Synapsys Blog

DIY eLearning - do it, but do it right

There has been an explosion of eLearning authoring tools that promise the ability to create effective, engaging eLearning content without even the need to know what 'HTML' means. Expensive or free, downloaded or used online - the options are endless.

We've noticed that as clients start to explore them, as many questions arise:
- Is 'simple' eLearning good enough?
-How do we make it genuinely 'interactive'?
-How do we make finished modules available?
-How will we maintain it?
-Do we have the expertise to use the tools well, and if not, how do we get it without getting stuck with an expensive consultant?

Our view?
-There are some fundamental attributes of any eLearning package that you should be able to achieve. If you can't, don't start.
-The better DIY authoring tools do set up an environment where you can create effective content without programming knowledge. However it doesn't follow that anyone can use them effectively. Not everyone can use a welding machine, a spreadsheet, or a syringe....

The essentials....
-The visual design and standard of content must reflect well on the brand of the organisation
-The information design must be pedagogically sound
-The modules must be transportable between delivery platforms
-The learner's brain must be actively engaged by the material through at least some interactivity
-It must be economical to maintain

As we reviewed and used the available tools, we realised that most applications provide varying degrees of functionality, but don't give authors the structure they need to create effective content. We also found many of the better tools prohibitively expensive. It wasn't just the purchase price, it was the time and cost of getting authors to the point where they could use the tool to create good content quickly.

Our response has been to launch ReB, the Synapsys Rapid eLearning Builder. It's a web based environment where we populate modules with page templates that reflect well on the client's brand and embed sound educational design features. As a web based service the cost model is very competitive, and clients can pick and choose how much support they need from us on an ad hoc basis. If you'd like to know more about ReB, contact us.

10 tips for creating effective eLearning

Ten tips for creating elearning experiences that actually deliver results

1. Don’t start with the technology
Start by being clear about the business is trying to achieve, and what experience learners actually need. It may or may not be eLearning.

2. Learning Management Systems – Get it right before you buy, not afterwards
Don’t start with choosing an LMS, don’t buy the first one that sounds ‘OK’. Test, pilot, gather requirements with the people that matter – the users.

3. Find your champion
eLearning will involve lots of change for many people. It won’t happen unless the initiative has overt, consistent support from the management team. Find your champion(s) and enlist them.

4. Experiment with creating content
There are a myriad of options, from contracting a company, to DIY, to SaaS services. Unless you’re setting up an eLearning development function, you’ll need to partner in some way. Don’t commit until you’ve tried creating the right level of content you need, and making sure it delivers results.

5. Get learners working together
Training isn’t the goal, changed behavior and improved performance is. People working in teams in a coordinated way is an important part of achieving this.

6. Interactivity generates learning
It might be cheaper to put pages of text online, but will it achieve anything? One way or another you have to engage the user’s brain. Interactivity is a critical part of the solution.

7. Get managers involved
If people are going to learn and change behavior, the organization is going to have to change as well. ‘Doing’ eLearning is not just about providing content people can study anywhere, anytime.

8. Know what your strategy is
eLearning is just another tool. Without a clear vision for what you’re trying to achieve, your effort is likely to be misdirected.

9.Return On Investment/Cost Benefit Analysis, ignore it at your peril
Enduring changes to bottom line performance will require investment. If you don’t project the return, you’ll find it hard to get the resourcing. Elearning may be cheap in large scale delivery, but there are a wide range of costs in getting established.

10. Make sure you can demonstrate success
Don’t get lost in the big systems issues. Small, piloted initiatives that are seen to work are critical to getting momentum.

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.

Gathering meaningful data for Return on Investment (ROI) analysis

One of the challenges in measuring return on investment in training/learning contexts is that much of the value can be intangible. Take for example training in new manufacturing processes. It’s relatively easy to measure ‘hard’ data such as reduced waste and rework. But what about intangibles that also come from the training.... ideas that improve the product, boosting sales.... staff who stay longer because the job is more rewarding.... It’s even harder when you move to measuring the impact of, say, a coaching programme on the performance of managers.

Our view? Be very clear about who will use the data, and what it will be used for.

Think about who the stakeholders are that will be looking at the results. What matters to them, and what evidence would they see as ‘valid’? Often stakeholders with a Human Resources/Learning and Development focus will be much more receptive to anecdotal data with more tenuous links to the bottom line....
• Three of ten managers all noted practical examples of improvement where they believe the cost saving to the company was greater than $2,000 so we can extrapolate that....
• The performance management cycle identifies that most trainees have improved faster this year in the area they got training in, so the programme is effective...

Those with a focus more on financial PKIs may discount this sort of ‘evidence’ as just speculation that cannot be meaningfully quantified.
• The manager’s perceptions are not reliable, and we can’t extrapolate over the whole company
• Improved performance is probably due more to the pay rises.... we can’t tell what the impact of the training was....

