Learning Ninjas

Everyone deserves a chance to learn.

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A New Era and New Leadership

I founded Learning Ninjas in 2010 to collaborate with the brightest minds in learning and development to create innovative, impactful solutions and give back to the community. Over the years, our collective found joy in working together, teaching others, and doing meaningful work for social causes. We are proud to create good in the world through our work and commitment to donate at least 10% of our time and revenue to charities and social causes. But, we can do more.

We believe learning can change the world, and every person deserves a chance to learn.


Hat tip to Shawn Rosler for his help with this video.

Announcing Learning Ninjas LLC

We’re forming Learning Ninjas LLC to grow our impact and take the organization to the next level. Through a strategic merger with Sarah Mercier and meLearning Solutions, we are expanding our leadership team and expertise to open new opportunities for growth.

In addition to experienced leadership and strong design strategy, Sarah brings excellent ideas for how to take Learning Ninjas to the next level. She founded meLearning Solutions in 2011 and later led and expanded the Academy at the Task Force for Global Health. She will continue to operate meLearning Solutions as the mobile learning design and development arm of Learning Ninjas LLC.

Sarah joins a leadership team consisting of myself and Sean Putman. Sean joined the organization as a partner in 2015. Through his experience in developing measurable, performance-based solutions, his expertise and writing about the Experience API (xAPI), and his passion for teaching others, he has helped the organization grow substantially. Sean’s vision helped bring us to where we are today.

What We Offer

Our business model isn’t changing. We continue to offer a collective of consultants, designers, and developers ready to support and teach our clients while we help them meet business goals. This merger brings additional leadership and expertise to our team, enabling us to further our mission to build effective learning solutions while teaching and mentoring others in our community. Along with some new strategic partnerships, we are excited to improve and scale our collaborative process, offer more workshops and learning events, and continue to pursue exciting products we have been developing.

I am proud to have turned a collective into an organization with drive and vision. I’m thrilled to enter this new chapter with Sarah, Sean, our partners, and our talented contractors. We look forward to providing opportunities for people to do the work they want, in the environment of their choosing, while educating and improving lives. This is our mission. We hope you’ll join us!

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Heading to DevLearn 2017

Sean and I are heading back to Vegas for another DevLearn conference. This conference is the best that the industry has to offer, and we love to participate, share, and learn.

devlearn 2017 logo

If you’re going to be there, and want to meet up, send us an email. We’d love to put some faces to names and/or meet some new people.

Sean is hosting 2 days of xAPI Camp with Aaron Silvers. In these two pre-conference sessions participants will learn about the basics of xAPI, hands-on practice setting solutions up for xAPI and a wide array of uses cases currently using xAPI. He will also present a concurrent session called Investigating Performance: Designing For and From Data. In this session he will look at using data to create better designs and how to design solutions to get the data needed.

We are also involved in HyperDrive, where Brian will be a judge, and DemoFest, as developers for the entry from Sarah Mercier and Art Werkinthin. The project uses xAPI and CMI-5 to track answers to self evaluations developed in Captivate. Sean helped generate the custom xAPI statements from the Captivate output.

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FocusOn 2017 DemoFest Winner!

Learning Ninjas was selected as the winner of DemoFest at FocusOn Learning 2017 for best vendor-provided blended learning solution.

Here is a quick breakdown of the tools used to build this solution for Leadership Formation Partners.

Free Tools

  • WordPress
  • Peepso Community Plugin
  • ThreeWP Broadcast
  • Dynamic Widgets
  • Nav Menu Roles
  • NS Cloner
  • MailChimp

Paid Tools

  • Peepso Add-On Bundle
 (Photos, Videos, Moods, and Messaging): $160
  • Gravity Forms (optional): $39
  • WP Broadcast Add-Ons (Queue, Multi-site Sync, Publish to Many): $97
  • Genesis Theme Framework: $59.95

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Update #006 – Work and Giving Back in 2016

It has been a while since we’ve written anything about the recent work we’ve performed, so we’re wrapping up 2016 with a quick update. We hope all our clients, friends, and family have a wonderful holiday season and head into the new year with hope and ambition.

We have had quite a year working on refining our business model, building partnerships, and strengthening our abilities so we can better serve our clients.

Giving Back

Part of our mission at Learning Ninjas is to give back. We donate 10% of our profits to charities. Each ninja has an option to select one or more charities for us to support. This year, we’re proud to be helping out the following organizations:

  • L3 Foundation
  • Toys for Tots
  • Rotary Foundation
  • Wounded Warrior
  • 1% for the Planet
  • Moyer Foundation
  • North Shore Animal League
  • Fender Music Charity
  • The Water Project

Another goal of ours is to give back to the community with resources like the free webinar we’re hosting next week: Getting Started with xAPI Statements.

Last, but not least, we love creating jobs and freedom for people, and this year we’ve worked with a mix of new and long-time colleagues on some interesting projects with measurable impact. Collaborative work is rewarding!

What we’re working on

We’ve continued to Co-develop on eight new courses with one of our clients, helping them learn best practices, instructional design standards, and iterative design processes as we go.

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We’ve been helping the Public Health Informatics Academy refine the user experience of their learning platform and creating a pilot plan for rolling out Immunization Information Systems (IIS) training to state health departments.

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We’ve worked with another client on a Learning Management System (LMS) selection project, and are currently supporting implementation of the RISC VTA platform.

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Brian facilitated a discovery workshop and requirements gathering project for the Children Without Worms program to determine requirements for a performance support platform to organize and deliver research and toolkits.

