Happy Friday people coming in. It's a great summer day.
Come on in turn on those videos, let's see your happy summer faces back. The
Hello, everybody, hello, be sure to say hello in the chat.
I I hear you, Nicole, my stomach's actually growling right about now,
that's okay. The atmosphere, happy Friday, people.
Hi, Cindy,
how is everyone Welcome? Welcome. Coming on in.
Gonna get all groovy about tools and ideas that we can use for those champagne learning programs we want to create, but only have that beer budget.
Everybody's having a good day so far.
Here in the chat, Tell us. Tell us how your day's going. What do you do? It just popped up a message for me, telling me, am I do I want to change to a different language. I do not. I speak English poorly. That is my language?
Hey, rainy day in Arizona. AR, Arizona, yeah, Arizona. Don't know why I had a brain melt there for a second. Hot Springs is or Arkansas? That's actually that was my first guess. I thought that can't be right. I clearly need more coffee this morning.
Hey, people coming in. Welcome, welcome.
Happy. Friday.
Beautiful day in Portland. It's a pretty day out here in the Chicagoland area as well. It was raining all earlier this week and a little chilly, but I'm thinking the weather's going to be a okay today and the weekend, boy, you're at a coffee shop Erica. That's nice. I like that. I
like that a lot. Now you need to take the headphones off and turn up the volume, and let's educate everybody in the coffee shop. No, Oh, fine. I tried June gloom. Oh, I remember those days. I'm originally from California. I remember those June blooms where everything is foggy or Misty. Engines. Pray we must fight. Yep, together,
okay, witness the next evolution.
Hi Kelly, good to see everybody today. Come on in what
happens? Hi Shannon, sorry, I'm gonna be off camera today.
All right, here we are. We are at the top of the hour, and as we continue to welcome Kiki in Happy Friday, everybody. Here we are again for another learning rebels, coffee chat, and I am Shannon Tipton. Owner of learning rebels and the moderator of this crazy bunch of people. And I enjoy it every other Friday, seeing everybody's faces. And today we are talking about champagne learning on a beer budget. And it's that time of year people where, you know, businesses, are looking at what they should what they should keep George, what they shouldn't keep, go. And you know where, you know where budgets are standing, where they might be looking for the second half of the year. And a lot of times, you know, they come back and they say, Hey, can you make adjustments, right? And this is where we we have to start thinking creatively. And, you know, good L and D people, as it were anyway, are always thinking creatively about what we can do with the, you know, limited amount of funds that we have, right? And as much as it's it's always funny to me, because the business does expect us still to produce those, you know, champagne learning programs, but they're not even giving us a beer budget. They're giving us like a water bottle budget. It's like tap water budget like, Okay, let's see how we can make that work. So what, what we are doing is today, going through some of the ideas that you have for low cost, even free tools. Also, what are some of your workflow ideas? What are you doing to make learning programs or resources in a workflow that is efficient? And also, I would be really curious about, how are you repurposing tools? So for example, in the email that I sent you yesterday, I gave you a few examples of project management tools being used other than for project management, right? So we can use those tools, especially tools like Asana or Trello or Monday, you know that have the Kanban type cards, right? And we can use those for active learning sets. We can use those for open journaling. So there's a lot of the ways that we can use the tools that we already use on our plates to make learning fun, make it more efficient and not have to spend an extra buck or two, right? Excuse me so already. Noel, thank you smart sheet for building learning paths for others when I don't have a learning management system, right? And I know a lot of you are using Excel for things like that too, you know. So there are tools out there. So before we get started, I just want to welcome everybody in. And for those of you who have not been to a learning rebels coffee chat, or this is the first time in a long time, perhaps, that you've visited us, please be sure to put that into the chat itself so we can give you the warm welcome that you deserve. I'd love to know who's new or who who's coming back to the fold for a little bit. And also, thank you to everybody who has their Claire welcome, who has their videos on. Now, we really don't go by any real rules. As far as this community is concerned, if you want to turn on your video, great. If you don't, that's also great. I realize that a lot of us are, you know, you might be eating lunch or you might be in a space that's not conducive to a video, but you know what? We really don't care if you're having a bad hair day. We don't care if you're in your pajamas. We don't care, you know, what we care about is just being able to see your face and to be able to, you know, communicate in this forum. Cindy, I happen to have a free Friday this morning. Oh, good. Well, I'm glad. Oh, pink eye. Kelly, sorry about that,
