eLearning Technology

Monday, August 31, 2009

Trends in Learning

Someone was just asking me about the big trends in learning and the implications of those trends on corporate learning and development. I initially said - "Look at my blog," but when I looked, I realized it might be a bit harder than I thought to pull out the central themes. So, here's a bit of a compilation of some of the things I've been talking about in my blog which points to some of the major trends in learning.

Environmental Changes

Some of the common trends I discuss in presentations are:

Decreased L&D budgets
Faster pace
Increased workforce mobility
Shorter job tenure
Increased job fragmentation - fewer numbers in any one role
Constant increase in complexity
Greater concept work
Need for faster proficiency
Changing expectations for learning

The bottom line is that Learning and Development needs to do more with less these days or they will be marginalized.

And the risk is pretty severe as described in the Business of Learning.

Trends in What L&D Organizations are Doing

As a result of these trends, some L&D organizations are looking to social and informal learning. Training Method Trends suggests that social learning tools are beginning to take off. This will be a slow evolution. And surveys such as Web 2.0 Applications in Learning suggest that this will be scattered.

There's considerable discussion throughout my blog around topics that relate to social / informal / learning 2.0:

The whole social / informal / elearning 2.0 discussions implies some very Disruptive Changes in Learning.

In Long Live, I discuss how we are not talking about eliminating instructor-led, but that organizations are looking at alternatives.

The whole problem is Long Tail Learning. There is just way too much stuff that people need to learn that we have to make choices about what we spend our time publishing into formal learning events. The audience has to be large enough. As concept workers, we quickly go past formal learning opportunities. There's no course on what I do every day. And you cannot Separate Knowledge Work from Learning.

One option is to say that limit of training / workplace Learning Responsibility is formal learning. Once you go beyond formal learning, then there's an immediate question of what else you will provide. I know from Data Driven performance improvement solutions that often informal learning can be very effective in driving results. To me, the answer is pretty clear. You've got to look beyond formal.

The Result

When you look at Examples of eLearning 2.0, none of them individually seem all that radical. Many organizations are using SharePoint to implement these kinds of solutions.

But when you look at the difference in control in Learning 1.0 vs. Learning 2.0, it's a pretty radical change.

There are significant opportunities around Online Coaching. I'm hearing more on this all the time.

Examples of how social and informal learning is happening in the consumer space:

Approach to learning strategy needs to be different: Learning 2.0 Strategy

You need to think about systems quite different: LMS and Social Learning

You have to prepare workers for web 2.0

L&D professionals and organizations having changing roles and responsibilities:

Other Thoughts

In Corporate Training, I look at the challenges learning and development organizations face in heading towards these kinds of solutions.

There are lots of possible Objections to making this happen.

Social Learning Measurement is still an issue.

Corporate Policies on Web 2.0 are emerging.

Desired Learning Outcomes may differ based on these changes.

Thursday, August 27, 2009

Qarbon Camtasia and Adobe Captivate

Question from a reader, hoping you can provide your thoughts:

I am in the process of selecting an elearning tool that is easy to use, quick to create the demos and does not bloat the file size much. I want to create some online videos that will be a total of about 6-7 hours and upload them on my site. These videos would have software demos, screencasts and PowerPoints embedded inside them. Also every screen would have audio (voiceover with my voice) accompanying it. I will want to have a simple menu system to break up the content into chunks. And I may eventually, but not initially, want to be able to track them under an LMS, i.e., have SCORM tracking.

I have been looking into various tools. Here are some pros and cons I found about them.

Qarbon

Pros:

Less File size.
Qarbon seems very easy to use.

Cons:

I'm finding it a bit difficult to integrate my voice with my demos and pull everything together.
Creates as screenshot. To present a moving demo I need to integrate another product called Viewlet cam.
Makes it a bit harder to pull everything together.

Camtasia and Adobe Captivate:

Pros:

Heard lots of good thing about them.

Cons:

Worried about file size for both of them

The more I am researching, the more I am getting confused.

----

There are quite a few Software Simulation Tools out there. I understand the confusion though because it's a combination of several different kinds of needs that are often addressed by different Rapid eLearning Tools.

What questions would you have? What might you suggest? What would you do to find a good solution?

Would you consider using a solution that integrates several tools that are possibly best of breed?

