Two weeks ago, the entire Artisan team had the opportunity to attend the Learning Solutions conference in Orlando. As usual, we had a great time. We had the honor of hosting two concurrent sessions, two morning buzz sessions, showcasing three courses in the SolutionFest competition. Here are some resource from the event that you might find useful.

Concurrent Session: Implementing Project Management Software for eLearning Production

As Tanya mentioned a few weeks ago, Diane and I spoke about the implementation process for our new project management software solution, Celoxis. We outlined our process for searching and selecting the tool and discussed the various features you can find in these tools. You can find our slides from the presentation here, and feel free to email me if you’d like to see the file we used to whittle down the tools we rated (there were 200 of them!)

By the way, you can follow Artisan E-Learning on SlideShare by clicking here, and then clicking Follow.

Concurrent Session: Ten Lessons Learned: My First Year in eLearning

Tim hosted a fast-paced session where he shared ten things he learned in his first year in e-learning. The room was packed with people who were at Learning Solutions for the first time. His tips were designed to help you become a more confident and successful e-learning professional. He shared the importance of setting high expectations for your work, the things no one else will tell you when you start your first e-learning job, and how to continue to be successful after your first year. You can find his PPT presentation here.

Morning Buzz: Managing eLearning Translation Projects

In the last two years, we’ve translated several hours’ worth of client courses into various languages. We’ve translated into over 13 languages ranging from Spanish and French to Chinese and Korean. We work with translation vendors and voiceover talent to provide us with the text and audio for the courses and then piece everything together within the authoring tool. Check out my previous blog post on E-Learning Translation Tips if you’d like to see more.

Morning Buzz: Starting a Freelance Career in eLearning

We discussed some of the common fears, insecurities, and unknown variables that most e-learning designers face when starting a freelance career. Sharing Tim’s own personal story as an example, he explained the strategies he used to build his brand and obtain his first client. We also discussed strategies for working with clients and managing projects.

SolutionFest

SolutionFest is a showcase where your peers demo courses they’ve created.  Attendees can walk around, look at the courses, talk to the people who developed them, get lots of inspiration, and then vote for their favorites.   If you weren’t able to attend, you can catch the E-Learning Guild’s free webinar showcasing all of the winners.  It’s on Wednesday, April 2nd at 10:00 a.m. Pacific. Click here to register. This webinar promises to, as always, provide a lot of great creative inspiration for your own e-learning work!

We were both humbled and honored to win in the Best Mobile category for the second consecutive year. We’d like to thank our great team of designers and developers who made this course possible.

Understanding JLG Hydraulics

• Tracey DiPaola
• Alana Elkins
• Dan Graham
• Pete Martinez
• Sean Pinder
• Tammi Ritter
• Meri Spahic
• Del Spearman
• Jim Wells
• Desiree Pinder and Nick Elkins (project managers)

And of course, we’d like to thank our client, JLG Industries.  This course is the result of a true partnership that we hope continues well into the future.

We’ll also be at the Lectora User’s Conference in Los Angeles this week! If you’ll be there, stop by and say hello! Diane is one of this year’s keynote speakers for the Lectora Power Users Showcase.

We hope to see you in Orlando next year for Learning Solutions or in Vegas in the fall for DevLearn!