“If we can get people to see themselves as connected to all of humanity, we might be able to change the way they think about themselves. It might be the trigger we need to motivate people to work towards a common purpose.”
Jay Van Bavel
Happy Friday! I’m starting to get excited for DevLearn which is coming up in a couple of weeks. I’ll be busy with four sessions including one on workflow learning, one on #NoCode, a panel discussion and a breakfast bytes morning session. Let me know if you’ll be there, I’d love to connect and say hi!
Thanks for reading!
What I’m Listening to: I stumbled across this Lane 8 Fall 2021 Mixtape recently and I’m enjoying it as my background sound for working today.
Last week’s most clicked item:
Most Online Courses Are a Waste of Your Time — Here’s How You Know
The Better Deck Deck
You know bullet points are bad, but what are your options? Where do you go for design inspiration to break out of your PowerPoint rut? I’ve dipped my pinkie toe into this arena and now Nolan Haim’s has gone all in with this absolutely fabulous product that I think EVERYONE should have ↦ The Better Deck Deck.
This deck of cards gives you 52 proven design alternatives to the dreaded bullet point layout and over 150 professionally designed examples of slides using these techniques to spark your creativity and improve your next presentation. If you ever build slides, you’ll love these. My deck has now taken it’s rightful place on my desk where I can access it anytime. It is awesome!
https://www.nolanhaimscreative.com/shop/betterdeck
How to Use Feedly: The Ultimate Guide
Anyone who’s been around me for more than 5 minutes has probably heard me sing the praises of Feedly for keeping up with all the things I want to know about. This guide walks you through the benefits, features and plans, as well as showing you step-by-step how to set up your account to get the info you want – and ignore the rest.
https://www.elegantthemes.com/blog/marketing/how-to-use-feedly-the-ultimate-guide
An explanation of cmi5 in (mostly) plain English
Are you hip to cmi5? If not, don’t worry. The folks at Rustici have you covered with this plain English explanation. In short, ““cmi5 is the bridge between SCORM and xAPI” Click through to learn more about what that actually means in non-technical terms.
https://rusticisoftware.com/blog/an-explanation-of-cmi5-in-mostly-plain-english/
Automation for education: Less time record-keeping, more time with your students
All of us have a number of not so fun jobs like record-keeping, compliance, and reporting. If you’re like me and would rather be doing other things you should check out workflow automation options like Zapier that can help you avoid the tedium of data entry, tab-switching, and copy-pasting type work. .
https://zapier.com/blog/automation-for-education/
Does an interactive table of contents promote learning from videos?
Learn more about some recent research that indicates the presence of a table of contents enhances organizational recall, and when that table of contents was interactive, it also facilitated relevant reviewing behaviors.
https://bera-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bjet.13164
Podcasts
- Starting an Online Learning Community with Karl Kapp on the Talented Learning podcast.
- Messing around is the best use of your time with Sendhil Mullainathan on the People I Mostly Admire podcast.
- Amy Edmondson on How to Build Thriving Teams with Psychological Safety on the How to Be Awesome at Your Job podcast.
Tools & Tips
- WellSaid Labs is a great option for text to voice narration.
- The Disabled and Here Collection is a stock library with photos and illustrations celebrating disabled Black, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC)
- Forms.app is a nice free online forms builder
- Guardo is another option for saving and organizing your links & resources online.
- Slab is a knowledge base with lots of valuable integrations including spreadsheets, slide decks, flowcharts, task managers, and much more.
Where You Can Find Me
- I had a great conversation with Tim Slade about free elearning and instructional design tools this week.
- DevLearn October 20-22
- New Jersey ATD – Future of Work – November 10
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Mike Taylor 