but um, Doug,
welcome to your second one in a row. I appreciate that. Thank you, Sandra, your third one. Thank you awesome. I appreciate all the people who are. You know, time is a valuable thing, and when you share it with us, that's that's really appreciated. So now I'm going to open this up. Here is a blog post that I found this morning, that I wrote about this time last year. It seems like where we were talking about this very thing, and I didn't add it to the newsletter yesterday, frankly, because I forgot that I wrote it. Yeah. Was so I found it this morning, and I'm like, Oh yeah, look at that. And so here we are. So I wanted to share that with you, but I would love to get started with the conversation. And let me. Let me go back up here. And that was Noel about smart sheets. Why don't we kick off the conversation? Talk to me, Noel, about how you are using smart sheets in place of your learning management system in place of a learning management system. How are you using it? Yeah, so
my my organization, utilizes Google Drive
for content delivery and content management, and I need to work within that tech stack. Within my limited budget, I recently got Smartsheet approved as a license, which has allowed me to do a little bit more, very excited for but yes, before I was using Google Sheets to try to create learning paths and say, Alright, first do this, then this, then this, and help guide people and show them what's next through their modules, tracking completions and engagement and all of that was really difficult and manual. So with Smartsheet, it's so much easier for me to be able to create a template of a path or a plan that's interactive for my learners, that they check boxes, click through things, expand, interact, comment, all within this this sheet, and then I The smart sheet allows me to roll up multiple people's plans into one reporting space for me so and very easily. I know what you can do it with Google Sheets too, but it gets complex and messy, and Smartsheet just makes it really easy. That's interesting. So how many people do you track on that smart sheet? Mm, so each each program. So I have, I have multiple Pro I have about five programs each person's enrollment. So let's say they take all five programs. So I've got five sheets per person, and then, and then, that depends on right the number of people I'm tracking through that program. They're coming in and out at varying stages. So I might have, you know, 20 people at any given time going through those programs. Okay, well, that's a great idea. So for those of you who are for smaller organizations, or you don't have to, you know, or maybe you're looking to track something separately. That's a that's a great idea, you know, to be able to take that and make it work for you. Now, what other, what other tools are you using, you know, to if you have a substitute for learning management system, I'd love to hear that, you know, or if you're using, is anyone out there using Moodle? So Moodle is a free, kind of, open source learning management system. I, I'd love to hear from anyone who's using it. I, I've evaluated it, and the issue I have with it is putting proprietary content out there and keeping it secured for only the audience it's intended for. Yeah, it didn't seem like Moodle was the right resource for that. Oh, that's interesting. I hadn't run into a security issue. I don't know if anybody else has
we actually Moodle for a while and then switch to learning pool, which still has Moodle in the background. It's still based on Moodle, but we switched to the more expensive, sure,
yeah, it gets to a point where it becomes unmanageable, you know. So, you know, so, God bless all of you. Who are, you know, trying to still manually work out a learning management system if you have a very large audience, because it can really be unwieldy, you know. But there are, you know, there are ways of working around it. And Moodle is one of those ways. And so Sandra, she's saying that she loves smart sheet as well. All right. Oh, so what tool are you going to replace it with? Oh, too costly, really smart sheets. I didn't think smartsheets Was that expensive, so maybe you need to make a business case.
Can you hear me? Okay, yes, absolutely. So I in a past organization use totora, which is Moodle based, or Totara. I don't know how it's but a Moodle based corporate kind of packaged Moodle. And that was, that was great. It was it was good. It was. Their first LMS, and it was good for what we needed at the time, which was just dip a toe into an LMS. It was, it was low budget. And I've also used no LMS in a previous business. We used basically a CRM software, you know, it was just hosting the content, and then we would embed a Google form into those assets as a way of tracking. That was really ultra no LMS, but it worked.
That is ultra well. And I had a client that had gone that same path. So they already had HubSpot, which is pretty expensive in of itself, but then they incorporated their training into the into a HubSpot path, or a journey, which I thought was an interesting use of it. You know, that's that's getting more than what you might think out of one tool, okay, figjam. What is figjam? So, Jessica, you want to tell me about that?
