Scher Progression News

Blog Posts

2010-10-26T22:10:00.002-04:00

We are still involved in migrating our site. This applies to this blog as well. Blogger moved from blogger to blogspot, so we're updating our links.

We're back...finally!

2010-08-04T09:22:00.002-04:00

Well, it's been a while since we posted, but the time hasn't been lost. Aside from delving deeper with some great tools (Captivate, AS3, and the CS5 premium suite in general), getting deeper into simulation approaches, some exciting quality techniques, we're really enjoying the incredible views since moving our office to Washington County!

Odds and Ends
Work with Fran and her crew on the APICS course Certified in Production and Inventory Management (CPIM) is going well. This course is a classroom certification course and includes such topics as "...optimizing inventory investment, delivering Just-in-Time products and services, streamlining operations through accurate forecasting, setting and achieving goals, managing all aspects of the supply chain, and maximizing return on investment for systems and technologies." Some very cool and useful material.

Fran's operations quality consult is also keeping her hopping - her client is realizing just how amazing she is as a project manager and team leader!

Finally migrated our site! You shouldn't notice a difference, but we now have mirrored the Scher Progression Site. You should see the same content at www.isdservices.com and www.scherprogression.com. We are using this as a starting point for consistent structure. Over the next few months, we'll start diverging the content and look, with the goal of giving our specialities of instructional design and quality engineering their unique focus.

This blog has moved

2010-03-19T09:35:00.001-04:00

This blog is now located at http://scherprogression.blogspot.com/.
You will be automatically redirected in 30 seconds, or you may click here.

For feed subscribers, please update your feed subscriptions to
http://scherprogression.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default.

Captivate 4: Simulation Actions Lessons Learned

2010-03-19T09:25:00.004-04:00

Deleting Variables and Advanced Actions

Recently, while debugging a simulation demo, I found myself in a bit of a Catch 22. Here's the situation. After finding a flaw in logic, I decided it would be easier to completely delete the offending routine in the Advanced Actions submenu.

Choosing Project -->Actions-->Advanced actions-->Delete brought a dialog box saying the action was in use (and couldn't be deleted). The same thing occurred when I chose to delete a variable. Captivate thoughtfully provides a Usage button to show where the variables and actions are used. Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on your view, you can't just go back to the root location in the list to remove things. Adobe is protecting you from yourself (Thanks to the Blues Brothers movie, I hear Aretha Franklin singing "You better think about what you're trying to do...!").

There may be a better way, but one solution I found is to go to each frame (refer to the Usage button list, Project-->Actions-->Advanced actions) where the code or variable is used. Right click on the object using the code, such as a button or text field, and then change the action to some other choice (and replace with a new advanced action later). I chose "Continue." Once all references to the name of the action are removed, Now Captivate will allow you to delete the action. Lesson learned!

2009 Time to Take a Breath

2009-12-23T14:04:00.003-05:00

Whew, the year is coming to an end and it's time to prepare for that Arthur C. Clark icon, 2010. Here's a quick summary of what we've been up to at Scher Progression LLC.

Fran coordinated, and developed with, her subcontractor and cadre of subject matter experts a huge certification quality course called CPIM (Certification in Production and Inventory Management). This is part of a series that will continue through 2010.

Also, she has been adding to our Quality-related consulting activity with FDA documenation work for a German-owned biotech company.

We worked together developing a course called BIM Technology (Building Information Model), which gets into state of the art construction modeling for 3D,4D, and 5D virtual buildings. Earlier in the year, we completed several projects for this same client, including an education needs analysis survey and the presentation of an education/instructional design trends workshop, that served as a team building program in its method.

I developed a course with the rather imposing title, Quality Assurance Specification Development and Validation for the Austin-based arm of a Dutch multi-national geotechnical company. We're trying to think globally and act locally.

Finally, I did a brief presentation for an Adobe User Group about some of our Captivate work.

It's not been all work, though. Fran traveled for her client to Toronto, (and I just had to tag along), and we visited some of our old Canadian haunts. Obviously, there was a lot of change since we lived there in the 1980’s, but it was really cool to revisit (I even got to meet some the Maple Leaf players!).

