1. Describing the Target Audience
2. Objectives Writing

Target Audience Description
The Target Audience Description describes the key characteristics of the learners that you’re designing instruction for. It assists in the selection of objectives, examples, terminology, typical work practices, and cultural issues.

Typical headings include:

• Age
• Gender
• Culture – organizational / ethnic / socio-economic
• First and other languages
• Education
• Existing skills and skill sets
• Professional and life experience
• Values
• Motivators
• Interests
• Taboos
• Current job
• Career history

An effective approach to elicit this information is to ask the SME to describe someone he knows who would be a typical audience member: what kinds of things would that person relate, react, and respond to?

Understanding organizational culture is important from the perspective of gaining learner acceptance when developing customized training.  The instructional designer should find out about vocabulary/argot, typical topics of conversation, clichés, conversation buzzwords, TLAs, corporate beliefs, do’s and don’ts, examples of successful and unsuccessful people and performance; speed of organizational feedback, and symbols (logos, mission statement, mottos etc).  Considering these factors will help paint a realistic picture of the people in the examples, scenarios and problems covered in the learning program.

Similarly (and particularly in e-learning and web-based training) there will likely be a need for a visual depiction of the audience profile – age, sex and particularly dress code (i.e. customer-facing organizations typically wear formal business clothes or uniforms, clean room production workers bunny suit).

Objectives Writing
Objectives are the key learning outcomes desired from the instruction. They emerge from the previous analyses – performance, task and goal – to provide the objectives that learners need to have mastered to perform the associated tasks competently.

Classically, instructional objectives have three elements: conditions, performance, and standards (see Table 1):

Table 1 Instructional Objectives

It’s quite common to find aims disguised as objectives in training materials. However, there is a fundamental difference between the two.  Broadly speaking, we can say that an aim (or goal) is a general statement of intent. They are not especially helpful for deciding an appropriate (1) teaching strategy or (2) assessment procedures.

Examples of aims include:
•    An awareness of the types of breakdowns electric motors are  prone to.
•    An understanding of how silicon chips are produced.
•    An appreciation of potential hazards in an industrial plant.

Objectives are precise: both learner and instructor know exactly what is required to master the learning activity. An example of an aim translated into an objective might read as follows:

The learner will, without using reference materials, draw and label accurately a use case which shows all the stages involved in a human-computer interaction.

Conditions
A performance of any kind will always have important conditions surrounding it.  The nearer these conditions can be to the actual work situation, the more accurate the objective will be.  For example, it is one thing for a worker to be able to repair a piece of  equipment in a workshop with every sort of tool available, but quite another to expect him to repair the same piece of equipment somewhere on-site, far from home base.

Conditions must be realistic.  Learners must be asked to carry out the performance objectives under normal conditions. For example, use the Hitachi Chip Etching Tool to set as a condition ‘using an electric drill’, would be pointless (and irrelevant) if there was no silicon blank, no fabrication facility, or the person concerned did not have a cleanroom space suit.

Performance
A statement of actual performance is of primary importance and is central to writing of good objectives. This performance must be an observable action of some kind.  Words and phrase such as "understand," "appreciate," "feel a sense of pride," "know," "feel deeply about," are irrelevant when deciding learning objectives. If you have any doubt about the appropriateness of a verb to describe a performance, just place the phrase "Watch me…" at the start of a sentence containing the verb.

For example,

• Watch me appreciate this piece of hardware (!)

or

• Watch me etch this 45 nanometer silicon chip processor core.

It is obvious which is the observable performance (the second one).

Standards
When developing courseware, instructional designers must consider the level or standard of the performance – how well must it be done?

For example a performance objective describing an  activity relating to some aspect of workplace safety demands a 100% standard. If a serious accident occurs, an employee won’t get a second chance to do the task more carefully.

Just as the conditions need to be defined with real, everyday situations in mind, so too do the standards. When setting the standard for an objective, always consider the level of performance required in that particular situation.

Next Time: Objectives Analysis

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Today, a source close to the ‘Grandpa Simpson of Irish Politics’ Minister for Education Batt O’Keeffe TD (yes, that really is his name) announced that the Department intends to tax the corporate sector through a levy on incorrectly answered questions in e-learning evaluations in an effort to generate money for the public purse in response to the deepening global economic crisis.