People like, Oh, she called on me. You're on mute. Jessica, so if you're
sorry about that, we use figma a lot more than we do now. We have Canvas as our LMS, and so canvas just got a integration with lucid, and so lucid does a lot of similar things as fig it's figma, but it's the kind of division of figma is fig jam, and fig jam works kind of like the old, like Google jam board did, where you can pull up post it notes and do online collaboration, and they have fun templates. It's just a really, I thought easy to use. Yeah, Miro is a good one, but figjam was free, and I thought it's capabilities were outstanding. And I just thought it was really easy to use, and it looked clean, and it's just, I really liked it. We have, like I said, since you gone to lucid, and lucid is great, but it doesn't have the same feel, I don't think, but, yeah, it was great. So check it out. If you're looking for something, it has a lot of like widgets in it as well. So like, as you're using it, you can throw timers on there, and you can embed, like polling in there, and you can do it's just got a lot of fun little things within it that are all accessible once you're in the program. And then I was going to also type out, but I'll just say it now. I've been using seven taps, which is like a micro learning site, and you get a free account, you get limited capabilities, but they just came out, oh, in the last few months, with, like, some AI features in there, where they prompt you to make your learning really actionable, and once you kind of answer the questions in the AI thing, it spits out this really, really well made micro learning sort of course. Or you could do a path of courses, and you only get so many per month. But what I did is I took that and then I recreated it in Canva for, oh, there you go. And, like, got the ideas from it and it, it turned out really good. So yeah, and
this is what I would like this conversation to really continue to roll on, is, how are, how are we using current tools and then repurposing them, right? So Canvas, a great canvas, a great example of that. So there's the free version and the pro version. And obviously you're only going to get so much out of the free version anyway, but still, it's very usable. And there are ideas that you might get from some place else and then be able to put them into a tool like Canva, you know, to create infographics or workbooks, those sorts of things, you know. So for those of you who are, you know, looking for a way to make nicer look books, workbooks, let's, let's face it, you know, you've got word out there, okay, but word has a funny way of doing what it wants to do, with your images, with your words and with your formatting, you know. And in a tool like Canva or vingage, you can, you know, make it look exactly like you want, you know, and so you can use a tool, you know, like, like an AI tool of any sort, take those ideas, move it into a free version, like Canva, and then create your workbooks, and you've got something that looks really nice without having an expensive like in design program, or something, you know, something like. That,
right? Yeah, there's napkin AI too, if you're looking for, like, some graphic like, it's free as well. So you can just put in any slideshow or any PDF, or, I don't know what types of resources, but it'll spit out like, 20 different options of infographics that you can do. And then you create those. You could download them. They're not great, but they give you a good starting point, and then you can recreate those in Canva as well.
That's interesting. That's a new one to me. I love when I hear new things, so I had about that, yeah, um, how are and I've got the URL for that right here. Now, here's the question in the chat, how are most of you delivering learning without an LMS? That's good question. So if you do not have an LMS, how are you delivering the learning? How's your E Learning getting delivered? So Noel is most are most of your courses live? Most of my courses are actually page turner, self paced via slides, right? Yeah, we also being a one person shop here where I do it all. Yeah, I have, I have over 100 different training modules that I have to maintain, and then I have a backlog of about 15 I still have to create, plus I build for software as well as like support other functions within the organization. So I'm looking at keeping up the content as well with 85 new features on average three times a year. So yes, so keeping it low tech actually makes it faster for me to just get in there and change the screens and make updates, etc. So yeah, so slide decks via Google Slides giving pass via Smartsheet for internal I use Confluence. Our product team has Confluence and JIRA Atlassian. So leveraging the existing tech stack we have today, I have Confluence paid landing page where I emulate the navigation of an LMS in courses, as though, to access that content in an organized way as well. I like that, and share and SharePoint is popping up too, and SharePoint has made if we were talking this time, maybe two or three years ago, I would hesitate to recommend SharePoint, but now there's been a lot of progress with SharePoint, and what you can do with it as far as creating things like, you know, like internal websites, right? So before, it was more of a knowledge repository, and now what you can do is you can create these internal websites that can help your business. For example, one of the things that we've recently done for a client is that we created a website on their SharePoint environment that is for is for training. Specifically, is for their L, D department. And so what we did is we created this page where it has an ongoing dashboard of their projects. So if a stakeholder clicked into that page, they would see where all of the different projects are at any given time, and then also it includes their training request form, all in this environment and all, all we needed was $0 and access to their SharePoint site. You know? So, so, again, this is about taking the tools that you already have and repurposing them in such a way that you can continue to get value out of them. Yeah, yeah. And you could, you could host courses on Canva in a in a limited way, you know, so you can. Oh, well, actually, Jessica, why don't you, rather than me, you don't need to hear my voice. So Jessica, why don't you share with people how that works within, within Canva. I
used it personally, but I was just on a webinar last yesterday with Danny Watkins, and she's like, a Canva guru. I do some work with Danny, yeah, and she said they just came out with these Canva courses, and she said they're not like perfect yet, but they're getting there. They're getting better. And I think she mentioned that there was data analytics and everything associated with them as well. So again, I can't speak from experience. I haven't used them, but that was new to me, so I'm assuming it's probably new to other people. Since it just came out, it
just come out, and we've had. Been in beta for a while, and so I've been keeping my eye on it. And the data is not really robust, but I don't think it's supposed to be. So I think really, if you think about how you use these sorts of tools, so when you think about Canva, in particular, a lot of people are who are using those tools are not in our area. They're, they're like, content developers, right? So you've got those, you know, the yoga 101, class, you know that they sell online, those sorts of things. And so you don't need a robust back end for that. Yeah, right. And so I think that, as with anything with Canva, it will continue to evolve, you know, at what pace? I don't know, but I suspect that they will probably evolve this pretty rapidly, because there are a lot of individual content developers, creators, influencers, etc, that would probably make use of this. So my guess is that they want to get into that. So you've got tools like Thinkific or teachable Kajabi, those sorts of programs which a lot of content creators use as their learning management system, but also their course developers. So I think that Canva wants to kind of get into that space and take a bite out of that particular apple.
