You’ll notice a passing resemblance between Tony’s photo and that of chisel-jawed motivational speaker Tony Robbins. I am assured that they are no more related than I am to suave master spy Roger Moore.I've put relevant photos below. Uh Donald, ...
Tony Karrer | Tony Robbins |
Donald Taylor | Roger Moore |
with a Yes/No response. The answer is "yes" unless the vendor is completely off their game. All LMS products support a variety of learning formats. At least clarify what you mean by a learning format. Are you talking different file formats or do you mean classroom vs. virtual classroom vs. asynchronous. And if that's what you mean, then list out the formats and what you mean by supporting the format.
The bottom line here is that there is only one case where a general / generic requirement is acceptable. That case is when it's a well known, well defined function and you DON'T CARE HOW IT'S DONE. In other words, any solution is acceptable. Otherwise, it's a waste of everyone's time to have a generic requirement when you really want something more specific than that.For example in Learning Management Systems (LMS) A Review, one of the example requirements is:
Most of the LMS vendors have the ability to define a course capacity and then put people on waitlists. The specific handling after that is often configurable, possibly at different levels of granularity. There’s notifications. A whole bunch flows off of this. As a vendor, do I guess at what’s important to the prospect? Hopefully, I can find a bunch of marketing text to copy in, but it’s going to be hard to write a response that will help the prospect.
Duh, it lists them and then it shows the course information. Is there something that your company needs that’s not standard?
Cmon - "easy to navigate," "intuitive," "feature rich," "flexible." As a vendor, you had better believe that you are all of these things.
You will need to formulate your own opinions about "easy to use" and "intuitive." This is going to come from demos and testing, not from an RFP response. "Feature rich" and "flexible" are probably a cop-out from writing more explicit requirements.
Increasing evidence abounds that Enterprise 2.0 adoption has begun in earnest with a typical example being Wells Fargo taking the plunge, having rolled out Enterprise 2.0 platforms to 160,000 workers. It has become clear that we’re moving out of the early pioneer phase to a broader acceptance phase. From the production side, a brand new analysis indicates that the business social software market will be nearly $1 billion strong this year and over $3.3 billion by 2011. In these and other ways, such as the growing collection of success stories, Enterprise 2.0 has arrived.Adoption is still sporadic, but it is certainly happening. I would suggest that there's a big difference between tools being purchased and adoption happening in big, meaningful ways. Keep in mind Knowledge Management (KM).
I’m preparing for my part of an upcoming session at DevLearn on LMS selection as part of The Learning Management Systems Symposium. I'm going to prepare for this in a slightly different way. I'm going to create notes in my blog as a series of posts as I think about what I'll present and then I'll turn them into slides. Hopefully, this will:
My selection experience primarily is in corporate environments, but I’ve also been involved in non-profits, foundations and to a lesser extent education and government. My custom implementation experience is generally with specialized content providers. Most of the time, I’m working with larger organizations who have 2,000+ learners and several different constiuents involved. However, most of this applies fairly well across other kinds of organizations.
Reservations:I'm not sure how interesting it will be to walk through the LMS Selection Process. In my experience, most of the definitions of the process are fairly similar. If you go out and search you will quickly find resources like:
To be clear, I do not think that Facebook itself is really a learning environment. It's a large, centralized piece of software that is getting creaky with use (we've seen more outages and the PHP code is once again dumping itself into users' browsers). Its privacy policies are questionable and it is giving out user information to applications willy-nilly. But it is still important, because it reveals many of the features future learning environments (and personal environments in general) will need to have. Something like the social network operating system, maybe. These are nicely captured by this article as Tony Karrer pulls together a number of recent resources on the site to throw out some ideas.Because Stephen and I come from such different environments, perspectives, etc., it's always an interesting data point when he and I are in complete agreement. I also feel like Facebook is a bit creaky and as Thomas Vanderwal's recent post Facebook for Business or LinkedIn Gets More Valuable points out, as you use Facebook more and have more friends, it seems to get harder to use. Linked in doesn't seem to suffer from that.
This is not to say QuickTime and Windows Media are dead technologies. They aren’t by a long shot, but when it comes to putting video on the web, the Flash Player has rapidly become the only game in town.Why has this happened?