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Models for Learning Questions

We wrapped up our free elearning webinar on Models for Learning in a New World. My portion was a fast paced look at several important environmental trends such as:

Decreased L&D budgets (see Business of Learning)
Faster pace
Increased workforce mobility
Shorter job tenure
Increased job fragmentation - fewer numbers in any one role
Constant increase in complexity
Greater concept work
Need for faster proficiency
Changing expectations for learning

The bottom line is that Learning and Development needs to do more with less these days or they will be marginalized. We also have so many more kinds of solutions we can offer. I described some common eLearning 2.0 patterns that are emerging much along the lines of my previous post Examples of eLearning 2.0.

Questions

There were some great questions during the session. Unfortunately, we didn't have much time to discuss.

1) Two issues that come up, at least in the world of training in a government environment, is that of a) security of information, and b) control of the information given to the learner to make sure it is accurate. Can you comment on those two issues?

Both of these concerns/objections come up quite often even outside of government. Security of the information is something that hopefully your IT organization is already dealing with. I recommend adopting their tools and their security mechanisms. If that's not possible, then start with content that doesn't have the same level of security concerns.

Control can be similarly avoided as an issue by initially moderating all edits. Yes that takes work, but it's less work than keeping all the content up-to-date yourself. Over time you will have some areas where moderation can be removed.

2) How do you sale to the NON-Gen Y's and Millennials who are in upper management who fear things like wiki's?

9) When introducing these new learning methods, I have the impression that the resistance from organisation is lies more in the new role of the training department rather then new technologies. Is this also your experience?

Resistance can come from a lot of places. I used to find IT very resistant, but now I'm finding more often there are allies with IT who are helping to make this stuff happen. I gladly jump on their shoulders (and systems). So, I would agree that new technologies is less the issue.

More often real resistance comes from senior VPs who are not willing to okay something they don't really understand. Yammer (internal twittering) is almost impossible to explain to someone who has no experience with any social networking (and probably not with anything more than email lists).

My suggestion is that you don't really try to sell Yammer or a Wiki or any other kind of tool. Instead, you simply say that you want to provide a means of editing the content more easily, or following up on the training to get dialog to happen, or whatever the obviously smart solution is that you are proposing.

As a side note, I think selling Twitter/Yammer is harder than selling social bookmarking and wikis. Twitter/Yammer is something new. Social bookmarking and wikis are often a smart replacement with obvious side benefits.

Many of the suggestions in Learning 2.0 Strategy still hold:

1. Start Tactical and Bottom Up
2. Avoid the Culture Question
3. Avoid Highly Regulated Content (and Lawyers)
4. Learning Professionals Must Lead
5. Prepare Workers for Learning 2.0
6. Technology is Tactical not Strategic
7. Avoid the CIO

3) Tony, what is "secondments" that is listed on your last slide?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondment

4) How is "accountability" for learning specific things being handled in 2.0?

5) How do we ensure learning transfer with Learning 2.0 methodologies.

This was discussed a fair bit during the session. You can certainly still test whether learning objectives were achieved, but … the point is often that "learning transfer", i.e., testing knowledge, is not really the thing you are going after. Instead, you often don't quite know what content will be covered and accountability is more the end result – for example, a presentation might need to be created. I might use the analogy of the thesis associated with an advanced degree. You are not testing for content, rather you are expecting the completion of a process leading to something that is fairly well defined. You will evaluate using much the same way that we Evaluate Concept Work.

6) Can you comment on the advantages/disadvantages of company-created social sites (private networking sites) vs public sites such as Twitter and Facebook.

Not sure I even know how to answer this. Most of the time, there's pretty clear separation between private and public sites in terms of your goals and use cases. I will say that sometimes companies get it a bit wrong when it comes to leveraging existing sites to create value that extends beyond the firewall. For example, having a robust group and network on LinkedIn can be quite valuable when you have employees who should be able to reach outside the firewall for expertise and can leverage LinkedIn to find internal expertise as well. Similarly having content that flows outside to partners, customers, etc. can be an interesting solution. I do think there are interesting opportunities here. However, most L&D are focused much more on the private kinds of solutions at this point.

7) Is there a method to map different models of learning to different types of projects?

Great question. I don't know. There are lots of patterns emerging, but I don't think there's a "method" yet. Is there a method for mapping blended learning to types of projects even taking away some of the newer complexities of learning 2.0? Not sure. Help?

8) We are in the brainstorming sessions of creating a blog and podcast. What tips or advise can you give on the focus and direction of these?
We want to allow users to get to know us and our abilities. One of the challenges we have is that many departments don't understand that we could help them identify and solve many training issues.

We would like to create a "Get to Know Us" site where we discuss what we are working on lately and some of the recent products we have released.