The problem is there is often a long chain of events between a training intervention and the company bottom line. If you require absolutely certainty before you recognise return, you’ll almost certainly underestimate the true ROI. Just because it’s hard to measure, doesn’t mean it’s not real.

So before you start, ask yourself:
1. Who will be relying on the ROI data?
2. What type of data will they need to see to have confidence in it?
3. What decisions are going to be made based on it?

Get this right before you decide on how you’ll measure ROI, and you’ll reduce the chances of your work being quietly binned.

Return on Investment (ROI) models

The starting point for most ROI models is the formula TB-TC/TC x 100. To work out your ROI, take the total benefit, deduct the total cost, and express the difference as a percentage of the total cost. Straightforward as far as it goes, but it doesn’t give you any clues on how to measure the costs and benefits…

There are a wide range of models that at least give pointers on how to approach the issue. Kirkpatrick’s four levels of assessing training is probably the most cited model. It suggests evaluation is conducted against four levels.
1. The learner’s reactions
2. What they have learned
3. How much that learning has been transferred into the work environment
4. What impact the transfer has had on the bottom line

You may be forgiven for thinking that the only measure that matters is level four. While it’s the ultimate measure of return on investment, evaluation at levels One to Three is critical if you aspire to continue and improve the intervention into the future.

Again, good as far as it goes, but how might you go about the measurement process? All effective models essentially include
1. Deciding on the impact you expect, and therefore what you need to measure
2. Measuring it
3. Analysing what you find
4. Reporting on ROI

Have a look at the Phillips Ten Step Model; it’s a good generic approach. (page 2).

We’ve been involved in several projects however where a valid ROI model was applied, and then ignored. Why? Because it didn’t measure the right things for the decisionmakers that mattered. Make sure your model gathers data that is meaningful to your organisation.

Keeping the ROI measurement process to scale

This case study is an example of a fullblown ROI analysis in a qualitative area (impact of coaching on manager’s performance). It includes evaluation at all of Kirkpatrick’s levels, and the development of data gathering tools that were embedded directly into the programme. Few companies in our experience are willing to commit to this level of analysis. From our perspective, that’s a real shame because decisions on whether to go with learning and development initiatives are often made without a real understanding of what they might deliver. The better the organisation understands the true difference between cost and investment, the more they’re willing to look at robust ROI measurement processes.

If you’re in one of the 90% of companies that don’t go there, how do you keep ROI measurement to scale? More
Here are our suggestions.
Be clear about why you’re gathering the information
• Is it to ‘prove’ its value to the organisation so that it will be resourced?
• Is it to find ways to improve the programme as well?
• Can you clearly articulate what you believe the value to the organisation should be (what you are measuring for)?
Only measure data that is meaningful
• Who will be evaluating the data, and what would they consider ‘valid’?
• Is there sufficient connection between the programme of activity and the change you are measuring?
• Is the ‘easy to get’ data really meaningful?
• Do you have enough data on the current state to be able to measure the change?
Do it as efficiently as possible
• Think about whether the people in the programme can gather data with a few simple tools as they participate. Naturally occurring evidence is always more efficiently gathered than using a separate process
• Is representative and anecdotal data that can be extrapolated enough? If so, don’t set up systems to gather and evaluate large volumes of information.
• Are there ‘other’ data gathering processes you can tap into that don’t require extra work. Option include the annual performance appraisal cycle and career progression models; key business bottom line KPIs; and parallel lean and operational excellence initiatives.

Choosing the right delivery mode

IDC's Corporate Learning Buyer Survey series suggests that most corporates choose the delivery mode of training based on available content (IDC, March 2009, #217336, Vol. 1). Hardly surprising really; migrating content from one delivery mode to another is no small task. Moving the words from book to eLearning is one thing. Creating an effective learning experience in the new mode is another thing again.

In our experience, corporates are motivated to change mode because of the apparent significant savings, and the promise of 'better' results. A back-of-the-envelope calculation of the cost of flying 10 people to a workshop for two days quickly moves into the tens of thousands of dollars. Plenty there for some good eLearning content creation, surely?

The problem is that creating a new delivery mode is an upfront cost while business as usual needs to continue. Where does the 'extra' money come from? And what about the risk, maybe it won't work? And where do we get the specialist skills to develop the new mode without becoming dependent on an external provider?... Perhaps we'll just run workshops for another year....

