The pace and complexity of modern life has caused us to adapt how we perform tasks or seek and consume information. You only have to look at today’s social media habits, which encourage fast digestion of mass content.
Apparently, average human attention span has decreased from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8.25 seconds today. That’s a 25% decline! If this shocking stat is true, our attention spans are currently less than the 9 seconds of your average goldfish. The advertising industry admits they aim to grab your attention within the first 3 seconds.
So, has our ability to concentrate worsened? Is life being designed to cater for people with a shortening attention span or just busy lives?
Home delivery dinner boxes for rapid cooking and less time shopping.
Interval hit training sessions (made fashionable by the wonderful Joe Wicks).
5 minute mindfulness app sessions to reset and calm the mind.
Grabbing a take out latte on route.
Taking a power nap to recharge.
Just like these behaviour styles being filters into all aspects of life, learning content should also be designed around a single, simple goal or objective.
There’s no time for fluffy filler content. We need to get to the point fast.
Bitesized learning or microlearning is a great way to meet these needs of an active, busy audience; designed to fit around juggling their ever-changing work priorities.
It’s all about effectively breaking down elearning content into digestible chunks. This makes it easier for learners to work through at a pace that suits them, boosts engagement and easily fits into their busy schedules.
But what are the benefits of bitesized learning for businesses in the long run?
1. Refresh
Learning can be designed for exactly when you need it; quick solutions to when you’re stuck at work.
2. Reflect
Delivering small segments of learning over time, gives users more time to reflect on each concept and experiment by putting ideas and processes into practice.
3. Retain
Users are more likely to learn better and understand training when there is no pressure to absorb so much.
4. Sustain
It helps to sustain learning and performance over time.
Summing up
Our instructional design experts at Eggu are here to help you redesign your more traditional, longer training sessions into more effective and engaging bites of interactive learning. Whether this might suit 1-2 min video tutorials or 5 min elearning modules, we’re all about delivering quality over quantity.
Speak to Eggu to get the best results from your bite-sized learning content and improve the ways in which your staff learn on the job.
Creating an effective induction process for new starters at any organisation is always a challenge and needs to reflect the unique culture and specific requirements of the business.
Deciding to make the transition to online can seem like a major change when traditionally your instinct is to lead such events face-to-face.
But it’s true that live sessions come loaded with ongoing expenses, both financially and in time management. So, why not eliminate the need for printed resources, physical training spaces, spiralling travel costs and non-productive staff time?
Now with so many new roles being advertised as remote-based, should we accept that online is the future?
To help you in exploring this decision for your business, we’ve put together a few pointers to highlight the real benefits of moving staff inductions online:
1. Ready to shine
Starting a new job is an exciting (and albeit anxious) time. But should day one be boycotted with a heavy schedule of formal classroom training sessions?
By bringing inductions online, businesses can request for new starters to complete a portion of their training before the big day arrives – allowing them to fully prepare themselves accordingly.
That little slice of early insider knowledge can gift new starters with added confidence and enthusiasm about working for the organisation before they even walk onsite.
2. Consistent delivery
Live face to face induction sessions often rely on the involvement of key staff in the organisation, whether that be CEOs to welcome new starters to the team, or heads of departments introducing their roles and responsibilities.
Being able to secure the same presenters at every induction session can be a huge commitment, and let’s face it, not always possible. You’ll find that either essential working hours of senior staff are stolen to repeat the same presentation time after time, or the delivery of sessions is just not consistent across new starter groups.
Moving inductions online can mean that you can prerecord welcome videos from key staff, and keep these easily updated with changes to the organisation structure.
3. Time to get personal
We would never recommend that all elements of an induction should take place online. For many businesses, practical demonstrations or site walkthroughs are essential.
But one of the biggest positives of a face to face session is the opportunity to meet new co-workers on a more personal level, network, ask questions and explore team dynamics.
Where time is so precious in any business, the opportunity for face to face time should be prioritised for forming these quality connections. The mandatory procedures and guidance can (and should) be kept separate.
