As I read online, I bookmark resources I find interesting and useful. I share these links about once a month here on my blog. This post includes links related to accessibility, AI tools and tips, animation pricing, scenario-based learning, and course hosting platforms.
Accessibility, inclusion, and usability
This site from the UK government includes a series of personas of people with different access needs and required supports. In addition to the personas are simulations where you try to complete tasks on websites as these people with disabilities experience them. You can see how poor design affects their ability to complete tasks, as well as see an improved design that makes it easier for users with disabilities to use websites. Even though this is more about general web content, a lot of this applies to elearning as well.
A detailed decision tree for determining whether an image needs alt text and what that alt text should contain.
Will Thalheimer and Ingeborg Kroese have developed survey questions to help measure how inclusive learning experiences are. You can read about the research, development, and pilot process on the website. The survey questions are available for free with a CC license.
ARC Toolkit – Page-Level Testing – TPGi
Free accessibility testing tool for websites. It would be interesting to test this with published elearning as well.
How People Read Online: New and Old Findings
Research from the NN Group on how people read online. Eye tracking patterns, how people scan content, recommendations. Overall, their findings haven’t changed in 20+ years: it’s critical to make online text easy to scan and divided into chunks with clear headings and hierarchy. Although it’s not mentioned in the article, making content easier to read also improves accessibility.
AI tools and tips
15 Times to use AI, and 5 Not to
Ethan Mollick is one of the prominent voices on AI who I follow closely. He spends a significant amount of time experimenting with AI and reporting the results, as well as researching what is and isn’t working with AI. I would not have thought of all of these suggestions for when to use AI. Note the list of 5 times to avoid using AI at the end of the article as well.
Work where you are an expert and can assess quickly whether AI is good or bad.
Work that is mere translation between frames or perspectives. For example, you have developed a policy but now have to turn it into a dozen different training documents for different audiences in your organization. AI is very good at this sort of translation, increasing and decreasing complexity of documents so that people can understand them.
Work where you know that AI is better than the Best Available Human that you can access, and where the failure modes of AI will not result in worse outcomes if it gets something wrong.
Work where you need variance, and where you will select the best answer as an editor or curator. Asking for a variety of solutions – give me 15 ways to rewrite this bullet in radically different styles, be creative – allows you to find ideas that might be interesting.
Beyond these clear-cut cases, here are five subtle but important areas where AI use can be counterproductive:
– Ethan Mollick (selected highlights from 15 Times to use AI, and 5 not to)
When you need to learn and synthesize new ideas or information. Asking for a summary is not the same as reading for yourself. Asking AI to solve a problem for you is not an effective way to learn, even if it feels like it should be.
Create animated videos with AI. Start by generating characters, which the site says will be consistent throughout your story. You can turn scripts into storyboards and customize them. Then, create videos in 30-second clips. The voice syncing doesn’t look great in their demo videos, but this still might be worth experimenting with. The free plan should be enough to test it out.
Napkin AI – The visual AI for business storytelling
Paste your existing text and generate visuals related to it. Includes icons, diagrams, organizers. Looks like it would work well for presentations to have visuals other than a list of bullet points. Currently free during beta, but will be a paid tool later.
Animation pricing
PRICING GRID | ideaMachine Studio
Samples of custom animated videos at different price levels. Great to see how they differentiate the levels. The entry level is $3800/minute, with more options up to $15k/minute.
Breakdown of the costs and process for creating animated explainer videos. Entry level is $2k-$4k, but costs can go up to $20k or more for higher quality.
How Much Does Animation Cost Per Minute? (2024 Update)
This article breaks down different tiers of animation from amateur and free tools through high-end broadcast quality prices. This shows more of what you get at each tier of pricing. It will be interesting to see how AI tools affect these prices moving forward, although I think most of the AI video tools aren’t quite there for production yet.
Animated Video Price: How To Calculate The Price For Your Animated Video
Pricing for animated videos based on length, animation style, and other variable. It’s helpful to have some benchmarks to compare pricing to, even though this is more focused on custom animation rather than tools like Vyond.
Scenario-based learning
Miranda Verswijvelen’s doctoral thesis on narrative design in branching scenarios (which she calls “interactive stories for learning” for clarity). Using techniques from game design, she created a framework for writing better scenarios.
The expert advice emphasised the pivotal role of emotions and player self-expression in crafting interactive narrative, along with the importance of designing believable characters and meaningful choices. A comprehensive heuristics framework to craft ISL was developed based on the insights from this phase. Through iterative prototyping and reflection, the heuristics framework was evaluated and refined, and subsequently applied to the recrafting of a virtual patient for compassion training
While no statistically significant differences for narrative transportation were found, the results from the playthrough data and open-ended questions demonstrated that incorporating emotional depth into virtual patient design significantly impacted learner engagement and empathy. Participants exhibited more compassionate care when interacting with the recrafted virtual patient, showing highly improved decision-making to promote patient outcomes.
– Miranda Verswijvelen
Howard Lewis, Ph.D., CPT on LinkedIn: Learning Experience Design – 1st Vs 3rd Stories-Scenarios
Howard Lewis summarizes research on the benefits and drawbacks of 1st and 3rd person perspectives in scenarios for learning
The choice between first-person and third-person stories or scenarios in learning experiences affects learners’ engagement, empathy, memory retention, and transfer of learning in distinct ways.
– Howard Lewis
Course hosting platforms and tracking
Monetise your expertise – Graphy
Graphy is an online course builder for experts to build and sell courses. It’s one of the cheaper options available. I’ve heard from another ID that you can include SCORM content, although I don’t see that in their documentation. I also see some negative reviews related to poor customer support for problems. Still, for some clients who want something much cheaper than Thinkific or Kajabi, this might be an option.
GoHighLevel – It’s time to take your Agency to the Next Level
A marketing and CRM platform with email, membership, course hosting, online community, etc. You can sell both courses and products. Recommended by Dani Watson.
Save Data to Google Sheets from Articulate Storyline and Adobe Captivate eLearning Courses
This is a Google Sheets eLearning Widget for basic tracking outside of an LMS. If I had stronger Javascript skills, I could probably figure this out myself. However, paying for someone who has already written the code will save me time, effort, and aggravation. This works as a lightweight solution for one of my current clients who needed something easy for a pilot.
Additional curated resources
Check out my complete library of links or my previous bookmarks posts.