We believe there are three critical steps to setting this process up correctly:
1. Use a sound process to choose the new mode. Base it on what will work for the learners. Audience analysis, organisational requirements, expected change, best model, and required resources.... It doesn't have to be huge, but it needs to ask the right questions.
2. Take small steps and start with the content. Don't leap in and choose an LMS, thre are plenty of cheap hosting options while you focus on creating some good content and the piloting process.
3. Take the time to do a basic Return On Investment analysis, and use it to measure the effectiveness of the pilot. It'll give you the confidence to proceed further - or not!

Growth in the recession

For Synapsys, this is going to be our year of fastest growth, at this stage it looks like it will be around 50%. We feel very fortunate to be in this position, and have been asking ourselves, "why us?".

The typical catchcry in times of recession is 'training will be cut'. What's new this time? Our view is that the analysis is a little deeper this time round. Sure, training budgets are not immune to the axe, but we're also hearing:
-We need to be ready to respond quickly when things improve
-Recession or not, the skills shortage hasn't gone away in many areas
-So we want to keep our staff, and the best way to do that is work smarter.

In the past, it was often enough to simply tick off training activity (courses attended, dollars spent). The conversation now is much more around what the benefit is:
-Are staff changing how they work?
-What difference is it making to our costs?
-Are we actually clear about the processes we want to train people in?
-How do we get people to really apply what they learn?

When companies start asking these questions, they quickly start to challenge the assumption that 'off the shelf' is best. It may be easiest, but often the actual tangible benefits are less visible.

Clients in the past who saw blended learning and customised training as 'too complicated' are now asking us to make a difference to their businesses. That's a very gratifying process, and we're hopeful that the success we're having is also reflected in the difference we can make to their operations. As we scan the wide cross section of clients we work for, they appear to be very much in rude good health. Long may it continue.

Integrating Unit Standards - Good concept, hard work

We've noticed a change in the way a number of our clients are approaching the issue of creating learning resources for Unit Standards. There is a growing desire to provide learning packages that integrate a number of Unit Standards. The motivations include:
• More flexibility in creating innovative, engaging learning resources
• Reduced duplication of assessment across multiple units
• A more coherent learning pathway than simply serving up content Unit by Unit.

Some of these drivers also sit behind the Government's recently announced decision to limit the extent to which students can be re-assessed against competency standards they have not achieved.

In the past some clients have been reluctantant to tackle these issues because:
• There was a need to allow learners to be assessed and sign off on individual units
• The task of aggregating content for multiple Elements and PCs was seen as too complex
• The task of writing integrated assessments for multiple Elements and PCs was also seen as too complex, particulary given the downside of multiple range statements being aggregated.

The heart of the problem is that while aggregated Units are great for learners, assessment and adminstration processes still need to manage content on a Unit Standard basis for recognition.

Our approach to this issue is to template a process that:
• Creates a matrix of aggregated P.C.s that define new topic structures but still leave transparent the Units they relate to
• Generates a matrix of assessment questions that maps aggregated P.C.s to assessment tools and keeps the linkages transparent.

That has taken us to the point where are able to provide to the development teams a coherent roadmap detailing how the content needs to be written. The next challenge is that creating integrated content resouces that meet these requirements is more complex that writing for single Units. More about that in a subsequent post....

Best practice in technical manual design

Our observation is that often technical writers focus excessively on the content itself. The final product is less effective than it should be because of inadeqaute consideration of:
• Assumed knowledge or skills of the part of users that just doesn't exist; for example baseline technical skills, the ability to source relevant information, "obvious" background information that actually isn't obvious....
• The context in which the materials will be used; A4 paper content for use in outside weather-affected locations... the need is for an urgent problem-solving decision, but the answer is buried in chapters of text....

Perhaps the biggest challange though is that content is mapped around the perspective of the Subject Matter expert (SME), not the users. The two can be quite different. SMEs already have deep knowledge, and can draw linkages between widely disparate pieces of information. They get frustrated with 'simple' information such as overviews and structures of content. Ironically, it is exactly this level of information that document users need in order to be able to make sense of the material.

For us, this all means that the template design process needs to include:
• A review and/or articulation of assumed skills
• Business Process Mapping of the processes to which the content will be applied
• An Information Architecture for the document that is driven out of pragmatic use cases
• The incorporation of best practice elements, for example the use of icons, text block layout, and so on.

Good document design also involves tradeoffs between competing interests such as ease of maintenance versus ease of access. The challenge is that these priorities are often skewed in favour of the things that matter to those responsible for creating the document, rather than those using it. Getting the right group together at document design stage is absolutely crucial.

Selecting an LMS for your Business

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

Breaking all the rules

Despite its youth, the blogging industry has already spawned a set of rules of thumb, two of which are widely considered inviolable:

1) Keep it short—this is a web audience.
2) Combine ("mash up") information from other people. With so much info on the web, you're better off filtering and aggregating than creating.