4. Track competency
Can you ever be certain that new starters have soaked up and digested all the information from a face to face induction?
Everyone learns differently, at a pace that suits them. Simply attending an event gives no certainty that each individual is fully prepared and confident to hit the ground running in their new role.
Incorporating an online assessment or feedback form at the end of an online learning experience is a great way to track a user’s understanding or highlight any areas that may need additional attention, whether for that individual, or all new starters in the future.
5. Stay refreshed
No matter how much we try, what we learn fades over time – especially when it comes to details we don’t call upon on a regular basis. And in a new exciting role, there’s always a wealth of new information to take on board. Relying on new staff remembering all this key information is always a risk.
By moving online, not only can learners digest everything at their own pace, they also have a ready made online resource to refer back to; when they need a recap on how to use technical system, find out who to speak to, or perhaps refer back to holiday and payroll details.
Allowing this information to be readily available at the fingertips of new starters can enhance knowledge retention, increase employee confidence and boost productivity.
Summing up
Converting your existing employee induction process to digital learning is quick, easy and inexpensive. It will streamline your processes, free up staff hours, save essential training budgets in the long-term and give added value and support to new starters.
Here at Eggu, we know every project we work on is unique, and sometimes we need to take a different approach in reaching deliverables. That’s why we like to use a range of authoring tools and software solutions to assist us in building our bespoke elearning courses.
Now with mobile responsive delivery and accessibility standards high on the agenda with any elearning project, at Eggu, we prioritise development using products such as Adapt Learning and Articulate Rise.
Both create courses that automatically adjust to different screen sizes, depending on the device the course is viewed on. This approach ensures a consistent and engaging learning experience wherever you are, and across a variety of devices and screen orientations. This eliminates the need for separate design and build for desktops, tablets, and smartphones; something that more traditional tools, such as Adobe Captivate or Articulate Storyline, do not offer.
With a wealth of expertise in both Adapt and Rise, we thought we’d take the opportunity to breakdown their pros and cons around some key topics.
Overview.
Branding and themes.
Ease of use.
Interactive components.
Accessibility.
Review functionality.
LMS Compatibility.
Price.
We hope this proves a helpful resource to anyone currently examining the best digital learning rapid development tools on the market.
1. Overview
Adapt Learning
Adapt is an award-winning open source authoring tool, freely allowing anyone to download and install the software for their personal use. The access to the source code allows customisation to the tool according to your specific requirements.
The open source nature of Adapt brings benefits from a vibrant and active community of developers, instructional designers, and elearning professionals. This provides valuable support through forums, documentation, and shared resources, fostering collaboration and knowledge-sharing.
Learning Pool offers a version of Adapt with their Adapt Builder, with some great additional interactions, however it is somewhat restricted in the CSS editing. This is why we would often opt for our own hosted version where we have complete control of the back end and ongoing software updates, which can have an impact on past styling.
Articulate Rise
Rise is rapid authoring development tool that’s part of the Articulate 360 suite. There’s no software to download, with all development occurring online. It’s fairly basic in its usability, with a super soft developer learning curve required.
Unlike Articulate Storyline, as a web-based resource, it can be used on Mac OS and Windows.
2. Branding and themes
Adapt Learning
Using CSS in Adapt allows you to highly customise the look and feel of courses through theming and branding. This ensures that content aligns with client’s brand guidelines, creating an engaging, highly professional learning experience, that perfectly harmonises with other digital representations of the brand. It also boosts actioning design changes course-wide, rather than manually editing individual components.
The built-in Vanilla theme allows a decent level of colour customisation throughout the course build. But, for true customisation, a decent knowledge of CSS coding is required.
Articulate Rise
Until recently, theme customisation in Rise was pretty limited; only being able to update fonts, accent colour, navigation, and course labels.
Now, you can choose from three prebuilt themes:
Rise.
Apex.
Horizon.
In addition to choosing from eight cover page layouts, you can also customise additional theme elements, such as navigation menu type, navigation button options, and lesson headers.
