The week started as usual with publishing the next YouTube video, my 20th. I now have 691 subscribers and I’ve been past the 5000 views, not bad for 4 months, but the watch hours will be lucky to make 1000 hours by the end of the first 12 months, only 25% of what is needed to join the YouTube partner programme. Still, I guess it is exponential, the more videos you have the greater the watch hours, in theory at least.

I did record the second video and was part way through the editing, by the end of the week. I’m close to being back on target after my holiday in the middle of October, but the podcast episodes have completely stalled, and I need to work on those to start catching up before the end of the year.

Last week I had created a page for a group of posts based on one of the new tags. During the week I created fifteen such pages, adjusting the Query Loop Block to the relevant tag, and revising the page title of course. I have added each page to a new page called Deep Dives which is now their parent page. On the Deep Dives page when you change the Query Loop block to the Post Type of Page you get a filter option of Parent, so I selected Deep Dives, and the query shows the fifteen pages, the child pages of Deep Dives. I have since added it into the top menu as a submenu entry under Blog with a paragraph at the top explaining the purpose of the page and alerting the reader to the fact that it is Work in Progress.

I now need to add an excerpt and a featured image to each of the fifteen pages. But I also need to add an excerpt to each of the 133 posts that belong to these pages and add a paragraph or two to the top of each page. Some of the posts are also missing a featured image. All-in there is several hours of work to keep me busy over the next few weeks. Getting inspiration for the featured images of each page will be a challenge.

I took advantage of Black Friday and went all-in on the Sensei Learning Management System (LMS), and I now have Sensei Pro plugin installed. That wasn’t the only purchase, I will have a ring light arriving during next week, a Godox LR150 18inch ring. This will sit behind my laptop and illuminate me as I demonstrate various aspects of the Maximo software to support the quiz answers for the course modules and lessons. I intend for the new Apple iPhone to be the primary source for recording these videos.

During the week I had a meeting with my management team, and they confirmed that there would be three additional new starters in the next 2 months and my role will become a trainer and mentor for four persons at least. Hence, why the purchases have been made recently. I’ve got the kit, got the software, and now need to work out how to use it all.

With my colleague Tadas starting on my YouTube videos, I now have a new weekly objective and that is to create a quiz for each video. The quiz and answers for my first YouTube video was created as a post, and on Friday we went through this together to see what we could learn from it.

Each video will be the starting point for a lesson, and I’ll need to suggest some practical elements to help reinforce what is being learnt. The quiz for each lesson will follow and I will need to start using Sensei for this. I think there should be a timer on each quiz question, as a guide only. There should also be some sort of difficulty rating for the question. Although the answers will be found from the initial video it is unlikely that someone will take it all in, and when we discussed the questions, I kept on saying to Tadas “don’t worry if you get this wrong, nearly all Maximo consultants of 10 years or more experience will also get it wrong.”.

I found a page giving an overview of Sensei and this is what I learnt. A course has modules, and each module has lessons. The Course Signup block allows registered users to enrol on the course. The Contact Teacher block is a way of communicating with the teacher and can be used before the pupil enrols but a private messaging function needs to be enabled. The Course Progress block provides the enrolled pupil their course progress. The Course Outline block is used to build the modules and lessons. The Conditional Content block allows content to be visible to enrolled persons, to those not enrolled and to those who have completed the course. There are Course Categories, Course Prerequisites and Course Notifications.

How to pitch the level of a course is one of the main decisions I will need to make. What I thought might be a module could be a course instead. The documentation says that once published you should not make major changes like adding/removing lessons or modifying quizzes.

Quizzes are associated with a lesson; a Quiz block is automatically added to a Lesson. New questions are automatically added to a question bank, so that it can be reused elsewhere. I’ll have to consider how easy it is to search the question bank, as I can see myself reusing questions. There are question types, and question categories. You can reorder the questions in a quiz, and if you opt for multiple pages you need to decide the number of questions per page.

The question types are multiple choice, open ended – where the pupil enters a description, true/false type. I’ll have to investigate this more and see what options there are for each type. It does look as if there is an overall timer for the quiz, but not one for each question, unless there is another block that can provide this.

On Sunday I started to create my first course – Asset Management, and the first lesson Location Types and Location Systems. The lessons will have the same titles as the YouTube videos and podcast episodes. The lessons will start with a link to the YouTube video and will have a quiz.

I started by adding the ten questions and answers I had constructed for Tadas, the process of entering the quiz is straightforward, a lot of cut and paste, but this would not be normal as for future quizzes I will hopefully enter the questions straight into Sensei. Most of the questions I created were multiple choice, but three were not and I was faced with reworking these. There are three question types that can benefit from automated marking, and I am not about to get into the burden of marking a student’s answers, even if they are single word answers.

Next up was to try and find a formula for each lesson which starts with the YouTube video already created. Excerpt and Featured Image were easy because I could use the same text for the YouTube video and podcast episode, the featured image is that for the podcast, but I’m thinking I can change this by adding an element similar to the YouTube logo, perhaps an image of teacher and pupil.

I am thinking that the lesson will have three paths, for beginners, intermediates and experienced. This is a level in the context of the lesson subject, and not how experienced someone is overall in Maximo. Each path will start with the YouTube video, a beginner will then have a set of tasks aligned to each section of the video which requires them to perform an activity in the Maximo system, you might call this a small lab exercise. I’m thinking that there would be a video at the end of each section where someone could watch me perform the lab exercise while I provided a running commentary.

The experienced would go direct to the quiz and if they got a reasonable mark, they could just review what they got wrong before moving on to the next lesson. But if they didn’t do as well as they expected they would slip back to the intermediate or beginner steps. I am not sure yet how to pitch the intermediate level.

At the end of the lesson, after the quiz, I’m thinking there should be a short summary to reinforce what the pupil has learnt. As this is likely to include some of the answers to the quiz it can’t be revealed until after the pupil has finished with the quiz.

There is still a lot more to work out including how I can use the different types of Sensei blocks that are provided including interactive screenshots and interactive videos.

There were two points I need to address next week.

• How to provide the backup text to a quiz answer?
• How to review a completed lesson as a pupil would see it, hopefully without publishing the lesson.

I did find a P2 community for Sensei where I can ask questions from those who will have a lot more experience. I’ve had a good search for documentation on Sensei and I haven’t yet found something as comprehensive as I expected, something like the level of documentation provided for WordPress.com, I’m sure it exists but I haven’t yet located it.

My objectives for Week 48 will be:

• Create the weekly YouTube video that I’ve already started.
• Start the process of updating the 20 published video transcripts and slides. The slides need to be .PNG rather than .JPEG to improve the clarity, and there are captions, Alt text and a table of contents to add to each.
• Continue to work on the first Sensei lesson with a priority being the quiz and answers so that as I create new quizzes, these can go direct into Sensei.
• Create the quiz for the second video – Service Address.
• Investigate the interactive image, interactive video, and flip card blocks all of which have potential in a lesson.
• Continue to build out the lesson format for each type of pupil, beginner, intermediate and experienced.
• Investigate how to test a lesson as a pupil would see it.
• Set up the Godox ring light and do a test video from my iPhone.
• Start using the Lavalier microphone, Power Director 365 video editor and add the soft box diffusers to the recently purchased lights.

As I write this, I know that I won’t have too much time next week as I have a user group meeting to attend during and that will knock a hole in the evenings when I tend to try and catch-up on this weekly journal. It also looks as if it will be a dry week and if it so then I will want to get in the garden on one of the days at the weekend. The objectives do not, then look realistic.