Synapsys Blog - Collaboration

Understanding the elearning landscape

One of the things that we've learned from our eLearning projects is that the term 'eLearning' means different things to different people. Once upon a time, eLearning just meant content - chunks of material that were self contained learning objects, with not much thought for the context in which learners engaged with that content. Increasingly, the term is expanding in it's reach and is now bit of a catch-all term that is used to cover a range of possible online experiences. And the number of possible online experiences is increasing dramatically.

If you don't believe me, check out the top 100 learning tools of 2009 collated by Jane Hart at the Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies

The list covers personal publishing tools, document collaboration and sharing systems, microblogs, video editing and broadcasting, web conferencing, learning management and portfolio tools and many many more. All of these tools in some way allow the creation of events that can form part of eLearning experiences. The trick is to understand what kind of experiences your learners need, and which tools are best suited to different learning experiences.

Each of the tools mentioned above are better suited to some tasks than others. They're also better suited to some environments, learning styles, content areas .. all the things that you would consider in a learner profile analysis. I've started to think about this as an eLearning landscape that is defined by these different dimensions (and I'm not the only one). If we can locate our learners in this landscape, and have a corresponding map of tools that work best in different parts of the landscape, we can more easily choose the best tools to use.

Let me give you an example. Lets say we have learners that can't meet face-to-face, and that there are three dimensions of interest when planning eLearning for this group:

• the number of learners (individual through to large group)


• temporal proximity (same timezone vs other side of the world), and


• the depth of learner engagement required (passive vs active).
  

With a large group of learners in the same timezone, we might choose a webinar tool for an expert-led seminar. When active engagement is required, we might introduce an online polling or survey tool to get real-time feedback on questions. When the audience is large, passive and in different timezones, a streamed video of the presentation and some reading material would probably be a better choice.

In contrast, a small group of people in different timezones with a need to be actively engaged in learning would have difficulty interacting in real time, so a webinar wouldn't be the best tool to choose. A better choice might be an asynchronous collaboration tool like a wiki or a forum where a small group can work together more effectively.

This isn't an exhaustive list of dimensions, or possible tools. But I hope it get's across the point that one tool does not fit all if your learners vary on important dimensions. If we want to achieve effective learning, and we want to make best choices about what tools to use, I find it a useful way to get underway. I'm planning on developing this idea a bit further in future posts and would be interested to hear your thoughts so let me know what you think.

Getting social and collaborative learning right

The goal of any learning initiative should be to make a difference. This difference could be increasing learners' knowledge in a subject or improving people's ability, efficiency, or satisfaction in their job. From the organisation's perspective, the value of these initiatives is seen in the extent to which this change occurs. Increasingly, organisations are seeing the value of creating opportunities for social and collaborative learning to drive this change.

Social learning techniques give learners the opportunity to apply their learning in a practical context, and gain feedback from peers and managers about how they have approached the task. It can be used to create ways for groups of learners to work collaboratively to achieve an outcome, learning from each other as they go. It can also provide a way for personal and shared reflection on their learning.

This kind of learning is less structured and formal than traditional classroom approaches, and as such it can be difficult to monitor. As a result it can be also be difficult to motivate learners unless there is transparency about the expectations and outcomes.

The challenge for an organisation is to make good choices about how they direct learners to do this, and to choose good tools for their learners. The good news is that there are a number of learning technologies that can help.

However, choosing between the many options available can seem like an impossible task. Many more organisations are making use of social networking tools such as Twitter and Yammer, and at the same time other business applications are become more social - from collaborative tools like Jive SBS and PBWorks, to CRM solutions like Salesforce.com introducing social collaboration into their services. Making the right choice, when many applications seem to offer similar capabilities, can be a difficult challenge.

From our perspective, you can succeed in this area by applying some basic principles, including:

• Get your activity design right - Focus on practical activities, using case studies and scenarios, to allow learners to apply their learning. Arrange for review by peers and supervisors, and coach them to provide constructive feedback and bring the benefit of their experience to solving a problem.


• Look at your current technologies first - If you are already using Sharepoint for collaboration, or a company intranet for peer discussion, see if you can use extend these to support social learning. Giving learners more than one place to go to discuss and share their knowledge and thinking could cause confusion and reduce the likelihood of effective engagement.


• Remove technological barriers to participation - if you need to introduce another application to handle social learning, consider how easily it integrates with your other systems. Nothing will kill collaboration faster than giving users yet another username, password and web address to remember.


• Don't forget the people - Technology doesn't create effective learning, people do. Make sure you invest in people to champion this approach, to foster and encourage learner collaboration, to facilitate involvement by managers and to ensure good quality evaluative data is gathered and reported on.


• Pilot and evaluate - Identify a small group or topic that you can use to trial these techniques. Ensure you have ways for learners to easily provide feedback. Measure the outcomes and compare it to the outcomes of other modes of delviery. All of this will be necessary evidence if you are trying to justify significant investment in people and technology to support this model.