The major downside however, is that CSS customisation is still restricted to editing the final published output files. So, it can be achieved, but ultimately the tool is not designed for this level of customisation.
3. Ease of use
Adapt Learning
Adapt offers a super easy-to-use interface which follows a typical WordPress backend style builder, using components, blocks and articles to efficiently construct modules rapidly.
Articulate Rise
Articulate Rise is renowned for its user-friendly and intuitive interface. The drag-and-drop functionality, along with pre-designed templates, makes it easy for both novice and experienced users to create engaging elearning content, without a steep learning curve.
Whilst the pre-built, editable lessons and templates, might save time, you will perhaps feel that all courses you produce in Rise end up looking very similar in nature.
4. Interactive components
Adapt Learning
Adapt has more interactions than any other authoring tool on the market, with a wide range of superb components already inbuilt. The open source nature of this software means that developers are continually adding to the bank of components and extensions available.
You can download and use over 100 community plugins that enhance your courses in unimaginable ways.
Ignacio Cinalli is the perfect example of an external developer that supplies helpful add-ons via GitHub.
Articulate Rise
There are forums discussing ideal new features from developers, however any creation of new tools is down to Articulate building these into the software. External plugins are not an option here. You can however embed more visual interactions created within Storyline to diversify delivery.
The inbuilt transitions of interactions are just great. They load and move beautifully.
The real downside is the customisation capabilities of these interactive features. You are limited with image placement and layout, with a few editable options only. This can make it hard to really harmonise with a brand’s other web presence.
5. Accessibility
Accessibility is a major priority for us at Eggu, and both Adapt and Rise integrate features to ensure courses are accessible to all learners. This includes support for screen readers and adherence to web accessibility standards, promoting an inclusive learning experience.
Both are built to meet the minimum WCAG 2.1 AA standards, but it’s down to the developer to ensure any alternative text is manually configured.
Clear instructions are also key before any interaction in elearning; something that is consistently provided throughout Adapt, but not in Rise.
For some helpful guidance in accessibility for digital learning, why not check out our 4-part blog?
Learning Pool’s version of Adapt Builder does offer review functionality, but this is sadly not currently available in standard Adapt package. According to discussions on forums however, this is something that is soon to come.
Articulate Rise
Without doubt the Review360 feature is one of its highlights; allowing simple team or client collaboration when finalising a build or reviewing ongoing updates.
7. LMS Compatibility
Adapt Learning
SCORM 1.2
SCORM 2004
Articulate Rise
SCORM 1.2
SCORM 2004 (2nd / 3rd / 4th editions)
AICC
xAPI
cmi5
8. Price
Adapt Learning
Adapt is free software to download and install onto your own server, however you do require the capabilities to do this.
Learning Pool’s Adapt Builder is linked to buying into their learning management system solution, which varies in costs depending on the end number of users.
Alternatively, there are great companies out there like Adapt Unlimited, who solely provide affordable Adapt hosting solutions delivered through the cloud.
This allows for course development to synch across computers and be shareable with your whole team, without the need for software keys or installation.
A standard team license (hosting only) starts at £880 + VAT per annum, with additional options to provide training and support.
Articulate Rise
A personal subscription to Articulate 360 starts at £960 + VAT, per subscription, per annum, with team subscriptions starting at £1295 + VAT, per subscription, per annum.
This can be secured via the official UK sales partner, Omniplex.
Summing up
Articulate Rise is great for cranking out clean, interactive learning content at a high pace. Where clients already comfortably use this in-house, it’s simple for external designers and developers to step in and support the development of ad-hoc projects.
But is it ultimately engaging enough for end users? Without the instructional or graphic design know-how, it does have the potential to create boring, one-dimensional, page-turners.
As a digital learning design agency, one of our priorities always comes back to visual impact and creating a bespoke product in line with a client’s brand.
Therefore, our personal preference often leans towards Adapt due to its customisation capabilities.
Do you have a need for support in bespoke elearning development?
When we think about digital learning, often our instinct is to visualise internal staff training. But the reality is that so much of promotion, PR and social media these days centres around building customer skills and knowledge.
