Want to learn how to speed up your searching on Google?

We instructional designers love a good job aid, it's way cheaper and much more performance oriented than having to build a class. Speaking of classes, we couldn't help noticing how few and far between are the companies that train and develop their staff to leverage many of the resources freely available to them courtesy of the web. Take Google, it's one entry search field is very effective at deceptively hiding a large chunk of the functionality available through its powerful search engine. 

The folks over at trendblog.net have done an outstanding job of compiling into an infographic many of Google's powerful search capabilities onto a single sheet. Many of you might not have even heard of some of this hidden power. Take a few minutes and pull up Google and hit that little microphone on the right hand edge of the search bar and play with some of these commands. It's a great way to learn more about Google, and it may save you time and keystrokes when performing searches in the future.

Google Now voice commands by trendblog.net

In case the graphic is not displayed correctly or you want to copy some commands, here’s the list in text:

General Commands

• “Search for [chicken recipes]?”
• “Say [where is the supermarket] in [Spanish]?”
• “What is [Schrodinger’s cat]?”
• “Who invented [the internet]?”
• “What is the meaning of [life]?”
• “Who is married to [Ben Affleck]?”
• “Stock price of [Apple]”
• “Author of [Game of Thrones]”
• “How old is [Michael Jordan]?”
• “Post to Google+ [feeling great]”

Notes & Reminders

• “Remind me to [buy milk] at [5 PM]”
• “Remind me [when I get / next time I'm at] [home / work / other location] [to send an email to John]”
• “Wake me up in [5 hours]”
• “Note to self: [I parked my car in section D]”
• “Set alarm for [8 PM]”

Time & Date

• “What time is it in [Tokyo]?”
• “When is the sunset [in Chicago (optional)]”
• ”What is the time zone of [Berlin]”
• “Time at home”
• “Create a calendar event: [Dinner in New York] [Saturday at 8 PM]”

Communication

• “Call [Daniel]”
• “Send [email] to Daniel, [Subject: Meeting], [Message: Will be there in 5]”
• “Send [SMS] to Philipp mobile, don’t forget to buy milk”
• ”[Contact name]”

Weather

• “Weather”
• “Is it going to rain [tomorrow / Monday]”
• “What’s the weather in [Boston]?”
• “How’s the weather in [Portland] on [Wednesday] going to be?”

Maps & Navigation

• “Map of [Flagstaff]”
• “Show me the nearby [restaurant] on map”
• “Navigate to [Munich] on car”
• “How far is [Berlin] from [Munich]?”
• “Directions to [address / business name / other destination]”

Conversions & Calculations

• “What is the tip for [125] dollars?”
• “Convert [currency / length ...] to [currency / length ...]”
• “How much is [18] times [48]?”
• “What is [45] percent of [350]?”
• “Square root of [81]”
• “….. equals”

Sports

• “How are [the New York Yankees] doing?”
• “When is the next [Los Angeles Lakers] game?”
• “Show me the [Premier League] table”
• “Did [Bayern Munich] win their last game?”

Flight Information

• “Flight [AA 125]?”
• “Flight status of [AA 125]”
• “Has [LH 210] landed?”
• “When will [AA 120] land / depart?”

Web Browsing

• “Go to [Huffington Post]?”
• “Open [xda.com]”
• “Show me [android.com]”
• “Browse to [reddit.com]”

Entertainment

• “Listen to / play [Intro] by [The XX]?”
• “YouTube [fail compilation]?”
• “Who acted in [Ocean’s 11]?”
• “Who is the producer of [Gladiator]?”
• “When was [Alien] released?”
• “Runtime of [Avatar]”
• “Listen to TV”
• “What’s this song?”

Easter Eggs

• “Do a barrel roll”
• “What’s the loneliest number?”
• “Make me a sandwich!”
• “When am I?”
• “Okay Jarvis, …” (Instead of “Okay Google, …”)
• “Who are you?”
• “How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood.”
• “Beam me up, Scotty!”

- Alex Santos

Alex is a co-founder and Managing Member of Collabor8 Learning, LLC, an instructional design and performance management consultancy. His firm collaborates with organizations to enhance the way they develop  and train their people. To learn more about Collabor8 Learning, click here.

Alex can be reached at 786-512-1069, alex@collabor8learning.com or via Twitter@collabor8alex.

How closely should your e-learning simulate the performance of a skill?

Our advice to clients— within your budgetary and other constraints your e-learning should allow for skill performance and practice that very closely resembles the real-world environment.  No picture that I’ve come across recently exemplifies this principle more than that of Patrick below, the virtual patient used to train medical students entering the field of proctology. You can track Patrick’s very existence to this line in the article—

“Currently, students receive minimal practice and interaction in intimate exams due to the high cost for training and high anxiety nature of the exams.”

