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Learning Solutions Conference 2019

March 22, 2019 By Brian Dusablon Leave a Comment

Sarah Mercier and Brian Dusablon will be speaking at The eLearning Guild’s Learning Solutions Conference in Orlando, Florida March 26-28, 2019.

Tuesday, March 26th
[F01] Panel: Where is Instructional Design Heading?
[405] Mobile Learning Design in Practice: Deconstructing a Financial Literacy App

Wednesday, March 27th
[F04] Designing for All: A Panel About Inclusive, Accessible Design

We also recommend these sessions from some of our favorite speakers, partners, and part-time Ninjas:

Tuesday, March 26th

[MB07] Visual Design: Challenges & Solutions (Connie Malamed)
[105] Getting Radically Better Data from Your Learners (Will Thalheimer)
[214] BYOD: Adobe Illustrator Basics for eLearning and Slides (Connie Malamed)
[403] The Science of Attention and Engagement (Julie Dirksen)
[STP106] Organizing and Streamlining Your Storyline Course (David Lindenberg)

Wednesday, March 27th

[F03] Learning and Technology: A Guild Master Panel
[508] Designing a 360 Virtual Reality Tour for Onboarding (Kevin Thorn)
[601] Developing Hype Resistance: Learning Science and Professional Practice (Clark Quinn)
[802] Prototyping: Turning Ideas into Reality (Nick Floro)
[705] Prototype to Implementation: Building Organizational Buy-In for xAPI (Ryan Hicks and Andrew McGuire)

Thursday, March 28th

[MB27] Design Thinking: What Works (Nick Floro)

Look for a Learning Ninjas shirt next week. We’d love to chat!

Labels in Articulate Rise 360

March 1, 2019 By Sarah Mercier Leave a Comment

Let’s say you are creating a course in Articulate Rise 360 and want to modify the labels. You will probably go to the “Settings,” then “Labels,” and make your changes. Seems easy enough, right?

Guess what? You just changed the labels for every module you currently have in Rise, unless you are using the “Custom Course Labels” feature.

The labels in Rise are saved to these custom tags, not the specific module you happen to be creating at the time. So, if you don’t create a custom tag for each course (or collection of courses) with unique labels, you will change settings globally for everything using the English default (or other language default). This means that the next time you go into any of your other modules and republish, you will end up with the same updated labels from whenever you last changed these global settings.

To avoid this, create a Custom Course Label tag for each unique set of labels using the following steps:

1. Go to Settings.

Edit course page with Settings link highlighted

2. Go to Labels and select “Create New” in the Custom Course Labels section.

Settings screen, labels section, with Create New button highlighted

3. Type in a name for your custom label set and select OK.

Pop-up box for entering custom label set name

4. Make sure that you have selected the label from the Custom Course Labels drop down for any course that you want to have these settings.

Label settings screen with Custom Course Labels drop-down highlighted

5. Check your course to ensure that the label settings have been applied correctly.

Course menu page example of the custom label change to say "in this module" instead of "details"

New Director of Operations: Teresa Dussault

January 17, 2019 By Brian Dusablon Leave a Comment

Teresa Dussault's Profile Picture We are excited to announce a new addition to Learning Ninjas! Teresa Dussault has joined our team as Director of Operations.

Teresa brings strong business operations, project management, and education expertise to our team, with most of her career focused specifically in workforce development. She is also the co-founder of Slow Wave Coffee, a responsible coffee roasting company, so you can be assured all Learning Ninjas will stay adequately caffeinated.

Along with supporting the operational growth of the organization, Teresa will serve as a project lead and subject matter expert. You can learn more about her on LinkedIn.

We’re excited about the expertise and insights Teresa brings to our daily operations, and thrilled about her community involvement efforts that align with our focus on social good and high impact projects.

And We’re Off to DevLearn 2018!

October 23, 2018 By Brian Dusablon Leave a Comment

The Learning Ninjas are excited to be heading to DevLearn this week! This is one of our favorite conferences, and we are looking forward to meeting new people and catching up with colleagues and friends.

We would love for you to join us for two sessions focusing on xAPI and data collection:

Session 106 – Investigating Performance: Using Your Data Effectively

Wednesday 10:45 am in Montego DE

In this session, Janet Laane Effron and Sean Putman will cover how to set up a project to collect data, and the things to look for while planning your project to show performance improvement.

Morning Buzz MB21 – xAPI Basics – Getting Started

Thursday 7:30 am in St. Thomas A

In this Morning Buzz session, Sean Putman and Sarah Mercier will lead a group discussion on the basics of xAPI and what is needed to get started. If you have questions or would like to participate in an open discussion to share your challenges and successes, we want to hear from you!

Be sure to explore the xAPI Central Showcase to see how people are using xAPI in unique projects.

If you have any questions about xAPI, would like to have a conversation about xAPI, or just want to say hi, join us at one of our sessions, find us in the hallways, or contact us!

Our other presentations span ecosystems, learning strategy, inclusive design and accessibility, and minimal solutions.

Session 313 – Doing More with Simple Learning Platforms

Wednesday 3 pm Montego C

In this session, Brian Dusablon will explore real-world scenarios in which organizations solved problems by using one or more non-traditional platforms for delivering accessible learning experiences.

Strategic Session Stage STRS204 – Developing a Learning Technology Strategy: Where to Start

Thursday 1:15 pm Strategic Session Stage in the Expo

In this stage session, Sarah will show you a practical, four-step approach to developing a learning technology strategy for your organization and common pitfalls to avoid.

Session 603 – Email Course Design: Using Digital Marketing as a Learning Strategy

Thursday 3 pm St Croix B

In this concurrent session, Sarah will show you a trend that is effectively used in the marketing space and can easily be applied to workplace learning: the email course. You’ll look at some great examples of email courses, discussing pro tips for designing in this format and learning what to avoid.

Morning Buzz MB32 – Designing Accessible and Inclusive Learning Experiences

Friday 7:30 am Andros AB

In this Morning Buzz, Brian will lead a session on incorporating accessibility and inclusion into your design process. If you have questions or thoughts on accessibility, bring them to this session.

Other speakers we highly recommend:

We look forward to seeing you at DevLearn! Please introduce yourself if you see a Learning Ninjas shirt or a Learn xAPI button!

A New Era and New Leadership

August 23, 2018 By Brian Dusablon Leave a Comment

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!