To our friends and clients (same thing, but redundancy is a wonderful thing), Fran and I wish you and your families a good end of the year and a healthy, safe, and prosperous new year.

Reflective Learning References

2009-07-13T22:36:00.003-04:00

Just a couple of quick references behind one of the learning approaches we like to use, the concept of reflection. Hopefully, it stimulates higher level learning. We want learners to consider the content, ideas, approaches, and processes and relate it to what they already know, possibly, how they presently do things on the job. Ideally, They'll consider what they would change when they return to their offices i.e, change their behaviors. This after all is the point of teaching and training.

Sometimes it's as simple as asking learners how they currently do things and then showing more efficient improvements and asking for the implications it has for their work. At the other end, we might allow time for learners to begin an action plan that might help them "hit the ground" running back on the job.

So here are a few citings behind this method, before I forget: Morgan and Saxon, 1991; Van Ments, 1990 concluded that the act of reflection could develop deeper meaning from what originally seemed more superficial learning. They found that this approach requires careful questioning that stimulates learners to relate to what they already know. Mezirow, 1990 stated how important reflection is to "transformative learning."

An interesting Aspect

In her book, Reflection in Learning & Professional Development, Theory and Practice, Jennifer A. Moon discusses the compulsion of teachers, particularly in higher education, to supply more "packaged" material as references and resources, and even computer programs. The teachers in effect "tidy up" the learning. This can reduce reflection and negatively affect learning. The book references many studies including those above.

Van Ments, M. (1989), The Effective Use of Role Play,
Morgan, N and Saxon S (1991) Teaching Questioning and Learning (London: Routledge)

Improving learning through reflection, Karen Hinett

What's Going On!

2009-06-19T12:48:00.004-04:00

Here's a quick update about some of our recent activities:

Fran is working hard on managing the update of five CPIM certification prep courses for APICS, the Association for Operations Management (CPIM is short for Certified in Production and Inventory Management). This is a major certification in the operations industry. She is working closely with a group of subject matter experts who are writing and reviewing the content. Fran’s role is to manage the project, coordinate the instructional design, compose graphics, and ensure product quality. Last week, she brought together, online, a number of subject matter experts from around the country to review the outline for the new Strategic Management of Resources course (the capstone course for the series). The SMEs were pleased with the concept of including more case studies and interactions she has planned. This project will run through September of this year.

Currently, I am designing a quality assurance course. It appears that we may beat our completion deadline by about three months! (We'll provide a more formal project description later when we have the client's permission.) We can say that this one has seven modules that include material about a state of the art QA simulation application, a very nice real world case study that brings together all of the course content, and some great back-on-the-job implementation aids.

We just heard that the FHWA (Federal Highways Administration) is planning to host a the effective communications course we adapted for online presentation. This is a nice blend of Web conference training (real-time instructor facilitated online) and Web-based training (online self-study). It's an exciting program with real-world and proven applied techniques that culminates in a fun role play with online breakout groups.

Baking Bread? Designing for Slackers

2009-02-26T14:25:00.006-05:00

Welcome to an episode of ISD-Guy. When we last caught up with our intrepid designer he was trekking through the Mudumalai forest. Luckily, he stopped by our office, so we didn't have to renew our passport.

ISD-Guy, a learned colleague writes:

My Learning 2.0-type class isn't getting the results needed. I read the traffic logs and see that only a few in our class visit the linked resources, no one offers any blog postings, let alone responses, during our synchronous sessions, the same people participate in the chat pods, and collaborative projects are done by the usual gunghoers while the rest of the team members merrily collect their continuing education credit. I've tried discussing the issues, talking to their bosses, as well as other teaching-tactics to no avail. Help!!!

Lost in Virtual Space

***

Dear LVS,

You've got a case of the social loafers, and I'm not talking about bread makers. You are now finding out that if you build it, they won't necessarily come. Another way to put it is "you can't lead a horse to water."

Set up your Way Back machine and visit the good ol' Journal of Personality and Psychology in 1979, look for a great research paper called Many Hands Make Light the Work: The Causes and Consequences of Social Loafing by Bibb Latenae, Kipling Williams, and Stephen Harkins.