Danny did a webinar yesterday on AI in Canva in training mag, I'll drop the link in you don't it's a free membership. If you don't have a membership to training mag, and you can watch do that, that'd
be great. Yeah, yeah. Danny and I have done a lot of work together. I need to say, hey, share that with me. Oh, I have our it uses Halo to manage tickets. That's interesting. We've added a training request form and some other workflows. There you go. So then, if you've got, if you're using a tool like Halo, and it's been a long time since I've looked at Halo, then, then again, you can massage that and think about how this works as you're thinking about its basic capability, not its end result. So a lot of times, we get hooked into what is this tool supposed to be? Right? So again, if I go back to the Trello example, so Trello is supposed to be a project management tool. So then when we think about it with those blinders on, then it's hard to think about, well, how does that work for learning? That's because you're thinking about it as a project management tool, but take the blinders off and think about, how does this tool operate? Right? How does it operate now? Can Can that operation be used to help us in developing learning content or resources? How? Can it work in our favor, right? And so Google Sites is another example. So if you don't have SharePoint and cool, then Google Sites. So Google Sites is a little known buried program that used to be pretty robust back in the day, but it's the same type of thing, where you can build a website out of Google sites. You can do the same thing in Canva. You can build a website out of Canva as well, but you got to host it somewhere. That's always the glitch, you know? But, yeah, you use Google sites for an internal wiki. Excellent, excellent. That's a perfect example of how you might use it. And then think about using internal wikis. Now let's, let's extrapolate this, or let's, let's go with the flow here. So you've got Google Sites, you build an internal wiki, and you can build as many as you need to build, because it's Google Sites, so however many you want. Now, what if you had a wiki for your different learning programs, so leadership, development, customer, service, sales, and then those learning programs hooked into that wiki where people can continue to add resources or have, Not really conversations, but add resources, add videos, images, articles, etc, so it becomes this breathing document of knowledge that just continues to morph as the classes go on. Right? So Jessica, I'm trying to figure out how to use our existing Microsoft tools, team, SharePoint, viva, to deliver a virtual Manager Development Program that is cohort based to a distributed team. Oh, what a great question that is. So I'm going to open this up to everybody here. So based on the comment there that Jessica just. Posted, and the conversation that we just had, what kind of ideas do you have
doing that exact thing right now? All right, Jason, go, it's it's all about using the channels within teams to drive them to a particular cohort and posting their tasks or whatever they need to do, and whatever assignments you give them in that and moderating the conversations if you need to. And then you can build out pages through SharePoint on teams to store that content, add additional flair, or whatever you need to do
to it. Yeah, you incorporated, excuse me, I haven't talked much this morning. Have you incorporated the Viva in there at all to track, or is that not part of the equation? That's not part of our equation at this time.
Yeah, and Viva is supposed to work very, well. I I have it on good sources that who have been using Veeva, and they really they like it, and they're kind of impressed with it. I personally haven't used it, so I can't offer an opinion one way or the other, but the feedback that I'm getting from it is that, especially as AI capabilities, and it's it's learning. Record Store is pretty robust. We use Viva to announce upcoming cohorts, yeah. So if I go back so Noel, I use Slack for the very same thing. So when I have, you know, learning, rebel specific items or workshops, etc. I usually run them through slack, you know, so if I'm doing something, so I've got an upcoming class with training magazine myself here in June, and so we'll run that through the platform that training magazine provides. However, the cohort itself will be set up through slack. And it's the same thing though. Slack and teams operate in pretty much the same way, right? So you have workspaces and channels, etc. With with teams, it becomes a little bit more robust, because, as Jason said, it can then it can hook into the different areas within the Microsoft environment and within teams, you can create one group, and within that one group you can create individual conversations. So then you can, you can have all of this contained in one space, yeah. And you can
segment the access into channels, so you can give everybody access to the whole team, and then say, only these people in this cohort can ask access this channel. Or we have two cycles of a program going, and cycle one has one channel, cycle two has another channel, because they're like, four months apart, so I don't want them getting confused, right? But then you can use the main channel for those bigger follow up push items that you want to give
them. So I hope, I hope Jessica that gave you some ideas.
