Accessibility, Outreach Emails, Failure: ID Links 8/16/22

As I read online, I bookmark resources I find interesting and useful. I share these links periodically here on my blog. This post includes links on accessibility and disability, outreach emails for freelancers, the importance of failure in learning, branching scenarios, and more.

Accessibility and disability

Accessible color palette builder

While there are lots of tools for creating color palettes, this is the first one I have seen that so clearly notes the accessibility of different combinations. Even if you create the palette using another tool, you could check it with this free tool to note which colors have sufficient contrast when used together.

Disability Pride Month — Qi Creative Inc.

A good starting point for understanding disability and ableism (with a summary of the medical vs. social models of disability). This has notes on language and links to people in the disability community to follow.

Outreach emails for freelancers

While I have never used cold emails in my own business, they can be a method of finding work for freelancers who are just getting started in the field. I did some research to find templates and examples for the eLearning Freelancer Bootcamp, and both of these articles seemed useful.

The Freelance Designer’s Guide to Cold Emailing (with Templates) | Dribbble

Parts of this guide are maybe too general and not specific enough if you’re just getting started, but the templates and example outreach emails are helpful.

Freelancers: Five Steps to Write a Cold Email That Converts New Clients | Observer

Options and sample outreach emails for freelancers. These templates assume the writer has a blog and other social media channels to promote content for potential clients.

Scenario-based learning and failure

Failure in Branching Scenarios

Karl Kapp writes on the importance of failure in branching scenarios. The choices and options should reflect common failure points. Karl gives two examples of the types of mistakes that you could include: skipping a step in a process and deviation from the process (doing something incorrectly).

You want learners to fail in an environment where they can receive corrective feedback and learn from their failures rather than make the failure on-the-job in the actual situation such as in front of a customer or violating a safety protocol on a piece of equipment.

-Karl Kapp

The 85% Rule for Learning – Scott H Young

We don’t learn very well if the tasks are so easy that we get it perfectly right every time, or so hard that we’re constantly failing. While it’s not the same for every task, this suggests that learning is more effective if you can succeed 80-85% of the time.

The 85% rule suggests growth will be maximized when we practice tasks we can succeed at roughly four-fifths of the time.

If you succeed in every attempt, you probably don’t have the difficulty high enough to improve. If you fail most of the time, you will likely make more progress if you start picking smaller, more manageable challenges.

-Scott H. Young

Scenario Based Learning: Examples and Templates for How to Create SBL

Rued Riis gives a quick overview of scenario-based learning with animated Vyond videos. In his example, he uses links within YouTube to go to the next video based on which choice you make. This blog post summarizes everything from all of the videos.

Volunteer opportunity for IDs

Rumie Initiative | Volunteer

Volunteer opportunity for new learning designers and instructional designers. Commit to at least 3 hours per week and build a short module that you can use in your portfolio.

ID hourly rates

Digital Learning Jobs: How Much Do Contractors Make? – Teamed

This article reviews the variables that affect hourly rates and the differences between W2 and 1099 contracting. It includes benchmarks for instructional design rates at early, mid, and senior career levels, for both education and corporate L&D.

Success Case Method

Success Case Method | Better Evaluation

Overview of Brinkerhoff’s Success Case Method for evaluating training programs. In this method, you gather stories from some of the most and least successful participants.

The Success Case Method deliberately looks at the most, and least, successful participants of a program. The purpose is not to examine the average performance – rather, by identifying and examining the extreme cases, it asks: ‘When the program works, how well does it work? What is working, and what is not?’.