Technical Communications – Page 3

December 18, 2014

eLearning: More Reflection

by Kevin Siegel

Last week I wrote about how you can use Reflector to create software simulations and demonstrations from your mobile device.

I received emails from several people who, having read the article, downloaded Reflector and attempted to create a simulation using Adobe Captivate or Articulate Storyline. While most folks were successful in reflecting the mobile device onto the computer, several people reported that none of the actions they took on the mobile device were captured by the eLearning tool.

As I mentioned in last week's article, the reflection of the mobile device you see on the computer is passive; you cannot control the reflection with the computer. Instead, you can simply see what's happening on the mobile device through your computer.

During the simulation recording process, if you're creating a software simulation, programs like Captivate and Storyline only capture the screen if you click your mouse (or manually create a screen capture by pressing the appropriate keyboard shortcut). Since you're not clicking anything on your computer (remember, the computer is simply showing you a reflection of the mobile device), neither Captivate nor Storyline will capture anything.Unless…

On your computer, start the recording process using Captivate or Storyline. Just prior to performing an action on your mobile device, click the reflection on your computer to create a screen capture. Next, on the mobile device, perform the action. Back on the computer, click the reflection again to create a second screen shot that shows the result of whatever it is you did on the mobile device. Continue this process over and over until you have completed all of the processes you wish to simulate on the mobile device.

If clicking over and over again to create a simulation sounds too difficult, all three of the top eLearning development tools (Camtasia Studio, Captivate, and Storyline) excel at creating videos. If you create a video of the reflected mobile device, everything you do on the mobile device is captured because the video isn't creating individual screen shots, it's capturing everything you do without discrimination.

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If you'd like to learn more about eLearning, come hang out in my next eLearning basics mini course. And if you'd like to learn more Captivate, Presenter, or Storyline, we've got a great collection of live, online classes for you.

December 16, 2014

Technical Communication: Don’t Wordpass on Passwords

by Megan Pitkin

During one of my recent Electronic Medical Records (EMR) classes, a student asked about best practices for creating a password. Many people use the same password for everything (and I mean everything… from accessing Facebook to logging into their online banking account). Believe it or not, passwords are often very easy to guess. In fact, here are the top three most common passwords in use today:

Common Passwords
Note: The image above features an avatar of Megan. If you'd like to create your own avatar, check out AJ's article.

Given the rampant reports about hacked accounts that have occurred in every industry, a strong password has never been more important. This is especially true in healthcare.

To create more secure passwords:

Use passwords with eight or more characters with characters of mixed types. (Keep in mind that common substitutions for passwords like Med1c1ne are vulnerable and random combinations are difficult to remember, like m%&5Bg$d.)
Use passphrases. Short words with characters or spaces separating are easy to recall. Rather than using common phrases, it is best to use random words as your phrase such a dog walk leash or sing_moon_jump.
Do not use the same combination of username/password for multiple sites.

Ensuring safety and protection for patients by properly creating and protecting passwords is critical. I found it surprising that the FBI's most wanted cyber hacker got arrested the same week this question was asked of me. Why was he caught? His cat's namewas his password.

I won't elaborate on why I felt this was ironic, but I do feel it is important to highlight this cautionary tale.

Patient information is precious and should be treated appropriately since healthcare workers are the majority of keepers and the first point of contact for the electronic medical records.

Note: If you're finding it difficult to keep track of your passwords (perhaps you're following my advice and you're using different passwords for every site), consider a password manager. PC Magazine has a nice list of some of the top password managers available.

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If you like Megan's articles, you'll love her live, online classes such as Train the EMR Trainer.

December 12, 2014

Localization: Training & Development in Norway

by Jen Weaver

As we make our way towards Scandinavia, let's explore some common cultural facts about Norwegians and their expectations when it comes to Training & Development.

Test your knowledge of Norwegian Culture

True or False? Norway remained neutral during World War II.
True or False? Norway is a monarchy.