LVS, basically, this means that if you have a group, some of the people will slack off. There are design variables you can tinker with to decrease loafing. The amount of structure in a social learning context is under debate, but it's always a good idea to pay attention to human behavior and look for tendencies. It's good practice to focus on the fruits of performance (products) on the job, but when it comes to learning put a magnifying glass on individual performance--design it in! For that matter, isn't it good management to do this on the job, too? Design the group project with defined roles and responsibilities (the group's required project output is usually not as defined; the group decides on the specifics).
Click here for the reference and detail. We'll try and discuss this in more detail and provide a wiki link when it's up.

2009 Training Trends Workshop

2009-01-25T13:15:00.011-05:00

Recently, our client posed an interesting puzzle to us. Could SP provide a program that presented the most current education trends, and could we also provide a team building opportunity? Both ideas are good for full length workshops, but the client had a need to complete the program in a morning. We wanted to avoid the usual boring program format of participants sitting through a long lecture of statistical trends and training minutiae.

Keeping with our mantra about presenting interactive programs, we added a twist; let the participants do the trending, and then compare their results with our findings. The result was an enjoyable, involving, and interactive experience. the most important factor for the success of the mix was a fun group of participants who really put themselves into the role plays.

On a side note: We also played with an estimating icebreaker. The groups estimated the number jelly beans in a giant container. The winning group took home the beans, after generously sharing them with the other groups. Proving the statisticians right, we found that putting every one's guesses together resulted in an answer that was only 70 beans away from the exact number. A nice illustration for team work. You might ask how we knew the exact number...other than saying it involved an ISD process, it's a trade secret.

What Would You Do?

2008-07-10T08:53:00.004-04:00

This is a call to everyone that has ever designed, taught, or participated in a training course. I would like your advice on a design problem I ran into as an instructional designer.

Scenario
You have a full day workshop and a half day workshop. They both have the same content and use discussion and questioning learning approaches. There is one difference between them; the longer course has small group and individual activities that help the group apply the content to the real world. The shorter class still has interaction between the instructor and group, and between participants, just no application activities.

The $64k Question
Since all the content and course goals are the same, is it correct for both workshops to have the same learning objectives?

I can really use your feedback!

You Will Remember, You Will Remember...

2008-07-02T16:21:00.001-04:00

I recently guest blogged (glogged) for a friend of mine from the world of hypnosis, Ellie Blunt. I don't have any plans to become a hypnotist, but I am impressed with the communication and learning applications of their approaches. I met Ellie through another hypnotist, my sister, L.S. King. No trance formations required, but maybe one of these days I can get one of them over here for another cross-field type of conversation. Tom, don't worry, I'll give equal time to the theorists, too. I can guarantee this will not be a lecture that will put you to sleep!

We're in the Book!

2008-07-02T13:42:00.003-04:00

We are now a published author (kinda). I was very excited to see that our short (but valuable) contribution to the eLearning Guild's new book on Flash techniques is now available. We suggested the simple technique of using Flash components for eLearning to control screen space when there is a lot of reference content to include. For example, if you are using PowerPoint as your platform and want to include a lot of information on a slide, but do not want to open another window or link-away from the slide, a scrollpane is a perfect solution. I've found that this is a great solution for classroom trainers that want to point out some content that is a long piece in participant workbooks, so eveyrone can see exactly what you are referencing.

eLearning guild says that "...these tips will be useful to any designer or developer looking for best practices to incorporate into their own production process." The book can be downloaded from the Guild.

Maryland Performance Awards

2008-06-30T00:44:00.007-04:00

A lot of hard work came to fruition and provided a great experience! Fran Scher served on the 2008 Board of Examiners team for the Maryland Performance Excellence Awards.

This program requires the team to utilize the Baldrige Criteria to evaluate an organization's business excellence. After much analysis of their candidate organization, they created a scorebook and conducted a site visit. The applicant that they evaluated won the Senate Productivity Award for 2008. Fran's topic was workforce excellence. She focused on evaluating the applicant's workforce engagement (workforce enrichment; workforce and leader development), workforce environment (worforce capability and capacity and workforce climate), and workforce-focused outcomes. Here's Fran, Senator Benjamin Cardin, and her fellow Examiner teammates.
For more information about the program, visit the MPEA Examiner site.

