A short week for me this week as I spent the first half of it skiing in Austria. A very enjoyable break with good snow and blue skies which by the end of the week had turned to cloud and rain at lower elevations. Quite different from the snow and arctic conditions that some were experiencing in North America.

There are now 22 transcripts and slides for the YouTube videos. After I spent time on the SEO course a couple of months ago, I realised that each post should have a Table of Contents, and Captions, and Alternative Text are needed for all the images. After upgrading my website to be full width I also needed to set images to full size rather than large, and that they should be a file format of .PNG rather than .JPEG which creates an inferior image definition. The transcript text which is discussing a slide would ideally need the same circular red images in the text to match that in the slide, currently it is a number in parenthesis.

This week and next, as it is quiet, I aim to update the 22 YouTube transcript posts. I’ve split the work into two and I’ve now added a table of contents to each post and replaced the images with .PNG file format, making sure that all images are set to full size. I’ll finish off the rest of this exercise next week.

I’ve got behind on the Podcasts episodes during the last couple of months. When I started the new playlist of YouTube videos for Maintenance Planning the average duration jumped from 16:30 to 30:30, nearly double the time. This has squeezed the amount of available time in a week and put me a couple of videos behind the original schedule of one per week. So, during next week I hope to catch-up on the nine missing podcast episodes, I’ll leave it to the end of the week when the house will be a bit quieter. This shouldn’t be too much of an issue the podcast transcripts were written back in May and June for the first 40 episodes.

I’ve been thinking about the structure for each lesson of the Learning Management System I’ve added to my Maximo Secrets website. I had wondered how I would branch from the start of each lesson, which is an interactive video to different sections for beginners, intermediates, and expert/advanced. I’ve decided that I will split the quiz to four questions at the beginning and six questions at the end. The initial quiz will help determine which path someone should take; the student would be able to determine this for themselves if they wish. Both would be a timed quiz.

The Beginners section will start with using the flip card blocks for any glossary terms. This will follow with a suggestion that the video transcript and slides is reviewed, as I am sure a student will learn a lot more from reading the text than they would do by just watching a video. Then, there will be some lab exercises that the student should perform on a Maximo system. This will be followed by a video of me performing the same lab exercise, these will be basic lab exercises. Finally, I’ll use the Image Hotspot block in a summary of the main points of the lesson that should be understood by a beginner.

The Intermediate section will start with some lab exercises which are harder than the beginner exercises, and this will be followed by the video of me performing the same lab exercises. To end, the student should listen to the shorter equivalent podcast episode, and this will be followed by a summary of the main points of the lesson pitched at both beginner and intermediate level.

The Expert/Advanced section (not sure which term I will use yet) will start with an overview of the beginners and intermediate steps. If the student feels they are missing out they can then divert themselves to the appropriate steps, you might think of this a bit like a pick and mix, they pick what parts they want to do. There will be one or two videos on more advanced topics where I show how Maximo works. There will be no lab exercises for the expert/advanced level as I suspect that if the student is inclined to learn further, they will perform their own tests, they should know that this is the best way for Maximo functionality to sink in.

While I am beginning to feel more confident about the structure to take for each lesson, I still need to work out how to implement this in Sensei. I should also look at the structure of the WordPress courses to see what I can learn from those and dig out a few old training manuals again to see what might be learnt. My youngest daughter is a trained teacher, and I am discussing with her how to improve the structure. It must be interactive and fun, she has suggested a few well positioned and relevant GIFs could be used, that might create another licensing issue, but I did note that there is a GIF block in WordPress.

The other point I feel I need to review is the style and formatting of the lessons. If I want to add a note how should this look, similarly for a tip, or an important point. The table of contents block that I have just added to 22 YouTube transcripts looks a bit dull, I just accepted the standard typography settings, and I am now wondering whether it would look better if the block had a background colour to make it stand out more. Do the links to each heading really need to be underscored? I think it will be better without. What this is telling me is that I need to focus on the look and feel of the lessons as much as the structure. I shouldn’t be thinking about changing the formatting of blocks when I have finished a course, it could become very tedious reworking what you believe to be complete.

During the week I added a comment to one of the posts from the Sensei team blog a few enhancement suggestions. A single question timer (seconds countdown). A difficulty rating for a question (could be a star rating) but ideally something linked to an overall score for a whole quiz. A way of setting a path through a lesson depending on whether the pupil is a beginner, intermediate, or experienced in the subject being taught in the lesson. I did get a quick reply from Ronnie Burt who seems the main person in the external facing Sensei team. I’ll need to find a wizard way of handling these three items for my courses, I don’t expect new code to beat me to it.

Week 52 will also be a short week; I am working at least two days of it. I want to use the time to catchup on a few points that I have been putting off for a while.

• Add Captions and Alternative Text to the 22 YouTube transcripts, the last few weeks I have been doing this, so perhaps only 16 or 17 posts need to be updated.
• Replace in the transcript text the numbers in parenthesis (1) with a circular red image using the inline image feature. I’m hoping this doesn’t make the posts slow to load. This needs to be done for all 22 posts.
• Have a go at reworking the formatting of the Table of Contents.
• Record and publish the nine missing podcast episodes. This will be a second series on the podcast platforms so it will be interesting to see how this is handled.