Re-Reflection In 2009, as I was approaching the end of my Phd program, I wrote a blog post titled, Some Thoughts on Grad School. It described lessons I learned during my time at MIT. Since then, I’ve received many requests to revisit the theme. Now that I’m a professor — albeit a new one — [...]

The Fixed Schedule Phenom Sheryl Sandberg is the COO at Facebook. Last year she was paid over $30 million dollars in stocks and salary. This year she was named to Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World list. But here’s what interests me most: in April she revealed that she leaves work every day by [...]

Two brief administrative notes… A2 Earns an A When I first started blogging in 2007, I needed web hosting. I noticed that Merlin Mann had a note on 43 Folders about his happiness working with a company named A2 Hosting. That was good enough for me: I signed up for their introductory package. That was [...]

The Dune Revelation In July 2009, I took a trip to San Francisco. At some point, I ended up hiking at a sand-duned nature preserve, not far south from Monterey on Highway 1. What I remember about this hike is a thought that struck not long into the route. In the summer of 2009, I [...]

Feeling Low on Flow In a trio of recent articles, I emphasized that flow is dangerous (see here and here and here). It feels good, so we’re tempted to seek it out, but it doesn’t actually help us get better: the key process in creating a remarkable life. Most of you liked this concept, while [...]

A Deliberate Morning This morning I finished my notes for an upcoming lecture in my graduate-level theory of computation course. There are two points I wanted to make about these notes… The process of creating them is very hard. On average, it takes me between 2.5 to 3 hours to prepare a lecture. This preparation [...]

The Chess Master and the Economist A reader recently sent me an interesting interview with Ken Rogoff, a hotshot economics professor at Harvard. As a young man, Rogoff was a world-class chess player. He eventually translated his ability to grad school where he studied economics with a focus, naturally enough, on game theory. What caught [...]

Professorial Exodus Living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which I did for many years after college, I learned to recognize a curious ritual. Come June, the academic offices of Harvard and MIT would clear out as a significant fraction of these schools’ professors decamped to New Hampshire, Maine, and, for the more remuneratively famous among them, Martha’s [...]

A Career Crossroads In the early winter of 2004, I was a senior at Dartmouth College and in the fortunate position of having two good job offers. The first was from Microsoft. It paid, by 2004 standards, about as much as you could possibly earn right out of college (around $85,000 in cash and stock [...]

College comes with its typical problems and successes. Every college movie has beaten them to death and you’ve probably been through many yourself. The successes are great, and you don’t need any help with them. But as for the typical problems, sometimes prevention is the best cure. With that said, here are a few ways [...]

As we’re wrapping up for the semester, it’s important to stay organized and on top of the dozens of assignments coming your way. While this might sound daunting, time consuming and annoying- it’ll be worth it when summer starts and you have a great GPA for the semester. The Stickie Note Method One of the [...]

College spring semesters are wrapping up, and as you’re stressing over finals you don’t want to forget to plan how you will be getting home. Getting home for the summer can be expensive, especially if you are a freshman, because you were probably not allowed to have a car. So if you do not want [...]

I’m not a dieter. I believe that if the good lord didn’t want me to eat food that was bad for me, he wouldn’t have made it so delicious. But I do, for the most part, eat fairly healthy. Neglecting fads, diets, or the sort of crazy-talk that leads people to “mango purges” or something [...]

One of Google Chrome’s standout features is its omnibox, the smart address bar which also doubles as a search box. Chrome’s omnibox saves time and screen real estate by allowing you to search any website using a designated search engine keyword. For example, you could set Facebook’s keyword to “fb.” If you felt like facebook [...]

    Summer’s finally here. The weather has finally caught up to the East coast and the homework and papers have finally faded away forever, or, at least until next semester. It’s time to kick back and enjoy yourself and your friends, and that means grilling. With that said, let’s get some tips on how [...]

The Kindle and other readers/tablets are quickly becoming more and more popular, and so is the idea of electronics textbooks. This term, I got two of my books electronically for my Kindle; in some ways I really liked them, but they were not perfect and probably won’t be the sole way I read textbooks anytime [...]