When questioned further the government source – who did not want to be named for national security reasons – elaborated on this plan, by saying that:

The e-learning sector in Ireland is doing really well, despite the downturn. There are lots of people out there using courseware over and over again, basically for free once they pay their initial fee for the content. We are looking for a way to continue to generate revenue from people every time they use a piece of e-learning. After consulting with experts, we have developed a bold and innovative approach to do this: we are going to charge learners a fee when they answer test questions incorrectly.

The government have already cut primary teacher numbers (making the student-to-teacher ratio the highest in Western Europe), and re-introduced third-level fees for the less well-off.

We are working with a number of prominent Irish e-learning providers to mandate that an extra piece of code called Reactive User Scoring Evaluations (RUSE) will be embedded in all e-learning content that will require the learner – or their company – to sign up with PayPal and the Department of Revenue so that they can be automatically charged a “failure fee” of one cent every time they answer a question wrong.

We are also collaborating with organizations like ADL/SCORM to add a new field to IMS manifest files to help us track this levy, so that when a user submits their test, the data is sent to our database. There seems to be a concern at EU level that this affects Irish citizens’ privacy and human rights, but in these tough times we have to put aside such selfish ideas and think of the greater good of the nation.

The source continued:

This has been incorrectly called a stealth tax. It’s not. We want everyone to know about it. We see this as an opportunity to monetize a previously untouched area of education, and a great way to motivate people to study even harder and answer correctly on training courses.

Frankly, if people are too stupid to get the answers right, they’re too thick to be in a job. We think that we’re doing companies a favor by letting them know how many eejits they have in their midst, which is keeping people with real skills out of employment. Based on current worker fail rates, this scheme will also net us about €6 million in the first year, which is a real sweet deal.

An opposition party spokesman stated that

this is typical of the gombeen-man ignorance in this government: everyone knows that this will fall flat on its face, much like the e-voting debacle a few years ago. I don’t know, sometimes I just despair of this crowd of wasters. They are truly unfit to hold public office in a modern democracy.

Industry insiders speculate that a move by the government to implement this program, called the Finance Act for Knowledge and Education – or FAKE – will lead to an increase in ‘unsupervised education’ and dangerous ‘free-form learning’ taking place ‘off the grid.’

One particularly gloomy respondent considered that Ireland would see a resurgence of the ‘hedge-schools’ which emerged during the Penal Laws in the 19th Century. What’s worse, it’s the kind of “innovation” that governments internationally will see as a legitimate source of tax revenue in tough times ahead.

If you want to help me stop this disaster before it’s too late, please e-mail the Secretary of the Department of Education, a Ms. Avril O’Fol at afool@deptofed.gov.ie with the e-mail header “Think of the children – stop the madness.”

It’s important that you do this today, the first of April 2009, or it will be too late.

Thank you.

______________________

Notes:

A Gombeen Man is a pejorative Hiberno-English term used in Ireland for a shady, small-time “wheeler-dealer” or businessman who is always looking to make a quick profit, often at someone else’s expense or through the acceptance of bribes.

An eejit is similarly an offensive term used in Ireland that deliberately insults somebody’s intelligence or foresight. An idiot.

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We can all appreciate the potential of m-learning as a component of an integrated online educational strategy in the medium- to long term. However a number of factors, encompassing everything from still-developing IT and telecoms standards and infrastructure through to the diversity of mobile devices’ capabilities has led to a situation where m-learning is still maturing as a learning channel, and is still finding its niche in the e-learning eco-system. What seems to be emerging is that mobile media devices work best as electronic performance support tools, and that some devices are more suited than others to enable people to learn and understand.

According to Gloria Gery, performance guru (2004)

Performance support enables people who don’t know what they are doing… to do [a task] as if they did.

We can say that the goal of training is to support learning – that is impart new skills and knowledge for the purpose of enhancing performance, and that the goal of performance support is to guide and improve performance directly.

With performance support, the desired outcome is performance.

Rosenberg, M. 2006. p.195

There are four benefits of performance support.

1. Makes work simpler Performance support can take the complexity out of work processes and tools. Mobile devices that can receive up-to-date support or step-by-step procedures enables already trained workers to perform faster and more effectively.
2. Provides High Scalability As digital data, performance support can be deployed to a few people or to thousands of learners. Using the wireless Web as well as 3G technologies updates in both content and features can be distributed quickly and securely. For example, an organization can pilot a mobile application to a small group of workers for UAT, and roll it out across the business (once it has proven itself) with relatively little additional effort.
3. Provides a known baseline of competencies Performance support can reduce variability in the way workers perform tasks, which improves activity performance by underpinning an individual’s judgment and decision-making abilities.
4. Allows non-experts to perform closer to the level of experts Performance support can enable individuals to perform with a similar pace and limited error rates as if they were more proficient than they actually are. Performance support can enhance the competence of an employee beyond the level of their training.

