Hidde Baggelaar, Author at Splintt

ELearning without end

Hidde Baggelaar — Tue, 24 Jan 2023 15:40:35 +0000

Rosa
eLearning developer

ELearning without end

If you’ve been sitting behind your laptop for 20 minutes and don’t know how long your e-learning will last, it can be quite frustrating. Especially if you have a packed schedule with several deadlines and tasks that need to be completed today. This can lead to mindlessly clicking through or even closing the session. That’s a shame and completely unnecessary. With these tips, you can provide clarity to the participant:

Break it into pieces
Make it clear where the participant is in the eLearning. This can be done in various ways.

Tip 1: Work with chapters
Introduce chapters. Make sure the chapters are all roughly the same length. You create unrealistic expectations if someone quickly goes through the first three chapters and then encounters a large amount of information in chapter four.

Tip 2: Add page numbers
Knowing you are on page 24 does not mean much, but being on page 24 of 30 tells you you are almost there. Using chapter page numbers can also make progress feel more manageable. If 228 pages seem daunting, break it into four sections. Four times 57 sounds much more manageable.

Tip 3: Use a progress bar
You can use the same trick with a progress bar, at the course level or chapter level. Let the bar fill up from 0 to 100%, and the participant will understand where they stand.

Make it clear
Completing small steps – whether they are chapters or pages – provides a better learning experience.Participants like to have an endpoint in sight.

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2 myths about the 70-20-10 model

Hidde Baggelaar — Mon, 31 Oct 2022 16:00:01 +0000

2 myths about the 70-20-10 model

When discussing workplace learning, the 70-20-10 model often comes up. In a nutshell, this model suggests that 70% of professional learning happens on the job, 20% through feedback and coaching, and the remaining 10% from formal learning moments, such as live training or eLearning.

These figures come from a study by McCall, Lombardo, and Morrison, in which 200 managers reflected on their experiences. The study took place in 1988 and has been around for a while. As a result, various misunderstandings and myths have emerged. Let’s look at two important myths and debunk them.

Omitting formal learning

A common question when someone first hears about the model is: if 90% of learning occurs in an informal setting, why invest time, effort, and costs in entire curricula of formal learning moments? Assuming formal learning accounts for exactly 10% – and not 9 or 11% – the percentage does seem quite low. Let’s consider an example:

Within a company, there is a specific procedure for making a product. You might think, “Oh, employees will learn that from each other on the job.” But it’s probably much more efficient to first explain the process in a formal training session or eLearning. This way, you avoid a lot of trial and error and frustration.

In this example, the formal part of the learning process, in terms of time investment, is less than 10% of the total journey from beginner to expert in this production process. Yet, it is incredibly valuable. The amount of time says little about the value of a learning moment.

When it comes to workplace safety, you also cannot omit formal learning. Accidents are not learning moments. You need to formally inform employees to ensure tasks are performed safely.

70-20-10 model as a matrix for structuring learning interventions

It is sometimes thought that it is a good idea to structure learning and development based on the 70-20-10 model. Each formal learning moment should then have 9 informal learning moments. It is also often thought that 10% of the L&D budget should go to developing classroom sessions and eLearning, with the remaining 90% going to resources that facilitate workplace learning.

The 70-20-10 model is then taken too literally. This model is not a matrix for structuring your learning interventions, and the percentages are not prescribed values. You should see this model as a conclusion drawn about the learning process based on a group of people willing to participate in a study on professional education.

Don’t forget the other 90%

Remember where the 70-20-10 model comes from: a study of 200 managers in 1988. Maybe we shouldn’t take it too literally. One conclusion is that informal learning – the 90% of the model – is also important and should not be neglected. You can’t just conduct a training session and think your employees will figure it out on their own afterward. No, don’t ignore the 70% workplace learning and 20% feedback and coaching. Ensure materials are available in the workplace. Do this at the times and places where employees need them. Set up a performance management process where gathering feedback, learning from each other, and staying in conversation with your manager are central.