Going Global!

2008-06-20T14:36:00.009-04:00

What do Italy, Spain, Jacarta, El Salvador, Washington, Chicago, and Wisconsin have in common? These were some of the locations of the participants for our online program that took place Monday and Tuesday of last week. The purpose of the program, on behalf of our client APICS (The Association for Operations Management), was to validate the outline, objectives, and content for a new series of instructor-led workshops. We worked with international supply chain expert Dave Jankowski, providing the instructional design for Dave's content.

We virtually walked through one of the workshops (in a series of five) about how businesses go about doing international sourcing. Our audience was made up of other subject matter experts and trainers from around the world. They gave us great (and very positive!) feedback on the program.

This series, and the design of the international workshops we created for the Council of Residential Specialists and TRO, offers some very nice business curricula. We really enjoy international audiences. I guess all of that travel and living outside of the U.S. has come in handy. And adding the virutal classroom to the mix sure beats having to fly in for programs.

Problems: Graphics That Suck

2008-02-07T18:06:00.001-05:00

We were contacted by Donna Safco of Mudpuddle Creations about whether we had some examples of poor uses of visuals in instructional design. She’s on the bill for The ELearning Guild’s Annual Gathering in Orlando, Fl, April 14-17. The event promises to be a lot of fun. If you make it down there check out Donna’s presentation What Not to Design – Visual Makeovers for e-Learning Content. You can find information and download the Guild’s brochure at http://www.elearningguild.com/content.cfm?selection=doc.834

Here’s some of the most common “bad” examples we’ve had to address in our clients’ projects for revising or adapting existing workshop programs for elearning. What’s yours?

Not enough graphics -- too text intensive, e.g., using descriptions when diagrams would be clearer
Too much artwork -- looks pretty but distracts from learning content
Unrelated art – not supportive of content or objectives
Garish colors and/or too many colors
Graphics that have been "over-Photoshopped" -- special effects/filters that make art hard to discern
Text colors that do not contrast enough with background making content hard to read
Colors contrary to 508 guidelines
eLearning and 508 -- missing alt text
Artwork that violates copyright
Sophistication misses -- cartoon clipart that doesn't suit content or audience
Overused clipart
Graphics and layout that are too regimented or cliché
Too many fonts
Too many different font sizes making material hard to read
Font sized to emphasize wrong elements, e.g., huge page numbers
Border outlines that unnecessarily separate or distract from content
Missing borders and separators that make columnar data easy to read
Layout -- table or page that spreads text too wide for easy reading
Text too close to edges
?

Project Wrap-Up

2008-01-09T01:00:00.000-05:00

I want to wrap up our project list that took us through the end of 2007. There were actually some other projects we were/are involved in, but they deserve more space, and are part of a bigger news item that I'll go into in the next posting. I will say that I'm working under a new banner with a partner and a new name, Scher Progression LLC. We'll keep the Instructional Systems Design Services (ISDS) domain going, but this is a new and improved animal. So on with the wrap-up! [Cool graphic effect--the steam is actually text from recorded narration. Used in communications course.]

Whew, what a year! I ended up moving between being an ISD, eLearning consultant, and online facilitator. On the design side, we wrapped up the realtor's project by upgrading, modularizing, and "internationalizing" their instructor-led course into programs about business planning, marketing, negotiation strategies, and working with clients. I can honestly say that the next time I'm buying or selling a house it will be with new eyes. Working with international consultant Ed Hatch was very intesting--he's an inspiring trainer. [We embedded Flash interactions in the WBT courses.]

Added to these four courses were two pavements courses for NHI-audiences, one for Web-conferencing delivery and the other for classroom, a blended Web-conference and Web-based (synch group and asynch self-study) communications course, and a train-the-trainer classroom course, to round out the ISD work. [Courses had very strong visual elements.]

The year also saw projects involving online facilitation of three three-month NHI "Sandbox" courses (Adobe Connect and Presenter platforms). We finished up by developing an eLearning strategy for APICS, a major operations management certification organization. They brought us on for a follow-up project creating their eLearning standards.