Feel free to read more about Patrick and the team that developed him by clicking here. When selecting a delivery medium for instruction, never forget e-learning is most effective when:

1.        Practicing the skills to be taught is too dangerous, risky or costly to allow for practice in the real world (think of the military’s use of flight simulators, or Patrick in the article above),

2.       Your learners are very geographically dispersed, or

3.       The skills you need to teach lend themselves to online delivery (i.e. software training).

Unfortunately, decisions are sometimes made at the beginning of the instructional design process with thinking that goes something like this, “because we have all these PowerPoint’s already built and e-learning development software is so inexpensive,” or “it has been decided this will be an e-learning project.” In many of these situations where the medium does not fit the learning situation, the results are often very unfortunate but irreversible after construction of the learning materials has begun.

- Alex Santos

Alex is a co-founder and Managing Member of Collabor8 Learning, LLC, an instructional design and performance management consultancy. His firm collaborates with organizations to enhance the way they develop  and train their people. To learn more about Collabor8 Learning, click here.

Alex can be reached at 786-512-1069, alex@collabor8learning.com or via Twitter@collabor8alex.

5 Cost drivers of E-learning projects

One of the questions we hear almost daily from customers is―How much should I budget for the development of my custom e-learning project?  Our answer remains the same every time.  We're not trying to be elusive with how we price our services mind you, but honestly it simply depends.  Anyone who tells you otherwise, I’d sprint away in the direction!  So, it depends on what you may be asking yourself?  And hence, we decided to write this post.

There are five key cost drivers the building custom e-learning and they are:

1. Project Management

Building e-learning generally involves some moving parts, and at any given time you want to know how far along in your course development you are.  When working on a course or building out a large curriculum, you’ll also be involving a variety of players such as graphic designers, animators, writers, subject matter experts, voice over talent, video editors,  or other specialists.  In order for your project to stay on time and on budget, you’ll want to budget time for the development of a project plan as well as weekly update calls or meetings.  In our experience we have found these activities to consume roughly 5 to 10% of your budget. As the old adage goes fail to plan and you’re planning to fail.

2. Instructional Design

Many clients who approach us at some point during our conversation will say something to the effect of “we already have the content; we just need someone to put it online for us”.  Experience has taught us to reviewing the content before providing a quote. Often what is referred to as content is often a PowerPoint deck or Microsoft Word Outline of the bullet points used by a previous instructor-led initiative. This “content” was designed to jog a facilitator’s memory that was going to stand in front of a classroom and dive deeper into these points. Without the luxury of the content inside of the instructor’s brain, the bullet points are can rarely be repurposed. More than likely the content must be rewritten from the ground up (beginning with a quick needs analysis) to meet the needs of an audience that will be experiencing this training online, without the aid of a facilitator or instructor, and at their own pace. 

This is where an instructional designer adds value to your project. While e-learning authoring tools are indeed simple to use, designing and building an engaging and immersive experience for your learners requires a degree of creativity, writing ability, and most importantly knowledge of instructional strategies that many subject-matter experts lack.  In our experience, you’ll want to budget roughly 25% of your e-learning project budget on quality instructional design.

3. Multimedia Design and Development

After the instructional design is complete and appropriate instructional strategies selected for all of the objectives that you’re teaching, it’s time to develop any multimedia assets you may need. This includes any navigational elements, custom graphic design, and video or audio that needs to be recorded and edited for use in the course.  If you’ve got a limited budget for the development of multimedia assets you want to let your instructional designer know so that they can leverage the use of lower-cost methods such as stock photography and or even assets currently existing in the public domain in your course.  A general principle is the more customized you need your course to be, the more you will need to spend to build these assets from scratch.  Again, generally speaking we have found it safe to budget roughly 25% of your budget to the design and development of multimedia assets.  This varies greatly of course; it is much more inexpensive to record software demonstrations on your PC then it is to hire acting talent and a camera crew in order to stage live role-plays and scenarios in a studio.

4. Interactivity

Training involves practice.  The effectiveness of your e-learning course depends on how well you allow the learner to engage with your content and practice new skills and behaviors (as opposed to having someone sit there reading or listening to a narrated PowerPoint show).  This secret sauce is truly what sets e-learning a part from what we call e-listening― a lecture delivered by a PC as opposed to a talking head in front of a classroom.  Luckily, a quality instructional designer can bake interactivity right into a course with the right multimedia assets, so there is no additional human resource to throw in.  The expense comes in the authoring of the activities, and in their testing in whichever software platform you are using to build the e-learning.  While anyone can insert static images onto slides, it takes a little more time, knowledge of your tools’ capabilities, and creativity to engage your learners in an online environment.  We’ve found throughout our years of building e-learning programs that you can reasonably expect designing interactivity into a course to consume about 25% of your projected budget.

5. Subject-matter expert (SME) availability

Last but not least, it is important to remember that no e-learning is designed in a vacuum.  One often overlooked expense is the time it takes for your designer or developer to acquire the content from subject-matter experts in order to build e-learning.  Even in smaller projects where a subject-matter expert is leveraging an authoring tool to build a course without the benefit of a designer, you must budget for the time it takes to gather all of the content, even when it’s just screen recordings or screen captures; it will take time.  Once your e-learning course is in its 1st draft or in a very rough state, you’ll want to budget in time for a SME who is also a member of your target audience to go through it and provide you with feedback on how you can improve the training experience.  A very general assumption is to budget for 10 – 20% of your costs to SME time. 

