Lessons From Sean Penn’s El Chapo Interview on the Importance of SMEs

When news broke that Sean Penn interviewed the infamous drug kingpin El Chapo for Rolling Stone, it didn’t take long for professional writers to speak up about how they felt about it. Journalists from the Washington Post, New York Times, and many more noted how dangerous this move was on Penn’s part—and how many professional…

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How to Storyboard eLearning Courses

Think of a storyboard for an eLearning course like a comic strip: Each frame tells a part of a larger story and moves the course along. Without a storyboard, your course can be all over the place. It would look a little something like this: Lesson 1! Irrelevant interactive game! Lesson 5! Pop quiz! Matching…

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How to Simplify Technical Language in eLearning

As someone who lives and breathes eLearning, you probably feel comfortable with terms like ‘Authoring Tool’ and ‘LMS.’ But when you go to a client or meet with executive leadership to explain what you’ll be doing when you design the eLearning course—you get some blank stares…and a lot of questions. The technical language means nothing…

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The Three Ps for Managing a Successful eLearning Project: Part 2

Part Two: Managing People In part one of this series, we talked about the performance expectations that define the scope and general objectives for a successful eLearning project. Now we’re going to look at the many different experts that have to come together to make an effective and interactive training resource. Today’s focus: P =…

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How Can I Make My eLearning Course More Engaging?

When it comes to eLearning, the main focus should always be on learner experience. Why? Because even the best content and subject matter expert you can find can’t fix a poor learning experience. When learners can’t easily navigate material, digest information, and use the features you’ve built in, all your development work goes to waste….

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5 Ways to Make Scenario-Based eLearning More Effective

Have you ever wondered, “Isn’t there a better way to approach this eLearning course? Are people really getting enough out of what we’re teaching?” If you’ve asked yourself these questions, you might want to consider using scenarios. Sometimes this can be intimidating to some people. Almost everyone realizes that a standard content dump is not…

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Incorporating Storyboard Examples Using Branched Scenarios

We love to write eLearning content that leverages story-telling and scenarios as much as possible. Scenarios don’t work in all situations, but when they do, they help engage learners in ways standard monologue presentations never will. Each of the last couple years we’ve spoken at a local conference, the Chicago eLearning Showcase, and presented various…

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A Tale of Two Seminars: FUN Compliance Training and Virtually Real Conversations

For six years now, ThinkingKap has been speaking at the Chicago eLearning and Technology Showcase, and this year was no different. In addition to the TK booth we had set up, we presented two separate sessions: Fun Compliance Training – More Than Just Checking The Box and Maximize eLearning Engagement by Converting Narration Scripts into Interactive Dialog….

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