarantee of retention.


How to make your training more emotional

There are many ways to make training have more impact, be relevant and even spark some empathy. Unfortunately, much of the training being created is usually nothing more than a regurgitation of some process manual, compliance rule, HR directive, etc. In other words, most eLearning is this side of mind-numbing, completely non-memorable and of no personal relevance to the employee.

How do we change this pattern of boring, meaningless, training? Here are some ideas:

Humor

Write content that includes some kind of emotional response. Humor is a great way to retain training. People remember funny scenarios, funny characters or funny sayings. The humor has to have some "relevance" to the training and should be something the employee can "relate" to in order to guarantee a higher level of retention.

Drama

We recently created a Safety video for Southern CA Edison's OSHA training in which we were teaching the importance of time management and safety on the job. The employee, a meter repair person, was rushing through her day. She was preoccupied and not paying attention to the safety rules. After several botched installs she makes the ultimate mistake and died.

We created a scene where all we used were some sound effects and a shot of her lying dead on the floor. The video slowly rotated around her dead body and the next scene we see her work mates at the office emptying out her desk and crying.

To people like these, where one mistake could mean the loss of a life, the emotional impact of the training really hit home. When it was shown, managers and workers were literally crying at the end. Not only did it have the emotional impact, it also was very relevant to their jobs and it tugged at the empathy they all felt. 

If you can find something that sparks emotion of some kind, you will create a memorable experience that the learner will not easily forget. If the impact is also relevant then chances are the behavioral outcomes of the training will have been achieved as well. All of that means greater productivity.

Summary and suggestions

As instructional designers, or trainers, it is very critical to employ the power of emotions in our training in order to achieve optimal learning results. All too often there is no impact, relevance or empathy with the training and, as a result, little or no improvement in retention or productivity. In other words, the training is this side of useless.

Keep these three simple words in mind when writing:

IMPACT, RELEVANCE & EMPATHY

I would highly recommend that instructional designers and trainers take some lessons or read some books on screenwriting. Learn how to set scenes up, scenarios that evoke something out of the learner. The more vivid and life-like our writing, the more results we will see from the learners.

Also, do some research on NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) techniques as well as read up on how cognitive functions in the brain work. 

All of this will help make your training much more viable, useful and productive.

Monday, December 7, 2009

Virtual Presenting Techniques - VOICE

Hello Everyone!

With our economy tight and travel costs severely restricted in many cases, holding training and meetings virtually is becoming a very accepted standard.But presenting virtually has some challenges:

  • How do you present to an audience you can't see? 
  • How do you keep the attention of your audience?
Simple questions which require some thought and effort to achieve successfully. I'll cover some of the most important points to keep in mind, which will help your presentations be interesting, lively, compelling and interactive. My focus today is on the importance of your voice.

Your Voice

How often have you been in a meeting where the speaker:

  • Had no oomph
  • Mumbled
  • Seemed off point
  • Went on incessantly
Now imagine that same presenter in a virtual environment. Not a good image is it?

Good presentation skills in the classroom or conference room, will transfer well to the virtual arena. And there is one tool, above all others, that will make all the difference in the world:




Your VOICE!

Yes, your voice. In a virtual environment, where the audience can't really see you unless your webcam is on, the only thing you have to distinguish yourself is the quailty of your voice. 


One of the first things people will notice in a virtual classroom is the sound of your voice.  It needs to have some of the following characteristics in order to make a positive impression and serve your purpose as a trainer, Sales representative or meeting host, Your voice should:


  • Be clear
  • Sound energetic
  • Not be monotone, have some inflection
  • Never mumble
  • Sound like its in command or focused
Following are some examples of the same introduction to a course spoken in different ways. Can you tell the difference? Which do you like most? Click on each one below:

Voice Introduction 1

Voice introduction 2

Voice introduction 3

The first voice was monotone. Listening to this for several minutes will most likely put you into a coma or chatting with your friends while suffering through the meeting.

The second voice was unfocused. After a while you get the feeling that the speaker doesn't know where he's goinga nd that you don't want to follow him to whatever undefined place he's heading.

The third voice has energy, speaks clearly and seems to have a purpose. It grabs your attention and, if combined with other good presentation skills, will keep it.

First Impression

Each of the voices you heard above left an immediate first impression. It may even have been the prompt to keep you in the meeting or to leave.

In person, we make impressions almost instantly. We have gut level reactions to how a person looks, sounds, smells (yes, too much perfume or not enough bathing will definitely make an impression) and dresses. Everything counts and it's all taken in consciously and sub-consciously within seconds.

In most virtual sessions you probably won't have a webcam on to conserve bandwidth. That leaves one main thing to keep your audience's atention: your voice! Sure it helps to have compelling content, but a boring speaker with great content will still be, well, boring!