Fortunately, a new entrant to the blog scene has decided to completely ignore this conventional wisdom (if something so young can be called "conventional"). Marc Andreessen has a bit to brag about: he was the co-founder of Netscape (sold to America Online in 1998 for $4.2 billion; the co-founder of Opsware (formerly Loudcloud), a public software company with an approximately $1 billion market cap; and the co-founder of Ning, a new, private consumer Internet company.

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.

Social Commitment Is Good Business

I am not normally a fan of McDonald's. But franchisee Greg LaPat is doing something right. During a four-month renovation of his McDonald's restaurant, he managed to retain every member of his 30-person staff.

How did he do it? Well, faced with an extended period of time in which he didn't have work for his people, he had a few options. He could have fired them and hired new people -- it's relatively easy to staff up a McDonald's -- but that would have been completely out of character. His staff have been with him an average of six years, some up to 18 years. He could have put them on furlough, not paid them and kept his fingers crossed that they would still be around four months later. He could have paid them to sit at home; no doubt some people would have appreciated the opportunity to watch 12 hours of uninterrupted CSI episodes every day.

Or he could do what he did: continue to pay them, and loan them out to social organisations like Hospice and the Red Cross.

Training Consistency is Franchise Operation's Key to Success

Subway Restaurants has just managed to top Entrepreneur’s Franchise 500 list for the 15th time—an impressive feat, and one made more achievable by the organisation’s dedicated and consistent approach to eLearning and other training opportunities.

Remote Networking

The technical capabilities of corporate networks are rarely in the minds of workers or managers, but the notion of working from home or while travelling is one capability that increasingly piques the interest of both. Connecting to network resources or desktop computers from home has an unusually strong appeal, and is associated in the minds of many with the freedom to choose your own workplace. In light of recent, dramatic, increases in fuel costs the possibility of reduced commuting times and costs are pushing remote networking from the realm of 'nice-to-have' to real-world practice for many.

Responding to retention issues

This article outlines research that reinforces the message that the risk of staff leaving is significantly greater in the first two years of employment. It puts the all-up cost of replacing an employee at 1.5 times their annual salary.

The survey focused on management strategies that reduced the incidence of employees leaving within those first two years. These include making work more challenging, being clear about potential career paths, and providing greater opportunities for development.

"...employers need to create an atmosphere where staff feel valued and secure - recognising them for good performance and listening to their ideas, then acting on them."

The article however did not address the importance of induction in generating a sense of engagement in new employees. In our view, job satisfaction is as much about
-understanding how an employee's contribution fits within the larger functioning of the organisation
-having a clear understanding of what business tools exist to support them in their roles, and, equally critically, actually being trained in how to use them
-being able to find information and expertise when they need it
-feeling genuinely part of their work team

These are quite realistic goals for an induction programme, many of which are passed over in favour of simply meeting Health and Safety requirements. This approach might result in a cheaper induction programme, but when true turnover costs are considered, the saving is often a false one. Add to this the more intangible cost of how high turnover affects the culture of the company, and the value of a well structured induction programme becomes obvious.

When approaching induction programme development, some of the drivers Synapsys focuses on include:
-a suite of generic information about the company the products or services, the sector/market, and the employee's place in it.
-blending media and training resources around the specific content being covered
-hands on supported training in relevant business tools
-compliance/sign-off processes that provide appropriate reporting data for legislative reporting requirements.
-clear process documentation for all induction activity; turnover occurs in the Human Resources area as well......

To LMS or not to LMS

At some point in their growth, many organisations identify a need to distribute learning and training material to people in diverse locations. E-learning is an ideal solution for this need, but how should it be deployed for maximum benefit to the organisation?
A key decision in a large-scale deployment concerns whether to use a Learning Management System (LMS) to manage the delivery of learning content. And it's not hard to see why - LMSs have many benefits, and in the right environment are a perfect choice for learning and training delivery to people in disparate locations. Some of the benefits include:

• A single location for material


• The ability to easily update material and have updates distributed to learners instantly


• The ability to manage access to different resources through user authentication

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.

eLearning design process, moving on from ADDIE

Most training developers are familiar with the ADDIE training development model, based on a series of steps moving from analysis through development to evaluation. This article by Kevin Kruse suggests that eLearning development processes might benefit from the incorporation of systemic design models that involve an interative process. Creative teams evolve and test concepts until there is broad user acceptance. He also suggests that a rapid prototyping step can be inserted as part of CD ROM solutions design to test out working models.

Our experience is that project practicalities such as budget and timeframe often preclude an open ended process of iterative inquiry. If (and it's a big if) the right information is gathered in the initial scoping phases, we can have confidence that the proposed solution will fit.

