There tends to be a mentality that doing your best is good enough (at least that’s what my mom told me when I got a C average in algebra), but what if your background was in finance, and someone asked you to develop a training course on accrual VS. Cash based accounting? Does it make sense that someone nearly-qualified to be a SME (Subject Matter Expert), is handling instructional design? And further still, does it make sense to give that same person access to a rapid-development platform to build out the actual course?

Many people are great at what they do, but if I’ve learned one thing as a small business owner, it’s when to call it quits. I don’t repair my own car, I hire a mechanic… I don’t clean the office bathroom (oh wait.. yes I do.. bad example)… I don’t do my own taxes, I pay my CPA. Knowing your limitations as a large corporation can be tough. Bureaucracy plays a roll, as does boredom. Sometimes jobs are spread too thin over multiple employees, which is when it’s deemed a good idea to take on the roll as eLearning developer for the day. And of course if your manager/superior orders you to do something, you pretty much have to do it whether you’re qualified or not. The biggest reason I’ve seen that large corporations try and handle eLearning development in house is to save money.

If a contractor cost $2,000 to write a script in three days, which resulted in 85% knowledge retention, focused goals and a memorable experience, how would that equate to an employee costing $178 in hours to develop the same script? Does that employee have the right expertise to laser-target the right action items? Are they more likely to bend under the pressure of upper management to “put that 40 page flow diagram back into the course… now!” Is having 40% knowledge retention worth the time it took to train those employees?

I personally love being on the outside. Although there’s the chance we piss someone off, our honesty is generally accepted and appreciated. We’re more likely to stand up for the integrity of the course content and quality development as our job/employment isn’t at risk (don’t get me wrong, losing a client would suck, but if your goal is to help them succeed, this generally doesn’t happen.)

When a large corporation hires a specialist to handle their training development, they get the immediate benefit of an outsider looking in. I know it’s a lot easier for me to pick out someone else’s flaws than it is to recognize my own, and this directly applies to in-house development VS. hiring a specialized contactor. We can quickly assess the need, propose a plan of action and immediately begin research and development. When you need us, we’re there, when you don’t need us, we go away. No need to become a training business with a five person staff on payroll when your company focus is on parts distribution. Do what you do best, and when you recognize your limitations, hiring out can become a great opportunity for both cost savings and business growth.

When someone mentions the word ‘corporate’ to you, what comes to mind? Vibrant colors, creativity, innovation, daring ingenuity, humor? Chances are, if you’re like me, you’ll think of the color blue, numerous managers, bureaucracy and long revision processes. These aren’t wholly bad things, they just seem to come with the territory. For the most part the training produced by such organizations mimic the same attitude of safe, boring and looooooong paragraphs (sort of like this one) explaining 19 points of interest over each 10 minute slide. I remember a teller at my bank asking me what I do for a living, so I told her we create custom training… She sighed, put her head down and mumbled something under her breath that probably wasn’t pleasant, referring to her own experience. This certainly isn’t the response I’d want. Training should always have the potential to educate, engage and entertain!

Notice how I don’t use names or point fingers here, that’s because I’m not trying to get into trouble… I’d just like to stress that when everyone gets their way, and all voices are heard (in other words, no single individual is in charge) messages blur and focus is lost. The end user, generally the employees or clients of such a company are the victims… told to drudge through countless screens of information no one could ever realistically retain in time for the post test.

The point? Corporate doesn’t have to equal a mind numbing experience, but that sure is a simple statement for what is in reality a very complex environment. Fifteen people all trying to simply get a job done on a tight deadline does not leave room for creativity – the job just has to get done. But chances are you’ll end up with an already dated approach to ‘training’ where little to no education takes place, in other words, a waste of money. But who’s going to care? It’s not their personal money, it’s the corporation’s. Not only that but you’ve been ordered to get that money spent by a specific date or it disappears!