Yeah, it's pretty similar to what I've been outlining. I was really kind of curious about how Viva could interact with all, with the with teams and SharePoint as well. We have an internal SharePoint site where, um, looking to house, um, some SCORM based training. I mean, there'll be e learning courses, there'll be discussion and virtual sessions. So there's a lot of different pieces, and I'm trying to figure out how to make them look cohesive within the tools I have.
Yeah,
yeah. And that's kind of it's not terribly difficult. And sometimes cohesion can simply be a thread, right? So cohesion could be how the organizational structure of it. It could be something as simple as color or tone or vocabulary. You know that makes things link. You just want people to be able to associate one with the other. You also do want to make sure that it as it's seamless, right? So maybe you can use your intranet page as the home page so the so the SharePoint page becomes the homepage for the cohort, and on that homepage are, here's what to do, when to do it, how you can connect with other people, how the team's environment is going to work for this cohort. You can post a little intro videos, you know, that sort of thing. So this way, and then link it. So you can link the team's channel through the SharePoint and have people go to that environment directly from there, and then they don't have to do it again. So that's one way of getting people from one spot to the other and then being informed. As far as what they need to do, let's see what else we got. Another tool for tracking without an LMS manifestly. Oh, that's new. I don't think I've ever heard that that. So, Ashley, you want to talk a little bit about that if you are able.
Yeah, happy to so we use manifestly for onboarding. We have all of our onboarding stuff in a workflow in manifestly so every new hire gets a work like it, starts a new workflow. And when the workflow is initiated, everyone involved gets a ping, and so you can log in and see where they are in their workflow. See if there's any steps you need to take. Like, I handle our company project approach onboarding, so, you know, I'll, you know, get a ping and then log in and, like, for example, schedule a meeting with them. But it's been a really helpful tool, because everybody involved can log in and see the checklist the person is working on. You can ask questions. We can also do updates or designate different workflows, for example, like for senior leaders versus project staff versus interns. You know, have like, a slightly different workflow for each of those, but it's been really great for us just to kind of automate that process a little more and have it be repeatable and visible to everyone. And like I said, there's, there's free runs. I think it's five free runs a month, or something like that, which isn't a ton, but we're small, so, you know, we're not onboarding a ton of people at a time. And I don't think the license itself is too expensive, but, yeah, it's been really helpful just throwing it out there.
Nice. Thank you. You know, new tools. It's a great thing, you know. And it's about, again, it's about figuring out what the tool can do for you. So once you go with, let's say, manifestly, you go here, you check it out, you may find that you've already have something in your tech stack that operates like it. So then, rather than buying a new tool to add to your tech stack, it's about adjusting the current tool that you have, you know, to make it work. And Laura, thank you for posting that that might be an interesting follow up coffee chat here in a couple of months, where maybe your colleague might be interested in joining us and sharing with the group how they use SharePoint to make this work. So that might be an opportunity. So we should, we should talk about that. Yeah, let's see what else we got here. So it looks like that a lot of us, or a lot of you, are using the Microsoft environment, which is great. So now, what other tools are you using to help you create the programs, the resources, etc, that you are using to support your learning programs.
So Canva is the obvious one. So a lot of people are using Canva. Are you using any other tools like Piktochart for infographics? Camtasia? Okay. Camtasia certainly not a free tool. Camtasia is not free, but still should be in most people's toolbox. Now, the free alternative to Camtasia, they just changed their name, so now I've got to remember what it was, but back in the day, it was called Screencast O Matic. Yeah, I see not so. Okay, I've been around this block a time or two, and some of these companies have changed names several times, but it but it was called Screencast O Matic, and it was the low to free cost version of Camtasia slide model. I love slide model there is, and I don't know I pay for slide model, and I think I said this during our last Coffee Chat I might have, so please forgive if I'm being repetitive, but slide model, for me, is one of those, one of those knowledge repositories, right? So when you go into slide model. You see a bazillion different slide templates, and what it does for me is it gives me inspiration for how to present information in a different way. You know, people get tired of seeing the same old bullet points. You know, it's just, it's just draining cognitively. It's just draining slide after slide of text or slide after slide of bullet points. So if we can create an image or a chart or something that's going to tell the story in a more engaging way, then we should do that. And for me, slide model is worth paying for so I can have that sort of inspiration. Mm. Let's see storyline definitely not a free tool. So if we're looking for a low cost version of storyline, what are you all using? So there was brain shark. Brain shark was a pretty low cost tool that you could use text, but just came out with a new free tool. Shut up. TechSmith came out with something free.