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Brighten Up Your eLearning with Some Color

Hidde Baggelaar — Thu, 23 Jun 2022 07:20:30 +0000

Brighten Up Your eLearning with Some Color

Ever created an eLearning with a white background and black text? Probably. Most eLearnings look like this. For good reason, as black on white is safe and works well, meaning it is highly readable. But by adding some color, you can give your eLearning that extra touch and ensure the material sticks better with the participant.

It all depends on how you use color. With color, you can attract attention, enhance readability, or appeal to participants’ emotions. However, too many colors, colors that don’t match, or colors that reduce readability can cause eye strain and detract from your eLearning.

Which colors to choose? That depends on the emotions and associations you want to evoke. Warm colors, such as red, yellow, and orange, stimulate the brain and often evoke positive emotions in people. When you think of yellow, you probably quickly think of the sun and cheerfulness. And with red, passion and love. Colors like red and yellow are mainly used to attract attention or emphasize points (think of the yellow highlighter!). Orange is inviting and exciting and can be used, for example, to encourage the participant to click a button.

Cool colors, such as blue and green, are mainly calming. Do you need to explain complex material? Then use a color that is calming and stimulating, like blue. Green gives a sense of safety, calm, and nature, making it suitable for ‘green’ topics. Don’t forget that colors can have different associations in other cultures.

To prevent your eLearning from becoming one big coloring book, here are some guidelines:
– Use no more than three colors; two main colors and one accent color.
– For the accent color, it’s best to use warm colors.
– Ensure the colors match well. You can use a color wheel to see which colors, for example, form a good contrast or are in harmony.
– Be consistent in your use of colors.
– Test readability. Not all color combinations are suitable.

So, use color wisely based on the tips above to increase the effectiveness of your eLearning.

Happy coloring (but stay within the lines, of course)!

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Does gamification improve eLearning?

Hidde Baggelaar — Tue, 28 Sep 2021 07:11:58 +0000

Does gamification improve eLearning?

Gamification involves using game elements and techniques in a non-game context. Think of badges, high scores, progression bars, challenges, levels, achievements, and rewards. Running apps like Strava use these elements to get their users running and, more importantly, to keep them running.

All these concepts were initially designed to make video games more attractive, with the goal of selling more copies. Take the classic Space Invaders, for example. You control a spaceship defending Earth from descending waves of aliens. To ensure players are entertained for more than just fifteen minutes, several concepts were applied. Here are four examples:

Story – A story about a war with extraterrestrial beings was added to the moving pixels on the screen. This gives meaning to what you are doing and assigns you an important role: you must defend Earth! This makes the game more interesting.
Levels – Every time you clear the screen, you move to the next level with a new wave of aliens. This makes progress more visible and provides a sense of accomplishment each time.
Challenge Curve – The levels are not repetitive but become increasingly challenging, with more or faster enemies, for example.
High score – You earn points for shooting down aliens and completing levels. You can try to beat your own high score or see how you compare to others.

These game elements influence the participant’s motivation. For digital learning solutions, motivation is a hygiene factor: if it is lacking, the solution will have little to no effect. Without motivation, a participant will not engage seriously, will click through as quickly as possible, or even close the training. Therefore, it is crucial that participants are motivated. There are two types of motivation: intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation.

Intrinsic motivation occurs when the participant is interested, curious, or otherwise internally driven to learn. Extrinsic motivation comes from external factors, such as having to complete a safety eLearning course to be allowed to enter a building.

Intrinsic motivation is much more effective for the learning process than extrinsic motivation. As you can imagine, participants who are externally motivated will try to complete the eLearning as quickly as possible. They complete the eLearning but probably learn very little. If participants are intrinsically motivated, for example, because they are curious about the content or want to achieve a good score, they are much more likely to learn from the eLearning. With gamification, we aim to evoke intrinsic motivation in participants.