These are some of the ways that m-learning can support learners:

Audio – The original, and most basic m-learning channel, audio can range from lectures to narrated glossaries. Podcasts, popularized by the iPod, also fall into this category. In essence, if you can have an audio recording of the content, it can be deployed via the mobile environment. Common audio file types such as .mp3 and .mp4 are almost universally supported by mobile devices. Within minutes educators can have their audio-based presentations prepared and ready for delivery to learners’ mobile devices.

Video – Most modern converged media devices support video playback in at least one of the major digital formats (.mov, .mp4, .wmw, etc.). Content in this category can include lectures, presentations, interviews, visual “how-to” guides, and demos. Since the display area on mobile devices is limited, video whose content is dependent on minute visual detail or extremely complex visual representations may not transfer to the mobile environment as desired, but most video content works quite well..

Flashcards – Basic to semi-interactive flashcards are a great learning tool for the mobile environment. The range of content that can be harnessed in flashcards is vast, covering educational levels from kindergarten to graduate studies, and subjects such as math, biology, medicine, anatomy, physics, English, language, history, law, etc. Devices such as the iPhone, which have built-in image libraries and support a slideshow feature, are very well-suited for flashcards.

Quizzes – Assessments comprised of basic question types such as MCQs and true/false statements can be integrated into the mobile environment. These are great resources for pre-exam reviews or end-of-chapter quizzes. Support for assessment is found on devices that have Web capabilities.

Slideshows & Presentations – Most slideshows or presentation can be successfully deployed on a mobile platform, especially those created with programs such as Microsoft PowerPoint. These presentations can contain images, graphs, tables and even audio. This type of content is normally supported by mobile devices with video capabilities.

Glossaries – Glossaries are possible in the mobile environment in a basic static form which consists of a term, its audio pronunciation and a small accompanying definition or image. There is limited native support for glossaries, but they can be created for newer iPhones and other Web-enabled devices like RIMs BlackBerry devices, and Nokia N-series smartphones.

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Gery, G. (2004) The Moment of Need: Directly Supporting Doing, Learning, Referencing and Collaborating [Internet] Available from: http://www.google.ie/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=6&url=http%3A%2F%2Ffiles.epsscentral.info%2Fgery%2Fpresentations%2FTEMPO-ASTD.ppt&ei=fnS-SereHeS1jAfVhPirCA&usg=AFQjCNFDHBizyYVisiHD7ivB1KG-NaoRVg&sig2=ji1XqzE6dEIO84r3B1Iz7Q Accessed 12 March 2009

Rosenberg, M. J. (2006) Beyond e-Learning. San Francisco, CA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

http://elearningcurve.blogspot.com/2008/06/e-learning-ecosystem-in-organizations.html

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Now read on…

Writing this review has proven to be a much more difficult (and time-consuming) task that I had anticipated it would be; in fact, I can say that I experience a mild cognitive dissonance whenever I’m asked the question “which do you prefer (or recommend): Camtasia or Captivate?”

The answer is I don’t know. Or more accurately, I still don’t know. More on this later. Like most people (in any industry) I tend to have a single ‘weapon of choice’ for each task I undertake. Last weekend I spent some time doing some DIY around the house for example, and despite owning many screwdrivers, I always return to my trusty old Stanley DynaGrip 10, pretty much regardless of the gluing and screwing job I’m doing. Similarly when I post-produce video I use one editor – Vegas Video, when I edit audio the files are authored in SoundForge, and I use DreamWeaver to do 95% of my HTML and website- related production. But when it comes to authoring demos? Well… there I have a problem. Inevitably I run mentally run through the dialog that I am about to share with you, dear reader.

Adobe Captivate and TechSmith Camtasia Studio are similar e-learning content development tools with uniquely different strong points. If you’re creating a software demo, or a PowerPoint presentation to deliver online, Camtasia is a better application; conversely, if you’re making interactive web-based training, or a complex software demonstration, Captivate is superior is definitely the tool for the task.