Finals week is back with a vengeance. Five plus days filled with cramming, all-nighters and nail biters. It’s no surprise 70 percent of students confirmed in a recent survey that they are more stressed during finals week than any other time during the school year. This time around, do yourself a favor and come up [...]

I’m not a fashionable guy. I have pants and shirts, and generally that’s enough for me. Occasionally, I’ll throw in a hat, especially if it’s raining. The only real thing I pay attention to are my shoes. Many people are self-proclaimed “sneaker heads.” I am not quite at their level. With that said, however, I [...]

In a recent post I made this comment about rapid elearning tools: Rapid elearning played a role in the evolution of elearning mostly because it took course creation out of the hands of a few programmers and placed it into the hands of anyone who wanted to create a course. Someone asked if that’s a [...]

Rapid elearning played a role in the evolution of elearning mostly because it took course creation out of the hands of a few programmers and placed it into the hands of anyone who wanted to create a course. I see this as the democratization of elearning. And it runs parallel to how digital media’s empowered [...]

I get a lot of questions about interactivity from those who are just getting started. Typically they begin with a lot of subject matter content and they’re not quite sure how to make the course interactive. There’s a lot to consider when it comes to building interactive elearning. But if someone’s just getting started here [...]

I’ve been on the road a lot lately doing elearning workshops and Articulate jam sessions. After the sessions I usually get some really good questions that are probably common to many of us. Today, we’ll look at how to manage the images used in elearning courses. Essentially there’s no right or wrong way to manage [...]

One of the topics we cover in the elearning workshops is how to quickly create templates to help move the elearning courses out of that PowerPoint look. At a previous workshop someone wanted to see how this was done so we created one quickly in class. I like to do these templates because they help [...]

I get a lot of requests for software demos and quick tutorials. I also do quite a few webinars. Because of this, I am always figuring out just the perfect screen resolution for my software applications. Another challenge is that most screencasts are recorded at a higher resolution than used in the elearning courses. You [...]

If you’re building elearning courses, then you should expect to have a graphics editing program as part of your tool chest.  In a previous post I mentioned a few free (or low cost) graphic editors if you don’t already have one. 5 Free Desktop Image Editors 5 Free Online Image Editors There’s even a good [...]

One of my favorite parts of going to elearning conferences is meeting so many of the industry’s thought leaders. During my recent trip to the Learning Solution Conference in Orlando I ran into one of my mentors and a real elearning pioneer, Dr. Werner Oppelbaumer. I was able to get some time with him for [...]

Infographics are the hot! They catch your attention because they look great and have strong visual hooks. I like them because they remind me a little of I Spy where you get to explore a busy graphic and search for interesting nuggets of information. Of course, not everyone’s a big fan of infographics. There are [...]

Q: Is it possible to view a learner’s assessment answers? A: Yes. A breakdown of a learner’s assessment answers can be viewed by going to the Reports tab and then…

A friend of mine  works as a ‘Customer Success Manager’ at Yammer and he invited me along to the Yammer On Tour event in San Francisco on Tuesday this week.…

Recently I was chatting on Skype with good friend and eLearning professional Ant Pugh, and the conversation turned to content authoring tools. Inevitably, the upcoming release of Articulate Storyline came up…

Here is that Top 10 Learning Management System (LMS) Must-Haves list from Wednesday continued: 6.     Make sure the LMS has the flexibility to import all types of content that…

We talk to a lot of people every day about their learning needs and what they are looking for in a Learning Management System (LMS). Back in the day we…

Q: Once a user signs in and purchases a course and therefore is assigned as an active user, how can they be deactivated so we don’t keep paying for that user…

Next month from May 6 – 8, Litmos’ parent company Callidus Cloud will host their annual user conference at the Aria Resort in Las Vegas. The conference, named C3 – Join the…

Last year two major US carriers United & Alaska Airlines took the plunge and made the switch to delivering employee training via the iPad. Now, Litmos has become the preferred LMS solution for Norwegian.com,…

We have just released an upgrade to the criteria that determines when a Litmos module ‘completes’ for a Learner. To explain a little about the changes please see this post…