Flash video content and MP3s delivered to Flash Player using a normal web server are delivered through progressive download. This content is cached on the end user's hard drive and can be easily accessed—and possibly stolen by the user. By contrast, audio, video, and data streamed to Flash clients using Flash Media Server are not cached on local client machines.The only way around this is to use a Flash Media Server. Of course, the same is true of the other formats. Delivering a file via a standard HTTP request (without a streaming server) will leave the asset available.
Level 3 evaluations measure whether the there was an actual transfer of learning to the actual work setting. This level of evaluation will increase the visibility of learning and development efforts, because successful implementation of Level 3 evaluation
ROI is toast. Use EVA instead.
Training & Support Return on Investment Calculator
ROI, or return on investment, is king in today’s business world. Touted routinely by managers and project leaders, ROI is used as a selling point in print advertisements and is featured regularly in news and business discussions because, for every purch
A training program with objectives linked to business results and backed with a solid business case is less vulnerable to spending cuts. To ensure adequate funding and organization-wide commitment to your training program, you must be equally committed to
Does it cost less to design and develop online teaching and learning today than it did a few years ago? Are the categories of cost different today from the past and from what the costs might be in the future? The costs of developing online programs are si
Measurement of training ROI starts with defining the reasons and goals for the training, determining how much the training costs, and verifying the amount of return. Questions you may have include: * What is the reason for the training? * What i
If people really are your greatest asset, isn't it time to look at your training programmes as investments in your organisation's human capital and not just as an expense? In this article, Clive Shepherd argues the case for return on investment (ROI) as a
Business process management (BPM), workflow management, business activity monitoring (BAM), and workforce optimization software also are designed to reduce lag time. BPM and workflow technologies have been able to achieve significant gains in productivity
Recently, functional managers have begun using eLearning to meet business objectives. Managers look beyond employees to customers, suppliers, and distribution channels -- everyone benefits from seeding eLearning throughout the value chain. This is where w
The problem is that nobody is quite sure what the appropriate metrics are for measuring ROI for learning. Is it student throughput or time to mastery? Is it dropout rates or full-time equivalents returned to the workforce? One thing is certain: many smart
There were four key questions that were going to be addressed: 1. What do we mean by ROI? 2. How important is it? 3. How do you calculate ROI? 4. What’s wrong with how it’s generally calculated?
The ROI for e-learning internally at Cisco is 900 percent per course.
E-learning can have an enormous financial impact on a business, but proving a return on investment can be tricky unless you know what to look for. There are hard and soft cost savings associated with e-learning. Hard numbers are the external factors, such
Despite the challenges associated with measuring ROI, there are simple steps that companies can take to create a meaningful ROI in a faster and more cost-efficient way. Below, we'll explore how companies can conduct "pilot" e-learning projects by tapping
At this point, someone higher up in the organization will start asking about the return on investment (ROI) for the program and whether they're getting their money's worth. The way to demonstrate that is by doing Kirkpatrick Level 3 (measuring the extent
When it comes to e-learning, computing ROI suddenly becomes a complicated procedure requiring thoughtful chinstroking, serious seminar time, and earnest input from consultants and vendors.
Different levels of management make different sorts of decisions, so it's appropriate that they use different measures of ROI.
People fail to recognize many non-cost related benefits of e-learning solutions, such as reach, consistent messaging, and flexibility. Despite those factors (and many others like them), proving a business case for e-learning still means being able to demonstrate value.
ASTD Josh Bersin What to measure: efficiency, effectiveness, compliance
"Facebook is the most convenient and respectable way to feel connected to friends, get updated on existing friends, find new people, build relationships and express identities."
Students, however, seem more interested in cashing out. "I want to build a really cool app and then sell it for some amount of money," says Jennifer Gee, a 21-year-old computer science graduate student. Classmates nearby nod in agreement.The class has each student creating applications in Facebook and presenting to potential investors. Interestingly, BJ Fogg (the professor) came onto my radar a few years ago because he was writing about persuasive technology - i.e., how do you persuade humans to behave a certain way with technology - a key component of human performance improvement through technology.
Q: "Willie, why do you rob banks?"Why are we going to be adopting Facebook? Cause that's where our users are.
A: "Cause that's where the money is." ~ Willie Sutton - Bank Robber
In the opening segment, Aaron and I talk about Tony Karrer’s article in T&D magazine, Learning and Networking with a blog. Here is a post on Tony’s site that gives some resources that were cut from the final article. We also talked about how his blog has some interesting posts on personal learning environments (PLE’s). The other person I mention is Michele Martin at The Bamboo Project. Her posts about PLE’s have transformed how I use and think about the web for my own professional development.