You may be thinking ‘don’t be silly, just take the money and do the job’. But this is my point of view: I’m passionate about bringing a true memorable educational experience to any topic, with any team, on budget and on time. There isn’t a single topic out there that can’t be approached in a creative way given a few days and medium sized budget needed for that training to be a success. Humor costs just as much to write as boring corporate-speak. Memorable photos in off-beat situations cost just as much to purchase as that collage of multi-ethnic business people standing in a line that I see on 50% of all eLearning development company home pages. My biggest suggestion of all would be this: Would you rather have a 100 minute long course where 10% of the training is grudgingly remembered, or a set of ten, 10 minute courses, on topic with memorable interactions and goals where 60% of all information is retained in digestible chunks. It’s like comparing a five hour long staring contest to a slap in the face out of nowhere. One is brief, memorable, and with a little work actually helps your corporation grow and thrive, as opposed to wasting time and money.

If I’ve learned anything over the years, constructive honesty isn’t always appreciated, but it’s definitely the best policy. This is true with my family, my co-workers, my contractors and my clients. We’re all in it together, and if you’re successful, we’re successful.

Finally, the sweet smell of victory! With long five hour days and relaxing nights, determined to meet our lack of goals and making it up as we went along, We’re proud to announce:

TOTAL MONSTER DESTRUCTION!

Take on an entire city of passive aggressive inhabitants as no one fights off your giant laser attack! Upload a photo of a friend or hated enemy, make up your own monster name and choose one of three exciting monsters: Roboto… The Slime or El Chupacabra!

Fast paced action mixed with a stunning custom soundtrack from our friends at www.scorechamber.com makes one intense monster destruction game! Send links to your grandma, send links to your kids, just send some links!!

Start your game at: http://clearlytrained.com/games/tmd/ today!

After a bit of a summer slow down, things are beginning to pick up around here with some of the most exciting projects we’ve seen to date!

On our plate is a little bit of everything from an interactive autopsy (yes.. you’ll get to poke a cadaver), nano-fiber engineering, fire safety and workplace collaboration skills to name a few. If there’s one thing I love about this sort of business, it’s that every new job is so entirely different from the last one – there’s rarely time to get tired of a topic.

As far as time lines are concerned, I have no idea, but everything is in the works. Hopefully by late this year/early next some of these projects will be available online to share.

Ahh, many know of my career’s origins, my true love around the ages of 10-13 – it was a little game company called LucasArts, and they made some of the best action adventures ever to land on a computer screen.

Monkey Island, the first and the best!

Reading through Ron Gilbert’s blog: the Grumpy Gamer (this guy was one of the original creators of ‘Monkey Island’), he had announced the release of early 1990’s era point and click classics such as Loom, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, and many others to Valve’s online Steam system. While originally used to sell virtual copies of Half Life and Half Life 2, Steam has become a great library of online games & game media (over 1,500 so far), allowing companies who can’t afford to pay publishers to sell their wares.

Loom - a short game but heavy on plot and character development

When I first played some of these games, I was floored.. the level of detail in the story, the non-linear gaming, the cause and effect action in the plot and the great characters all came together to form a memorable and life changing experience. I can only think of a few games in the last 8 years that have stuck with me as being fond memories, but nothing tops the nostalgia and thrill of those old classics 19 or so years after first playing them.. now that’s staying power.

Monkey Island 2, where else can you row a coffin through a swamp?

Those games got me interested in interaction, game development, character animation, story and plot, which in turn pointed me to a life in eLearning and educational games. I’m simply happy that a new generation of kids and adults now has instant access to these games, and might possibly get inspired the same way I did back in the day.

Has anyone ever told you a skill was worthless, or you’d never need to do that, so why bother?  Well, for the last few weeks we’ve been doing a rather daunting project on the side, all for the sake of pushing our limits and learning new things. When I stand back and look at the results so far, I’m wondering how it relates to this company, our portfolio or anything having to do with training… the short answer is.. it doesn’t.  But, there’s always a bright site to digression – sometimes you stumble upon things you never knew were possible simply because you became curious.

A very rough draft

The project idea initially was to create a sushi-eating interaction, where you could take on the role of a person shoveling various types of sushi into their mouth. Over three weeks it went from that into a giant monster attack destruction game, where users control laser eyeballs of a giant robot, slime, or chupacabra as it destroyed the giant 3d city.

We built the 3D city next

Everything we’re working on is animated with programming, or scripted particle effects, combined with the user ability to upload a photo of whoever, and place it into the giant menacing monster to add some humor and a personal touch – all of which can be saved and sent to a friend.