This is interesting. I personally would be really concerned about making sure that my blog or podcasts were valuable to my target audiences. Creating an internal newsletter as a blog or podcast that doesn't have compelling information may find few followers.

I think rather than "Get to Know Us" or "What we Offer" – maybe instead focus on "Smart Ways to Solve Your Problems" … Taking a focus on case examples or new methods or ??? that is all around how they can get their work done better would seem to be much more interesting. How about becoming an aggregator for them of this kind of information? Show them interesting solutions at other (related) organizations so that they can have a more interesting conversation with you.

In some ways, I would think of this as you taking the lead in learning the kinds of things that they would want to have time to learn about themselves. How are other organizations using these things? How are they improving performance? What are some interesting trends out there? Bring that together for them. That's high value for you and them. I'd think that's a compelling internal blog and/or podcast.

One last note – podcast implies that you have a set of people who have access to iPods / iPhones and time to listen. I personally, listen sporadically to podcasts. A blog would be much better to reach me personally. Maybe you have a good audience for the podcast. But my guess is that the blog will fit much better. Heck, you can probably get the blog posts emailed to people. :)

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Slow Evolution of Learning Solutions

Great post from Charles Jennings –Down But Not Quite Out: what can we learn from the plights of Learning Tree International and Readers Digest?

Learning Tree reported a decline of 31.2% in earnings compared to 2008. Operating expenses were down from $22 million to $14.6 million ($1.5 million of that contributed by producing less of those damn catalogues). And overall operating profit was down by 40.7% compared to the same period in 2008. Net income was down 44.7%.

This is similar to what I've been discussing in the Business of Learning and we are both citing Learning Tree's woes. This whole topic has got me thinking about all of the implications and I've been regularly posting on it:

Charles discusses what Learning Tree (and all training providers are up against). There's free content and the assumption that content should be Free.

Charles talks about the Changing Expectations of CLOs:

Many CLOs in large corporations around the world now subscribe to the view that most organisational learning is informal and even where formal learning is used they expect more than a one-off event from their suppliers. The expectation is that the provider will make on-going support available through some form of online forum and email at least, or make their content available online in an on-demand way such as the excellent Books 24x7 has done. And CLOs want to integrate their provider's learning materials and learning tools with their own internal systems so that they can be made available across the corporation.

This echoes what I've heard from several other CLOs. At the same time, I would be cautious on the word "many" – yes, there are many, but quite a few CLOs still take a very traditional view of their focus (see Learning Performance Business Talent Focus) and are fairly traditional in their view of solutions. Many vendors are looking forward to the day when CLOs are willing to pay for more of these things. The reality is that many vendors offer expertise – but if CLOs are not willing to pay for accessing that expertise outside the classroom, then it's not going to work out from a business model perspective.

Charles discusses the Reuters Institute of Technology which won a CLO Magazine Award for innovation.

The Institute didn't include any courses from suppliers such as Learning Tree, but was rich with resources from Books24x7, TechChek (a web-based technical skills assessment tool), internal company communities and knowledge sharing wikis. A ning site, podcasts, video learning resources, RSS feeds from the large technology providers such as Cisco, Sun and Microsoft, and a number of other facilities including a range short formal modules deep-linked from the corporate LMS that could be pulled on-demand.

A lot to be learned from these kinds of examples. Thanks for sharing Charles.

Monday, August 24, 2009

Top 99 Workplace eLearning Blogs

I just saw a post by Amit Garg Top 47 eLearning & Workplace Learning Blogs. His list was very similar to the list of sources that eLearning Learning includes. It made me wonder how many sources does eLearning Learning include? Turns out it's exactly 99.

Please let me know if I'm missing any blogs that produce good content on eLearning and more particularly Workplace eLearning that would make sense to include. eLearning Learning is looking for a bit deeper posts that focus on applied issues.

If you don't want to subscribe to all 99 sources individually, then you can subscribe to either the Full Feed or Best Of feed from eLearning Learning. The full feed provides snippets from each source. And the Best Of feed provides a weekly summary with the top content from all of these sources. The Best Of also includes upcoming free elearning webinars. Personally I find that this is high value even though I try to stay up on all the latest and best content.

I'll also mention that there's one source that's a bit different than the others. It's Tony Karrer delicious links. As I find interesting items that are not part of these sources, I manually mark those. It's part of the overall social filtering that the technology relies on. I would definitely welcome involvement of more content collectors. So …

Wanted: Content Collectors

and heck, might as well mention…

Wanted: Calendar Curators

So here are the 99 sources in no particular order:

I wonder who will be number 100?