There are many elements we can borrow from video games to achieve this motivation, but more is not always better. Choose a few elements that resonate with your target audience. These might be different for doctors than for firefighters. And remember, gamification is a nice addition to your learning solution, but nothing more. Your content must still have appropriate didactic methods and a logical structure. The game elements ensure that participants engage with this content attentively.

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I wouldn’t want to lose it

Hidde Baggelaar — Fri, 04 Sep 2020 07:29:54 +0000

I wouldn’t want to lose it

Would you also find it terrible if your laptop got stolen? Or if it suddenly stopped working? I would. Not so much because I would have to buy a new one (I already had my eye on the latest MacBook Pro), but because of all the history I would lose. The photos and videos that can’t be replaced. I’m just afraid that along the way, I’ve already lost some things, despite all the cybersecurity and information security protocols I follow.

At least you don’t lose photo albums. I know exactly which cabinet at my parents’ house holds all the photo books. They are brought out every now and then, and then they go back to the same place. I can specifically look for that one photo where I’m 5 years old and so angry that my cheeks are the color of an eggplant, or where I’m with my best friends from elementary school, that photo just after my mother removed the flowerpot from my head to show my new haircut (after she had put a band-aid on my ear).

I know the photos, I know exactly what they look like, and if I start talking to my mother or brother about the eggplant photo, they know what I’m talking about, what the photo looks like, which book it’s in, and roughly on which page. It’s funny, we laugh about it, and sometimes it’s nice to actually look at the photo again.

On my laptop, it’s the opposite world. There are folders with names like “photos” and “New folder” and “IMG_0909.” Because that seemed logical at the time. I think. And these are then hidden in overarching folders named “backup” followed by a date. Backups of laptops that had backups of earlier laptops. All very organized.

I have no idea what beautiful pictures you might find if you open the folders. They contain thousands of photos, transferred from cameras and phones and other laptops of mine or others. If I randomly click on some, I find pictures where I don’t recognize anything, where I’m in the photo but have no idea what’s going on, or where I vaguely remember what I wanted to photograph but can’t tell you who the people are.

There are also all sorts of variations of those photos, because why be frugal with those MBs you can reuse, right? Variations with a slightly different smile, blurry and shaky variations, variations where I can’t really tell the difference. The collection has never been cleaned up, and no selection has ever been made, as you would do for a physical photo album.

So, I almost never look at them. I can’t say with a straight face that I’ve never lost photos. Maybe I accidentally deleted a backup once, or never made a backup. I do know that I can never find what I’m looking for. That’s also a form of losing.

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Phishing through the years

Hidde Baggelaar — Thu, 28 May 2020 07:34:20 +0000

Phishing through the years

Lately, I’ve noticed that phishing emails are hardly distinguishable from real ones. Where are the days when you could just laugh heartily at the desperate attempts of these cybercriminals? The question used to be, “Who falls for this?” when you showed a funny example to your colleague. Now the question is more, “How can I tell this is phishing?”

Filled with nostalgic feelings and longing for the good old days, I googled the evolution of phishing, a phenomenon that appeared on the digital scene as early as 1996. And that wasn’t the only interesting fact I came across. Phishing scams use fake emails and websites as bait to trick unsuspecting victims into voluntarily exposing their sensitive information. Just like you use bait to catch fish. And that’s where the name comes from. “But why is it spelled with a ‘ph’?” I hear you ask. Well, that was also traceable. Hackers were then also called “phreaks,” and “phreaking” referred to experimenting with and studying telecommunication systems by these underground groups.

In the beginning, phishers created credit card numbers using an algorithm. It sounds complicated and not really foolproof, but it turned out that they hit the proverbial jackpot often enough through the sheer volume of attempts to make it profitable. With the created fake credit cards, they opened accounts with the American internet provider AOL, and they used these to send out more phishing attempts. Until AOL put a stop to it.

The next step was what we still encounter in phishing emails today: they posed as employees of a company and sent emails with urgent requests and threatening consequences. And yes, phishers wouldn’t be phishers if they didn’t pose as employees of the very company that thwarted their previous plans: AOL. Over the years, phishers expanded their repertoire to emails from banks, online stores, postal services, customs, tax authorities, and so on. They also got better at it, realized they needed to make fewer spelling mistakes, and started getting more creative in their attempts.