Quick Tips for Training & Development in Norway¹:

As members of the least punctual culture in northern Europe, Norwegians often run 10 to 15 minutes late for appointments. Be prepared to wait, but always arrive promptly yourself. While it's common for meetings to begin a bit behind schedule, be sure to end your classes on time, especially if they run until the end of the workday.
While English is widely known in Norway, the official language is Norwegian and may be the preferred language for use in your training materials. Even when fluent in English, many Norwegians prefer written communication in their native tongue.
More analytical than emotional, Norwegians tend to view outside information cautiously, and they are often slow to make decisions.
Communication is typically blunt and straightforward, and it's the cultural norm to accept statements at face value.
Individual freedom and independence are highly valued. As such, any kind of debt is avoided, as it's viewed as an impediment to one's freedom.
Family units are perceived as a way to maintain stability and structure in life. Norway's social welfare system perpetuates this support as well and is a great source of pride for the Norwegian people.
Gender roles are greatly minimized in Norwegian culture, as both parents share childcare responsibilities and women have great freedom in behavior and personal or professional aspirations.
Norwegians are quiet people, so avoid speaking too loudly or boisterously.
Talking with your hands in your pockets is considered too casual for business interactions, and the American "okay" gesture is perceived as rude.
Although Norway is a very affluent country, gift-giving is not acceptable in business interactions due to strict anti-bribery laws.

Knowledge Answers from Above:

True. Although it was occupied by Nazi Germany during World War II.
True. It's a constitutional monarchy with the king as chief of state.

References:

¹Morrison, Terri, & Conaway, Wayne A. (2006). Kiss, bow, or shake hands (2nd ed.). Avon: Adams Media.

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Developing international training and development materials? Contact Jen at Carmazzi Global Solutions. And if you love Jen's articles, check out her new Localization mini courses.

December 7, 2014

Technical Communication: Applying Lean Principles to Documentation

by Megan Pitkin

While I was working as a bedside nurse, my organization decided to adopt a new way of approaching patient care and improve workflow: Lean. As described in this article about Lean in health care, "Lean is an industrial managerial system that aims to eliminate process waste in the forms of transportation, inventory, motion, waiting, overproduction, over-processing, and defects."

While Lean was originally intended for industrial applications, the article describes the efforts of Dr. M. Peggy Hays, associate professor in the UAH College of Nursing, to bring industrial Lean practices in healthcare.

"Nursing staff today have more and more duties," said Dr. Hays. "How can they make their job more efficient so they can focus on patient care, which is why they got into the profession in the first place?"

According to the article, Dr. Hays said that "healthcare applications [for Lean] include unearthing greater efficiencies in emergency room waiting times, operating room use, use of nursing rounds, medication rounds, processing patient paperwork in administrative offices, and workflow of the staff."

The planning and assessment phase for my unit started with the team receiving Lean education and concluded with a list of probable projects and action items needed for the week. Because the main action item was patient wait times, data was collected for the time it took for call lights to be answered.

An initial assessment found that we walked over five miles each shift between patient rooms for medication delivery, gathering of supplies, locating equipment, and patient care needs. After streamlining workflows, reorganization of the medication rooms, and standardizing equipment processes, my walking was reduced by a mile for my first shift of the implementation week. With the improved processes and reduction in the amount of walking required for the nurses to complete their tasks, there was a significant decrease in call light wait times.

Seeing how successful Lean was in my unit and throughout the organization, I began to question if the Lean principals could be applied to the materials I used in my Electronic Medical Records (EMR) training classes. While adopting an industrial process in the creation of training materials may sound like a stretch, I'd like to illustrate one simple way that I applied the Lean principles to a PowerPoint presentation I use in my classes.

Since standardization is a key Lean component, I used my organization's approved fonts and colors on my first slide.

Applying Lean to technical documents.

I also organized my lesson plan sections and agenda using approved colors, and I used the colors in a very deliberate way. For example, in the image below notice that "Locating the Patient" is a dark purple on my agenda slide.

Applying Lean to technical documents (agenda slide colors).

I used that same dark purple banner on all of the slides in the "Locating a Patient" segment of the course. (One of those slides is shown below.)

