Home

Notes for the "Hire Me" presentation

I created this website and the presentation/scenario that (I hope) you've just been through (if not, click the image) over the space of 4 days in mid-March 2010. It is my first foray into "Instructional Design," a discipline I never even knew existed until around September 2009 (more on that below).

Creating The Website

I used a template for the website and edited it to suit my needs. It relies heavily on the jQuery framework/library, which is something I know absolutely nothing about! But I was able to mod things the ways I wanted, dropping in my own images and customising a few other things. It doesn't work properly in Internet Explorer, despite cross-browser compatibility stylesheets, but that's no surprise, really. I'm not a fan of IE.

Putting Together the Video Intro

The video intro was built using a stock intro created in Adobe After Effects and a piece of stock music. I downloaded the free trial version of After Effects and muddled around until I got it doing what I wanted. Fortunately, the designer of the video had included a simple Camtasia/ScreenFlow tutorial to show me what to do!

I edited the audio using Audacity, which I've used on and off over the years for simple sound file editing. I took a section from the start, spliced in the dun-dun-dun ending. If you listen carefully at the end, there is a very small "skip" where I couldn't quite get it to line up perfectly (although maybe it's only musoes that can hear it!). Finally, I snipped off a "tinkly," broken-glass-like sound at the end, which I didn't think matched the feel or branding message I was trying to convey.

Building the Presentation/Scenario

The main presentation itself was created 100% in PowerPoint (with image editing done in Photoshop Elements). I then "wrapped" it in the player using Articulate Presenter, which also allowed me to "lock" the navigation and disable keyboard shortcuts so that users can only find their way around using the hyperlinks within the pages. Note: I had never used PowerPoint or Articulate before!

(Well... I first used PowerPoint in December or January (2010) to create some flowchart graphics. But that's it. Seriously.)

So... given that fact, I'm rather happy with what I was able to get it to do in just a few days.

There is a nice little section where the three candidates are first introduced where, if you click the magnifying glass icon to go back and read the information again, you don't see the animations again. Likewise, when you click forward you don't see the animations again either. This was achieved using a simple "duplicate" slide and careful hyperlinking backwards and forwards.

Similarly, once Carol's 5 criteria appear (boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom!), returning to the Main Menu gives you a static background with the icon that will enable you to proceed once you've read as much about the candidates as you like. Note here that the user doesn't have to read about all 5 criteria if they don't want to.

The main section, where you have to select one of Carol's criteria and then examine each of the candidates took a long time to "map out" so that once you've read about one person, they get "checked off." Then, when you read about the next person, and return both of the previous choices are checked off. Finally, all three get checked off. In the end, I managed to achieve this with just 20 slides per coloured section. Feel free to download a pdf showing the flowchart.

There are 118 slides and 5 Master Slides which make up the presentation, although it's unlikely that most users will view more than about 30 or 40.

All the images are stock, including the picture of the man representing me (Leslie). I might swap him out at some point when I get an actual picture of me that I can use, but for the purposes of this demo, it's fine being represented by a stranger. He's probably a few years older than me and I have more hair on my head, but less on my face.

Carol's Decision about Who to Hire

As an educator with over 10 year's classroom experience, and backed by post-graduate qualifications in the field, I know that the best way to facilitate learning is to actively engage the learners with the subject matter and the learning process. So, naturally, I employed the same principles here.

There was more to the scenario than simply doing a hatchet job on poor old Veronika and Baz. I want you, the "viewer"; (i.e. the person helping Carol make her hiring decision), to actually engage with the process of selecting the best applicant. Now, of course, it's not much of a choice the way I've positioned the other candidates, but the point is: Rather than tell, tell, tell you I'm the best candidate (akin to jumping up and down with arm raised shouting "Pick me! Pick me!"), I want you to instead "arrive at" that conclusion in a way that feels like you've done so of your own accord!

I've used this technique in my classes for as long as I've been teaching because I know how much more powerful it is. I could give my students a lecture about Facts X, Y & Z, but it's obviously MUCH more effective to give them some kind of task which leads them to "uncovering" and "discovering" Facts X, Y & Z for themselves, is it not?

