iPad instructional design apps and workflow

INTRO

I've had an Apple iPad for the last 18 months or so. It mostly replaces my laptop (Mac Book Pro) when I'm away from home. I currently use a 32 GB 3G (Verizon) & WiFi model. Though the iPad has the ability to access the Verizon 3G network I tend not to enable it. I actually use a Verizon 3G MiFi device for my on-the-road internet access; it's sort of odd but MiFi 3G is way faster and more reliable than when I have my iPad's Verizon 3G turned on. 

Since I work a couple of states away from home I depend on it a lot for personal and professional use. This post describes how I use iPad in my instructional design work; today I'll talk about my preferred instructional design models and how I use iPad to facilitate note-taking when meeting with customers and subject matter experts. I had thought at first that I'd be able to hammer this out quickly in one post. As it happens something like three weeks have gone by since someone asked me to talk about my iPad and instructional design experiences. I ended up reflecting on it quite a bit longer than I thought.

INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN MODELS

I hear a lot on twitter and other places that some of my peers, other instructional designers, don't much care for the ADDIE (Analyze, Design, Develop, Implement, Evaluate) instructional design model. I sort of like it. I use ADDIE and ARCS (Attention, Relevance, Confidence, Satisfaction) on every instructional design project I do, and have for the last three years. iPad and ARCS, in particular, work quite well with the storytelling approach I favor. I think you'll see the apps I use reflect this.

PROJECT KICKOFF

I hadn't really thought much about how I use iPad in instructional design until Allen Communications came out with their DesignJot app. It does an excellent job of walking someone through a full-on instructional analysis. It's all in there, including the kitchen sink. I've used it a couple of times but I've found that it's overkill for the kind of work I do. Most of my projects are for a federal law enforcement agency. I ran through DesignJot once and then the second time I used it I realized I didn't need to; I mean my customer and target population weren't likely to change. If I were a contractor again, servicing many and varied customers, then yes, DesignJot would probably be a more active tool in my kit.

ADDIE starts with the analysis phase: meeting with the customer and getting a feel for the sort of project it's going to be: topic, target population of learners, identifying roles and responsibilities and so on. Part of this process involves helping the customer understand and appreciate what instructional design can and can't do. This is especially important when the desired method of course delivery is elearning. The apps I use for analysis and customer interaction deal mostly with recording meeting notes, record keeping and project management. It's vital that I come away from customer and subject matter expert (SME) meetings with a thorough understanding of the project.

Note-taking apps: Noteshelf makes note-taking a breeze. You basically write (freehand) your notes. You want to use a stylus with this app. The first step in note-taking involves creating a notebook. You can customize the notebook cover and pages. There are a number of default covers and paper styles; my favorite paper mimics my trusty yellow legal pad. You can also buy more using in-app purchases; I haven't done this. After you've finished taking notes it's simple to export (I routinely use email, print and dropbox) your notes. The thing you want to remember about Noteshelf: it takes freehand (hand written) notes. It does not let you type text into your notes. Notability is my other note-taking app. Like Noteshelf you can record your notes freehand. Notability also supports audio recording, typed-text and PDF annotations. It really pushes the note-taking envelope by letting you mix audio, text and drawings on the same page. I mostly use the app for freehand note-taking as the soft-keyboard (or using a Bluetooth keyboard) tends to distract the people I'm meeting with. In the design phase (ideation) it's a killer app.

For record keeping I depend on emailing my notes to my computer for storage. If I'm working on a rapid design project I'll sometimes forward the notes to the customer or SMEs; the notes can be a little on the messy side; when they are I like to clean them up in a word processing app like Pages, QuickOffice or Office2; the latter two office apps I use when I expect to receive Microsoft Office formatted documents from the customer when I'm in the field; both are excellent when it comes to compatibility. I also use Dropbox for archiving. I can create folders to organize my notes. The people I work with say I use Dropbox like they use Sharepoint. I think Dropbox is much cooler and faster.

For the last several months SG Project has been my project management app. It works a little like Microsoft Project; I like it for that and because I can import/export XML Project files back and forth.