Here you can upload a photo, rotate and resize, change your monster's name, and choose what monster you'd like

The further we get into this project the more complex ideas pop up, and the more we seem to learn. So besides the fact there’s nothing you can learn from blowing up cars with a laser beam, we’re now more proficient in database management, file saving and uploading, email integration, action script programming and file compression. On the creative end we also managed to design the entire city with Swift 3D – modeling and lighting our way to a miniature city look and feel that couldn’t be created in Flash alone.

Put them all together and you get some exciting results!

Sometimes it’s just nice to try something off topic and a little different. We’ll launch a working version in a week or so, until then.. I’ve got some rubble to draw.

Earlier this week we wrapped up and launched Edheads Design a Cell Phone activity at www.edheads.org. With the help of Motorola, as well as the Ohio State University College of Engineering we approached the idea of getting girls interested in Engineering careers.

It ends up, boys like to blow things up, build things, work with machines, while girls tend to stay away, but for what reason? The activity uses the idea that we can use design and engineering to help people (in this case senior citizens), not just give them something cool to look at.  In the end with the right product we can better their lives.

Edheads Engineering - Design a Cell Phone

Creating the activity was a short but rewarding process – we created a design application where users can build a near infinite number of different phone styles using our 100% script based phone builder. We had to put the breaks on certain aspects to fit the activity, but overall it’s a very intuitive and rewarding feature which has already been used 97,000 times in the first week since launch (based on our lesson tracking data).

Through the process we worked along side Ohio State, as well as Motorola engineers to create a situation where the user needs to not only research and design, but listen to consumer feedback in order to get the best sales results. If you ignore the research you won’t know what sort of phone to build, and chances of being successful go down quite a bit.

Interview the senior citizens

This is the first non linear activity we’ve built for Edheads, and it’s already proving its educational value based on user testing, critiques and overall response. For some additional information on the launch, check out The Ohio State Engineering news site for a little blurb on the project. Motorola also has a bit of info on their overall educational initiative used to help fund the project at their news site.

Engineering Sales Results

We have many more engineering project topics to explore, it’s just a matter of time and funding – next up starting late July we begin ‘Nanotech’ – something to do with fabrics, but that’s all I can say.

All joking aside, we’ve spent some time redoing our entire portfolio of eLearning, training and educational game samples to show a bigger variety of our work in a more enticing format.

Great creativity and design sells itself, and we excited to show off a set of clear categories, larger visuals to ogle, and many more projects to view.

Be sure to check out the new character design, 3D and illustration sections as well! Although not commonly found services within an eLearning development company, these services are a great addition to any simulation or game and help smack your users in the face with entertaining visuals!

Over the last 11.5 years of developing eLearning for the full range of humans (1st grade on up to corporate and elderly) I’ve gotten to experience a wide variety of situations, scripts, content and end results.

The thing that struck me as odd along the way was how the larger the corporation is, the more project managers they have on board debating the content of a course, the easier things get for the end user. For some reason plot points disappear (too hard to follow), humor is erased and sterilized (you’re going to offend that one person out of 20,000 – so everyone else will have to be bored and disengaged as opposed to entertained with a memorable learning experience) and complexity is added back in (well, if they’re not going to be entertained, we should at least cram in all 75 pages worth of content into that single slide and lock the next button so they don’t have a choice but to read).

I was talking to Matt my developer yesterday, and we agreed that if the user really hates what they’re going through, they’ll find a way to ignore the content, skip the slides and in the end they always have the option of clicking the little X/close button on the browser window. To think that we, as educators, don’t also need to entertain and make it a priority always amazez me. 

When peter Jackson made lord of the rings, his point wasn’t forcing plot retention and memorization of the books, but to slim them down, prioritize entertaining and action packed moments, bring out the true essence and emotion of a broad and lengthy concept – in other words – make it accessible to the general public without them feeling the writer/director was  treating them as brain dead, unable to grasp complex ideas.