It's a web based screen recording. So it's like, if you have us, if you're working with us, me, and they need to record their screen you could, you have to sign up for an account. But it's free, nice. It's a, it's a it looks pretty slick. I went to their webinar the other day where they announced it. And, yeah, but it's free,
nice. I'm gonna have to check that out, because I do pay for Camtasia. I pay for the suite. So I have Audi eight, which, by the way, for me, it is the best audio tool out there it is, it is going to be a little pricey, and there are certainly free, free or low cost tools for text to speech. But I tell you, the voices that come out of audio eight, it's like butter. It's like butter. I mean, it is so good, and I have been so impressed with it, and I have used other tools because I was hesitant to buy something, but when I compared it apples to apples, there was just no comparison.
Yeah, and their webinar the other day they they used Audi eight to create, to show how to create a video with their new Camtasia pro AI tool, which is going to be an additional cost,
right? Yeah, right. Snagit. Yes, I love Snagit. Snippet is Snagit grown, you know? Snippet wishes it could be Snagit. That's how I always think of it in my head, is that you can do a lot with Snagit. So if you only could get one tool, if you only had one of those sorts of tools in your tool belt, choose Snagit. Because Snagit you can snag recordings, you can snag images, you can edit those. So that's a small tool that does big things. So it might be an expense, but it'd be worth it, rather than having several different tools that don't do the job quite as well, speechify, yes, speechify does have sleep dog, as I've played with that. It's a lot of fun, right? You know Amazon Polly also, thank you for that, another tool that is also little known. I'm surprised Amazon has not plugged this more, but Poly is a nice tool to use for speech, text to speech, and here I'll find the link for that, and I've played with that quite a bit. Um,
here we go. So I love this. So we've got, we've got speech to text tools. There are. Now, when you think about the different sorts of AI tools that are out there, for some reason, I can't copy this the different sorts of AI tools out there which can generate, they can generate images as part of their package. And so you could still generate images off of chat GPT. In the free version, you're limited as to how many you could do, but you can still do that same thing with Leonardo. So with the Leonardo image creator, video creator, you get certain you get on the free plan, you get 150 tokens a day. It's not a lot of tokens, but still, it's free, right? So you can use that. I do not sleep. It's what I do in the airport. I'm checking these things out, but, yeah, low cost authoring tool, evolve, okay, oh, I have not played with evolve. I've heard of it, but I have not had an opportunity to check it out. So let's see. So Cindy, do you want, have you had an opportunity to play with it?
Yeah, I have. I'm kind of learning it right now. There's a free learning course online that you can sign up for, but it's, it's a low cost. It's half the price. I think it looks super clean. Sometimes you can't even tell the difference between, like, a rise course and evolve. It looks so similar, nice, yeah, definitely worth checking out if you don't have the budget for an articulate license, because it's pretty hefty. Or, you know.
Yes, it is expensive. So it's very expensive, especially if you want a team to be on it, right?
And if you want to see really good examples, I would take a look at Cath Ellis portfolio, because she uses evolve a lot. She's a well known ID in New Zealand, I think Catholic.
You want to pop her name into the chat and we'll, um,
she's great, yeah, she's presented at Dev learn a few times, and has been in the Um,
okay, nice, yeah. Oh, okay. Fabulous. Sharon resources. I love it, all right. And so going back to evolve here real quick. Cindy, do they have a team license?
Um, you know, I'd have to look on the website. Let me. Let me pull it up real quick and see,
I think they do. Let's see here.
Yeah, I see your comment there about Captivate, and if I would never recommend an older version of Captivate is just too buggy. It is a learning curve is difficult, but their newer versions seem to be more streamlined.