The truth is, I don't know the "archetypes" in the Instructional Design/eLearning world so when creating the Veronika and Barry "characters" (one might say "caricatures"! ), I just took a stab in the "twilight"; from what I've seen in my life, there seem to be people in every industry who fit these two profiles to some degree. I see no reason to believe it's not the case in ID as well.

Veronika represents a particular type of expert who may be a good adjunct to the team, but shouldn't really be let loose with clients or in the strategic planning stage relating to how the educational outcomes are going to be met. I think it's fairly "easy" for whoever is "helping Carol" to scratch Veronika from the list.

Bazza —despite looking like a villian from an episode of Starsky & Hutch—is, perhaps, "less easy" to scratch. He's laid back, knows a lot about Flash, CS4, etc., has an actual degree in ID and industry experience to match, and doesn't appear to be in it just for the moolah.

Discovering Instructional Design Almost by Accident

I started taking an interest in building websites just a few years ago. I bought my first book about HTML & CSS in January or February of 2007 and I've been glued to my computer ever since!

In that time I've also learnt a lot about marketing and the way various site owners and A-list bloggers disseminate their message and create their "tribe" (as Malcolm Gladwell has dubbed it).

As a teacher, I'm also incredibly interested in the potential for—and obviously growing market for—online learning.

And all of this lead me (through a long and convoluted story for another time, perhaps) to stumbling across some Instructional Design sites in mid to late 2009. The best one I've found so far is Tom Kuhlman's Rapid E-Learning Blog. I think I probably arrived at that because I'd been investigating various software packages, Content Management Systems (and other platforms), membership site scripts, authoring tools, and on and on... for some time, which lead me to Articulate. And from there to Kuhlman's blog, which is a insanely clever marketing strategy on their part!

Now, in my current job, I get a 30 minute morning tea break (and another 30mins for lunch, which always seems to get eaten up by something or other, unfortunately). It's been on my morning tea break for the last 6 months that I've been reading through all the archived posts and following the rabbit-hole of links around the web; making lists of great sites; making an unfeasibly long list of books that look good; and so on.

I don't even have sound on the ancient computer I currently use at work so I can watch the presentations and screenr videos and so on, but I can't hear the instructions! Not to worry, though, because I've been so busy re-designing the entire curriculum, materials, and session notes for an 8-week full-time teacher-training program that I haven't had the time or energy to come home and practice any of what I've read anyway!

This scenario is, as I said, my first attempt at any kind of "elearning" thingamajig at all. And I'm pretty darn pleased with it, I must say!

The Purpose of This Presentation

Typically, I'd start a piece of writing like this with its purpose. However, in this case I think that (if you've watched/been through the presentation), it's fairly obvious that the purpose is to showcase myself and to say "Wouldn't I make a spectacular addition to your team!"

For anyone who has been around elearning or instructional design for a long time, I'm sure there's nothing especially mind-blowing about my little scenario. So why detail how I created it before telling you why?

Because the points I'd really like to emphasise are:

Someone sent me (quite out of the blue) a job ad on Sunday night for an Instructional Designer gig, saying "Hey, I was browsing [site name] today, saw this and thought of you." As it turned out, that job was a pretty good match for me, but I decided against applying for it because it didn't seem to offer any training.

While I was at that job-site, though, I punched in "elearning" to see what other things were out there. A job came up that looked great: Solid salary, opportunity to receive training, walking distance from my home... and to top it all off... I investigated the company a little bit more and discovered –to my complete delight!– that their approach to learning and their educational philosophy seem precisely in line with my own!

So, I thought "Y'know, I've been reading about this stuff for some months now... why don't I create an 'out of the box' kind of job application and see where it takes me!" And that's how this all came to be. And here I am, Thursday night. Just 4 days after receiving that email and having never done anything like this before ever.

Hire Me

If you're reading this and you'd like to discuss a job offer, you can contact me via: or my Contact Form.

Thank you very much for viewing and interacting with my "Hire Me" Presentation/Scenario and for taking the time to read through these notes.

I hope to hear from you soon.

Best regards,
Leslie