More to come!

Projects In the News

2007-03-08T21:27:00.000-05:00

Usually, I keep notes and thoughts here that help me with projects, but I've had a chance to work on some interesting projects and people lately and wanted to keep track of them. So here's the latest in ISDS news:

Sell Them Thar Houses
We were excited to team up with The Rochelle Organization again. Our project this time is to upgrade and streamline four days of content for the Council of Residential Specialists. The workshops, Business Planning and Marketing, Effective Buyer Sales Strategies, Listing Strategies for the Residential Specialist are part of the six core courses required for the CRS Realtor designation. These folks rank among the top realtors in the country!

NHI eLearning Sandbox
We are facilitating a very fun online project with five groups of engineers for the National Highway Institute. They are using a hands-on approach to teaching online. A learning path is mapped out for participants to learn Adobe Connect and Adobe Presenter. The program includes demonstrations, virtual room group work and creating a one-hour pilot class for a real audience. Though they are exposed to both WCT and WBT, participants decide what type of course they will author. The program was founded under Debbie Qwaltney, of the Federal Highways Administration,and senior instructional designer Susan MacDonald Osborn. ISDS was very excited to be chosen to continue the program.

Just Try to Say That Fast!
We're providing senior ISD review for the Dallas office of FUGRO Consultants, Inc. (Nederlands) for their course Analysis of New and Rehabilitated Pavement Performance with Mechanistic-Empirical Design Guide Software. Our role is ensure that good learning principles and strong interaction is built into the course. Subject matter experts and developers Mark Gardner and Katie Hall really know their pavement!

Another Fine Blend
We just completed our high-level design plan for adapting an instructor-led workshop to a blended learning Web Conference (WCT) and Web Training (WBT) approach. The course, Effective Communications In A Public Involvement Campaign, has teamed us up with SME Steve Moler out of San Francisco. This promises to be a very interesting project!

Happy Twenty-Oh-Seven! Sheer Audacity

2007-01-09T22:38:00.000-05:00

We finally crossed over from writing 2007 on schedules and budgeting projections, to "live and in person" real meetings. Hope 2006 and New Years were good to you. Just to catch up, here's what I've been up to lately.

I've been working/playing with some cool applications lately. In December, I had a chance to get back to some digital recording and sound editing using the open source program Audacity. It's functions and interface are almost identical to other apps I've used so the transition was very easy.

Rather than go into a full-scale article on recording, I'll focus on one important aspect of the audio work; clean-up. Here's the technique for Audacity. Highlight a blank section of the wav file to sample room noise, breaths, etc. The first pass of the noise reduction effect creates a profile of this "noise. Set the amount of clean-up you think you'll need the program to use in its profile. This is for searching and removing the noise across the wav file. Unfortunately, you may get some squirrely electronic noise as a side effect.

My cohort at the time was talented designer Michael Heroux, who suggested a nice noise reduction approach. Since the annoying electronic sound is most apparent in the pauses between words, simply select these "spaces" and set the volume level to minus 10. This avoids the sudden drop-off of a true silence, and softens everything selected to a natural point. Geekin'!

By the way, the context for this work was a series of rapid development projects for Fannie Mae. These e-Learning projects included awareness training for some of their internal systems, Sarbanes-Oxley Compliance, and E-Learning guidelines. The guidelines were in the form of a quick start guide they could give to perspective internal clients. Platform tools were Articulate, Articulate Quiz Maker, PowerPoint, and Audacity. (I'll get into Articulate in the next blog. In the mean time here's the link for Audacity. I had the best luck with Audacity's alternate Site.).

Let me leave this cool insightful quote that certainly describes the ISD approach and interactive Socratic teaching:
"...a master is not someone who already knows the answers and has the solutions but someone who is able to ask worthwhile questions and direct the process of learning, problem solving and creativity to form new maps of the world that lead to useful new answers and possibilities." Modeling With NLP, p 16, Robert Dilts.