A relatively linear model doesn't preclude creativity. The key determinant here is that the development team needs to have clearly defined roles and processes which allow the creative/expansive work to be done in a managed way. If the team composition isn't appropriate, or if the process is unclear, it's doubtful whether a truly effective solution will emerge, no matter what time or resource is allocated to it.

At Synapsys, the vision for the elearning experience is driven by the educational designer. Graphic designers and coding developers are charged with responsibility to 'make it so', as much as techncially possible.

As more and more of our work involves blended learning solutions, the other big challenge becomes clearly defining the relationship between the different media/experiences so that the learner has a clear pathway to follow that makes sense to them.

On larger projects we'll manage this process through the use of media-specific project managers, whose output is managed by the lead educational designer. It is this person who is charged with the role of 'champion of the learner', continuously monitoring from the perspective of the learner whether the final experience will be both seamless and effective.

Beginner's Guide to Distance Learning Issues

The California Distance Learning Project (CDLP) provides a useful overview of common issues and concerns in the development of distance learning materials. eLearning related development is also addressed. Content includes an overview of the history of distance learning, as well as coverage of more contemporary issues such as SCORM compliance and open source LMSs. Administration and evaluation issues are also overviewed. If you need to clarify what these terms mean, or orient yourself around broad issues, this is a good place to start:

CDLP

One Laptop Per Child

As citizens of wealthy Western societies we seldom stop to consider the importance of even the most rudimentary learning tools: pens, pencils and paper; but no one would argue the importance of these tools for developing minds. Over the past 20 years computers have become an increasingly common educational tool for children in first world nations, earning a place beside the pen and paper of my youth.

Communicating with Novices – getting the basics across when you’re the expert

Ever found yourself running training and staring at blank faces when all the time you’re thinking – “but this is simple stuff”? Maybe you’ve been inducting someone into your organization and you’ve simply forgotten to tell them a detail that is important to them but seems like just commonsense to you? It may be that what you’re experiencing is part of the inherent communication difficulties between novices and experts. When we are designing learning experiences for our organization we often turn first to our subject matter experts to provide the content and maybe even the training itself. The only problem with this approach is that experts have often forgotten what they didn’t know and have moved to a stage of performance which is enormously fluid and often difficult to explain.

Contrast this with the needs of Novices – clear rules, simple situations etc and the communication gap can sometimes be too wide to cross. Novices become confused, experts become frustrated and everyone looses out. So how can we encourage our experts, and ourselves, to provide learning experiences that are accessible to novices?
Step by step it – encourage Subject Matter Experts to break information down into workable chunks
Start with the commonplace – guide novices through the ‘normal’ tasks first to allow them to begin to develop a base of experience to learn from.
Provide constant, simple feedback – novices can find lots of complex reasons difficult to absorb so stick with the ‘one reason’ explanation.
Make sure they feel they can ask – remember novices have limited situational judgment so encourage them to seek clarification and feedback by being receptive to questions and providing ‘one reason’ answers.

These tips are based on the Dreyfus and Dreyfus Novice to Expert model of acquiring expertise. For a great summary of the 5 stage model and some coaching tips for each stage – have a look at this article www.nols.edu/store/pdf/leadershipnb_competence.pdf

Why doesn't our eLearning work?

Many organisations approach the issue of eLearning and computer based training by
1. Deciding it might add some value, or reduce training cost
2. Purchasing a Learning Management System
3. Purchasing off-the-shelf content or taking existing training resource and putting it on the intranet.

It is not uncommon for them to discover:
• Implementation costs far exceed estimates
• There are a raft of unanticipated staffing and technology issues
• There is low uptake in the training by staff
• There are real questions over whether the new training is actually delivering changed behaviours

Why? Because effectively leveraging the value of eLearning isn’t just about technology and content. It’s also about your organisations’ culture, how people cope with change, and the quality of the learning experience.

No surprise then, that a truly eLearning capable organisation has strategically addressed issues of:
• Leadership and Management
• Organisational Culture
• Technology, and
• Staffing

It's a daunting list, but the industry is mature enough now for there to be clear indicators of the sorts of characteristics that typify organisations how have developed their eLearning capability effectively.

Synapsys has classified these indicators and developed an audit service that involves mapping your organisation to a series of indicators for each area. We report to you on your organisations’ status, and provide suggestions for tactical initiatives that will target your particular areas of priority. Contact us for more information.

Games in the workplace.

Games are probably frowned upon by many business owners as time wasters.
But they can have their place in a work place. For example, after a long, busy or stressful week, getting together after work on a Friday to shoot and kill your boss/subordinates/co-workers (or even clients) over and over again in a networked First Person Shooter game can have a very rewarding effect on all involved.

As long as there are clear rules regarding the use of games during business hours etc, they can be just as much a part of the work place as having a chat during a break or any other work place activity, after all, most business these days have LAN networks more than capable so why not use it for team building/fun as well as work - the worst that can happen is you will be killed, but you can always hit the spacebar and respawn to return the favour.