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Though every project is different and we're not very big fans of generalizations, these cost estimates are born out of our experiences and yours may be different. 

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Quality of e-learning development is a subjective thing, and budgetary and other resource constraints may limit the instructional strategies you can employ.  Coupled with the fact that- as this image points out “there is always someone who will do it cheaper”.   If we left out a cost driver, or you’d like to share with us how your projects for different please do so in the comments section below. We'd love to hear from you!

- Alex Santos

Alex is a co-founder and Managing Member of Collabor8 Learning, LLC, an instructional design and performance management consultancy. His firm collaborates with organizations to enhance the way they develop  and train their people. To learn more about Collabor8 Learning, click here.

Alex can be reached at 786-512-1069, alex@collabor8learning.com or via Twitter@collabor8alex.

HR strategies for cultivating a customer service culture

Your customer service training course will fail unless you take a systems view and develop a culture of service.  Customers are not serviced in a vacuum, and unless EVERYONE is involved in delivering a positive customer experience, your investment in customer service training is headed down the drain. 

If you earnestly want to improve the customer service experience for your customers, begin at the top by analyzing your mission, vision, and values.  If all of these aren’t aligned and focused on your customer’s experience and how improve their condition―it’s time for a refresh.  You must involve your Human Resources (HR) team to help you answer the questions as to how you get there.  Human Resources, instructional design and organizational development practitioners can help you analyze your culture from the people you bring into the organization, to how you can develop a more customer-centric and service-based culture with the people you already have. 

Click on the diagram for more.

At every step of your HR workflow, there are strategies and tactics that you can employ to ensure your success.  A culture of customer service involves a system of inputs and outputs, all working towards building a team recruited and completely focused on ensuring the satisfaction and loyalty of your customer base.  As this diagram above illustrates, to build a culture committed to service you begin with your people.  The ones you have not yet hired, the ones you are in the process of hiring, and the ones you've hired in the past.  Click on the image above to learn more about the questions you should be asking at every stage of recruiting, hiring and managing to achieve a culture of service.

Finding a contract HR professional, instructional design or organizational development consultant with the appropriate skill-set needed to properly help you achieve results from your customer service initiatives can be an overwhelming challenge for any organization.  If this is the case for your company, consider seeking guidance from a firm like Collabor8 Learning.  Collabor8 Learning is experienced at strategizing, designing and delivering custom customer service strategies and solutions that exceed your expectations, regardless of your organization’s size.  

- Alex Santos

Alex is a co-founder and Managing Member of Collabor8 Learning, LLC, an instructional design and performance management consultancy. His firm collaborates with organizations to enhance the way they develop  and train their people. To learn more about Collabor8 Learning, click here.

Alex can be reached at 786-512-1069, alex@collabor8learning.com or via Twitter@collabor8alex.

Epic recruiting and what you can learn from Mark Cuban

Your challenge, should you choose to accept it―lure a top prospect to your organization while offering him/ her less money than what they are currently making all the while helping your organization cut back on the number of days critical positions remain open.  Sound like Mission Impossible right?  Not for Mark Cuban and his Dallas Mavericks, and you my instructional designer friend can employ a similar tactic to improve the performance of your HR team.

I don’t often write about recruiting practices, but I bumped into this clip earlier this week and find its use ingenious and very clever on the part of the Mavs.  Want to know the best part?  Say your organization is struggling to attract the type of hires it wants or worse, is losing out on these candidates to your competitors- you can storyboard a clip like this, fire up Camtasia, and build a short, customizable, and re-usable recruiting asset for your HR team!  And don’t limit yourself to creating a video clip either, many of you possess tools like Articulate Storyline, Adobe Captivate, Lectora Inspire or any of a number of e-learning authoring tools out on the market.  Many of these tools can be used to very quickly build an asset like this, and one your company’s HR team should be able to measure the return on. 

Why build something like this you may be asking yourself?  And I’m going to highlight for you one of Mark’s lessons in business here:

“What I do know, at least what I think I have learned from my experiences in business is that when there is a rush for everyone to do the same thing, it becomes more difficult to do. Not easier.  Harder.  It also means that as other teams follow their lead, it creates opportunities for those who have followed a different path.” 

-Mark Cuban

And there you have it- as the labor market continues to improve, companies will have to adapt to greater competition for high-potential candidates. They will have to find ways to distinguish themselves, to stand out from the crowd.  In your instructional designer role, and with the tools at your disposal―you can make a huge contribution to your HR organization’s efforts.

- Alex Santos

Alex is a co-founder and Managing Member of Collabor8 Learning, LLC, an instructional design and performance management consultancy. His firm collaborates with organizations to enhance the way they develop  and train their people. To learn more about Collabor8 Learning, click here.

Alex can be reached at 786-512-1069, alex@collabor8learning.com or via Twitter@collabor8alex.