This is Why Freelancers Need Floaties

This week’s Articulate E-Learning Heroes Challenge is to create a photo collage that tells a story.

I’ve just gotten home from a (great!) week at the E-Learning Guild’s Learning Solutions Conference in Orlando, and the theme that kept coming up was freelancing. Not just in sessions, but in countless random conversations, and I found myself offering a lot of advice to hopeful freelancers.

I Smell a Theme

So because there’s only so much space in my head and this is the topic currently on tap in there, my photo collage story this week is about a guy who wants to freelance. The points I’ve included are a summary I quickly put together for this piece, but it’s similar to what I was sharing all week.

The Story

If I’m going to tell a story, I need a starting point. So I overlaid our (miserable) hero on top of the rest of the photo collage so that I could establish his yearning-to-go-freelance motivation. The underlying photos and their content, each of which reveals a portion of our hero’s journey, can be visited in any order. And of course you get to see the result of his efforts at the end.

Visual Design

I kept the visual design pretty simple. The photos are framed in a pseudo-Polaroid fashion. The caption font on the top photo is Dawning of a New Day. The title font on the pop-ups is Swiss921 BT, and the main pop-up font is Candy Round BTN Condensed.

I reused a beach and palm tree from a recent post about freelancing, mostly because I wanted the tree for the end scene.

And I reused poor Ian again. I’ve forced that poor man into service as an airline pilot and a beer-guzzling traveler in recent weeks and wanted to give him a rest, but I needed someone who could fit into the outfit at the end, and he had the perfect figure. (Sorry, guy.)

Storyline Design

When clicked, each photo in the collage pops up on a slide layer with more info. Then I have each photo disappear after viewing it. That way I was able to set up a new layer of interest below. (Not unlike my approach to this menu.)

That interest includes having each photo, in miniature, drop down into the palm tree and hang there like an ornament. You can then click on those ornaments to review their content. I did this by adding a second slide layer for each collage photo.

And, of course, I had to show Ian’s transformation after he’d followed his own plan, but I could only show that after all photos had been viewed. To do this, I created a variable for each photo. After all of them have been visited, Ian and his final outfit are triggered to appear.

See the Result!

You can see Ian in all his freelance glory here.

I’ve not had this happen before with Storyline, but I found I got very erratic results in getting Ian to show up at the end when viewing the published files. I published to Web and included HTML5 and Articulate Mobile Player on iPad output.

Ian always came in just fine when viewed on the iPad – but on Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari it would sometimes work and sometimes not – even after endless rounds of cache clearing.

But I’m hopeful you’ll see Ian at the end just fine. Enjoy!

A Story Resource I Can Love

Today, Sunday morning, in the middle of coming up with a story to draw learners in, motivate them, and act as the framework for a new course, I took a break to see what was up in the paper.

Lucky for me, there was an article in the Wall Street Journal about using storytelling to do all of the things I need it to do, plus a whole lot more. The article, by Dennis Nishi, is To Persuade People, Tell Them a Story, about using stories to make the impact you want.

In it, he mentions corporate trainer Paul Smith’s book Lead with a Story: A Guide to Crafting Business Narratives That Captivate, Convince, and Inspire.

Clearly the WSJ’s Dennis Nishi knows how to tell a good story, since it took me no time at all to purchase and download Mr. Smith’s book. And though I haven’t had a chance to savor every word yet (hey – I’m working, here!) some of the things I’m crazy about right off the bat are:

• It’s from a business perspective. My courses hit learners where theory (“this is what you should do”) meets reality (“this is what the sales department is going to say about that”). The more I can make my stories reflect reality as I present the theory, the more valuable the courses will be.
• He organizes them into workplace challenges and themes.
• He includes “ready-to-tell” stories you can adapt for your own uses.
• His final chapter walks you through how to get started developing your own stories, where to go for inspiration, where and how to deliver them, and more.
• His appendix includes a very simple Story Structure Template, a Story Elements Checklist, and a Story Matrix that sorts his stories by theme, elements, etc. (The matrix doesn’t render very clearly on iPad or PC, but it’s usable with some effort.)

Though directed to a business audience, this is a simple, clear, and inspiring book that can easily help trainers, including e-learning designers such as myself, quickly find the structure and creative spark they need to develop stories that can make a real impact.

Well, my break is definitely over by now, so it’s back to that story…

Tell Me a Story!

Learners love stories. The reason even old-school boring PowerPoint-laden instructor-led training can be mesmerizing is because the trainer is someone who brings real-life experiences that matter – to life.

So it’s no mystery that adding engaging stories to the rather sterile world of e-learning is a big plus for learners. Once they’ve been captured by a character they can follow, be surprised by, relate to, and/or learn from – they’re hooked.

I’ve been developing a couple of courses this week, and in both I’ve introduced a main character up front and used them as the framework for the trainings. The most entertaining part has been developing characters for a sexual harassment course. It’s clearly not an amusing topic, but bringing the “villain” to life has been an awful lot of fun, and the learner has a far better chance of remembering the (boooooooring) content by relating it to a character. (You’re welcome, learners!)

Cammy Bean from Kineo does a great job of giving examples of storytelling and use of character in her “Yawn-Proof Your E-Learning” presentation, a version of which you can probably find online if you take a look around. I highly recommend taking a look.