Synapsys Blog - Implement

Selecting an LMS for your Business

What are the keys to successfully selecting a Learning Management System for your business?

I've just finished viewing an excellent webinar on this topic, courtesy of Bryan Chapman. In the webinar, Bryan talks with three senior managers at large corporates (NEC, Sharp and Valero Energy) about their process for selecting and implementing a Learning Management System.

There's a lot of really useful insights in this presentation, but the key messages that I took from it are:

• There are hundreds of potential LMSs to choose from. The challenge is to identify the one that's best for your organisation.


• Consult widely within your organisation to determine the requirements.


• Finding the right supplier is as important as finding the right system.


• Frequent communication with stakeholders, an organisational champion and leadership from senior management are all critical to the success of your implementation

Nothing terribly surprising, but it's always great when you see industry leaders agreeing with your approach. Synapsys has long been convinced of the importance of understanding your stakeholders, your audiences and their needs before making strategic decisions.

It's clear that an effective LMS implementation can have wide ranging effects on your business. The people interviewed during the webinar quoted shifts in online delivery of training from 10% pre-LMS to 90% in some cases. It was also fascinating to hear how NEC had turned their LMS into a revenue generation channel, using it to advertise and sell training packages to their dealer network. In this particular case, NEC achieved a 1300% (yes, 1300%) return on investment.

It's clearly a decision that can have wide ranging effects on your business, and making sure you have a clear understanding of what your users need is of paramount importance. And that's where we can help.

Getting it done in Abu Dhabi

One of the benefits of working internationally on similar projects is that you get to understand how people in different places do things differently. A team of five landed at Abu Dhabi four days ago and we've quickly become immersed in the local culture.

What we've found, nearly immediately and manifested everywhere we look, is that Abu Dhabi is a place that Gets Stuff Done. The people here are the type who Make Things Happen.

And you'd have to be pragmatic, if you want to effectively manage a GDP of 599 billion dirhams (roughly NZ$240 billion) with a skeleton crew. Abu Dhabi produces that GDP, more than twice that of New Zealand, with a population less than half the size of ours.

So how do they do it? Well, the obvious, and cynical, answer is oil. Sure, it's easy to make a bunch of money when you've got more than 92 gigabarrels of black gold in the ground. But that doesn't explain the effectiveness of the Emirate at implementing other large-scale projects: an NZ$40 billion island development, a Formula 1 motor racing circuit, or thousands of acres of land creation.

It's a given that after a mere four days we are by no means experts on this area. Not even close. Our early observations all speak to one thing, though: these people are doers. They decide quickly, and implement well. The oil money underpins their capacity to do this, but the culture and character of the people driving the activity is consistently and extraordinarily proactive.

This approach generates a measure of relief: we don't need to debate endlessly, strategise indefinitely, and collaborate eternally. We are becoming forced by our environment to produce at the same frenetic pace as our hosts, and speed has its advantages.

We've got lots of little culture shocks as well: Google in Arabic (when you click on the search box your cursor right-aligns), sand instead of dirt rising through cracks in the sidewalk, calls to prayer ringing throughout the day.

We'll continue to post as the project progresses, but the theme for today is this: you can get a lot done—by doing it.

Avoiding the Spam trap.

Email spam is an issue for business; it can take up man hours and time, which cost the company money.

One method spammers use to get your email is when you join a site you are required to submit an email address, some of these sites sell their email list to spammers.

The other method is spam bots or email harvesters. These are similar to search engine spiders in that they crawl the web looking for websites, but instead of looking for content and listing your website on a search engine, they are programmed to look for email address and send them back to the spammer’s server. This is what we will look at today.

The Catch-22 is your business needs to be easily contacted from your website; a contact page and/or email address is required. Making it hard for someone to contact you creates an unfriendly user experience and you will lose potential customers, but putting your email out there makes it a target for spammers. That's quite a catch, that Catch-22.... Read on.....

There are a few ways to combat the email harvesting bots and reduce the possibility of ending up on a spam list.

1. Use a contact form on your contact page.
Use a script that doesn’t require the recipients email address to be in the form (you may not see it, but it is there in the code for the spam bots to see).
Also, if you are using a common script such as formmail.cgi make sure it is set up to only accept requests from your server or it could be hijacked by a spammer and used to send out bulk emails using your account.

2. Confuse or block spam bots.
This can be done several ways using various script languages.
The spam bots scan the HTML code behind the page for email addresses; you can use script to hide the email address in the code but still display properly for a human.

JavaScript can be used to confuse some spam bots by breaking up the email address into parts or switching charaters and then writing it to the page (remember the spam bot will see the JavaScript code, not the result of the code)
Even better would be to not put the JavaScript directly into your page but to link to it as a .js include file. This method is independent of what platform you use to host you website.

The next method is to use server side scripts to detect the spam bots and block them. They can also be used to the same effect as the JavaScript method, a combination of both would be best just incase a new bot slips through undetected.
There are free scripts available for PHP and ASP with updated list of known spam bots and email harvesters from the links below.
You can even fight the spammers by poisoning their harvest with fake emails, just make sure you use a robot.txt on your server to block legitimate search engine spiders from crawling it.