Interface Design Basics

Sometimes, when surfing the ‘Net, you come up with some real gems. And this web page is one of those.

I was searching out new ideas on Designing User Interfaces (namely how to design a page that people feel comfortable using). Of course, I do that every time I create a project, or so I would hope, however, there is always room for improvement. I wouldn’t say this article actually comes up with new ideas, but what it does is clearly focuses on the good ideas. So why is that important?

Well, if you are taking a web site design request to a professional and paying big bucks for the pleasure, you really need to know that what you get back is worth the dollars. This easily written article will give you the background to discuss with the professional exactly what you expect of your site.

Rubrics round every corner

Just when you thought you were catching up with all the jargon to do with assessment and web portfolios, along comes another term to send you scurrying for the dictionary – Rubric.

This term has only relatively recently scrambled out of the Christian churches and insinuated itself into educational circles, however, it was only a matter of time before Rubrics were being touted all over the web.

A rubric is a set of rules of conduct or procedure, and especially referred to conduct or procedure for a Christian service. It has a secondary meaning to do with titles of a book, but its primary meaning has much more application to online assessment and web portfolios. Basically it now means a set of procedures or standards by which a piece of work is judged. It can also set a standard for observed activity, such as “samples show student knowledge of netiquette” or “participated several times a week in the eForum”.

Within New Zealand’s Qualification Framework an Element and its related PCs form a “rubric”. The rubric starts with a clearly defined skill that needs to be demonstrated as learned and/or internalized and then defines the standard that will demonstrate whether that standard has been exceeded, met or has not been met.

Distance Instruction in Education

If you’re an academic at one institution and are thinking about setting up a course using Instructional Television, then this article by Saul Carliner may be just what you are looking for. Saul was contracted to teach a course at Crookston Minnesota while based in St Paul’s Minnesota 350km away. He discovered there were a number of issues to consider that would not have been present if he had been delivering even an online course from his own institution.

Adobe Reader Speed up

Most offices use Adobe Acrobat Reader in some version or another, for many purposes. For my work in Synapsys, I use Reader 7.0 every day, and often find the program loading speed and file opening speed to be quite slow – very frustrating! Based on an article in the April 2005 edition of PC Authority magazine (page 61), I downloaded the FREE Adobe Reader Speed Up 1.32 software (NOTE: The program is not affiliated with Adobe Systems in any way). The article was correct in it's analysis of the product, it is easy to install, and yes, “it does something you didn't know needed doing”. After installing the program, Reader opened up very speedily, and files that used to take several seconds to open, now open up immediately. Great!! I would recommend the installation of this program to anyone who uses Reader regularly. For more information refer to the article. Download from here.

Create your own training site

Developed in a series of workshops since 2002, the On the Cutting Edge Program, is sponsored by the National Science Foundation in USA. This programme is focussed on Geosciences, but the information presented on sound web development for training sites applies across multi-disciplines.

The site appealed to me because of its simplicity and down-to-earth instructions that follow very similar processes to those we have developed in Synapsys NZ Ltd. This site can give you a good start in creating your own training online. If you'd like some support in how to apply the principles to your own organisation, give us a call.

Start by looking at Web Based Resources - Developing Effective On-Line Educational Resources in the Geosciences and work through the site for a step-by-step web build for a training site. Excellent layout allows sequential and random access to information for JIT reference.

Also of importance is the section on Observing and Assessing Student Learning. On these pages, users can find activities for evaluating student learning as well as information on how to use different assessment methods in different learning environments.

Full credit must go to the planning team for a well constructed site with heaps of practical information:
1. Heather Macdonald, College of William and Mary, rhmacd@wm.edu
2. Cathryn Manduca, Carleton College, cmanduca@carleton.edu
3. David Mogk, Montana State University, Bozeman, mogk@montana.edu
4. Barbara Tewksbury, Hamilton College, btewksbu@hamilton.edu

Multimedia development process models

The process of multimedia development is complex. Each organisation will develop its own process which reflects its own culture, as much as it does good process design principles. Here's an example of one process module developed by Stephen Lowe for use by Level 7 Multimedia Diploma students. Note that each step has rollovers, providing useful background.

Reading in lexiles

What’s a “lexile”?

a. An extinct lizard.
b. A system of measuring reading comprehension levels.
c. A set of exercises designed to strengthen the plexus muscle.

If you’re an educator you will have answered “b” … or would you?

How to select a Learning Management System (LMS)

For many organisations, the process of selecting a Learning Management System is one of the most crucial and difficult tasks in developing eCapability. In our view, many organisations rush to make this decision before being clear about what they really want the system to do, what the best learning experience would be for their staff, and so on. There's a temptation to 'get things going' by buying the technology infrastructure.