Even where their functionality converges, their operating procedures and user interface are so different that each will probably appeal to different users. If (like me) your background is in media production, you’ll find Camtasia easy to learn and use, and Captivate frustrating. On the other hand, if you’re used to authoring content in PowerPoint, you’ll find Camtasia a strange, and Captivate more intuitive and fit-for-purpose.

Figure 1. Captivate UI (above), Camtasia UI (below).

[Click image to enlarge]

Beyond these, however, are certain functions at which one product excels and the other either doesn’t perform or performs quite poorly. For example, Camtasia excels at capturing streaming video content, which Captivate cannot do. If you need to ‘pan and scan’ a close-up of a screen element of the content that you’ve captured, Camtasia is your only choice. However, the reverse pertains if you’re creating a quiz – Captivate offers a much richer toolset. Similarly Captivate’s ability to generate Word or PDF versions of files for hardcopy distribution is a fantastic timesaver.

Indeed, the more you use both tools, the more you begin to realize that if you’re authoring a range of e-learning, demonstration, and presentation projects, you probably really need both .

Using Camtasia
Like most screen-capture utilities, Camtasia captures a video of the screen as you interact with it, with added audio if you enable narration, as well as Picture-in-Picture (PIP) video if you add a webcam. The resultant CAMREC output file is a recording of all of the audio, video and interaction elements. In editing mode, Camtasia enables the addition of multiple tracks for captions, breakout boxes, callouts, PIP, quizzes, and so on.

Using Captivate
Captivate works differently. Rather than capturing one multiplexed file, Captivate captures the user’s interactions as a series of screens, each containing one mouse click and movement. Very much like its progenitor Flash, Captivate stores each object of each captured screen as a separate element. As with Camtasia, you may add additional content enhancements – 508-compliant closed captioning, callouts, quizzes, etc in post-production.

Audio
Both applications enable the author to either record audio narration in real time during capture time, or import MP3 or WAV audio in post-production. In my experience, Captivate audio recorded in real time loses synchronization over the duration of the recording: this becomes especially noticeable in 20-minute-plus recordings and can be very frustrating to remediate. However you can add post-content captured audio slide by slide (tedious), or by importing a completed audio file. A very neat feature of Captivate is that it recognizes audio markers, so if you include these in your WAV or MP3 file, it will synchronize with the slides in the presentation. I have also noticed that the audio generated by Captivate can be pretty ropey (even though it’s MP3 format) – in fact, at some of the lower sample- and bit rates, it reminds me of the horrible .VOX format I had to use in my Authorware days, back in the last century.

In my view, Camtasia Studio provides a much more easy-to-use and intuitive audio recording and editing experience. The fact that you can see all the audio on a timeline layer means that you can see how the audio fits in context with the whole presentation’s ‘big picture.’ The ability to split audio and move it around the timeline is an added bonus. Similarly, I feel that the audio enhancement features – normalization, noise reduction (NR) and so on – are easier to preview and use in Camtasia. In terms of outputs, there no end to your choice of formats – MP3, WAV, and WMA. The facility to render podcast-formatted audio is a very cool feature that Captivate just can’t compete with.

This concludes this part of my head-to-head review.

Next time: Video editing, content rendering, and my conclusions.

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Now read on…

authorSTREAM is a web-based PowerPoint presentation sharing platform from authorGEN Technologies. After creating a presentation in Microsoft PowerPoint, content creators can upload presentations to the authorSTREAM website. During the upload process the content is converted Adobe to Flash SWF format displayed via the Flash player. Content creators can use the provided HTML code to embed the presentation in a blog or website, as well to share the presentation via e-mail, and submit the content to YouTube. authorSTREAM also enables users to share their presentations via mobile devices that support MV4 playback such as the Apple iPod or iPhone.

Slideshare supports a range of import file types, including PowerPoint PPT, OpenOffice.org Impress, and PDF format. Broadly speaking, we can say that the SlideShare upload process shares many characteristics with other Web 2.0 tools, and is in fact very similar to the authorSTREAM submission procedure. Generally speaking, once a file is uploaded and converted to SWF, it is publicly available.

The content creators can choose to make the slide show available to be downloaded. Interestingly for a service provided by a for-profit organization Slideshare is linked with Creative Commons, so various attribution licenses are supported (click here for more thoughts on Open Source Software). As with other hosted Web 2.0 services (including YouTube), a presentation can be viewed in the small screen or take the full screen of a monitor.

Table