I really long for the time when I could still chuckle at the repeated message that I was the millionth visitor, no matter which site I visited, or the chance to win a €100 voucher for the local McDonald’s. Click now! Those were the days.

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Building an eLearning platform

Hidde Baggelaar — Tue, 25 Feb 2020 09:09:16 +0000

Building an eLearning platform

The story of Splintt and Maxcode

They say “you live and you learn,” but the way we acquire information has changed so much in recent years. With the revolution of the internet and social media, instructional manuals have slowly become obsolete and hard to update. Traditional learning strives to keep pace with the increasing desire from users to have visual, interactive training available 24/7. This is where Splintt comes into the picture.

How Splintt started

It was 2008 when Natasja Jager, founder and director of Splintt, noticed these changing trends and decided to switch from her classroom training business to eLearning. With the help of a Dutch developer, Splintt was born. In the beginning, she used the system to host online training assessments, videos, and stories that she distributed to her client’s user groups.

Then the internet caught wind and everything changed. Niels van Drimmelen became Natasja’s business partner and introduced Splintt to Maxcode to host the platform and bring it online.

Here we are at the beginning of a beautiful partnership.

Learn the ropes

As the company grew, bugs and technical hiccups revealed the need for a team to bring the application to the next level. Within the company, they divided the roles, with Niels becoming fully involved on the technical side and Natasja on the business side, discussing with clients to find out the message they wanted to convey and understand their learning goals. Maxcode took the third role: since they were already hosting for Splintt and understood how the application worked, they became the dedicated software development team for the Splintt application.

The project started with a team of two people, under the supervision of Niels, who brought their clients’ wishes and their own ideas together and discussed them with the team to achieve the most effective functional perspective. As soon as the work started, they realized that the written code was at the point of no return and trusted the Maxcode team to start fresh with a newly written application.

Two heads are better than one

With the software development needs satisfied, the Splintt team realized that the eLearning platform also needed talented people to build the didactical modules for the learning platform. Since it was a new area of expertise, it was difficult to find the right people with the proper skills to conduct this activity. This is where Maxcode jumped in again to help, and together with Splintt, they built and trained a team of professional eLearning editors that grew into a strong team of their own. In time, the team discovered and learned new skills, from technical abilities to project management, and proved their worth and qualities to the Splintt team.

This is how a long and beautiful collaboration started, and how the adventure of Splintt took shape, with victories and difficulties, as any adventure goes. A huge test of this partnership came with one of their milestones when a Splintt client wanted to personalize the experience of the end-users for the application with functionalities that did not exist at that point. This was a great opportunity to invest in the features for the platform, as well as plan work for an expanding team to implement all these changes. However, the client decided to cancel the project. The development stopped, the workflow reduced, and the teams had to adapt quickly to this new change in setting. There was no point in wallowing and accepting defeat, but rather in working together to solve the problem. The teams both in the Netherlands and in Iasi became smaller to fit the new needs, and Splintt took this curveball and turned it into a home run together with Maxcode.

This openness and their shared experience have cemented the strong connection between the two teams, Splintt and Maxcode, into one big team of dedicated people.

Great minds think alike

The software discussions are open: developers share ideas about the platform constantly, and their input is valuable and treated as such. Both the developers and the QA engineers know the platform like the back of their hands, and their responsible spirit will always put the sake of the product ahead of any ego. The development team learned to adapt their technologies and style to the different integration needs of the Splintt clients, proving that beyond knowledge and talent, a flexible spirit will go a long way.

On the technology side, the team uses ASP .NET, Angular JS, HTML/SCSS, as well as Azure technologies such as Cloud Services and Application Gateway. They are continuously improving the process, with their constant goal being to migrate to new technologies as the domain advances and becomes modern, leaving old technologies behind. One of their main concerns is the quality of the applications they develop, which they assure by using automated tests that run on builds and releases and by using SonarQube with custom static code analysis rules. With software being an ever-changing domain, the developers’ duty is to perfect their trade, regardless of the project they are working on.