The risk is obvious: buy something that doesn't work at your peril. Especially when it may involve a significant capital investment that needs to function for a long time to pay dividends.

How to avoid the risk? Be clear about what you want. Areas to consider include:
-Integration with existing systems
-Ease of installation and support
-Fit between functionality and organisational need

and most importantly...
Be clear about the experience your learners need to succeed, including interface/functionality, activity and resource types, feedback and assessment systems, and linkages to blended learning solutions.

For a background paper than describes an evaluaiton of Open Source LMS solutions, see this link

For support in making your decision, give us a call.

Distributed classification systems: making sense of information

One of the big dilemmas in managing access to knowledge is how to classify it in a way that is meaningful to users. Traditional approaches usually involve developing frameworks of topics or themes that are currently recognised as 'appropriate' for the group. Problems inherent in this approach include:
- A lot of information is not easily classified into a neat box.
- What seemed like a logical framework at the time of creation rapidly loses currency
- People don't necessarily understand such frameworks in the same way, they put different meanings to the same words. This blog entry explores the use of distributed classification systems (DCSs). Essentailly, users classify information in whatever way that makes sense to them using tags. The framework of links between artefacts grows out of the group of users and how they interpret those artefacts......

What are wikis good for?

Along with Blogs, wikis are starting to gain traction as a technology tool that has application to learning. Essentially online documents that can be edited by multiple users, wikis are in a relatively early stage of development, but starting to gain currency with educational institutions. This artilce: http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/perth04/procs/augar.html provides useful background on wikis as a tool, and outlines the use of a wiki at Deakin University as an icebreaker activity for online learning.

Browser Wars II

The browser wars of the 1990s may be over but a second, underground, revolution is on its way that may alter the browser market from the inside out. As the importance of web standards and the potential cost of past laxness looms dark on the horizon, a dozing Microsoft may find itself playing catch-up while newcomer Firefox enjoys a welcome boost.

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.

Building companies that last

From Built to Last by James Collins and Jerry Porras, a book about Visionary companies and how they come to be visionary, the authors say:
To stimulate growth Visionary Companies do the following:
1. Establish “BHAGS” i.e.: Big Hairy Audacious Goals
2. Try a lot of new Stuff
3. Live by “Good enough never is” ( or relentless self improvement).

In order to grow, companies need to think outside the box, say Collins and Porras. But can you define the “box” you want to think outside?

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.....

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.

Print Production Process

Generally, when we work with a client interested in a print-based product, this is a general summary of the process Synapsys uses to make sure that we, and our client, understand our various roles and that the finished product satisfies the client’s needs.

1. Identify the Use and User of the product
2. Specify the content and ancillairy goals of the organisation
3. Create detailed timeline and budget
4. Determine the technical specifications for the product
5. Identify the visual elements and structure for the content
6. Development of the templates and content
7. Roll out and edit the content
8. Client proofs the product
9. Print files to printers
10. Final comments/feedback from client

Helpful links for more information on the print production process:
Document
Webpage
Webpage

Cost of developing interactive courses

One of the most common questions we're asked is "how much does it cost to develop an interactive course?" That's a bit like asking "How much does it cost to build a house?"... It's frustrating to get the answer "It all depends..." but it does. One of the key determinants of cost is the level of interactivity. Hundreds of pages of static content can be produced in the time it takes to build one sophisticated interactive learning environment.

One the other hand, the value of an interactive learning experience can be hundreds of times that of simply reading through electronic content....

Recent figures out from the US suggest that the custom development of learning content can range from US$15,000 per learning hour for low level interactivity to $42,500 per learning hour for full blown simulations.

We draw two conclusions from this:
1. If you look simply at the cost of development, you'll probably shy away from high level interactive solutions. Don't. Take the time to measure what the benefit is in changed behaviour that comes about from a successful learning experience. We've watched many organisations 'tick off' an eLearning initative because they've uploaded pages of content, even though nobody has changed how they do their jobs as a consequence. THAT is a waste of money.
2. New Zealand is a great place to get custom development done. Local costs are substantially below US prices, and you have the security of knowing that the solution will be developed appropiate to Western business processes.

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...

The merging of KM and LM

Part of Synapsys' core philosophy is that we'll see in the next 10 to 15 years a coming together of Knowledge Management and Learning/training initiatives. There are a number of pressures driving this, many stem from the need to see actual, tangible changes in behaviour as a result of either type of initiative.

It's no longer adequate to measure how many courses are run, how many eLearning pages are clicked... What matters is how people change what they are doing as a result of the learning. Similarly, developing a knowledge repository on the intranet is meaningless if people don't know how to access the information, don't trust it, or it's not perceived as relevant to their jobs.