Partisans of blogging argue that there are many potential business applications of the technology (and they discuss these applications in their blogs!). But I believe that blogging falls into the unproven category ... at the moment it's a tool for individuals to express their somewhat random musings. I know of no organization in which the benefits of blogging have been measured. Perhaps the biggest problem for blogging is the time it takes to read and write blogs. If anything this tool has detracted from productivity, not increased it. ... Bill Ives argues that his own blog is really a vehicle for managing his own personal knowledge. If this particular use of blogs caught on broadly, it could represent a new approach to organizational knowledge management.Yikes! This tool has "detracted from productivity." It's interesting that earlier in the book Davenport was careful to say that he really wasn't talking productivity as much as he was talking about performance and results.
The person he uses as his example, Bill Ives, I've met through blogging!!!Yes, it's a weak tie. But certainly is good enough that I'd invite him to have a beer anytime I was in the neighborhood and absolutely if I have a question that falls in Bill's areas of expertise, I would ask him his thoughts. Better yet, I might ask in my blog, and there's a fair chance he might respond.
eLearning / E-Learning - learning that is accomplished over the Internet, a computer network, via CD-ROM, interactive TV, or satellite broadcast.
eLearning / E-Learning - Broad definition of the field of using technology to deliver learning and training programs. Typically used to describe media such as CD-ROM, Internet, Intranet, wireless and mobile learning. Some include Knowledge Management as a form of e-learning. Took awhile for the right term to come about, circa 1995 it was all called "Internet based Training", then "Web-based Training" (to clarify that delivery could be on the Inter- or Intra-net), then "Online Learning" and finally e-learning, adopting the in vogue use of "e-" during the dot com boom. The "e-" breakthrough enabled the industry to reaise hundreds of millions from venture capitalists who would invest in any industry that started with this magic letter.
eLearning / E-learning (electronic learning): Term covering a wide set of applications and processes, such as Web-based learning, computer-based learning, virtual classrooms, and digital collaboration. It includes the delivery of content via Internet, intranet/extranet (LAN/WAN), audio- and videotape, satellite broadcast, interactive TV, CD-ROM, and more.
eLearning / e-Learning - Any learning that utilizes a network (LAN, WAN or Internet) for delivery, interaction, or facilitation. This would include distributed learning , distance learning (other than pure correspondence ), CBT delivered over a network, and WBT . Can be synchronous , asynchronous , instructor-led or computer-based or a combination.
I am the Manager of Education and Training in a non-profit that serves homeless youth and whose mission is to get the kids off the streets by offering services which include getting their GED. Grants demand accountability on success rate and outcomes of our GED teaching process. As a non-profit, buying an LMS program that would track our GED students in math, writing, reading, social sciences and science would be extraordinary. Our need is also to make the learning process fun! How can we both have a system which engages the student and tracks their academic progress?
A broad array of online players, from major media companies like Viacom to e-commerce providers such as eBay, are adding networking features to their online destinations, letting users create detailed Web identities, connect with people over common interests, share content, and, above all, socialize.Hmmm ... how is this new? Hasn't eBay had social networking features for a long time? Granted they are being enhanced, but still. And doesn't Flickr (images), del.icio.us (bookmarks), etc. all have a social networking aspect to them?
I'm sure huge and generic social networking destinations will continue to do well, but I'm placing my bet on the biggest impact coming when social networking becomes a standard feature on all good sites, bringing community to the granular level where it always works best.I sort of agree. Certainly, niches offer an opportunity to leverage social networking capabilities, but I think that there are really big risks right now for any site because you need critical mass and passion to be successful. I actually think that Facebook and Ning are heading in the right direction by becoming platforms for social networking solutions. I'm not sure if these are going to win or if something a bit lower level will win, but someone has to provide a means for us to share our profile and social network activity across our niche sites so that we can lower the barrier of participation. Thus, the platforms are going to be the big winners. The rest of us will build off of it. This avoids the The joys of re-entering data!
tried them all (facebook, myspace, bebo, orkut, linkedin, twitter, etc.) and then resume the more ad hoc mixture of blogs I've been using for many years. Quite simply, social networking sites require a high level of commitment.