We will be writing more on this topic in the future, including commentary on possible technology choices and examples of approaches to the design of social learning activities. In the meantime, get in touch if you'd like to talk about these concepts in more depth.

Social networking tools

Social networking tools are a rapidly growing area of technological development. This growth is due mainly, in our view, to the growing realisation within both the corporate and educational sectors that:
-Managing knowledge requires more than documenting it
-The use that knowledge can be put to depends largely on the ability of people to contextualise it within their organisation, and that requires engagement and communication.

What began as software for dating sites and the like is growing into a range of applications from event organising, to academic networks to marketing applications. One that is starting to gain traction is Sossoon. This tool is gaining traction as a forum for academics to share information and ideas globally, and is also being used to network those involved in the purchasing industry , and professes to have a wider range of commercial applications. It will be interesting to see how this new type of offering shakes down over time. Solutions which can be demonstrated to have application to a wide of range of contexts are more likely to succeed, and in that regard Sossoon may be worth keeping an eye on.

Ectus Media e-learning tool

Introduction
New Zealand-owned Asnet Technologies Limited is the authorised distributor of the entire Polycom® Office, including the full range of voice, video and web-based conferencing products and management tools. Two of these products are Ectus Media and Ectus Place.

Ectus Media allows streaming of live video conferences to PCs with users able to interact in real-time via an integrated chat facility.

Introduction
New Zealand-owned Asnet Technologies Limited is the authorised distributor of the entire Polycom® Office, including the full range of voice, video and web-based conferencing products and management tools. Two of these products are Ectus Media and Ectus Place.

Ectus Media allows streaming of live video conferences to PCs with users able to interact in real-time via an integrated chat facility. It also records the conference, indexes and makes the content available. Ectus Place links the content with a collaborative environment for e-learning. Ectus Media can also be used to deliver pre-recorded digital video or presentations.

Government Sponsorship
The company received a $300,000 grant from Technology New Zealand for research and development and a $20,000 Business Development grant from New Zealand Trade and Enterprise for branding strategy.

The advertising material shows a single leader talking to several listeners in a single room, and this is the limitation of Ectus Media 200 – it can only have two concurrent connections, and a limitation of 10,000 page views per day. At the top end Ectus Media 800 allows eight H.323 connections with up to 50,000 page views per day.

Off-line Access
Participants do not need to remain connected to the network to access collaborative material – including online conversations. With News Reader access and email integration, participants and hosts can minimise their connect time.

Ectus Place expands the useability of Ectus Media by adding chat, integrated email, and search of recorded conferencing. The advertising blurb suggests uses such as:

1. Brainstorm: Collaboratively develop, discuss and rate ideas
2. Workbooks: Create personal journals, ePortfolios, drop-boxes etc.
3. Wiki: Collaborative web page development
4. Peer Review: Quick and easy set up of peer review and assessment tasks
5. Personal Calendar: Comprehensive web-based calendar
6. Shared Calendars: Simple or comprehensive group calendars
7. Weblogs: Standards based blogging
8. File Management: Make file stores available through the web
9. Message Attachments: Attach multiple files to messages
10. Inline Images: Image .les displayed in messages “inline ”
11. User Photos: User controlled photos and personal pro .les
12. Instant Messaging: Self-contained web based Instant Messenger service
13. Who ’s Online: Quickly see who else is logged in.

TeleTeaching
TeleTeaching Via Videoconference is steadily climbing, as teachers from schools and tertiary institutions undertake asnet's 3 day Certificate in TeleTeaching course - 'Mai te Hui-Ataata' - Via Videoconference. Begun 18 months ago, the intensive 3-day workshops have seen over 140 graduates from 15 courses. The Certificate in TeleTeaching courses sprang from a need to transfer good teaching practice into the videoconference environment, with particular requirements to suit the wharekura's need to teach and learn in Te Reo Maori.
Graduate TeleTeachers thus far are from Wharekura, Paerangi, East Coast schools, from ICTPD school providers, and Otago rural secondary schools.

Denise Hansen from asnet is facilitator, with Mercia Dawn Yates as Maori co-facilitator where this is required. Teachers work 'on-line' between two videoconferenced classrooms, adapting their sample resources and teaching style to suit the medium. Best teaching practice reigns for the 3 days.

Feedback from workshop evaluation forms has given clear indication that teachers are highly motivated by the new skills gained. And as a bonus, teaching in front of colleagues, hearing their feedback, and evaluating others as they teach, is of enormous value, and is often a first in their teaching careers.

Find out more from the Ectus website.

The New Knowledge Management?

We're very interested in ideas around the evolution of knowledge management and how it fits into an organisation's training strategy. Dina Mehta's blog just provided us a new piece of the puzzle -- the idea that effective knowledge management is more about the flow of knowledge than the collection or dissemination of it. So, the most important thing is to have collaboration spaces that allow access to people who know stuff. Not a new idea, certainly, but there are a host of nifty technologies enabling this kind of real-time access to people.

More from Dina here:

http://radio.weblogs.com/0121664/2004/02/19.html#a374