ID and eLearning Links 10/29/19

Links on converting Flash to HTML5, Bloom’s Taxonomy, ID careers, change management, and multiple choice questions.

In this post, I share links related to several topics:

  • Converting Flash content to HTML5
  • Options for instructional design careers
  • An interview on the purpose of Bloom’s taxonomy
  • Why you only need 3 choices in multiple choice questions
  • Change management for software training
  • How being generous builds your credibility as a consultant

Converting Flash to HTML5

How to Update an Old Course Without the Source Files
With the impending demise of Flash, organizations will need to upgrade their libraries of old Flash elearning to HTML5. If you can’t recreate them from scratch, Tom Kuhlmann shares this method using screen captures to quickly convert old courses. You still have to manually add interactions, but you can bring in a lot of content as screen capture images.
tags:e-learning flash html5

How to Copy Text from Flash Courses When You Don’t have the Original File | The Rapid E-Learning Blog
Images and audio files are relatively easy to recover from a published SCORM package, but text is hard to get from courses if they were published in Flash only. This shows two methods for using OCR to get text from Flash images.
tags:e-learning flash html5 scorm

Extract content from SCORM package – Building Better Courses Discussions – E-Learning Heroes
I’m bookmarking this for Matthew Bibby’s reply. If you have only the published SCORM files for a course published in Storyline 3 or 360, you can use this Javascript code snippet to select the onscreen text. That at least lets you copy and paste rather than retyping everything.
tags:e-learning flash html5 scorm

If the course was published with SL3 or SL360 then dropping this code in the JS console will allow you to select the text onscreen (so it can be copied):  

document.querySelectorAll('text').forEach(node => {
node.style.pointerEvents = 'all';
node.style.userSelect = 'all'
});

Instructional Design Careers

Finding Your Place In an Instructional Design Career
“Instructional design” is a big umbrella that can mean different things in different organizations. This post describes a number of options for the focus of instructional design and related roles.
tags:newid instructionaldesign career e-learning

Bloom’s Taxonomy

Part 1 Bloom’s Taxonomy Lorin Anderson Part 1 Off-the-Cuff Episode #022 – YouTube
Alexander Salas interviewed Dr. Lorin Anderson, author of the 2001 revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy. They discussed how the taxonomy was intended for writing test items in higher education, not helping performance in workplace learning. It wasn’t designed for writing learning objectives.
tags:bloom education instructionaldesign

Multiple Choice Questions

Three Answer Options Are All You Need on Multiple-Choice Tests!
While we are used to providing 4 options in multiple choice questions, using 3 is just effective. Writing good distractors is the hardest part of writing multiple choice questions. If you only have to write 2 distractors instead of 3, you can create questions faster. While it’s not mentioned in this post, reducing the number of options also immensely reduces the complexity of branching scenarios.
tags:instructionaldesign assessment research

So here’s the main finding: no significant differences were found in terms of item difficulty. There were also no differences found in terms of test reliability. Thus, Baghaei and Amrahi (2011) concluded that three answer options are all you need. If the test characteristics are essentially the same, there doesn’t seem to be any reason to spend our time developing additional answer options…

Rodriguez (2005) argues that shifting to three answer options also increases the amount of content that can be tested. Because students don’t have to spend as much time reading four or five answer options, there will be more time during the test for students to read additional questions on different course content. Instead of spending your time on identifying more answer options, spend your time developing additional test questions.

Change Management

Change Management for Maximum Software Adoption
Software training can fail without change management support. Learning new software means you’ll be less efficient for a while, so you have to get enough motivation to push through the learning process. In fact, this applies to many areas of training.
tags:softwaretraining training changemanagement

Benefits of Being Generous

Sharing the Wealth – Mindful Mornings
Patti Bryant mentions me in a blog post about how helping others and being generous with your resources helps consultants gain credibility and find new clients. A scarcity mindset says there aren’t enough clients to go around and you should hoard your resources and knowledge. An abundance mindset says there’s enough, so go ahead and share generously. (She doesn’t use the phrase “abundance mindset,” but that’s what she is describing.)
tags:consulting

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Instructional Design and E-Learning Links

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