Over four years ago, I reviewed the first volume of The Online Learning Idea Book. Then I expressed my disappointment that most of the content was biased towards academic applications of online learning. Of course, things have moved on and the corporate market has continued to develop and some of the early experiments that originated in the education market have trickled into the corporate arena.
So I was keen to read this second volume:
The Online Learning Idea Book: v. 2: 95 Proven Ways to Enhance Technology-Based and Blended Learning
There is a better balance now between ideas that would be best suited to academic projects and those that would be meaningful to a corporate training audience. Chapter two is probably the one that has least to offer an organisational L&D practitioner, though having just started to experiment with using Yammer to facilitate group analysis of case studies, some of the content on reviewing online project work has given me food for thought.
Back to chapter one - Ideas for the Design and Development Process. The ideas here will apply to all types of project and concentrate on tools and techniques for defining learning objectives, delivery approaches and working with subject matter experts, amongst other design considerations.
Chapter two - Ideas for Supporting Learners and Learning - mostly contains ideas for supporting students in an academic setting as they work with asynchronous learning materials, starting with engaging the audience, through to evaluating the contributions from those taking part. As well as the latter, another interesting idea that would work in a business setting is the idea about reading guides. The suggested templates would help employees to get more from any pre-reading that you might set as part of a blended programme.
The third chapter - Ideas for Synchronous and Social Learning - starts to increase the usefulness of this new book for the corporate world. I loved the opening "Open House" idea for using virtual breakout rooms to cover multiple topics in one session, by rotating the audience around a number of rooms and facilitators. There were also some great ideas for breaking up the monotony of webinar lectures in the topic on "re-energising lectures with insert-learner-activity-here strategies; and some new ideas for how to use discussion forums, which I'll definitely look to use with Yammer. There were also some interesting ideas about how to integrate third-party polling tools in your programmes.
In chapter four, the focus changes to Ideas for Self-paced Learning. As a user of Articulate, this also saw the first of many valuable contributions from the team at Articulate providing their own ideas, starting with a very clear overview of how to use PowerPoint to create branching scenarios within the software; though a lot of this chapter will be of greater value to Flash developers using web-development tools. The most valuable idea in this chapter looks at how to reduce the amount of on-screen text, a problem we all face.
The final fifth chapter - Ideas for Media and Authoring - as the editor notes, is the largest in the book and this is the one that offers the most value to those designing e-learning in the corporate sector. I've often thought that the Pecha Kucha format could work well as an e-learning format - and that's covered here. There are then some great tips for finding and then doing great things with standard clip art graphics. The team at Articulate are on a roll in this last chapter, with ideas - some of which I've seen before on their blogs - such as creating a TV-style video player, using silhouettes to great effect and recording better audio. I'm particularly keen to try out their ideas for integrating non-Articulate Flash files into Articulate Presenter as tabs, as well as different ways of embedding PDFs into courses. Integrating online polls and word clouds into courses are also covered, along with a number of tips for uses of Captivate 5.
Overall, as you get further into this book, there is lots of good content for enhancing all forms of technology-based learning in the corporate L&D world. Interestingly, this book is available in a Kindle edition too, but given the issues with rendering illustrations on Kindle pages, I'd recommend buying the softback version.