Customer education is all about supporting your clients to learn about and extract the most value from your product or service.
Whether we are instructing how to use a product, shifting ideas or simply showcasing brand expertise and building a community.
So, here are our three key drivers for the use of digital learning to educate your customers.
1. Build brand
At Eggu, we see a fine line between the techniques used in learning and promotion. Demonstrating your expertise through tutorials is a truly effective way to build brand reputation and trust.
Equally, for organisations such as charities, where sales are not the focus; educating followers on your mission is a golden opportunity to spread key messaging, promote your brand and further expand your reach.
2. Improve satisfaction and loyalty
Digital learning content doesn’t need to centre wholly on your product or service. Instead, it can best a great means to demonstrate your overall values of an organisation, connect with customers and welcome them into a wider community culture.
Perhaps you’re looking to introduce customers to your ethical activities and sustainability efforts?
Maybe you’re hoping to educate followers around body inclusivity and celebrate diversity?
Or perhaps you’d like to champion improving your audience’s fitness and nutrition, with healthy step-by-step recipe guides or exercise plans, all whilst showcasing your product?
Educating your customers is always a valuable investment. It can foster true loyalty, ensuring longer engagement and retention. Trust us – by sharing such content, customers will feel validated in choosing you.
3. Streamline support
It may seem obvious, but digital learning is an effective and cost effective solution for software or technical product instruction. For customers, the provision of interactive online training can itself be a huge selling point.
Evidence shows us that tutorial videos are significantly more useful to customers than providing a lengthy readable manual. By filtering users to the exact FAQ or challenge, you can resolve their queries in an instant. The result? Happy customers all round!
You will find that without sufficient customer training, some products or services will just fall flat and potentially gain you negative reviews. Supporting your clients post purchase can be just as important to retain their custom as that initial sale.
And an added bonus – it’s an ideal solution to reduce enquiries and requests for support, ultimately saving you both time and money too.
Do you have a product of service you would like to educate your customers on?
With every new release, the open-source learning management system, Moodle, continues to enhance and grow.
The days of clunky, uninspiring platforms are history, with improved visual styling and an immensely friendlier user interface, now fully responsive and consistent between devices.
Plus, you’ll now see heightened security settings and a range of gradebook enhancements too.
There’s a reason why Moodle can vouch for 300 million users worldwide, with a thriving online community of collaborative developers, freely sharing their technical knowledge.
At Eggu, we use Moodle as an effective LMS solution for those clients brand new to digital learning, looking for that complete online package. It provides a great container to securely host and manage all your online training and track user activity; all without breaking the bank.
We’ll custom design it to your brand and needs, host it, manage it, provide administrative support and even run a technical helpdesk for the end users. Phew – Just another weight off your shoulders.
And the fact that you can use Eggu to create all your bespoke digital learning resources too, you’re guaranteed a high quality, professional and consistent delivery throughout the user experience.
So, with a stack of LMS software to choose from on the market, why can Moodle sometimes be overlooked as a great, affordable solution? We thought we’d fill you in and highlight some of the latest developments and favourite new features we love about working with Moodle.
Themes
Although Moodle have streamlined the course page design to better conserve screen space and improve user navigation, there is always room for improvement when it comes to customising the design to reflect your brand.
By using pre-built Moodle themes and templates, you can create the right look and feel to seamlessly harmonise with your core website. Users won’t even realise they have ventured to a different site.
ThemeForest offers a host of affordable themes and templates to help create a modern and eye-catching website for your learning environment.
All are fully customisable, allowing you to change fonts, colours and layouts. They’re super-intuitive too, built with modular blocks to mix and match in the best way that works for you.
Plus, you’ll find them packed with lots of additional features and plugins, all of which are regularly updated with new options.
One of the key improvements in Moodle 4.0 was the addition of a new collapsible and expandable Course Index on the course page.
This revised presentation of materials offers an easier and quicker solution for students to locate activities or resources and educators to track activity completion.
But never just be restricted to the formats offered within the standard Moodle. There are plenty of plugins on the market too, which provide alternate course layouts to play around with.
