In this Issue:

• What You Don’t Know About PowerPoint WBT: Making PowerPoint Navigation Work
• Developing Courseware Really Fast:: The Carrot Vs The Stick
• New Summer Workshop Schedule 2007

Over 80-participants joined me for the ASTD Orange County monthly lunch meeting and professional development workshop that followed on June 27, 2007 in Orange, California. This was my fifth successful ASTD fund raising development event. After the event ended and I was heading out to the airport I make a mental note of the most common questions to arise during the event. I assume that ASTD members would want to know more about how to design learning activities or complex games in PowerPoint. I thought perhaps this audience being in the LA entertainment market might be interested in advanced special effects afforded in PowerPoint. It wasn’t games or advanced animation effects that stimulated a lot of question and discussion; it was how to turn off default navigation in PowerPoint files… Learn more

My phone rang at about 11:30 am PST. I was invited to a hotel near the Los Angeles Airport to meet with a long-term client, “John,” a senior manager for a large multinational manufacturing corporation. I was asked to be available by 1:00 pm to discuss a possible project. I arrived at the hotel, took the elevator up to the executive floor and was buzzed in. John met me and we sat across from each other in the executive lounge. John indicated his company was rolling out a new publishing system and wanted to develop a supporting sales training course very quickly. I asked how fast. He looked at me and said the project must be completed and ready for live testing within five weeks. John went on to describe in detail the course specifications. He envisioned a blended course curriculum to include five days of lecture/demonstrations and five days of hands-on labs. The instructor led training had to be produced using the actual publishing system that was being readied for market release. Also, the labs had to be designed to be 100% self-paced using interactive video training for step-by-step performance modeling. I asked if there were any existing course materials and/or documentation that we could leverage. The answer was no. This was a new product and there were no existing materials nor was the documentation complete. John pointed out that a prototype system and subject matter experts (SMEs) would be available to support the efforts. He indicated it was essential to produce the program using the new product because he planned to hire a filmmaker to create a documentary of the development efforts and use it for marketing the product. I summarized the requirements: John confirmed the requirement and simply asked, “Can you do it?” … Learn more

Dr. Parks has posted his new workshop schedule for Summer 2007. Please click the course schedule hyperlink on right for the most recent courses time/date. Dr. Parks is offering at popular request his very popular PowerPoint for Web-Based Training webinar as well a tour of the highly regarded latest release of TeraLearn v4.0 with On-The-Job training, HP virtual rooms and dynamic online testing support. To schedule a private event with your company please email or call 916 536-1275.