147 pages pdf - ICT Digital Literacy

Global & Cultural Perspectives -- How NOT To Get Lost In Translation
#353: Help The Audio With Neutral Accents
Try to ensure that the session leader has as "neutral" an accent as possible as strong regional accents (in
any language) can be difficult to understand over an IP connection and especially when you have
delegates conversing in a secondary (or tertiary) language from their own prime language.
Anonymous
#354: When Is A Day Longer Than 24 Hours?
Design asynchronous collaborative assignments and activities such that the frequency of
interaction required is not negatively impacted by the latency caused by time zones of global
participants. Under normal circumstances, a single simple step of "establishing roles" in a team
exercise could take days to accomplish with upwards of 36 hours latency between transactions.
Christopher Davis
IBM
#355: The Value of Humour (or Humor As We Say In The U.S.)
E-Learning programme makers may shy away from injecting humour into their programmes because one
person’s humour is deeply offensive to others. What starts as an attempt at humour can breach the
bounds of political correctness and, far from achieving its learning objective, produces unlooked for
adverse consequences for both the programme’s producer and buyer. Yet, unless in-house and external
e-Learning developers can anchor their offerings in the humour that underpins the language and culture in
which they are working, e-Learning programmes will never compete effectively with other humour-related
methods of learning delivery.
Bob Little
Editor of QL Magazine
#356: Round The Clock Global Considerations
When suppliers go "global" they have to decide how to do all the learning design steps in a way that is related to
each particular product and which incorporates clients’ wishes. One way to do this is to have task lists, then have
templates and checklists for each stage and also have an additional level of review to take account of cultural and
geographical differences between the producers and users of the e-Learning materials. As a global producer of e-
Learning materials, you need to ensure that the end user has access to the technology to use the materials you
have developed. This could be terms of access to technologies such as the Internet, intranets, extranets and
videoconferencing. There needs to be an on-site coordinator for the users, along with local subject matter experts,
local editors and end-user workshops. There also needs to be strong project management, not just taking account
of but also exploiting the time differences between geographies – for example, using different time zones to reduce
the time taken to develop the e-Learning materials.
Sanjaya Sharma
TATA Interactive Systems
#357: Growing Your e-Learning, Literally!
When creating a Spanish-based version of an existing e-Learning course, consider that the
number of words when converting from English will increase approximately 30%. This will
impact a number of e-Learning components including your on-screen layout, spoken audio, and
likely the cost (e.g.,we pay by the word for our Spanish translation). Although we've yet to
convert courses to other languages, our experience and research shows that other languages
such as Italian and French are comparable, and that German has the most significant increase.
Coley O'Brien
Sears University
#358: Don't Ignore The Obvious
If using offshore development vendors looks too good to be true, it probably is!
Anonymous
701 e-Learning Tips by The MASIE Center www.masie.com 70