508 Accessibility and ELearning

2006-10-26T01:23:00.000-04:00

Top 10 Accessibility design rules for e-learning

1. Images: Use alt text to describe all static elements, such as graphics, icons, graphic text.
2. Multimedia: Provide captioning and transcripts of audio, and descriptions of video.
3. Hypertext links: Use text that makes sense out of context. For example, avoid ‘click here’.
4. Page organization: Use headings, lists, and consistent structure. Use CSS for layout and style.
5. Graphs & charts: Summarize or use the longdesc attribute.
6. Frames: Use the noframes element and meaningful titles.
7. Tables: Make line-by-line reading sensible – summarize.
8. Questions: Avoid ‘difficult’ screen types, such as drag and drop.
9. Punctuation: Meet requirements of screen readers, e.g. full stops at the end of all bullet points.
10. Keyboard: Ensure clickable elements can be controlled via keyboard, e.g. Tab cycles and Enter.

For more detail, visit www.section508.gov.

WBT Audio Strategies and TextAloud Voice Synthesis

2006-10-18T00:03:00.000-04:00

One of my clients wants to use audio in their Web-based training. Audio can improve the accessibility of the self-study, whether WBT or CDROM, and spices up a program. The program should have a visual element allowing learners to set their own pace. Also, a learner should be able to complete and continue through a screen before the audio is completed. It's about learner control.

I've used different audio strategies that include professional narrators, directly capturing subject matter experts (SMEs) talking about their subjects, and self-recording. The pros are expensive, but can actually save you money with their experience and efficiency--not to mention the slicker product. Sometimes we can get too slick. Recording SMEs in the field, on the job site, or over a conference set-up can be cheaper, and offers content validity with working audiences. This is one of our "Blair Witch" rapid course development techniques.

Another technique is voice synthesis. I recently tested a popular voice-to-text program called TextAloud from
Next-Up.com.

I was interested in using it to speed up development for an audio component in the WBT portions of a course. The program can be used to read email, stocks, news, documents, or in our case teaching scripts.

One very nice feature of the program is that it can reside in the background. If you come across some text, say in a PowerPoint or Word document and try to copy it, TextAloud pops up and asks if you want to include this for voicing. Once you have the text you want for audio, you save the piece as an "article." This basically creates a Wave file to use in your programming.

The default voice is named Mary. She sounds very human, but is too robot-like for anything longer than a sentence. I reviewed, some higher quality voices that are compatible with the program. These are very credible synthesized voices from other companies such as AT&T, NeoSpeech, and Acapela. The NeoSpeech voices really stood out, quality-wise, to me. They're quite affordable at $35 each and I recommend buying and alternating a female and male voice. The Next-Up.com voice engine (to run these voices) is only $24.95. This approximately $100 is considerably cheaper than a professional narrator or consultant.

My next step was to bring the audio to my WBT. I used Breeze Presenter and Meeting, but the same approach would apply to similar platforms such as Articulate. These programs convert standard PowerPoint to Flash files (SWFs). These work very well on the Web. By the way, these PowerPoints don't have to be the classic four-line bullet points that you see in most meetings. Think of them presenting material as an interactive book on a person's screen.

The downside is that adding audio to a moderately lengthy WBT text section requires bandwidth and disc space. One page of synthesized audio at 16 kHz produced a 4.3 Meg Wave file. Converting the file to an MP3 took it down to 495kb. I created a 10 slide PowerPoint using this small file on every page. Audio compression was good, but the published Breeze folder was 3.5 Meg. Without audio, the folder size was 467kb. Quite a difference! The decision to use this approach on our project is now in the hands of my client. I let you know in a future blog how it goes. By the way, sometime when I have time, I might do a real product showdown, but this quick exploration answered out questions. Good luck in your own audio WBT work.

Summertime and What Was that About Living?

2006-09-26T00:24:00.000-04:00

Happy Autumn! "The Living" might have been hard, but things were really hoppin' around here. I thought I should include our old news site content so we wouldn't lose it with the new Blogger format.

August 2006

Instructor Develop. Course for WCT Pilot

ISDS Principal Mark Scher was asked to participate in the National Highway Institute's pilot Instructor Development Course for WCT.
WCT, or Web Conference Training, brings learning to the desktops of employees. This increases the reach of training opportunities at a lower cost. WCT is typically characterized by brief, targeted, and task-based learning.

