E-Learning Council

Five Favorite Friday is a curated list of what we enjoyed, noted or thought about in the week just past.

1. Favorite Upcoming Webinar: Interested in Learning Management Systems?  Austin ATD Learning Technologies SIG presents ELS Speaker Katrina Baker as our virtual guest speaker! Katrina will provide a side-by-side comparison of some of the top LMS vendors broken out by industry leaders and key features. This is the hugely popular presentation she did at ATD International this year. Join the webinar Tuesday, June 28 at 6:00 PM, Central Time. Get more information at the ATD Austin Event Site.
2. Favorite Event: Microassist’s CTO Hiram Kuykendall discusses how to develop an accessibility testing strategy for learning and web pages at the Austin Adobe User’s Group. I know we seem to be on an accessibility kick lately. Why? Well honestly we believe universal access is a right. However, we’re seeing more and more litigation around accessibility issues. Here’s a good overview article on digital accessibility from the Employer Law Report
3. Favorite Resource List: Have you set quality standards for the elearning your team produces? Tony Bates has pulled together excellent resource of E-learning quality assurance standards, organizations and research.
4. Favorite L&D Article: In Your Perfect Elearning Development Shop: An Individual or a Team? Kevin Gumienny talks about the pros and cons of an individual creating learning vs. a team. In my experience, a team creates a stronger end product because each member can focus on their skill set. An individual can often move quicker to create learning.
5. Favorite Comedy Video: The Expert (A Comedy Sketch) is a must see for anyone who has had to go through the design and specification process.

Have a favorite article, video, resource that you would like us to included in #5FF? Shoot it to us on our Contact page.

Five Favorite Friday is a curated list of what we enjoyed, noted or thought about in the week just past.

1. Favorite Conference: Elearning Guild’s FocusOn Learning conferences was in Austin June 8–10th. I was excited to meet with Clark Quinn (@quinnovator) and David Anderson from Articulate (@elearning). Even managed to schedule an interview with Clark on effective elearning (watch for it later this month). If you would like to see tweets from Focus On Learning, the hashtag is #FocusOnLearn. Our contribution was mostly the great places to eat and drink around downtown Austin (we stopped at Gus’ Famous Fried Chicken, a Memphis transplant, on the way out). As usual David Kelly’s (@LndDave) conference back channel is one of the best information sources about a conference (doubly so since David was a host with the magical silver pin).
2. Favorite Quote: Alvin Toffler’s quote on learning—“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” seemed to resonate with the twitter verse. Lots of retweets and faves.
3. Favorite Learning Book: Re-reading Clark Quinn’s Revolutionize Learning & Development: Performance and Innovation Strategy for the Information Age after meeting him for coffee. Getting a lot more out of it the second time around.
4. Favorite Must Read: Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends 2016 is a must read Power Point (yeah I know groan) for me every year. It is an information dense report that is the fastest way to learn everything going on in tech. I would love to hear y’alls thoughts on how these trends will effect learning and development. How do you think messaging dominated by Facebook and WeChat will effect communication? Will emojis be a part of learning courses? Will the rise of voice interfaces (Echo, Siri, Cortana, etc.) change how we design training?
5. Favorite Quick tool: Using Youtube as a Screencast Recorder. Don’t have one of the myriad other tools installed for creating a quick and dirty screencast? Youtube includes one!