Yeah, it looks like evolve has a team license. The personal license is 588 a year, but for a team, it's 1560
There you go. There you go. So that's a steal. So for those of you who are using articulate team licenses, which, as you probably know, still charges you individually. All it does is it gives you access to be able to collaborate with each other, you know. So the license is still something in the 1400 range per person per year, you know. So, so that is certainly something worth looking into if you're looking to be able to work as a team with your E learning development programs. Now, let's think about E Learning Development for a second. Now, typically, when we think about tools like Captivate or, you know, our story line rise, etcetera, you know, we have a vision in our head, right? And so how can we make better use of that tool? Rather than just saying we needed to, we need to develop an E Learning course, which then needs to be uploaded into our learning management system, you know, because we have to have everything SCORM wrapped. So let's take a tool like rise, for example. What are some alternative ways that we can use a tool like rise that doesn't have to be a full blown e learning course? Anyone have any different ideas for for that particular tool or or a tool like evolve as what we're seeing.
You mean like making your employee handbook in there, or there you go, in there? Yes,
exactly. So, Jessica, you came with that right off the bat. So have you thought about doing that? Or have you done it? I
put our new hire orientation materials in there that kind of give the high level overview of the handbook, and linked the handbook in it so that I know that they've had opportunity to see it, whether or not they actually open the document. I know I gave it to them.
Yeah, I love that idea. That's a That's a wonderful idea. So you think about creating your your resources, your StandAlone Resources. So what's to say that you couldn't host a live event and rather than giving people the PDF version of the workbook? What if the workbook were built in rise or some other tool like that? You know. And so now what we're doing is we're creating something that might be a little bit more engaging for people to access, if you might be able to, and with a PDF, you could still do hotspots and things like that, but it'd be easier to do in an E learning tool, because it's already built in that's part of its functionality. You know. So again, tools, what is it that they can do? What is what's a different functionality that would be helpful in your designs? I uh, let's see, I've used rise to create a marketing teaser. Oh, I like that. So, so other Jessica, so other Jessica, talk to me about that. How do you How have you done that?
Um, we just kind of created, like, some promotional. Little script up at the top, and then we had put in some of the more engaging kind of activities or things that we thought would pull them into the course and get them interested. So just a little sneak peek, like I said, a teaser giving to maybe prospective students who might want to take some of our courses. These are more for, like, our non degree courses. I'm at a university that we offer. So, yeah,
that's a wonderful idea. I love that. And so how do you where's it hosted? How does it get to the public, or how does it get to the audience?
Great question. Um, I don't, I don't know off the top of my head how they hosted it. I created it, but I'm not sure where they or how they hosted it. I can't answer that.
Well, you can it. When you create the RISE program, it creates a URL.
Mm, hmm. So I did give them that URL, but I'm not sure then where they put that, or if they use that, or something else. I'm not I'm not quite sure. I want to say if I was guessing, I don't know. I want to say that they've maybe put it like into a email or something like that. Oh, specific people, like, they were targeting specific people who were on the fence about taking the course would maybe clicked on, like, the they had clicked on the information, and we can track who's like, looked at it, but they hadn't pulled the trigger yet, and so we kind of reach out with them, like, hey, try this out, see if it's for you. That's a
smart idea. Oh, I'm going to steal that. That's a smart idea. So now, so now what we've done is, I want you guys to recognize this. What we've done here with Jessica's example is that we've used two tools that most of us can lay our hands on right now. So that is an E learning development tool and email, okay? And, and for those of you who have been through my drip spots and blogs, session and workshop. You know that I advocate for these things. So you've got email which is an easy tool for you to use to deliver lessons, courses, modules, workbooks, pre work, post work, right? So you can, you can actually develop your email templates to reflect those sorts of activities. Then, when you put what Jessica is talking about in there, it turns it into that sizzle reel, right? So it's like, I want people to be I want people to sign up. I want them to be excited. So you could use that as an opener. So if you go back to using the where was it at in my comments? I'm sorry, I've got it. Here we go. So other Jessica, right? So your, your comment, your question, was about, you know, using teams and all of that to build together, right? So you could use an E learning development tool, plop that into an email and send people then to your intranet site, right? So you could use rise or whatever, create your little marketing, your little sizzle reel about this program that you want people to participate in that sends them to your intranet site, which then sends them to teams. So now you've got something cohesive happening. Yeah,
uh, other Jessica, can you send us the link to your teaser so I can see what it looks like?