"This was WCT performance-based learning and a great experience. During the sessions, I participated in the real-time (synchronous) online Web conferences and explored a series of short on-demand (asynchronous). It was exciting to see some of the work I had developed on project for NHI sampled and instructed during the course. This was very valuable feedback for me as a designer," Mark explained.

The sessions culminated in teach-backs critiqued by fellow participants and senior ISDers Susan McDonald Osborn and Thomas Elliott. His teach-back was enthusiastically received, which was great validation from respected peers.

Some especially good beneficial results from the course meant registration in FHWAís online Community of Practice for WCT Facilitators. We will also partner with NHI as a WCT Facilitator as part of their initiative to build workforce capabilities in the highway transportation industry.

Met with FHWA and experts for design review meeting with John McFadden, Geometric Design & Safety Engineer, Dean Larsen, Safety Engineer, Tom Elliott, NHI ISD Project Manager

July 2006

Outside the Box Design Award

ISDS Principal Mark Scher received a surprise award from senior NHI Staff. The recognition was for his design and development work creating the eLearning course Principles and Practices for Enhanced Maintenance Management Systems. Originally an instructor-led course, the project revised and converted existing PowerPoint material to an interactive, blended learning approach.

Learners participated in subject matter expert-facilitated sessions, ebook self-guided study, and interactive activities. This course awards continuing education credit. The target audience for this course includes State and local maintenance engineers, maintenance supervisors, asset managers, and their industry counterparts. In particular, individuals who are responsible for directing and managing maintenance operations and budgets, maintenance project and treatment selection, and/or the monitoring of system conditions.

"Distance learning design for technical courses is a lot of fun. Though our typical learner in this course is in a supervisory capacity, we knew that the people would come from different regions, have varying experiences, diverse educational backgrounds, and different levels of computer skills. The age range alone runs approximately from 25 to 60 years old. All of this makes for a challenging design, and is why we like designing these programs in the first place. "The folks at Adnet and the National Highway Institute are a particularly great group for collaboration, and I really appreciate their recognition of the quality of our work," said Mark Scher.

PowerPoint eLearning Conference

I know, I know...PPT and eLearning go together like, oh, let me see, well, maybe they don't. At least I wouldn't have thought so until we redesigned and converted the huge NHI instructor-led courses. People ended up really liking them, wanting more, and this is the best part--the courses don't look like PPT slides! Turns out our ISD brother and sisters out there are doing a fair amount of development using PPT as a platform and then moving it to the Web using Breeze, Articulate, and Captivate. We participated in the ELearning Guild's Online Forums "Converting Classroom and PowerPoint Content to e-Learning." We picked up some great ideas and will be blogging more on this.

Donna's Silent Movie

Congratulations to Mudpuddle Creations, one of our favorite graphic design collaborators. They participated in Baltimore's annual 48 Hour Film Project. Given the genre of Silent Film, they storyboarded, shot, post-production edited, and created a classic silent film theme-based music score accompaniment. They completed their six minute masterpiece from start to finish in a weekend. You can view the piece as a streaming Flash video at:

www.mudpuddlecreations.com/silentmovie.html

June 2006

Fran Scher, PhD Receives MBA and ASQ

Now this is really an achievement and we are especially proud to report that Fran Scher achieved two major career milestones, and almost back-to-back. Though holding down a demanding full-time position, she completed her Masters of Business Administration from Johns Hopkins. As her capstone project, she and her group won a competition against all other Hopkins MBA teams. The competition required business research, analyses, and recommendations for increasing Sun Trust Bank's commercial industry position from fifth place to third. Their approach, presented to, and selected by, a panel of the president and other VIPs from the bank, was enthusiastically received.

As if this honor was not enough, Dr. Scher followed another path and fulfilled the requirements for an ASQ-Certified Quality Engineer. This is a significant level of recognition of professionals who have demonstrated an understanding of and commitment to quality techniques and practices in their job and career. This certification is from the American Society for Quality and allows individuals to use "ASQ CQE" on their business cards and professional correspondence. For more information visit

www.asq.org/certification/quality-engineer/.