The Buttons course format plugin for example, is a great, simple plugin to cleverly group activities, allowing the user to navigate sections one-by-one, without being overwhelmed with a wealth of learning content in one go. The buttons are fully customisable in terms of shape, colour and listing and allow for an alternate course layout for a touch of variety.
Bootstrap
Bootstrap is the most popular HTML, CSS, and JS framework for building responsive, mobile-first front-end web development. And great news – it’s fully compatible with Moodle.
When styling pages and components in Moodle, rather than inventing things from scratch that need custom styling, it’s always helpful to re-use pre-built snippets from Bootstrap.
This gives you a great start in pulling together new layouts and components, by integrating simple code to further customise your Moodle site.
The great news is that development has already begun on upgrading Moodle from Bootstrap 4 to Bootstrap 5, with Moodle 4.6 now planned for the full launch of the latest software.
Completion progress block
The completion progress block is a great time-management tool for students, visually representing anything the user needs to complete on the course, with colour coding for quick reference. This will collate a ‘to do’ list of anything on the course with activity completion settings.
But for teachers, managers or site admins, you can also get a helpful overview of students’ progress so far, allowing identification of those needing further support.
Report builder
Not well versed in SQL? Creating database reports has historically required in-depth technical knowledge and hard coding.
But the Report Builder, originally a feature of Moodle Workplace, has now been incorporated into Moodle 4.0, allowing you to easily create custom, dynamic reports, specific to your data needs.
Access to such data is key to measure student progress, analyse the learning impact and improve course delivery.
Need your own dedicated LMS?
At Eggu, our dedicated Moodle learning management system subscription packages are based on the estimated number of users and start from as little as £2,000 + VAT per year. Even better, the more courses and resources you add to your platform, the more cost-effective it becomes.
Why not speak to Eggu about your own dedicated Moodle platform to host and manage your bespoke digital learning?
January’s third Monday, “Blue Monday”, is thought to be the most depressing day of the year.
This might be triggered by gloomy weather, post-Christmas debt, disappointment from not keeping New Year’s resolutions or dissatisfaction about going back to work.
Spoiler alert: None of this is actually true. Obviously, the darkest day of the year would be different for every one of us. Blue Monday is really just a clever PR ploy to sell holidays!
But there is truth in seasonal variations in our mental health. Bodily changes in the winter can also impact our hormones, sleeping, eating habits and even our mood.
So, in light of this trending calendar event, the Eggu team have put together some of the things we find are great to protect our mental health, both in January, and throughout the rest of the year.
Mark flicking through vinyl in a record store
Mark – For the love of vinyl
Music has the power to evoke joy and create strong associations. Listening to a great album can trigger positive emotions and memories, releasing a dose of dopamine in the brain, which definitely helps me counteract any January blues.
As a graphic designer, I appreciate the artistic and physical aspects of vinyl, as records often come with visually appealing album artwork. Choosing a record, placing it on the turntable, and carefully dropping the needle is always a more satisfying experience compared to just pressing play on Spotify.
For me, streaming is more associated with background listening, whereas vinyl records typically require more effort and attention to play, allowing me to fully engage with the music.
Entering a record store or record fair, rummaging through crates of albums and finding a bargain or rarity evokes happy memories of my childhood which cannot be replicated by any algorithm Amazon tries to produce.
Kat surrounded by sequins
Kat – Just bloody wear it
When I put on an outfit that makes me feel good… it’s like a rush of adrenaline. It gives me armour to tackle my day with confidence and positivity.
Even during lockdown, sat on Zoom after Zoom, pregnant and uncomfortable, there wasn’t a day I did not style a look and slap on some lippy. It seems crazy, but I even insist on a spritz of perfume before every video call. It makes me feel prepared and gives the meeting as much importance to me as if it were face to face.
You might think dopamine dressing always has to be bright colours and sparkle… it often is… but sometimes what you have a craving for might be a bit of grunge, DMs and a dark smokey eye. Whatever the outfit, if it’s captured and coordinated right, it has the mentally stimulating impact I’m looking for.