Applying Lean to technical documents. More color coding.

Lastly, I color-coordinated the supporting training materials, like pocket guides, so that they match the colors used in the presentation.

Applying Lean to technical documents. Pocket guides.

As a nurse, it is encouraging for me to see more hospitals doing an excellent job of implementing Lean tools that manufacturing has been evolving for more than half a century. As an Instructional Designer, I have been pleased with the overwhelming positive feedback I have received by adopting these Lean philosophies into the creation of materials for EMR classes.

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If you like Megan's articles, you'll love her live, online classes such as Train the EMR Trainer.

December 5, 2014

Adobe Captivate: System Time Variables

by Lori Smith

Last week I showed you Captivate's date variables. This week, let's take a look at the Time variables, the System Information variables, and a handy little variable called cpInfoMobileOS.

Adobe Captivate: Time Variables

Specifically, I am going to address the variables listed in the table below using 2:15 PM and 32 seconds as my example.

Adobe Captivate: Time Variables

Perhaps you do not like military time (24 hour) and instead you want to use 12 hour time. A little advanced action can easily convert military time to 12 hour time. I have also created two user variables to help out: am_or_pm and myHour.

Adobe Captivate: Variables in use.

When added to a text caption as shown below, the variables will display 2 PM.

Adobe Captivate: Variables added to caption.

Now let's talk about the cpInfoEpochMS variable. It can be used to determine the play time for a lesson (or part of a lesson). By subtracting the value of the variable at the beginning of the lesson from its value at the end of the lesson, you can calculate the lesson's play time down to the millisecond. In the image below I have created a couple of Advanced Actions that make use or CpInfoEpochMS and a few user variables that I created:startTime, endTime, and timeElapsed.

First, you need to capture the lesson's start time using this Advanced Action:

Adobe Captivate: Lesson start time Advanced Action

At the desired point in your project, capture the time and calculate the timeElapsed.

Adobe Captivate: Time elapsed Advanced Action.

Last but not least, let's cover the cpInfoMobileOS variable. It's only job is to indicate if the learner is using a desktop computer of a mobile device (iPhone, iPad, etc). If you have certain elements or slides in your project that you want to behave differently depending upon the learner's device, you can use this variable in a conditional Advanced Action to create the desired behavior.

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Looking to learn Adobe Captivate? We offer several Captivate classes. Feel free to contact us to learn other ways to meet your training requirements.

November 20, 2014

Adobe RoboHelp: Embed a YouTube Video

by Willam Van Weelden

Last week, Kevin taught you how to embed YouTube videos in your eLearning projects. This week I'm going to keep with the YouTube theme and show you how you can embed YouTube content into your RoboHelp project.

Go to YouTube and locate the video you'd like to use.
Click the Share button below the video.
Go to the Embed tab and copy the embed code.
In RoboHelp, open a topic and switch to HTML mode.
Paste the embed code in the topic.
In the src attribute, type http: in front of the url.
Save your topic and generate your output.

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Looking to learn RoboHelp? We offer a live, two-day online RoboHelp class once a month. Feel free to contact us to learn other ways to meet your RoboHelp training requirements.

November 18, 2014

eLearning: The Origins of a Training Methodology

by Kevin Siegel

I've been creating eLearning since the early 1990s. Back then, eLearning (or E-Learning, pick your style) was known as CBT (Computer Based Training).

My first attempts at creating software video training was with a program called CameraMan. That program was ahead of its time, allowing you to capture your mouse actions, add captions and audio, and then publish into a video format that could be viewed on most computers. It was awesome software for the times but crashed a lot and had very few options. It was pretty much a record-pray-publish kind of tool.

When TechSmith released Camtasia I gave CameraMan the heave-ho and began producing slicker content in half the time. Then RoboDemo came out (RoboDemo later became Adobe Captivate) and I was quick to add that to my toolbox.

Today you have plenty of options when it comes to developing eLearning, including Camtasia, Captivate, Storyline, and two Presenters (one from Adobe, the other from Articulate).