A very good anti spam site fill of helpful links and information: http://spamlinks.net/spambots.htm

Some anti-spam measures to fight SPAM: http://www.kloth.net/internet/spam/

The Web Robots Pages: http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/robots.html

Web Development 101

Several years ago web development was a boutique industry with technical skills a necessity. As the years have gone by, the skills needed for basic web development have slowly diminished to the point that, today, almost anyone can create a complete website in a matter of hours. Simple WYSIWYG authoring tools, such as Dreamweaver and FrontPage, with their standardised interfaces are often no less usable than software people use on a daily basis (Word, for example) making the transition a painless one.

This evolution has opened the Internet up to a degree once thought impossible. The downside to this explosion is the growing number of sites that prove impossible or painfully difficult to navigate due to poor layout, flawed navigation, colour and formatting choices. To prevent these visual nightmares, here are a few basic tips for new web developers.

Fonts. Use a standard font such as Arial or Verdana. You may have a font on your computer that you've grown attached to, but there's no guarantee that users of your website will have the same font installed on their computers, making the resulting page they will see entirely unpredictable.

Use a font colour that contrasts well against your page background: black on white is always a safe choice. If the font and background colours are too similar, people will have difficulty reading your text. Neon fonts are a definite no-no.

Avoid italicised fonts as they are much harder to read, and try not to use more than two or three font sizes on the same block of text. Pages with many different font sizes make a site more difficult to read and visually chaotic (unless, of course, this is the effect you're looking for!).

Backgrounds. Neutral colours are best; yes, boring perhaps, but bright colours can be overbearing and reduce the legibility of text. Some browsers also refresh the page more slowly as you scroll down a page, which combined with a bright background may produce a flashing light-show that will have your users flying into epileptic fits en masse! Not really, but you get my drift. Oh, and if you decide to use a background image, don't watermark it, as this can be distracting when scrolling down long pages.

Navigation. Found a nice Flash or Java manu system have you? Feel free to use it, but make sure it isn't the only means of navigating your site. Many users won't have the plug-ins necessary to utilise them and will be faced by empty grey blocks rather than buttons. Put standard HTML links on the page just in case. Make sure that whetever primary navigation system you use remains the same on every page.

If the navigation layout changes on different pages you will have your users tearing their hair out in frustration. Lastly, bear in mind natural human interactions with the page. In most Western cultures people's eyes will be drawn to the top left-hand corner of the screen and then right, along the top of the screen. Your main navigation should ideally be near where they look first on your page.

Images. Always use an appropriate image compression format. If you're compressing an image with large blocks of the same colour (such as logos and most navigation buttons) use something like GIF. If you're compressing a photograph or complex image with lots of gradients, textures and highlights use JPEG. Using the wrong format will increase the file size dramatically. And try not to put more than 100KB of images on the same page; any more can cause aggravation for dial-up users (of which there are still many).

Finally, and this is a biggy, don't re-size an image on your page using the HTML size tags. If you shrink the oscreen size of a large image on your page (in pixels), the actual file size (in KB) still remains the same. This means that a very small image on your page may still take a very long time to download. Use something like Photoshop (or even Paint) to re-size the image instead, thereby preventing the need for me to throw things at my monitor and swear profusely when visiting your site. And don't increase the size of an image using the same tags. This will cause pixellation of the image, making it look grainy and jagged.

Contact pages. If you decide to put up a contact page, be cautious about plastering your email address on it. Trust me, it will be an unwelcome surprise when the spam starts rolling in. If you are able, use a contact form, or conceal your email address from spiders (those programmes that trawl through websites for content) using Javascript. Think about creating an email address specifically for the site; one that you can abandon if things go haywire.

General Usability. Try to maintain standardisation across your pages. This may mean spending some time coming up with a page template at the outset, but it will make things considerably easier for you and your site's users down the track. If you're coming from a print background remember to think broadly in squares and rectangles when designing a page. Circles and curves may look nice, but they're difficult to implement.

Consider the screen resolution of your users. Most people will be using a screen resolution of 1024x768 (pixels, width by height) or above, but there are still quite a few using 800x600 or less. If your page is wider than 750 pixels these users will be forced to scroll sideways to view the full width of the page. It's up to you to decide what compromises you make to accommodate varying resolutions, but try to avoid extremely wide tables or images as a rule.

If you use links, make sure they're clearly identified as links (underlined, for example) and make sure you don't use the same format for plain text (I hate it when people underline text on a site but it isn't a link, but that may just be me!)

Finally, remember that these are just guidelines. Many of them may be broken under the right circumstances with great results. Guidelines are a useful tool, but web development is as much an act of artistic creativity than a purely technical one! Now fly! Be free, my little grasshopper!