About the stylus: I've used two. My first stylus was the Pogo Sketch. Lately I've been using Just Mobiel's Alupen. Both work quite well as a stylus for note-taking and sketching. I switched because the Pogo Sketch doesn't feel quite natural in my hand; it's on the skinny side. The Alupen is much fatter and fits quite well when I hold it. If the Alupen has a down-side it's that it lacks the pocket-clip on the Pogo Sketch.

One more word about record-keeping on my iPad: Blogsy. Blogsy is the app I use for blogging. I haven't tried any other apps for this purpose; what I had seen available in the app store tended to be unappealing given their UI or customer feedback. Blogsy's really easy to use; it can be a little quirky though. For example, tagging a blog post by adding labels causes the app to freeze. Weird things happen when I use Blogsy's undo-redo: chunks of my text disappear and don't come back. Even so, it replaces what I had been using before: either the blog's default web-based text editor or Adobe Dreamweaver. That's not a typo: Blogsy, for how I do blogging, is as effective as Dreamweaver.

SUMMARY

In this post I talked about my favored instructional design models: ADDIE and ARCS. I outlined the apps I use for what I consider to be the main component of ADDIE's first (analysis) phase: note-taking, record keeping and project management. My favored note-taking app is Noteshelf. It is flawless when it comes to writing freehand notes. Notability is another note-taking app I regularly use. It has richer features including audio recording, text support and annotation. I use it a lot in ADDIE's design phase. If you're going to do serious note-taking on the iPad (of the freehand variety) then you need to get a stylus.

In my next post (tomorrow hopefully) I'll describe how I use iPad apps in ADDIE's design phase. I'll also start in on how the iPad shines when it comes to ARCS.

Instructional Technology

I wasn't always an instructional designer. I used to be, for something like 16 years, an electronics technician (ET). After maintaining some fairly sophisticated Navy communications and semiconductor manufacturing equipment for so long I think I know a thing or two about problem solving methods and tools. The main take-away, that is the primary transferable skill, from my ET days is knowing how to identify and solve technology related problems quickly using an appropriate set of tools and processes. Back in the day I used electronic test equipment and hand-tools to identify and solve problems. Today my tools are quite a bit smarter: computers and software.

The other day I got to thinking about commonalities between then and now: ways of knowing and doing. What I came up with was story and pencils. A story usually started a problem solving effort: Someone describing some thing. The pencil helped me record facts and impressions. That was then. Today story still kicks off my instructional design efforts. The pencil's a bit different now. I guess you could say it grew up; it's an iPad.

I use my iPad mostly for recording, ideation, prototyping and communicating, all things you can do with a good pencil. Where the iPad stands-out is in communicating. When I meet with a customer or subject matter expert (SME) my iPad (and stylus) are my primary tool. I use it for note-taking and doodling. It's simple to pass it around to others so they an see where we're at. It's intuitive to use, too, so others can manipulate the information it contains.

Over the next several days I'm going to describe how I use iPad in instructional design.

Crash Project

Welcome back to my on again (mostly) off again blog.

Last week was hectic but very enjoyable. A peer retired the other day, leaving me with some unfinished business: a four day instructor-led course on intellectual property compliance; the course was due to be taught for the first time at the end of this month and was in need of a little more work. Though I lacked a deep knowledge of the subject matter I was able to edit several of the lessons and connected with the customer on several levels/occasions to make their deadline. The deliverables on CDROM were picked up only a moment ago.

What made it possible for me to come through on short notice? My customer service and project management skills made it happen. My former peer had done a good job with the instructional design. What I needed to do was be able to facilitate a post-pilot review/edit cycle, publish and deploy.

There were a couple-three more review/edit cycles more than I'd like to have. I think this was due less to project creep than the need for the crash-nature of the project. It was fun, heady almost, zooming from one task to the next.

Next on my plate: two online courses. Both on diversity in the workplace. Sweet.

Instructional design for manufacturability.

Before I was an instructional designer I worked as an electronics technician in the Navy and in high technology manufacturing: fixing things and doing stuff to things to decrease the chances they'd break. Better uptime meant more time for liberty ashore and profit sharing in the corporate world.