While developing content for my Getting Started with eLearning mini course, I became curious about the origins of eLearning. As I mentioned above, I began developing eLearning 20 years ago. Surely that makes me one of the more senior eLearning developers around. It turns out I'm am just a young pup when it comes to eLearning. In fact, at a recent conference I met a person who said she started developing eLearning 30 years ago. 30 years ago? Wait, wouldn't that be the 1980s? Sure computers were around in the 80s… I was an early Mac adopter and I remember PCs with early versions of Windows (heck, I used DOS and floppy disks when they were still floppy). Those early computers struggled to do just about anything beyond word processing. How could anyone have developed eLearning on those early systems?

At the same conference, I met another person who said he was creating eLearning in the late 1970s. And that got me thinking… just how far back does eLearning go? And who was the first person or company to provide eLearning?

It turns out that eLearning really got going in 1953 when the University of Houston offered televised college credit classes. A few years later, the first adaptive teaching system (named SAKI) went into commercial production. Basically, with this system, the course got more challenging as learners improved.

When I was creating eLearning in the 1990s, the eLearning content I published consisted of video files that were huge. The files wouldn't fit on a floppy disk and computer hard drives weren't very big. Thankfully, DVDs were available (expensive, but available). The content I published was burned to a DVD, and then I hired a DVD replicating service to mass produce my content.

With the ever-growing popularity and power of the Internet and cloud computing, the need for DVDs went the way of the dinosaur. While many people think the Internet got started in the late 1990s, it came along far earlier. In 1969 the U.S. Department of Defense commissioned the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), which became the Internet as we know it today.

In the 1970s, a company started delivering live training over corporate networks in what they dubbed "virtual classrooms." And in the 1980s, the first CBTs were rolled out. In my discussion with the conference attendees I mentioned earlier, they revealed that those first CBTs were little more than teaching machines. And while they were limited in scope, they were nevertheless CBTs.

What's your earliest memory of eLearning? What tools did you use back then? And when did you first notice eLearning replacing the term CBT? Feel free to post your experience below as a comment.

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If you'd like to learn more about eLearning, come hang out in my next eLearning basics mini course. And if you'd like to learn more about the history of eLearning, the infographic below is a great place to start.

Source: Roberta Gogos, Social Media & Content Marketing Consultant.

November 16, 2014

Localization: Training and Development in New Zealand

by Jen Weaver

As cold weather looms in the United States, our friends in New Zealand are preparing for the summer season. Let's take a warm excursion to the Southern Hemisphere to explore some common cultural facts about New Zealanders and their expectations when it comes to training and development.

New Zealand Trivia:

True or False? New Zealand was the first country to grant women the right to vote.
True or False? New Zealanders refer to themselves as "Kiwis."

Tips for Training & Development in New Zealand¹:

Truth is based on objective facts; emotions and hype are not deemed appropriate in business presentations. Stick to the facts when developing your training materials.
Business interactions are more formal until credibility and rapport are established.
Despite their proximity, do not confuse Aussie culture with that of the Kiwis. They are entirely different people groups.
The Maori tribespeople are the earliest known inhabitants of New Zealand, and Maori is still one of the official languages. But with English being the other official language, most Maoris speak English fluently.
Kiwi executives value individual achievement and are internally motivated. As such, many experience anxiety regarding professional growth or pending deadlines.
Expertise is greatly valued, so be sure to communicate your corporate and personal achievements to demonstrate aptitude in the subject matter you're training.
Tardiness is a serious faux pas; even social events start on time.
A first-name basis is common in New Zealand business interactions, but wait to refer to your counterparts by their first names until invited to do so-or at least until they set an obvious informal tone in your interactions.

Trivia Answer from Above:

True. In 1893.
True, and the kiwi–the flightless bird, not the fruit–has become a national emblem.

References:¹Morrison, Terri, & Conaway, Wayne A. (2006). Kiss, bow, or shake hands (2nd ed.). Avon: Adams Media.

Developing international training and development materials? Contact Jen at Carmazzi Global Solutions. And if you love Jen's articles, check out her new Localization mini courses.