Yeah, I can look and see if I can find it. If not, I'll send it to Shannon and I can have
resources. Thank you, yep, yep. I'm sorry. So for those people who are be listening afterwards. So there's Jessica C and Jessica k. So
I usually go by Jesse. I'll change it on my screen. Jesse, okay,
there we go. All right, awesome. So I love how this is all rolled together here and again. This is about, you know, just opening up our eyes to it's, it's just so easy for us to get, for us to get deflated, right? It's like, I've got all of this stuff to do, and not enough people to do it, and not the right tools to do it, you know? And and then, then you get the you get that feeling of, Oh, everybody else is doing that, and I can't do that, right? So you kind of feel bad about what you want to create. Right, and what you know your business wants you to create, and you then you sort of feel like I'm just not, I'm not doing the job that I could be doing, because I don't feel like I've got the tools readily at hand for whatever reason. So hopefully this conversation has has helped you see that you do have tools at your disposal. So now it's taking the blinders off and thinking about those tools in a very different way, you know, and making them work for you and still make it look like you've got a million bucks, right? So yeah, we're back here with this big, huge champagne budget. We've got that marketing budget. It looks like it, we know we don't, but it looks like it, and maybe your people will, you know, you'll feel better about the work that you produce, and also your users will be still impressed about what you're able to create. Yeah, another free authoring tool is adapt. It's on my Yep, it's on your list. We've got. What I want to do here is, I don't know where everything has gone,
so I'm searching for a resource here for you. So I see that, um, let's see Jennifer flirting with using notebook. So I you've heard me talk about notebook for like, the past three weeks, so I don't think I need to talk about it anymore. But what, what we will do is, and especially if you came to our session, the micro learning and AI, you know, after party that we had, we talked about notebook lm a lot, and notebook LM can certainly benefit you. You know, in curation, and I put together a video that walked you soup to nuts through notebook. Lm, yeah, so the recording was great, so we had a lot of fun with that. And I'm going to try and find, I don't know what's happened to my Vimeo account, but I can't access it, so I'll share that resource with you. Oh, actually, you know where that resource is, right now, if I went to my own website, I would find that resource. If I if I just looked beyond my own nose sometimes, here we go. I
And it's not it's not there, darn it. Okay, I'll find it for you guys, and I'll put it into the resources after we're through here. But one of the main things to take away when you're thinking about a tool like notebook LM, is that use it for curation purposes, so when you are doing your research, so you don't notebook LM free, Feedly, also free, but also paid. So there's a lot of tools out there for curation. But the benefit here, the difference between notebook LM and a tool like Feedly is that notebook LM is going to give you information about those resources. So if you find let's say you're putting together a leadership development program, you start loading resources from your own from your own computer, and from your own sources, and also outside sources, YouTube videos, articles, things from Forbes, things from HBr, what have you. You load those in there, and you can ask it questions about that. And also the podcast feature is, I can't say enough about the podcast feature. The podcast feature will blow your minds away. And the benefit to the podcast feature is that it gives you a summary. And I feel like I'm frozen. So can you let me know in the chat you're fine? Okay, good. My screen is totally frozen, so I'll just keep talking then. So the benefit of the podcast is that you can, one, download it, and you can share it as an audio file. Two, is that, is that you can use it for your own sources, so it'll give you a condensed version of everything that you've uploaded. And then also. You can ask questions within that podcast. So now there's a new ability there, where you can interact with the podcast itself. So you can stop the podcast, ask the podcast a question, and it will give you an answer. It's just stupid. How wonderfully it works, and so it could be a big help for you, and that is also free. Now if you have an enterprise version of Google, so if your organization is a Google organization, you may have the enterprise version. So it would go in take a look at it. It's going to ask you to sign up for Google if you don't have a Google account, and then you'll be able to see it. So anybody else right now using I am completely frozen. So can somebody let me know whether or not you can hear me? We can hear you. Okay. Good, good. Both of my monitors are completely frozen. Yeah. So anyone else playing around with notebook, besides Jennifer,
I'm playing around with it, especially the podcast piece, and then transcribing it and turning it into animated video and beyond, so that just attach the changes in the voices, but I'm still getting that content, yeah, just makes it a little more fun to watch.
Yeah, it does, yeah. And that's a great example of taking a free version and using it with another tool, right? Okay, you can see and hear me good. I've become unfrozen now, so I'm I'm all good, but I was at a scary couple of minutes there, and it is amazing. I mean, that tool is absolutely fabulous. So I encourage you to go and check it out. And I'm going to write something up about notebook LM and the different ways that you can use it. But I will also include the video that I created in this round of resources that you guys will get. So here we are at the at the top of the hour. So you know, as always, it's been, it's been a fabulous time with you guys spending this with every other Friday. But I also want to make you aware that I do have my computer. I do have a new course coming out. It is a builder. Your discount code is after party 20. That gives you 20% off the lab. Okay?
