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Yesterday was Thanksgiving for us here in the U.S. and I’m super grateful for so many things including the amazing tapestry of friends and memories I've collected over the years. Here's to each of you remarkable souls who make my journey around the sun so much brighter.

Thanks for reading!

📰 News & Notes

5 Formatting Techniques for Long-Form Content

The latest article from Nielsen Norman Group offers tips for creating engaging and easy-to-understand long-form content. They advise content creators to keep long-form content concise and clear to avoid overwhelming readers. They suggest using structuring strategies like overviews and content chunks, along with formatting techniques like summaries, bullet points, callouts, bolding, and visuals, to make content more scannable and easy to understand. This guide will help you help your readers quickly find and understand important information.

🎯 Take away: Enhance reader engagement in long-form content by using concise summaries, bullet points, callouts, bolding, and visuals, making complex information easily navigable and digestible.

What makes a learning experience good?

Adobe Design presents the Learning Outcomes Assessment Framework (LOAF), a tool designed to gauge the effectiveness of learning experiences. Created by Victoria Hollis and Mercedes Vega Villar, LOAF assesses both the practical and emotional outcomes of learning interventions. It takes into account factors like engagement, difficulty, knowledge acquisition, and the ability to apply learned skills (functional outcomes), as well as enjoyment, excitement, autonomy, and self-confidence (emotional outcomes). The framework employs a combination of rating scales, open-ended questions, and hands-on exercises to measure these outcomes. LOAF provides a systematic approach to evaluating and comparing various formats and instructional content.

🎯 Take away: The Learning Outcomes Assessment Framework (LOAF) evaluates learning experiences by balancing functional mastery with emotional engagement, transforming how we view educational effectiveness.

Do More With Google Docs

Did you know that Google Docs has passed Microsoft Word in market share? In his Thanksgiving-themed article, Jeremy Caplan shares some cool new tips for using Google Docs. He talks about twelve cool things you can do in Google Docs. These include making a new document really fast, translating text automatically, adding a table of contents to find things easily, showing how many words you've written, and typing with your voice if you're tired of typing the usual way. He also shows how you can use the "@" sign to add stuff quickly, put email drafts and project plans in your document, and even add gifs to make it look fun.

🎯 Take away: Google Docs shines with user-friendly features like quick document creation and voice typing, solidifying its role as a staple in our digital toolset.

🧰 Tech Tools & Tips

If tools are your jam, check out my new Work Smarter newsletter.

🎧 Podcast

This is the conversation that caught my ear this week. Check out previous episodes in the Friday Finds podcast playlist.

🧳 Where’s Mike?

• ATD ICE, New Orleans, May 19-22

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Engage Learners with Colors

Colors play a vital role in making a learning experience compelling. They can inspire, calm, surprise, challenge, or warn your learners. When selected and combined consciously, colors can capture attention, immerse people in the learning process, and set just the right mood for learners to grasp the topic at hand.

Discover how to accomplish this by joining our webinar, "Enhancing eLearning with Color Theory," featuring Sabire Akay on Tuesday, December 5, at 11:00 AM EST. Sabire will share practical tips on incorporating color theory into eLearning design, provide several examples, and answer all your questions.

Visit our website and register for free.

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