November 11, 2014

Adobe Captivate: Embedding YouTube Videos

by Kevin Siegel

If you need to include YouTube videos in your Captivate eLearning project, the traditional technique was to insert a click box or button on a slide and, on the Properties Inspector, use the Open URL or File action to target the video's URL.

When the learner clicks the click box or button, the URL action will take the learner to the YouTube video in a web browser window.

The URL action works wonderfully, but I recently had a student in one of my Captivate classes tell me that she needed to embed the YouTube video on her slide. (She needed to include the video with other slide objects and animations.) This is the perfect use case for the new YouTube Learning Interaction.

To embed a YouTube video on a Captivate slide, first go to YouTube and copy the URL for the video to your clipboard.

From within Captivate, open or insert a slide and choose Interactions > Learner Interactions.

Adobe Captivate: Learner Interactions

From the Interactions dialog box, scroll down, select the YouTube interaction, and click the Insert button.

Adobe Captivate: YouTube interaction.

Adobe Captivate: YouTube URL.

On the Configure Interaction dialog box, paste the URL you copied earlier into the Video URL area.

There are several options in the dialog box such as AutoPlay and Loop, but I think the coolest option is located in the lower left: Particular time in the Video.

Adobe Captivate: Particular time in the Video

Using this handy option, you can take learners to a specific time in the YouTube video. In the image above, I've specified that the learner should go directly to the 1 minute mark of the video.

After setting your options, click the OK button and a placeholder for the video will be added to the Captivate slide. You can use the Properties and Timing Inspectors to control the position and timing for the object just like any other slide object.

Adobe Captivate: YouTube Placeholder.

And that's it… if you preview the lesson in a web browser, you'll be able to test the link to the embedded YouTube video.

Adobe Captivate: Embedded YouTube video.

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Looking for instructor-led training on Adobe Captivate? Check out our live, online, instructor-led Captivate classes.

November 5, 2014

Adobe Captivate: Replacing PowerPoint Slides But Keeping the Audio

by Kevin Siegel

I received an interesting email from a fellow Captivate developer who was in a bit of a pickle. The developer had imported a 60-slide PowerPoint presentation into Captivate and then added audio to each of the Filmstrip slides.

Just as he was about to Publish his finished project, he was told to use a different PowerPoint presentation. Mind you, it wasn't just that the imported presentation had changed and he needed to update it in Captivate. In that case, all he would have had to do is click the presentation's red "not in synch" icon on the library and the new PowerPoint content would have come into the Captivate project. In this instance, he was given a completely different presentation (the same audio was going to be used, but each slide visual was going to change).

Since the developer had already invested time importing the 60 audio files (files he was going to use on the replacement slides), he contacted me hoping he wasn't going to have to start over from scratch.

The bottom line is he didn't have to start over again and was able to reuse all of the imported audio files. Here's what I instructed him to do:

First, visit the Library and rename the audio files so the name of each audio file matches the slide where it was used. (To rename a Library item, right-click the item and choose Rename.)

Adobe Captivate: Rename Library items.

In the image below, notice that I've renamed my audio files so the names match the slide that's currently using them (slide1Audio, slide2Audio, etc.).

Adobe Captivate: Renamed Library Items.

Next, delete all of the imported PowerPoint slides. Because Captivate projects must have at least one slide, if your project only contains PowerPoint slides, insert a blank slide first (via Insert > New Slide From). Then delete all of the slides except the blank one.

The above step can seem extreme and nerve-wracking because you're deleting all of those awesome slides. But keep in mind you'll be replacing the deleted slides with new slides in just a moment.

Check out the Library. Even though you deleted the slides, the audio files are still in the Library. Notice the Use Count shows a bunch of zeros because none of the audio files are being used.

Adobe Captivate: Unused Audio Files

Import the new PowerPoint slides into the Captivate project (via File > Import > PowerPoint Slides).

Delete the blank slide you added earlier and, as a final step, drag the unused audio files from the Library onto their corresponding Filmstrip slides.

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Looking for instructor-led training on Adobe Captivate? Check out our live, online, instructor-led Captivate classes.