Author Archives: Melissa A. Venable

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About Melissa A. Venable

Working at the intersection of instructional design and technology, social media, and career development.

Tools for Freelance Instructional Designers

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A recent LinkedIn eLearning Guild Group member asked “What are the top tools for freelance elearning design and development?” and 100 comments later, there was quite a list.

The result was a nice mix of both specific software for getting the work done and advice and suggestions related to running a freelance business.

Here is my attempt to categorize and capture all of the recommendations, in no particular order of course. While I tried to include everything that was mentioned, my apologies if  I may have missed one or two…

  • Software Suites and Packages – Adobe Creative Suite, Adobe eLearning Suite, Articulate Studio, Microsoft Office, Open Office, Google Tools

  • Rapid Development – Captivate, Lectora, Cam Studio, Camtasia, Articulate
  • Screencapture/Screencast – Jing, Screenhunter, Snagit (very popular!), Snap4

  • Image/Photo Editing – PaintNet, GIMP, PaintShop Pro
  • Video – Sony Vegas Pro, Sorenson Squeeze, After Effects, Celtx Script Writing
  • Audio – Audacity, Soundbooth, Levelator
  • Delivery – LMS, Portal – WordPress, Drupal, Blackboard, Moodle

  • Synchronous Communication – Skype, DimDim, Elluminate, WebEx, Centra, LiveMeeting, Oovoo
  • Programming Skills – PHP, HTML5, CSS3, SCORM
  • Project Management – Gantto.com, OpenWorkbench, MSProject, LotusLive
  • Business Operations – Dropbox, GetHarvest.com, Adobe Acrobat, PrimoPDF, QuickBooks, FreshBooks, MyHours.com, FastTrack, BullZip, PDFPen, Zoho, and a local small business Accountant
  • Professional Development – Books – Roam, Clark, Horton; Advice – Entrepreneurship.com, Forbes.com; Networking and Mentorship – professional associations recommended: ASTD, IPSI
  • And more… Notepad++, iSpringFree, Flash Firestarter, SwishMax2, MindManager, Prezi, Xtranormal, ReadtheWords.com, Tokbox, Adobe Kuler, Wampserver, Balsamiq, Questionmark, Madcap Flare, Color Schemer, Fireshot, and Compliance testing sites

A few absolutes to close: Internet access, a powerful computer with multiple monitors, coffee, aspirin, a sense of humor, and a support system!

How about it, Freelancers? Any corrections or additions to the list?

Update! (12/1/2010): Please see the cross posting on OpenSesame. They have graciously provided links to each of these tools! Very helpful.

Image credit: keepthebyte, Flickr

Online Project Management and the Course Development Process

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Working with virtual teams to develop online courses presents multiple challenges. Managers, designers, developers, and faculty content experts must all be able to communicate and collaborate effectively, and primarily asynchronously, across time zones. Online project management applications are available to help provide shared workspace and an overall structure for the process.

This post summarizes a Sloan-C poster session I presented with Noel Broman last week. We currently use Basecamp to facilitate the course development process with small teams. This service is a paid one, but there are others – many others, with a range of pricing schedules as well as free options. Take a look at this list of 15+ Project Management Tools.

Reviewing the Options

Consider how your team might use an online system and what features they need to get the work done.

  • How many people need access to the system as a whole? To an individual project?
  • How many projects do you have running simultaneously?
  • What is your budget?
  • Do you want/need a social networking component? (personal profiles, etc.)
  • What features do you need?

A short list of features to get you started:

  • Calendar
  • Milestones and benchmarks
  • Automated notifications
  • File storage
  • File version control
  • Check-in/Check-out function
  • Internal communication (email, instant messaging, conferencing)
  • Collaboration space (whiteboards, wikis)

Benefits and Challenges

From my own experience the following features make a positive difference in the process:

  • Version control of documents – Ending the need to ask the question: who has the latest development guide?
  • Visibility of milestones – calendar feature with email reminders ensures that dates and deliverables are openly posted and available to all members of the team.
  • Task assignment – creating to-do lists and assigning specific tasks to team members by name
  • Project templates – once you set up a project area with the milestones, etc. you need, you can copy it for use with other, similar projects.

A few things we are still working on:

  • Learning curve – take the tech skills and experiences of your team into consideration when making a selection and allow time for everyone to experiment with the interface.
  • Training – most of these applications come with guides and tutorials of some kind, but these may not be enough. Consider creating a sample project that everyone has access to just to try out all of the features and practice with the tools without fear that they will break anything.

Your Experiences

Are you using a specific tool or feature that you can recommend to the rest of us? Do you have questions about using an online project management system? Please post your ideas and questions.

Image credit: stock.xchng

Searching for E-Learning Project Management Blogs

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Last week I presented a brief session at E-Learn that described an online search for blogs that address the instructional design of e-learning and project management. I worked on this project with Amy Hilbelink. We work at the intersection of instructional design and project management, coordinating the development of e-learning products and managing large-scale initiatives. This presentation was a look at our attempt to organize a search for leaders who are blogging about these topics.

My primary goal was to find out more about blogs that might inspire Design Doc. Amy, considering a blog of her own, wanted to find a niche. We also hoped to create a list of blogs and authors we could follow for current information in our field. Managing the available information is daunting to say the least.

The result was a list of 36 unique blogs: 50% were sponsored/written by individuals, another 33% by businesses and organizations, and the remaining 17% by educational institutions. This list still requires some level of curation. Not all of the blogs, found in March 2010, are still live. Many haven’t been updated in a while. Others have changed names or just don’t hit the mark, even though there is some coverage of either instructional design or project management. We thought there were gaps, too. Why didn’t some of the blogs we were already aware of make the list? Perhaps our favorite bloggers aren’t writing with SEO in mind. Should they?

Here are a few blogs you may be interested in that did come up in our search:

Who are you reading? Please reply and add to the list.

For more information about our search process, keywords used, and information collected take a look at the presentation.