I’m a confessed shopaholic and huge supporter of independent brands. So much of my wardrobe I used to hold back for those special occasions. Those times we dress up for a social occasion to really feel glam and put together. But why do we lock away these items for fleeting moments each year? We should strive to capture that enthusiasm and self love every day.
In the words of my true fashion icon Dawn O’Porter… just bloody wear it! So I’m gonna!
Luci walking the Scottish hills
Luci – Climbing the Scottish hills
Putting one foot in front of the other and filling my lungs with fresh air is my go to.
When I feel anxious, or lonely or just a bit flat, I pull on my trainers and get out for a walk. Saying hello to people I pass and smiling gives me that little rush of endorphines. Breathing the fresh air deeply slows down my thoughts and steadies any angst.
Sometimes I get the tunes pumping, sometimes I listen to a podcast, or sometimes I just listen to the world. I always make sure to stop and look around me and take in the beauty – it makes me feel lucky to live where I do, and happy I made the choice to be here.
Amy stretching in the gym
Amy – Kicking negative thinking to the curb
Mental health has been one of the most talked about things over the past couple of years and for me it has taken time to find something that can really make a positive impact to my mental health.
Then I found my kind of exercise… Body Combat! As well as really pushing myself and getting the strength and weight loss benefits, the endorphins I get afterwards has really helped boost my mood and get my days started off right with a clearer mind and more motivation.
I’m the better and happier version of me having found this way of boosting my mental health!
REMEMBER: It’s always important to distinguish between temporarily feeling down and experiencing depression or a mental health problem.
If you have concerns for your mental health and are looking to seek help and support, Mind is a great place to start.
Welcome to our four part guide on accessibility for digital learning. In this third blog we will explore key points you need to consider and helpful tools when designing accessible elearning for everyone, including those with learning, visual, physical and auditory difficulties.
1. Colour contrast
When it comes to using colours, always be aware of the contrast between the background colour and font that sits on top.
To make sure colour contrasts are accessible, we use a colour contrast checker.
This ensures that we are making it as easy as possible for users to read the text.
If you are using colours to convey meaning in your elearning design, try to avoid using these again elsewhere as this may cause confusion.
Also, try not to use colour to solely express meaning without further clarification.
For example, when presenting feedback to a question, if green indicates correct and red indicates incorrect, always include an icon, such as a tick or a cross, or results wording, so that it is more clear to a person who is colour blind.
3. Placement of imagery
Imagery can be a great asset to enhance elearning. However, the placement of an image with the content it relates to is important.
If an image is placed before the content, information may need to be provided within the alt text to clarify its relationship to the content yet to be read.
You can check out part 4 of our series on accessibility to understand more about the role of alt text.
Always ensure images are of high quality, as some users may utilise a screen magnifier. Images that are too small can appear pixelated when zoomed into.
What’s next?
In part four, we’ll look closer at the role of alt text and how to best write accessible content to describe the appearance or function of imagery used within your digital learning.
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Last week, Kat, our MD was in Parliament with long-standing client, Brook to lobby the Government to take an evidence-based approach to Relationships, Sex and Health Education (RSHE) Guidance for young people in schools during its review in 2023. Hosted by Maria Miller, DBE the event was set up in response to vocal opposition to inclusive Relationships and Sex Education. It is vital that any changes to the guidance continue to support – and not hamper – teachers’ provision of high-quality RSHE in our schools.
RSHE was made a mandatory topic in 2017 with mass cross-party support. In 2019, 538 MPs voted in favour of the statutory guidance: guidance that was informed by, and had widespread support from, organisations across health, education, safeguarding and faith groups.
The guidance is now being reviewed.
Part of the video evidence submitted to support the RSHE Guidance review was co-created by Eggu:
Brook wants the Government to take an evidence-based approach and use this opportunity to build on the 2019 guidance so that it is a practical tool for teachers which enables them to provide the RSHE that children and young people want and need.
You can find out more, and pledge your support here:
