Bottom-Line Performance

Each week Brandon Penticuff, Bottom-Line Performance’s Director of Technology and admitted app-obsessed iOS user will share an app that he is using that week. Whether it is an app to make you more productive, teach you something, or simply entertain you, we hope that you’ll enjoy learning about them!

This weeks’ app is Textastic, an extremely powerful text-editor for the iPad. While Textastic is suitable for creating any simple text file, where it’s power really shines is in its syntax highlighting and completion support for HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP, allowing you to finish complex code samples with a keystroke. If you’re not a programmer, what this means is that Textastic will recognize the format of over 80 different programming languages and provide color-coded highlighting automatically while you create your code, making it much easier to read and work with.

So how does an app like this fit into your workflow?
For me personally, I have multiple websites that I’m responsible for maintaining. Whether it is checking in on the server status or applying hot-fixes to a web-app, when we have an update that needs to be made, we need to make it right away. Before this app (and the iPad in general), that meant lugging around a laptop and all of the necessary support items (power, internet, case.) Now with a full-featured editor like this one, I have everything I need with a fraction of the weight/hassle. For example, with our Knowledge Guru eLearning game product, I can just about anywhere but still login and apply an update if needed at a moment’s notice.

In eLearning, content is and will continue to be king. However, we can’t overlook the vital roll that programming and media development play in providing effective mediums to carry those messages. Tools like this one empower developers by expanding their reach and flexibility. Textastic raises the bar for what is possible with productivity on the iPad and allows users to work differently, and that’s a great thing.

If you’re a programmer, what features would you like to see added to Textastic? If you’re not, what’s your dream productivity app that would help the iPad become an even more effective tool for you and your workflow?

Textastic Code Editor – [$9.99]

Follow Brandon on Twitter for more tips and tracks on all things App related. Got an app you want featured? Send him a tweet to have it considered!

I have a colleague who once created a presentation called “Herding Cats: Working with SMEs.” Needless to say, her viewpoint on the value of SMEs was influenced by some negative experiences.

Can subject matter experts (aka SMEs) make good developers? How do you manage them and keep them focused? Can you shift them from a content (input) focus to an outcome focus? How do you keep them from derailing your project by overloading you with content? If a SME doesn’t know anything about instructional design, how can you involve them in designing a learning solution? What about deadlines…how do you hold them accountable?

In our experience, which spans a lot of years, subject matter experts are critical to most of our projects’ successes. Conversely, they can also become the Achilles’ heel that hinders success or makes a project take far longer than it should to complete. How to you ensure the former scenario and prevent the latter one?

That’s what our February blog posts are about. Over the next four weeks, we’ll share our tips and tricks for maximizing the relationship with SMEs. Specifically, we plan to talk about:

• Managing expectations between the SME and the designer/developers and techniques for clarifying roles/responsibilities.
• Tools that can make it easier for SMEs to function as developers – and designers.
• Techniques that make it easier to hold SMEs accountable for delivering what they say they will deliver.
• How to speak the language of the SME rather than trying to teach the language of learning design to the SME.

We welcome your thoughts and ideas as well. If you’ve identified a great strategy or technique for partnering with SMEs, share it! If you have a question or a challenge, let us know that too and we’ll try to address it here.

Also look for a couple interesting interviews with SMEs. While we view them in a particular light, it’s always good to view the world from their stance as well.

How much time does it take to develop a training course?

The answer, of course, is that it depends – on a lot of things:

• The media you are using.
• The length of the course or solution.
• The complexity of the media being used as part of the learning solution. (An animation takes longer to build than a static image with some text on it.)
• The complexity and availability of content.
• The desired outcomes (learner awareness vs. learner skill development/appication)
• The number of people involved in its development
• What’s already known about the audience, the task, the need, the gaps, etc.

Here’s a bit of data from Bryan Chapman at Brandon Hall research on “average” development times for different media. The data is culled from surveys of learning professionals and was reported by Brandon-Hall in its reports. See if the hours match your own experiences:

34:1 Instructor-Led Training (ILT), including design, lesson plans, handouts, PowerPoint slides, etc.

33:1 PowerPoint to E-Learning Conversion. Not sure why it takes less time then creating ILT, but that’s what we discovered when surveying 200 companies about this practice

220:1 Standard e-learning which includes presentation, audio, some video, test questions, and 20% interactivity

345:1 Time it takes for online learning publishers to design, create, test and package 3rd party courseware

750:1 Simulations from scratch. Creating highly interactive content

I would assume the 33:1 for PowerPoint to e-learning conversion is what most closely correlates to Tom Kuhlman’s references to “rapid development” of e-learning since I know it’s not the 220:1 ratio reported by those Brandon-Hall surveyed.

Does this match your own experiences?  How much time DOES it take to develop learning…and which tasks consume the most time? Our experience points to reviews and revisions consuming large chunks of time…and managing the process of reviews and revisions. What about you?

Recently, I’ve found myself researching webinar software for internal use. There are a ton of great products out there, each with different features. And vastly different price points.

I admit, I love Adobe Connect! But I hate it’s price tag. So my solution? DimDim.

DimDim touts itself as a web conference service. It has several of the same features of Connect and it’s free. For up to 20 participants, you can share PowerPoint files, pdfs, Web sites, your desktop, or a whiteboard. And it requires no software for you or participants. Want to show the presenter? Turn on the webcam and you can stream audio and video to participants.

I’ve found just one feature that I miss from Connect: polling. The only way I can ask the audience to respond is to use a white board. But there’s hope. DimDim is open source software. Maybe with DimDim 6.0 I’ll see the polling feature.

Test out DimDim and let me know what you think. Or is there a better, free webinar software that you use?