Coordination, Collaboration, Cooperation

If you've ever given any thought to the differences between the three terms, coordination, collaboration and cooperation, this reflective piece from Dave Pollard is for you.

Link here...

Search Engine Optimisation vs User Optimisation

You may have heard of the term Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and why you need it to get thousands flocking to your website. There are companies that specialise in this field and will claim to put you in the top 10 search results of the major 3 search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN).

But there is one thing that will beat any SEO code tweaking voodoo magic and 'pay per click' add campaigns hands down everytime. Something search engines love, and people love – Content.
On the internet content is king, the internet is about sharing information. If you have a website packed with good, relevant informative content, then they will come, the search engine bots and the humans.

Many web development companies select and develop content based on the users and the visual appearance they want to convey. They tend to see site optimisation as something that happens after the site is build. This is a trap.

New Zealand and Australia in 'Early Stages' with eLearning?

From a Learning Circuits news item on a new Cape Group report:

"While Australian and New Zealand organizations have adopted a sophisticated array of e-learning tools and technologies to drive business outcomes, few are exploiting the full capabilities available to them, according to a new research report, "Releasing eLearning's Potential: eLearning in Australian and New Zealand Organizations" published by the Cape Group."

More here...

Interoperability in Action

Via Derek Wenmoth's blog, a link to a 25 minute video presentation on interoperability standards and what they can do for us all. This particular presentation is based on the X4L interoperability programme, using the RELOAD content packaging tool. Still, the basic principles will apply to many interoperability efforts.

Link here... (Quicktime)

Implementing an eLearning Project

This is a very enlightening article that stresses a deeply-held Synapsys belief, the importance of a design-centred but well-balanced team approach that is central to making eLearning projects successful.

Read the article, Why eLearning is So Difficult to Eat, here...

Interactive Technologies for eLearning

We gave the third in our series of eLeanring Solutions Seminars in conjunction with our partner, Hand Multimedia. We had a good turn-out and discussion...

We talked about theory related to interactivity, specific technologies and showed a number of examples of games, simulations and scenario-based learning.

Everyone really enjoyed seeing Hand's thermodynamics learning game, Fireman Frank. You can view it here, if you missed it.

We didn't discuss collaboration, lms/lcms's, or any of that as we'll be covering those topics in future seminars.

View the presentation...

Learning Objects Wiki

Here is another site that we post both for the message and its medium. It is a relatively basic site about learning object repositories, but presented in Wiki format, so that visitors can easily update the pages themselves (with an audit trail, of course). That's the way to get others working for you!

http://www.academiccolab.org

Social Software

The latest category of software to be defined (or redefined, depending on your perspective) is 'social software', or tools that enable social networking. The key difference between this and groupware or other collaborative software is that the networks self-organise from the bottom up. Blogs and instant messaging are a perfect example of this. According to Eva Kaplan-Leiserson of Learning Circuits, learning networks in organisations can and do follow a similar model, a phenomenon she dubs 'we-learning'.

http://www.learningcircuits.org/2003/dec2003/kaplan.htm

Research on Current Practice

In May 2001 Synapsys participated in a survey on online learning practices. The results of that survey are now available at http://www.publicationshare.com/docs/corp_survey.pdf

Respondents were from the corporate sector, spanning all sizes and industries, the largest respondents being education, I.T., Finance and Industrial. The results provide an interesting snapshot of how things were at that time, and canvas a range of issues including:

-barriers to learning
-organisational structure and training methods
-development methods and pedagogical approaches
-communities and resources
-methods for engaging learners
-Return on investment (ROI) measurement, or lack of it
-emerging technologies

Bear in mind the snapshot is of two years ago, but it still makes for interesting reading. There are 15 broad recommendations covering areas such as:

-learning objects
-online learning policies and procedures
-tool development
-freelance instructors/designers
-information portlas and communities

Our Partner, Hand Multimedia, Makes News!

This article about Hand Multimedia discusses their novel approaches to Macromedia Authorware development that really simplify the way projects are put together.

http://www.canterburysoftware.org.nz/current.htm#feature1

Simulations for Learning

Clark Aldrich is the author of a recent book, Simulations and the Future of Learning, in which he discusses how to leverage simulations as learning tools. In this Q&A article, he clears up some misconceptions about simulations (they needn't be complicated nor expensive!) and elaborates on their potential.

We're doing some work with simulations for a couple of clients of ours at the moment, so we find this stuff quite interesting.

http://www.elearningpost.com/features/archives/002199.asp

Real-life Lessons About eLearning

This is a fascinating summary of a talk given by Damien Faughan, Charles Schwab's Director of Infrastructure & Technology, at the eLearning Producer conference. Damien frankly discussed lessons the large financial services company has learned about eLearning over the last several years, including issues related to technology, reusability, learner motivation, blended learning, etc.

These lessons learned really substantiate many of the principles we espouse at Synapsys, for instance: "At the end of the day, all learning needs to be strategic and transformational, learner-centered and focused on contributing to the business."

http://www.internettime.com/blog/archives/001021.html