Here's where this is going: my technical and manufacturing background makes me want to work efficiently. I'm a big fan (and believer) in measurement, particularly the statistical process control (SPC) kind. I've lately been wondering how I could apply SPC to the process of instructional design. One measure that comes to mind is cycle time: the time required to produce a course (or to complete a step in the process of creating one).

Like a lot of ideas I get this one was on the back-burner for a while. What made me think about it again was a blog post I read earlier today: Rapid Intake's take on instructional patterns. I'm not a big fan of rapid authoring tools. I prefer to use rapid instructional design processes to speed things up. Tools like Rapid Intake's speed up development time by using pre-built shells an instructional designer pours content into. Rapid instructional design processes, the A and D in the ADDIE instructional design model, speed up ideation and prototyping, decreasing cycle time.

The difference between the two, rapid development and rapid instructional design, is subtle but significant. If you think about it, you don't get much benefit from a rapid development tool until after you've analyzed a learning problem or opportunity and come up with a design to solve it. Development, you'll recall, is the second D in ADDIE. It doesn't make much sense to jump right into rapid development if you don't have stuff to pour into it.

Rapid instructional design is done up-front. Put succinctly, you get the instructional designer(s) in a room with the customer(s) or subject matter expert(s) and then you come up with ideas for creating a learning experience. It's a lot like brainstorming. I think the most effective tools at this point in the process are a pencil and paper. Working within the constraints of your artist you sketch out prototypes based on your ideas. It's easy to come up with, and shoot down, lots of prototypes. At this step in the process the deliverables are two or three prototypes that can be shown to others to see if they get what you're trying to convey. Changes at this stage are cheap: pencil and paper, remember? Changes made during development, even if you're using a rapid development tool, are a bit more costly.

Anyway, you can see where this is going. When you finally pick up your authoring tool of choice you work from the paper (some designers I know create PowerPoint slides from their sketches) prototypes the customer or subject matter experts have helped you create. This really helps out later by decreasing the need for lots of reviews (and changes).

The Hard Part About Blogging

Okay, it's been like seven months since my last blog post. In that time not so much has happened besides school and work. Basically I'm getting burned out with the former and having serious fun with the latter.

Burn-out with school isn't much of a surprise given that I've been going to school pretty much non-stop since January 2004; in that time I've completed my BA and MS and have gone part-way towards an Ed.D. I've lately begun to question continuing to work towards a doctorate. Of necessity I've been taking classes through an online university. Lately though I've been questioning how effective online learning is for someone like me.

Though close acquaintances might say, if asked politely, that I'm generally reclusive, preferring my own company to being around others, the opposite is true, at least in the educational sense. I think I thrive in environments where the exchange of ideas happens in high-fidelity through real-time social interaction. I don't get much of it either in my online studies.

Anyway, I'm presently trying to make sense of how I might add a little more hi-fi social interaction in my distance learning studies. Going forwards that's where I think this blog is going.

Looking ahead to the end (of the year)..

I was taking a look at my 2010 list of things to think about. Towards the top of the list are:

+ get started on becoming a storyteller

+ figure out what the workflow for designing a 508 compatible elearning course is

+ research the role humanism plays in the (e)learning experience

There are other things on my list but these are the heavy hitters because, well, they've caused me some amount of pain over the last year or two. Take storytelling for example. You, me, and every one else on the planet have a lifetime's worth of experience we take with us everywhere we go; our life experience is a kind of story that, to one degree or another, we hide or share with others. I'm keenly interested in the latter: sharing stories. I think there are two significant ways that stories can be shared. The first way to share a story is over a campfire with friends or at bedtime with a loved one; hopefully you've had the chance to experience on or the other or both. The second way I think a life story can be shared is during a learning experience. If I can fashion a learning environment where information is presented in such a way that it touches on some experience in your story then, perhaps, the learning can come easier, last longer, and be applied to some problem or opportunity quicker.

Here's where I'm going with this: when I was a boy mama used to tell me the story at bedtime about the grasshopper and the ant. Maybe you've heard of it. The moral of the story, I think, is that a lifetime of hard-work and thrift offer significant rewards later in life. The problem, for me anyway, is that at the time I heard the story I hadn't lived much life yet: my story didn't include much within it that the bedtime story could touch. It wasn't until some years later that I figured it out. In my case, with this learning experience, the learning didn't come easy and I wasn't able to apply it to my life until quite a bit of time had passed.