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We continue to support the rollout of a learning platform (OnPoint) for Integrated Disease Surveillance and Response (IDSR) through our work with TEPHINET.

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Sean has spent the last couple of years writing a book with Janet Laane Effron called “Investigating Performance”.  2016 saw the book project come to fruition and the book is in the final stages of editing with a release date early in 2017. Sign up here to be notified when it’s available.

Where we’ve been presenting

Sean presented at all of the 2016 xAPI Camps and at Torrance Learning for the xAPI Parties and Download Conference. He also presented at a corporate conference on the process of collecting and using data.

Brian delivered a keynote, “Design for All: Accessible Learning Experiences”, at the BLR Learning Conference in November.

Brian and Sean both presented at DevLearn:

Brian Dusablon presenting at DevLearn Hyperdrive event on lessons learned from a project.

Brian also won an award as a finalist in the DevLearn Hyperdrive event.

It was a great year for us presenting and talking with people at various conferences throughout the year.  We are looking forward to presenting at and participating in more events in 2017.

What we learned this week

In case you missed it, Sean is delivering a free webinar, “Getting Started with xAPI Statements”, next Wednesday. Following that will be two add-on authoring tool sessions on Thursday covering xAPI basics for Captivate and Articulate Storyline.

The Focus Summit is an excellent free series of video interviews on focus in your business and life.

Our friends Connie Malamed and Megan Torrance talked about “Applying Agile Principles To eLearning Projects.”

Mark Britz writes about the Tale of Two Socials.

Be well and be kind, everyone. See you next year!

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Prototyping in Elearning

Prototyping is a vital step in the design process in many other industries. So, why don’t we use prototypes when we develop new content? Is it a lack of time? Is it that we are just converting existing material and we think we do not need it? Maybe, in some cases, we think we already know what the learner needs. Even if all that were true, we should follow other industry best practices and create prototypes for our content.

What is a prototype?

Prototypes can be created in many different ways. Create physical prototypes (also called paper prototypes) with simple office supplies to show the end user an approximate facsimile of the interface. The user interacts with the interface and the designer/developer is able to watch the interactions. The paper prototype gives feedback about mouse movement and the general layout. Since it is early in the design process, this feedback comes when you can easily change layout and element placement.

A second type of prototype is the digital prototype. Build digital prototypes with tools like Balsamiq or Moqups, tools web designers use to create wireframes. eLearning rapid development tools such as Captivate or Storyline could also be used to setup the digital prototype, though it’s often faster to prototype in standard presentation tools like PowerPoint or Keynote. Use the digital prototype in conjunction with the physical prototype as an added layer of fidelity. The physical prototype is somewhat abstract in that you are just trying to get the placement of elements down. Start to add real content to the digital prototype to achieve a more refined edition. A benefit of the digital prototype is the ability to share it with a wider audience since it does not require users to be in the same physical location.

Why are prototypes so important?

The primary goal of prototyping is feedback. When we receive feedback early in the design process, we can change things more easily and rapidly. It takes only a few minutes to alter the entire layout of a physical prototype. Prototyping also allows you to quickly test ideas with your audience rather than spending extra hours in the development phase. Once the physical prototype is set, create a digital prototype and refine it as you go forward. Then, when development starts , you have a clear path forward with the design. Use prototypes to get sign-off from stakeholders throughout the design process to reduce conflict and surprises when development begins.

Take the time to create prototypes during your design process. It will save you valuable time during the development process. Web design and app design have showed us that these methodologies are worth the effort.

Happy prototyping!

Related:

Learning from the Web World: Paper Prototyping

Workshops

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Update #005 – A Lot About xAPI

What we’re working on

Brian led the judging at the E-Learning Showcase at the 2016 ATD Houston Tech Conference. The project benefited the Houston Food Bank by producing compliance training courses.

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Sean and Brian and Art from RISC talking around table at lunch.Brian and Sean presented at the Torrance Learning xAPI Party in Chelsea, Michigan, and again at the Torrance Learning Download the following day. We enjoyed the events and the quality discussions around xAPI and how we can implement it.

Sean presented on the basics of xAPI statements and the state of xAPI in the rapid development tools.  Brian spoke about our experience creating LearnxAPI.com and gathered great feedback for future additions to the site. At the Download, Sean and Brian presented some of the good, bad, and ugly things we have seen in course reviews. Attendees joined in an energizing discussion and shared some of their own examples.

Thanks to Megan and the rest of the Torrance Learning crew for hosting these events – an excellent opportunity for networking and building the community.

Links to our presentations and others at the events can be found here and here (or use the direct links below).

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Co-development work with one of our clients continues, including storyboards, interaction prototypes, and visual design concepts. We will soon begin preparing them for developing the courses in Captivate. This has been an exciting opportunity to teach and coach as they grow their internal learning and development team.

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Last weekend was our first company retreat. Sean and Brian met in a secret location with a large supply of sticky notes and sharpies to brainstorm, plan, and create value for our clients. Stay tuned for more about what we learned!

What we found interesting this week

Moqups Update – Improved collaboration, markup, and commenting. Excellent!

Accessible Typography – “It’s hard to justify cutting corners in an effort to get stuff done faster at the risk of reducing access for some people.” (Also: Today is Global Accessibility Awareness Day)

Connecting the Digital Dots – Becca Wilson writes about her experience creating learning experience for digital product management teams.

Innovator Interview – Art Werkenthin from RISC is interviewed about CMI-5, LMS’s, and and a look to the future.