How to Improve your Voice

If you don't feel you have a great voice, don't worry, you can do some simple things to trainit to sound better. All it takes is a little effort and the desire to sound better and improve. Here are some suggestions:


Practice your presentation - nothing makes perfect like practice. The more familiar you are with your presentation's content, the better you will sound. If you don't know your content, it will definitely show in your voice. Practice builds confidence!


Record yourself - what your ears hear is not what others hear. Most of us don't like how we sound until we get used to hearing ourselves. Record your presentations before giving them and be your own worst critic. But be fair with yourself too. Listen for the good and bad. The more you do this the better you will get.


Get Feedback from others - this is a tricky one. If people like you they may not be brutally honest. If they don't like you they may only focus on the negative. Ask people for their honest feedback and poll them on what they liked and what they didn't care for.  Leave your ego at the door and let your mind be receptive and open. Feedback can be very important and will help you become a stellar presenter!


Listen to others - we are creatures of emulation. We copy mannerisms, fashions, language, etc. Watch and listen to others presenting. Take what you like and try to copy it. No, I don't want you to become that person, just feel like that person for a bit. Try to feel what a successful presenter sounds like and copy that style if it suits you. Refine it and make it your own.  This is actually a pretty important step and will fast-track you to better presentations.

Get training - if after doing the above steps you still feel that your presentations are lacking, get training! There are many speech and voice-over coaches that can help you find that inner actor. They'll teach you how to breathe and project. They'll help you enunciate and feel confident with yourself and your voice. This can be priceless but, keep your hand on your wallet. Some of the trainers are looking to buy that new luxury car on your tuition...

Happy and successful presenting!

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Virtual Classroom with Adobe Captivate and Adobe Connect Pro webinar

Hi Everyone!


I will be presenting the next two webinars for Adobe on Virtual Classroom with Adobe Captivate 4 and Adobe Connect Pro on Oct 21st and November 18th.  Registration link is below:

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/event/index.cfm?event=detail&id=82518&loc=en_us

I'll be covering how to create an interactive virtual classroom with these tools, showing examples and, hopefully, having some fun too!

I believe the presentation will be recorded for that that could not make it.

See you there!

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

My Favorite e-Learning Development tools

I get asked this question all the time, "What e-Learning tools do you use to develop your pieces?" So it's time to countdown my top 10 favorite tools!


1. Adobe Captivate 4

I've been working with Captivate since it was originally FlashCam (that's a long time ago). As it's grown and evolved from a simple tool to a full-fledged e-Learning authoring tool, it's hard not to love its Flash output, ease of use and growing power and capability. In the old days it was buggy and not good for large projects. Today? It's my tool of choice. Captivate is also the most used tool in the industry with over 250,000 licenses in the corporate and government use.  It is also heavily used in colleges around the world.

2. Adobe Photoshop CS4

I can't think of any tool I spend more time in to create, edit and publish content.  Aside from being near magical in nature, Photoshop provides an incredibly productive work environment and tool set.  While we use Adobe Fireworks occasionally, Photoshop is my number one choice for image processing. And with Adobe's new eLearning Suite, the integration between Photoshop and Captivate really speeds up development time. Two thumbs up and then some!


3. Adobe Flash CS4

Flash is another extremely useful tool. Easy to learn? No, it has a steep learning curve to get good with it. But, it is extremely powerful and when you start adding ActionScript to your pieces, the power is literally unlimitted. While I'm not a Flash expert, I know it well enough to be dangerous and yet do some pretty cool things with it. To learn Flash, I would recommend you take the Lynda.comhttp://www.lynda.com courses. They have the best training in the industry for Flash.


4. SwishMax 3

And you thought there would only be Adobe products here... Nope, the right tool for the right job. SwishMax 3 is a Flash development tool that combines ease of use with power. Our good friends from Australia at Swishzone.com have done an extraordinary job of creating a great tool that outputs Flash SWF and AVI files. I use SwishMax for many of the animations I use in Adobe Captivate and other tools.  In fact, take a look at our website and all the banner pages and animations were done using SwishMax 3: RELATE,com, Swish Max 3 has a full ActionScript-like programming language that is easier than Flash for the non-technical types.


5. SnagIt 9


This almost made the number one position! SnagIt is simply the best screen capture and documentation tool available on the market. It's fast, works well, not buggy and outperforms whatever is asked of it. Not only do we use it for many of our Captivate projects to capture screens remotely from while in collaboration sessions with clients, it also has great features for documentation, graphics, call-outs, etc. We use this heavily with our Microsoft Word instructional design templates.  A great tool from TechSmith.com.



6. Sony Vegas Pro 9


I have been a Vegas user since Sound Forge released the first version. It is the most object-oriented, fastest, most stable and most powerful video editing tool on the market. Sure, the Final Cut Pro and Avid guys will argue that, but they'd be wrong. :)   We can edit video with Vegas faster than just about anything out there and with no compromise on power. Things that took us three weeks in FCP took us 3-4 days in Vegas. That's a huge time-saver. We use Vegas to render out our AVI, MPG-2 or QuickTime files and then off to Sorenson Squeeze for final processing into FLV and h264...