Another thing I want to figure out is how to design an elearning course that meets the needs of my target population of learners. 508 is an amendment to the U.S. Rehabilitation Act of 1973. 508 mandates that digital information be accessible to people with disabilities. It has had some significance during my professional life: I produce courses that people take online to learn stuff. To be able to learn what a course contains a learner has to be able to access and experience the information within it. Lately though 508 has caused me some amount of consternation.

Here's what I mean: say I'm asked to produce a course to show someone how to become a harbor pilot. One of the things a harbor pilot has to be able to do well is guide ships into and out of a harbor. Could someone who is blind be a harbor pilot? I don't know the answer to that one but let's say that the answer was no. If the course had to be 508 compliant does the learning experience have to be dentical for persons who are blind and persons who can see? I don't have a good answer to this one either. What I've done to date is design courses that were mainly text-based that screen readers would have no problem with.

Is producing an elearning course in this manner best practice? I don't think so. This is why I'm trying to figure out what a workflow would be for determining when and how a course should and can be 508 compliant: effective and accessible. I'd like to be able to use simulations in more of the courses I produce, but I haven't quite figured out how to reach everyone yet.

The third thing I want to figure out before the end of the year is actually going to be the subject of my dissertation research project: how to make elearning courses more human. By this I mean how might an elearning course be designed so that a wider audience than exists now could learn from it. Most of the elearning courses I produce are taken by learners that never come into contact with other learners; more often than not there isn't even an instructor. Some learners don't perform well using this model. I want to learn if there is a way to make the online learning experience more accessible, in meaningful ways, to a wider audience. Part of this involves helping the learner feel less isolated during their learning experience.

I hope to report out what I learn about these topics in this blog between now and the end of the year.

u

If you design it will they be able to ..?

Someone I follow on twitter remarked this morning that Microsoft came out with a beta of the next version of Internet Explorer; her comment included a statement that I should care about it. My immediate reaction: why? After thinking about it for a while longer (another 30 seconds or so) my reaction remains the same: why should I care?

In my instructional designer role I serve two audiences: learners in-house and readers of the social media to which I post including twitter and facebook and, to a much lesser extent, linked-in.

In the case of my first audience the government agency for whom I worked locks the browser down very tightly: the standard here is IE 8. Though it supports a variety of rich media the agency allows only HTML rendered text, PDFs, JPGs, GIFs, and Flash to appear within it. Other types of media including MP3s, Quicktime, RealMedia, and so on aren't supported. I expect that whenever IE 9, currently in beta, goes live it's going to be much as it is now.

The second audience I hope to reach on the internet includes, well, people much like you. I have no clue what type of browser you might use now and in the future. With this in mind I keep things pretty standard: text and Flash. I'm learning/experimenting with HTML 5 (on my iPad) but to date, with work and my doctoral studies taking up much of my time, I haven't been able to get much beyond "Hello world".

Which brings me back to IE 9 beta and its capabilities. Within the firewall, sure, you have to go with what your infrastructure people tell you is the standard. I don't think it's a good design decision to tailor content to a specific browser on the public internet, however. The reason is simple: you'll lose the eyeballs belonging to the folks whose browsers don't support media in the same way as IE 9. Microsoft has a long history of spinning standards their own way to make people dependent on their technologies far into the future. Making a learning experience dependent on one specific browser is, well, oppressive.

A mindful instructional designer will consider what the (instructional) message is and how best to create an online environment in which the learners she supports can experience it. Designing a learning experience around a technology like IE 9 that all learners may not possess or be able to use (my iPad, Android, and other mobile devices can't use it) isn't a good idea. It makes more sense to format your message in the rich container (mp3, Flash, HTML 5, etc) that makes sense given your target audience.

One more thought: the iPad doesn't support Flash. So yes, Apple is limiting my media options. I don't think this is a bad idea, however, given the iPad's form factor and touch-interface. How does one implement a roll-over when there's no mouse to roll? Anyway, my head is beginning to hurt. Perhaps I have to do some more research and reflection on the issue.

u