I’ve always though an analogy, whether visual or spoken (as a story) goes a long way towards helping the average person understand complex ideas. We use this over and over in our Edheads.org projects – take hard to teach concepts and make the accessible to the average user. We open doors by using a set of hand drawn animated characters, in bright non-intimidating fun environments. Once users feel welcome, they open their minds to the activity and really begin to learn. We ask them questions, suggest open discussions and let them take it from there.

In comparison, corporate level projects tend to use visuals of multi-raced adults standing on white backgrounds, or someone in a cubicle hard at work.. it’s almost too realistic and definitely not a fun and engaging visual to entice your employees. Setting an analogy outdoors, telling a story through a mythical character, using light humor that can’t possibly offend will only make people pay more attention. Once you have their attention, you can begin to layer on the challenges.

When a learner is disengaged, the chances of them wanting to solve a problem are slim.. they might poke around at it but in the end they really don’t care. Entice that same learner into story with mildly dramatic plot points.. you’re saving the company form disaster.. you’re helping people overcome a problem, you’re negotiating a sale with a virtual customer… suddenly there’s another aspect, usually character driven that looks back at the user and spurs them on to conquer the challenge. This is something that no number of multiple choice tests will accomplish.. I can tell you i barely passed my SATs.. got a D- on my algebra exams, and thought overall a C average was great. Now as an adult I use algebra on a daily basis when programming, use problem solving skills and a whole lot of real world experience when building my companies and completing jobs.

In the end, there’s a reason people cringe when they have to sit down in a sound proof room with a camera over their shoulder when taking some eLearning certification test.. it’s not fun and brings back haunting memories of high school. We have the potential to truly teach people these days, sure it might take a little longer to develop and cost a bit more.. but would you rather spend $5,000 on a course that people forget, retaining no information what-so-ever, or spend $12,000 on a course where people spread the word on how fun it was to learn a concept, actually got buzzed about the learning experience and looked forward to the next course. Suddenly you have an engaged employee, open to learning, happy and excited about solving the next challenge that comes their way. Motivation is a powerful tool, it’s just a shame how often the opportunities to motivate are passed up, and in return we can expect some mediocre results.

All I can say is it’s worth it.. the effort, the time, the cost. Look at Brain surgery on Edheads.. One month went by with no marketing, no one forcing anyone to use it, and we’ve had over 1,000,000 unique users, word of mouth and a great response overall. It is possible to create this in the corporate world, it just takes some additional effort.

We just wrapped up a rather large project for an unnamed client involving about 16 one to four minute videos of the client speaking about a process. Our task was to import and compress the videos on an alpha channel, then time them to animated reveals, drawings and bullet points over time – and it needed to be exact.

Flash is a little tricky when it comes to this sort of thing… choose a single wrong export setting when making your .flv file and you waste three hours figuring out what went wrong (I’m talking about 3 gig video files being compressed into 4 meg .flvs.. it takes a while!).  For instance, if you thought importing the video into the .FLA timeline sounded like a good idea, it may be but only if the file was less than 25 seconds long. After that the audio track either speeds up or slows down and the visuals of not only your flash animation, but the person talking in the video itself become out of sync.

So understanding the above, and that we should use .FLV (external flash movie files) and import them into our eLearning template, we thought we had it figured out. The odd thing was, was that the audio and video might be in sync, but the timing of the main timeline visuals was completely random. We’d test the file once, and everything (bullets, animations) would time up perfectly. Test it again, and suddenly only the first bullet was well timed, the rest was completely off, sometimes by as much as 5 seconds. It was random, things like deleting a single frame would throw everything off.. even clicking a key frame would shift everything around.. it was very buggy looking.

The way I see it, the video is on an independant timeline, and once I thought of it that way I assumed that the video was playing as fast as it could, and the flash timeline was playing as fast as it could, and every once in a while they’d sync up, which wasn’t good enough.

The solution was to glue the video to the timeline, while still keeping the .flv files external. The way we went about doing this was importing a silent 1 second audio clip, adding a layer, then set it to loop, and stream for the entirety of the video file and main timeline.

Just like the difference between event and stream sounds, the streaming sound basically embeds everything on the flash timeline down into a permanent visual/audio experience. It makes the file sizes a little larger, and degrades the quality just a bit, but in the end you get a flawless timing of and external video file and an internal timeline animation.