For the Philpaper platform, the editing team works with multiple eLearning authoring tools, such as Articulate Storyline, Adobe Captivate, and Lectora Publisher. Some client modules also require image editing (Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator), video editing (Adobe Premiere), and basic programming skills (HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript).

This responsible nature, as well as their hard work, is what recommends Maxcode in the lifelong collaboration with Splintt. The team’s enthusiasm, motivation, and investment in finding solutions rather than admitting defeat in the face of adversity are values strongly embedded both in the Maxcode team and in the Dutch Splintt team. It is this involvement and passion to do things right that has created a core of connection.

Being the professionals they are, the Splintt team surrounds themselves with people that challenge their ideas, rather than saying yes to everything, even if it might not work. They have found exactly this and more in the Maxcode team, people who recognize merits and accept recognition in their end, who create a family vibe, even miles away, and who use humor and great energy to make the distance seem minutes away.

Knowledge is power

When Splintt chose Maxcode years ago for their development skills, they discovered talented people from a country that proved itself emerging as a competitor in the market of quality software products delivered all around the world. By choosing and maintaining the partnership with the team in Romania, Splintt broke the stereotype and proved that they can beat their competition not only in pricing but also by providing a high-quality software application, built by passionate Romanian developers.

What better proof for their work than testimonials from clients who adopted the Splintt Philpaper app for their employees, decided to switch to an internal system, and then chose to return to Splintt because it was the best learning platform they have ever worked with. The user-friendly experience of the platform is one of the top appreciations of the Splintt clients, and it is the pride of both the Dutch and Maxcode teams that they are building the right thing in the right way. That, together with the great support offered by both teams for the clients implementing the system, is the secret recipe to building the perfect experience from the ground up.

With the help of their clients’ feedback, both Splintt and the development team grew together, they evolved and improved their processes and, by doing so, they created both a great setting to learn and share learning as well as a strong family with a single goal in mind: to deliver the perfect product.

Looking for a solution for your situation?

Simply schedule a call or Zoom meeting with one of our eLearning experts. We’d love to show you more using a demo!

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Tip 6: make it concrete

Hidde Baggelaar — Wed, 20 Mar 2019 09:02:44 +0000

Tip 6: make it concrete

eLearning should be more appreciated. Until that happens, I have decided to no longer be part of the problem and contribute to the solution. Therefore, I will write 8 blogs in the coming period, each with a tip for writing good eLearning modules.

My first five tips mainly focused on presenting the information you want to convey. My sixth tip also addresses the content and making the material practically applicable.

In many theory books for driving courses, you find beautiful helicopter views of intersections. The lesson car approaches the intersection, a pedestrian comes from the right, a scooter from the left, and the tram coming from the other side turns left, crossing the path of the lesson car. Who goes first? The question is. Easy, right has priority, and a tram always goes first, the pedestrian has to wait to cross. So, tram, lesson car, scooter, pedestrian. Great. Let’s go through 88 more of these situations!

A hundred situations later (12 extra, just to be sure), you get into that lesson car yourself. At the first street corner, you panic. Because yes, you know the rules, but you’ve never seen it from this perspective. And you know where your right is, but putting yourself in the shoes of the other road users is not so easy. Especially now that you’re no longer in your helicopter.

This is often a problem when writing eLearning modules. Policies are often formulated in such a way that participants have difficulty translating them into practice. Therefore, it is important not to speak in general terms but to make the material as practical and concrete as possible. Come up with scenarios that participants may encounter during their work. Let them apply the knowledge in practical situations. And no matter how beautiful and clear the helicopter view sometimes is, don’t fall into the trap of making it abstract. Make it concrete.

Looking for a solution for your situation?

Schedule a call with one of our eLearning experts. We would be happy to show you more with a demo! Or leave your question. and we will contact you.

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