When you’re building your elearning, chances are you want to convey a lot of information to your learner. Infographics are a great way to condense a lot of that content in a way that is appealing and helps learner retention. If you can effectively put a number of relevant points into an easy to read infographic, you’ve already taught your learner a lot with very little. 1. Infographics help visualize data If your elearning contains a lot of lists of numbers, pretty soon they

The concept of responsive learning is that eLearning and web-based training should operate and act similarly regardless of which device it is being accessed on. Having content that can adapt and look good on a range of devices is becoming more important as learners are increase accessing training on the go. Below are four things to consider when developing responsive eLearning: 1. Multi-Platform Learners expect to take eLearning on a number of devices including laptops, table

When developing eLearning it is important to consider what type of experience the learner will have and how they will interact with your digital training. Having a poor UI (User Interface) or poor UX (User Experience) can be the difference between a learner losing focus, getting frustrated and giving up or being kept engaged, focused and interested. Below are some UI/UX trends you can implement to improve your eLearning and web-based training: Gamification Gamification is an

One of the most important books on dissecting sequential art – “Understanding Comics”, by Scott McCloud – contained a chapter that discussed the continuum between realism and abstraction in art. Specifically, it discussed representations of people in comics, with regard to how realistic or not the art chooses to portray them. A photograph would be the most realistic representation, as it is the closest approximation to a real, individual human face, with no abstraction; while

.This week I had a discussion with a fellow training professional that afterwards, left me feeling very thankful our relationship was a casual one, in that we did not work together or for the same organization The reason for this was his lack of understanding or appreciation for all of the work that went in to creating a training program. In this particular instance a 2-day instructor led course that he had facilitated and had been developed by his team, and that he spent

There is a lot of talk now in days, about how Canadian companies should be more innovative. But what does that mean in the training industry? Some people tend to think whiteboard animations are innovative, and gamification. For some companies just moving away from classroom learning to eLearning or blended learning is innovative, but the reality is there are many new ways Canadians can be innovating their training methods. Virtual reality eLearning is here and it is amazing

Recently a client was asking me about best practices for facilitator training and certification… and subsequently asked what processes do we follow at Pathways Training and eLearning, to ensure our facilitators maintain excellence in the classroom. I told them this was an excellent question, as this is something I am most passionate about. Pathways Training and eLearning employs only professional facilitators, who combined have spent more than 50,000 hours in the classroom, l

It’s amazing how we continue to find new features as we explore Storyline 360 further, and I really believe, you can increase the engagement level of your eLearning modules with these new features. Let’s take a closer look at some of them. Articulate Review Technically, this isn’t a Storyline 360 feature, but rather an Articulate 360 tool, and even though it doesn’t add engagement or interactions to your eLearning module. Most importantly, it improves your workflow by allowin

This battle has been happening for quite some time, not only for web development but also for eLearning development and deployment as well, but due to some recent events and personal experiences, I think the time to choose between HTML5 and Flash, has come (or at least, in my daily context, this decision is only happening now). Unfortunately, the making of this decision is not only up to us, but up to our clients as well. I remember a couple of years ago, we were tasked with

Here at Pathways, we like to always use the most advanced tools when it comes to creating eLearning modules. Of course, that includes using the latest versions of rapid eLearning authoring tools, like Storyline or Captivate. However, it is always important to explore these tools and make internal tests, before considering using them for clients’ projects. Such is our case with the new Articulate Storyline 360, which was released a few weeks ago, and as part of our day-to-day

As a programmer, I have faced situations in which I have to reuse my code from a previous project, since maybe, on another eLearning project, I have need functionality that I have already programmed. I have also faced situations in which I have had the need to use code from another programmer. Unfortunately, and it has happened with my own code as well, not all the time the code that I need to reuse, is well documented. By “documented”, I mean adding annotations that explain

And by design I am (for the most part) talking about Graphic Design. Think about it for a second, on a standard eLearning module, you usually have a rectangular area in which to put in your content and graphical assets, and if we talk in degrees, it’s around 90 (horizontally and vertically) degrees that you must cover. That is relatively easy, since we are used to that format and you can make a good use of white spaces (for most graphic designers, a very important concept in

In the past month, Pathways has been asked to develop eLearning modules on the topic of Social Media awareness and usage by three of our clients. Considering the frequency of these recent requests, I decided to spend a few weeks discussing how we use Social Media. When discussing this topic with a friend he mentioned that while he was very careful with how he presented himself on social media when using his companies’ channels, he felt he could be “more himself” when using

In the past month, Pathways has been asked to develop eLearning modules on the topic of Social Media awareness and usage by three of our clients. Considering the frequency of these recent requests as well as the acknowledgement that Social Media is by no means a new phenomenon, this leads me to believe that more and more organization have, while probably already realized long ago the potential benefits of utilizing social media, only now realizing the potential pitfalls of

Alright, time for some classic eLearning development discussion! In the last few blogs, I have been discussing our experiences and lessons learned in the realm of 360 eLearning videos, but since here at Pathways, we are still designing and developing lots of classic (and very interesting) eLearning modules. Of course, we always strive to take our products to the next level, making good use of the tools and even extending their functionality with external tools. However, the c

Moving forward with the development of our 360 eLearning video, we have found along the way that there are lots of opportunities to improve the learning experience by teaching the content in a more interactive way. However, and unfortunately, given that 360 eLearning videos is still a technology in development, we have also found several challenges and limitations, especially when it comes to deploying this product on mobile devices. And even more specifically, deploying then

Recently the Pathways team took part in an exciting project in creating one of Canada’s first 360 video eLearning modules. Last week I wrote about this experience, talking about the lessons learned, specifically related to camera movement and lighting. This week I would like to continue the discussion, focusing on our discoveries around the camera hardware, sound and available post production software. With regards to the camera hardware, our device, like many 360 cameras

Let’s continue diving a bit more into our favourite topic of 2017. And I say favourite because as it is a developing technology, here at Pathways we are proud of being one of the first training and eLearning companies in Canada, implementing 360 video and virtual reality into eLearning. While developing our 360 eLearning video, we also started thinking about how to bring the final product to the next level, keeping in mind that only by having the 360 video integrated with an

Earlier in my career, I had a boss who had a somewhat unique way of responding whenever he (or his team) was asked to take on a training & development project that was outside of the regular technical development we usually focused on. It did not matter the size of the project or how many resources would be required or for how long, his first question was always the same… “What problem are you trying to solve”? Now before anyone pulls an optical muscle rolling their eye

Recently a few folks from the Pathways team, including myself, flew to Vancouver to shoot a 360 video in partnership with St. Johns Ambulance. While I will be writing about that experience in the next few weeks as it was certainly an exciting project to be a part of…for today I would like to talk about a discussion I had with my seat mate on the flight over. About halfway through the flight my seatmate and I got in to a brief discussion about what we each did for a living.