Getting Beyond Bullet Points (visuals only)

Once again, I consider myself extremely lucky and privileged to have been asked to speak at the Learning and Skills Group Annual Conference earlier this month at London Olympia.

I always try to facilitate a session that (I hope) has  immediate take-aways for anybody that has attended. I believe that there are enough people speaking at a strategic and theoretical level about L&D and it’s associated disciplines without me throwing my hand in too, so I always try to ensure that I do what I can to offer what I call a ‘Monday morning quick win‘ i.e. something that can be implemented immediately (or at worst very quickly back in the workplace) following the attendees return to the ‘real world‘!

This time around I wanted to offer people the next step in improving their presentations. I get the feeling that there are more and more people who understand the need to move away from bullet-point riddled slides but are not sure exactly ‘what’ should replace them.

It was this uncertainty that I hoped to address during my session by showing some examples. It is these examples that will form the basis of my next few blog posts:

Part 1 – Getting Beyond Bullet Points with visuals only

Part 2 – Getting Beyond Bullet Points with visual and audio

Part 3 – Bringing in the backchannel

Part 4 – The Learners Voice

Part 5 – Getting Beyond Bullet Points live recorded podcast

Part 6 – Tools and resources

But let’s get things started, by having a look at the Slideshare presentation below. At first glance it ticks all the boxes in terms of reducing the bullet points and using images to illustrate my story, but there’s something missing. It would be great if you could take a few minutes to progress through the slides and leave your thoughts in the comments box below……

View the original article here

Getting Beyond Bullet Points – Tools and Resources

For those of you who have read this series of posts relating to my LSG11UK session you’ll know that I reference several tools, resources and pieces of research throughout.

Rather than just sitting on these resources I thought I’d share them with you via this blog post.

You can find the bookmarked resources in my Diigo account or alternatively if you fancy viewing them whilst you are out-and-about, here’s a QR code that will get you to the same location.

If you find anything of interest/use it would great if you could let me know in the comments box below or indeed if you know of any resources that I could add, then again please leave a link in the comments box below.

Part 1 – Getting Beyond Bullet Points with visuals only

Part 2 – Getting Beyond Bullet Points with visual and audio

Part 3 – Bringing in the backchannel

Part 4 – The Learners Voice

Part 5 – Getting Beyond Bullet Points live recorded podcast

Part 6 – Tools and resources

View the original article here

Oh no, not another ‘getting started with mobile’ blog post…

…. well….. Yes and No.

“Yes” in so far as it is about introducing the concept of mobility into your L&D approach…

…. and “No” in so far as it’s not about a lengthy, decision riddled, strategic approach, it’s about simple, pragmatic approaches that you can adopt (and indeed may already be doing) that can help you get your foot in the door, prior to moving onto other things.

Most of the slides used in the screencast below were inspired by the JISC Mobile infokit by Doug Belshaw – so thanks to Doug and JISC for providing the inspiration for this.

View the original article here

Getting Beyond Bullet Points with visual and audio.

If you’ve not already read my previous blog post ‘Getting Beyond Bullet Points (visuals only)’ then I’d strongly suggest having a read of it before you read any more of this post.

Why?

Well for 2 reasons really:

1. The earlier post will provide you with the context behind this post.
2. The purpose of this specific post is to act as a comparison to the first post in this series, hence the benefit of viewing the first one!

As you will have seen in the previous post, using the approach of images and single words in a presentation is certainly visually engaging, however where it falls down (as highlighted during my live session by Laura Dickson) is when the presenter/facilitator is no longer present to provide the narrative – the engaging presentation is now nothing more than a collection of images and out of context words.

Here are the same slides that were contained in the earlier post, but this time with the narrative.

Don’t forget, this is Part 2 in a series of posts surrounding my LSG11UK session.

Part 1 – Getting Beyond Bullet Points with visuals only

Part 2 – Getting Beyond Bullet Points with visual and audio

Part 3 – Bringing in the backchannel

Part 4 – The Learners Voice

Part 5 – Getting Beyond Bullet Points live recorded podcast

Part 6 – Tools and resources

Did you get anything from the Slideshare?

Why not let us know in the comments section?

View the original article here

Getting Beyond Bullet Points – Tools and Resources

For those of you who have read this series of posts relating to my LSG11UK session you’ll know that I reference several tools, resources and pieces of research throughout.

Rather than just sitting on these resources I thought I’d share them with you via this blog post.

You can find the bookmarked resources in my Diigo account or alternatively if you fancy viewing them whilst you are out-and-about, here’s a QR code that will get you to the same location.

If you find anything of interest/use it would great if you could let me know in the comments box below or indeed if you know of any resources that I could add, then again please leave a link in the comments box below.

Part 1 – Getting Beyond Bullet Points with visuals only

Part 2 – Getting Beyond Bullet Points with visual and audio

Part 3 – Bringing in the backchannel

Part 4 – The Learners Voice

Part 5 – Getting Beyond Bullet Points live recorded podcast

Part 6 – Tools and resources

View the original article here

Podcast #16: Getting Beyond Bullet Points ‘live’

If you’ve not already read my previous blog posts ‘Getting Beyond Bullet Points (visuals only)’, ‘Getting Beyond Bullet Points (with audio), Bringing in the BackChannel and The Learners Voice then I’d strongly suggest having a read of them before you read any more of this post.

