Learning Ninjas

Everyone deserves a chance to learn.

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A Refreshing Start to 2016

As we blow past January and into February, we’ve refreshed our website to be more usable and provide a better window into the type of work we love to do. We look at this as an opportunity for a fresh start to the new year and to highlight some of the awesome people we get to work with and the clients and projects that helped us achieve success in 2015.

The State of the Network

Our network of ninjas is strong, and we’re learning every day how to work smarter together and build better, more accessible learning experiences. Learn more about how we work.

We have some great new services we think you’ll find valuable.

xAPI Strategy and Solutions

We have been involved with the Experience API from the beginning, which has allowed us to understand the specification and how it can be used to help you build a better learning ecosystem within your organization.

Contact us today about your project

eLearning Reviews

One of the ideas we’ve had for a while is a service reviewing elearning courses. We have access to the best designers and developers in the industry and want to make it easy for you to get access to them and learn best practices. Our extensive report offers feedback and recommendations to help you create the best possible experience for your learners. We provide detailed analysis of usability and interaction design issues and opportunities to optimize the course. We are excited to simplify this for you and help you design better elearning.

Start a Review Today

Webinars

We are producing webinars on hot topics in the elearning industry. Webinar dates will be announced soon. We’re planning sessions on Converting ILT to Elearning, xAPI Readiness, Usability and Accessibility in eLearning, Prototyping, and more.

Workshops

A big part of business is helping and teaching others. We’ve spoken at conferences, run pre-conference workshops, and built custom workshops for our clients. We’re starting to standardize some of these offerings to make it easier for you to select the right solution for you or your team.

We’d love to build a custom workshop to help you with your elearning or your ecosystem, or both. Submit a request to see how we can help.

The Blog and Newsletter

We have a lot of exciting plans for 2016. Subscribe to our newsletter to keep up to date and receive many great resources, tips, and tricks along the way.

We hope you have a wonderful and productive 2016. Let us know how we can help!

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Learning Ninjas at DevLearn 2015

Sean and Brian will be attending DevLearn 2015 in Las Vegas September 29-Oct 2. We have some new ideas to announce, and we’re bringing some schwag! Let us know if you want to meet up.

Brian Dusablon:

  • xAPI Camp (Tuesday, September 29)
  • Hyperdrive presentation on the Learn xAPI project (Tuesday, September 29 3:30pm-6:30pm)

Sean Putman:

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What’s in a QA?

Do you do quality assurance (QA) testing for your elearning courses?

If so, what do you do?

Depending on the number of interactions and how much conditional feedback is involved – and the user conditions you need to emulate for testing – I’d say it takes on the order of 2 to 4 hours for a thorough QA of a 30-minute module. I tend to assume 6 to 12 hours per module, knowing that most modules will need to undergo more than one comprehensive QA in a typical development cycle.

Things we look for in a QA person:

  • Detail-oriented
  • Familiar with elearning and/or web development (perhaps some coding knowledge, but primarily a solid understanding of basic web concepts like browser caching, relative links, etc.)
  • Familiar with project management and issue-tracking/ticketing tools
  • Background that includes technical writing
  • Works independently/requires minimal supervision
  • Clearly articulates their observations in a way that’s actionable and developer-oriented
  • Manages their time, prioritizes projects and escalates issues efficiently and effectively

We’d love your thoughts on this topic, so please comment below!

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Gathered Intel #10

This Week at Learning Ninjas:

We have been designing scenario-based elearning with multi-level feedback loops inside of Storyline, and talking about how important the ecosystem is as we build interactive training and performance support solutions. If we don’t identify and capture enough of the right information from our content, we’re not doing our jobs. We need systems that enable more than just tracking completions. We’re also working on configuring a new online community of practice for the World Health Organization and CDC.

If you’re not aware, there’s a new Curatr MOOC on the Experience API (xAPI) that started this week. You can still sign up and participate, and we’re available if you have any questions.

We’ve also launched our first iteration of eLearning Reviews, a quick and easy way for you to get a thorough review of your elearning course or performance support solution. Learn more about this new product, and we’d love to hear your feedback.

What We’re Reading:

Let’s Face It, Compliance is Not the Same as Learning – Clive Shepherd
“My main concern is the effect that compulsion has on the learning process. In fact, it’s clear to me now that compliance changes everything.” Indeed. We’ve gone so far down the compliance rabbit hole, can we make it back out?

Data Driven Design in the Real World – Smashing Magazine
L&D can learn a lot from marketing and web design when it comes to data-driven design. These industries have been using data to drive design for many years. In this article you will get a good introduction into data driven design including some nice examples.

10 Twitter Accounts Every Entrepreneur Should Be Following – Entrepreneur
We all have lots of people we follow already, but if you are looking for new insights these are some folks to follow. They give great advice and provide inspiration on a daily basis. If you are an entrepreneur or just want to follow some inspirational people, here are a few to look at.

Learning Communities with Purpose – ATD
A great article from Aaron Silvers and Sarah Gilbert on developing a Community of Developing Practice (CDP). The article provides an overview of what a CDP is and how it works. It also provides a real world example of how the Public Health Informatics Institute Academy is using a CDP.

Taming Big Data with Smart Contexts – Paper.li Blog
A great post on making sense of collected data. While the article focuses on the data collected by Paper.li, there is an easy correlation that can be made to learning. The article made us think about ways we could use context for better learning eco-systems.

How To Be an L&D Mythbuster – Cathy Moore
This ties in nicely with the recent announcement that Adam Savage will be keynoting DevLearn later this year (we’ll be there, by the way, for xAPI Camp and hopefully a workshop and some additional sessions). “We work in organizations that believe harmful myths. We’re pressured to work as if the myths are true, and we can’t or don’t take the time we need to keep our knowledge up to date and combat the myths.” So many myths persist in our industry today. It’s time for them to stop.

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Quick Thoughts on xAPI Camp

This week we had the opportunity to attend xAPI Camp at the University of Central Florida’s Institute for Simulation & Training. We’re an early adopter of the Experience API and helped several organizations leverage it to gain more meaningful insights into learning content and experiences.

This camp, however, blew us away. What an amazing room full of vendors, designers, and developers all with the same goal. Better experiences. Better data. Better learning. As Brian mentioned on Twitter, if you’re not paying attention, you should be, and if you missed this camp, make sure you go to the next one at DevLearn in September.

It was excellent to see all the different use cases that validated some of the work we did with CRS and the Watershed First project, helping them gain more meaningful insights into the Emergency Needs Assessment training we helped them build.

We have a lot more news on this topic, and much more to announce in the coming days and weeks. It’s an exciting time to be a learning professional!

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Picking the Right Solution for Learning and Performance with Judy Katz

Judy is delivering a webinar for ASTD Atlanta in April.

If you have a plumbing problem that requires a wrench to solve, banging with a hammer (even banging really hard with a well-designed hammer) will only do so much good… and it might even make the problem worse.

Stakeholders often come to us saying that they need an elearning course or an instructor-led course; they may even dictate the duration. And they may not be receptive to our attempts at analysis or our suggestions for alternatives. As learning and performance professionals, we may also be the most familiar with “courses” as solutions, as well; but as designers, we’re responsible for becoming aware of the many kinds of interventions that may be able to address our learners’ needs.