7. Sorenson Squeeze Pro 5


Sorenson makes the best video compression software in the industry. It literally has no equals! The air is nice and fresh in Utah and these engineers have put together a great package with just about every kind of video conversion format you could want. We use Squeeze for our Captivating! podcast to convert our AVIs into FLVs for YouTube and h264 for iTunes. The files are small, pristine and very sharp.  An invaluable tool well worth the hefty price.




8. Adobe Audition 3


There is no excuse for having bad sound in your pieces nowadays. Technology and costs have gone down and the days of highly compressed and distorted audio are over. Adobe Audition 3 is a great sound recording, editing and multi-track digital audio workstation software. I use Audition 3 and it's great set of audio effects to record, either single or multi-track, and process our audio for e-Learning, videos, podcasts and Marketing. There are many good digital audio tools, but this is one of the best!




9. Sony Sound Forge 10


"Wait a minute!" you say. "Didn't you just say Adobe Audition 3 was the best?" That I did. And Audition 3 is what we use to record and process. But editing voice-overs is unparalled with Sony Sound Forge 10! Sound Forge has the leanest, easiest and most powerful system of markers, regions and editing out there. Editing narration is a snap and the batch converter that's included is divine. We record with Audition 3 and we edit with Sound Forge 10. It's a great workflow and it works for us. Now you can record quite well in Sound Forge 10 as well, but I like the ability to the see wave form as I'm recording and that makes Audition 3 better... If you do a lot of audio like us, both are needed!





10. Adobe eLearning Suite


This could have been number one because many of the products we use are in this suite. And what a suite it is!!!!!


The eLearningSuite pretty much has everything you need to create high impact, compelling, professional and powerful e-Learning. The integration between the tools is superb and the time savings... well, ENORMOUS!!!


With Captivate as it's hub, integration with Photoshop, Bridge, Dreamweaver, Flash, SoundBooth, Device Central, etc. just makes life a lot better. I have it installed on my machine and use it daily. At first I thought this was a bad idea of a product. But now? I LOVE IT!!!


Honorable Mentions


Following is a list of other tools we use that didn't make the top 10:


  1. Trivantis Lectora Professional 2009. Powerful development environment that is easy to use. If only it output to Flash...
  2. TechSmith Camtasia Studio 6. A major part of our podcasting and a great screen recorder and editing software.
  3. Bluff Titler from OuterSpaceSoftware.com. This $50 program is magic!!! It is a simple version of AfterEffects with an amazing amount of power. We use this often to create great effects and sequences for our videos and eLearning. And $50!!!!!
  4. Microsoft Office PowerPoint and Word. We use these all the time. They work well and are great for writing and animations.
  5. Adobe Presenter 7. Part of the eLearning Suite or standalone, a great tool for creating compelling training in Flash from your PowerPoint content.
  6. Adobe Connect Pro. The best collaboration tool in the industry. Maybe it doesn't have the best screen sharing on earch (we'll see if it's better in the new version out in a couple of weeks), but it has more features and functionality than the competition without sacrificing ease of use.
Summary


There you have them, my top 10 choices for software development tools used in eLearning.  We use other tools as well but these are the main ones. In future blogs I'll discuss some of our workflows and provide examples to you.

Thanks for reading and, please, don't forget to Follow us!

Welcome to my learning blog!

Hello Everyone!!!

Welcome to my new blog on topics covering e-Learning, Adobe Captivate, digital audio and video, as well as aspects of learning and business.

For the past year my wife Leslie and I have been helping Adobe's e-Learning and collaboration Marketing tea, by working the Adobe learning trade shows. For us this is a great opportunity to meet users of many Adobe products but specifically, Adobe Captivate and the Adobe eLearning Suite. The feedback we receive at the shows makes it to the Engineering and Marketing staff and we hope that will help future versions of these products become even better!

My career started with International Credit at Citibank and rapidly switched to Information Systems, or Management Information Systems as it was called back when (I admit, I've been around a long time). I worked in IT management at Marsh & McLennan and Day Runner and then started RELATE Corporation,  initially a provider of iT and ERP implementation services. In 1995, I wanted to do something different and RELATE became a Training company that specialized in web-based training.

In a short time we became a top reseller for Macromedia (now Adobe), Allen Communications, Aimtech, ClickToLearn and others. Today we focus on developing custom e-Learning content for customers like General Eletric, the County of Los Angeles, Cisco and many others.

Aside from my duties at RELATE, I am active in the Learning community, a teacher of the martial arts (which I've done for over 45 years), avid reader, videographer, digital audio fanatic and voice-over talent. OK, I don't sleep much... :)

Future blogs will have much more substance now that the intro is over. Thanks for visiting the blog and please, subscribe. Also, on the right you'll see that we have podcasts for Adobe Captivate, which can also be found HERE.

See you next time!