Why?

Well for 2 reasons really:

1. The earlier posts will provide you with the context behind this post.

2. You will notice in the the earlier posts I suggest that whilst a modern, bullet-point free, visually rich presentation is certainly very engaging and less cognitively challenging for any learners, this approach certainly falls down when you distribute the slides on their own after the event.

Essentially all the learner is left with is a collection of pretty slides, which without the context that your narrative provides may fall short of it’s intended purpose. I mentioned that an audio recording of your ‘live’ presentation can be coupled with your slides to provide that important narrative, possibly utilising Slideshare to synchronise the various elements.

The second of this series of posts coupled visuals with a ‘non-live’ audio recording. The benefit of this was that I could keep the duration fairly short, improve the quality of the recording and stick to the ‘script’ – Of course, that also meant that any questions that were asked during the live session are lost to the learner and that any interesting digressions are not included.

To illustrate this point the audio recording below was recorded live at my LSG session. The audio was taken from my lapel mic, into the audio mixing desk and then directly into my Zoom mp3 recorder.

(listening time 59 mins)

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Upon reflection, I’m not sure that I would ever use this type of audio as a learning resource. I feel that the lulls throughout the recording (when the attendees were undertaking group work) would be off-putting to a listener and only serve to make the recording longer, although of course those silences could be edited out.

I also feel that the duration of a ‘live’ recording would be naturally longer than a ‘clinical’ scripted recording, again I feel that the shorter the resource, the more likelihood of a learner accessing it.

But what do you think, would you rather listen to the live, uncut, raw recording?

Would you prefer the scripted, shorter version?

Or would you actually prefer to have both resources made available so that you can make your own choice?

Don’t forget, this is Part 5 in a series of posts surrounding my LSG11UK session.

Part 1 – Getting Beyond Bullet Points with visuals only

Part 2 – Getting Beyond Bullet Points with visual and audio

Part 3 – Bringing in the backchannel

Part 4 – The Learners Voice

Part 5 – Getting Beyond Bullet Points live recorded podcast

Part 6 – Tools and resources

View the original article here

From Compliance Course to Campaign Part 3 – Getting outside help

If you haven’t read this series to date it may be worthwhile doing so in order to set the context for this post…

Once I’d won the SMEs over (I’m still pinching myself to be honest) I invited 3 x local vendors to come and meet with me to discuss my idea and to see if they would be interested in participating in the procurement process. This was a huge advantage for both sides as it:

allowed me to sense check my ideas and proposed approachprovided the vendors with an opportunity to take a brief look around my organisation, observe some of the resources and channels that we currently use (and may well use to communicate the campaign resources) and ascertain whether they felt we could work together.

I’m pleased to say that at this stage all 3 vendors were keen to work with us and all of them commented on how refreshing it was to see a traditional subject such as compliance training having a radically different approach taken to it.

Having previously worked as a vendor I understood the complications and ‘quirks’ that can be associated with a tender process, so I was very keen (from both perspectives) to own a process that was as transparent, fair and simple as possible. Rather than wrestle with (or expect others to) the typical procurement portals that are often the bane of a vendors life I decided to use Google Docs (I can’t get into the habit of calling it Google Drive) to write and communicate my Request for Proposal (RfP) through.

This had the advantage of being:

freesimple to usemobile friendlyable to allow each of the vendors to ask any questions ‘within’ the document, thus negating the need for a procurement portal and allowing each of the vendors to see each others questions – and of course my responses – thus keeping the process as fair and transparent as possible.

Several of the vendors said that they seldom saw GDocs being used in this way and were welcoming of the approach.

In terms of what I included in my RfP I used a great deal of the advice contained in this post from Stephanie Dedhar along with my own previous experience as a vendor

Once I’d released the GDoc RfP I set up a f2f meeting at our offices to:

allow each of the vendors to come inask further questions in an open forumand also to provide them with another opportunity to look at some of our existing comms channels etc.

Again, the feedback I got from this was very positive with one of the vendors saying that it helped to confirm their interpretation of the RfP and removed any ambiguity.

At that point I:

sat backanswered questionsarranged some access to some of our portalsconducted a few Adobe Connect session to explain our internal collaborative platform to some of the vendorswaited…..

I did learn some lessons along the way with this approach, here they are:

Get your potential providers in early, way before you write the RfP – the conversation will inevitably help you shape your thinking.No matter how long you provide people with the opportunity to respond, somebody will be late.Include a ‘please let us know if you intend to submit a proposal by xyz date’ request. I didn’t, and as a result had a vendor drop out with only 1 week to go until final submission, despite having the best part of 2 months visibility of the project scope!!!

Keep on reading this series of posts to discover what happened after we’d received the proposals and what I’m calling the ‘end of the beginning‘

If you’d like to discuss how we may be able to work together to bring about a fundamental change in the way your organisation delivers its mandatory training or would like to advise on how you can maximise the effectiveness of your next tender process then please get in touch.

View the original article here