This focus on seeing change happen leads to a focus on questions such as:
How can we make information and learning relevant to people's work?
How can we serve it up when they need?
How can we contextualise it to suit the work at hand?

The answers to these questions lie in the integration of KM and LM initiatives - Synapsys's core business. These sentiments are starting to be echoed in the broader eLearnign community. See for example this article from Brandon Hall:
http://www.brandonhall.com/public/whitepapers/lmkm/

Mind Mapping Tools

Mapping
Concept Mapping, Knowledge Mapping, Mind Mapping, Flowcharting, & Note Taking are becoming increasingly important for today’s businesses. We have links to three software solutions for mind mapping included below. These can be useful tools for capturing information while on the go, while in meetings, and for helping you organize/brainstorm your thoughts while you think of them. The Synapsys development team uses Inspiration software, mainly for planning websites, brainstorming for projects, and capturing the groups’ ideas. Inspiration is very user friendly, great for visually minded people and you can easily switch back and forth from visual maps to text outlines. It is easy to learn to use, with lots of icons and symbols to choose from for your mapping. We have found this to be a very effective tool in our business.

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.

Using FHM Magazines to get out of doing blog entries.

When you are asked to do a job by your boss, and you don’t produce, you need a good fall back plan.

In this technology driven paperless office world we live in, the old “my dog ate it” excuse just won’t cut it no more (unless your boss knows you have a *** big Rottweiler with a savage disposition).

Enter what I like to call “The Bootie Plan”, yes, there’s nothing like the female form reclining herself all over the glossy pages of a magazine to help your boss forget to kick your arse down to the unemployment office.

Now, I find the famous FHM magazine ( http://www.fhm.com.au/ ) to be quite the ticket for such a delicate operation as this. Their articles are good, and it has good weight and feel so as not to give an impression of a lame attempt at damage control. Word has it there is no equivalent for the fairer sex, try chocolates.

Useful Blended Learning case studies

This White Paper: http://www.centra.com/download/whitepapers/CaseStudy_BlendedLearning.pdf contains a couple of useful case studies illustrating the way in which different blended media can be purposed for different business needs, together with commentary on the decision making processes sitting behind them.

They do a good job of selling blended solutions, but don't go into any depth around the actual change processes that have to take place for solutions such as these to work. Case study 1 includes the use of a range of different technology tools. Unless your organisation already has them bedded down as part of its culture, the job in getting people to work with them may well overshadow the learning that you're hoping to achieve through their use.

International Journal of Knowledge and Learning

The International Journal of Knowledge and Learning has released its first volume, focussing largely on knowledge management.

There are a number of interesting articles and case studies by a range of experts and practitioners.

Of particular note:

- The Knowledge Society: a manifesto for knowledge and learning - Miltiadis D. Lytras, Miguel Angel Sicilia

- Learning management systems: a new beginning in the management of learning and knowledge - Audrey Grace, Tom Butler

- Knowledge management and the Australian Public Service: some lessons learned - Bill Martin

- Knowledge sharing in practice: applied storytelling and knowledge communities at NASA - Denise Lee, Jessica Simmons, Jennifer Drueen

Link here...

12 Learning Principles

From Renate Nummerla Caine and Geoffrey Caine, a simple list of twelve fundamental learning principles rooted in neuroscientific research.

Link here...

George Siemens on eLearning

George Siemens has been busy these last few weeks, providing his readers with a variety of interesting items via his elearnspace blog. Here's a sample:

Why people don't share what they know

5 Key Knowledge Management concepts

Corporate Elearning: Technology in the Workplace - Key Issues to Consider Before Committing to Computer- Mediated Instruction

Rich eLearning

And my personal favourite, 'Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age'.

eLearning in the UK

Via Learning Circuits, a recent online poll conducted by CIPD highlights the state of eLearning in the UK.

"It can be seen that CD-ROMs remain the most popular form of e-learning. The other methods seem to have supplemented rather than replaced the stand-alone CD-ROM. For some time we have recognised that e-learning can take two forms: content centered-activity (modules made available to the user at his or her PC) and collaborative learning activities (discussion sites and Webinars, which are Web-based seminars led by subject matter experts). The former predominates but, within this category, there is a marked shift to customised modules specifically created for the organization’s needs."

Top Ten Tips for Implementing eLearning

From Jane Knight at the eLearning Centre:

1. e-learning is more than online courses
2. Content is not the answer to every learning problem
3. Beauty is in the blend
4. Learning solutions must be appropriate
5. e-Learning is a strategic solution
6. An LMS is not a necessary prerequisite for e-learning
7. Coordinated e-learning efforts make sense
8. Success measures should be clearly identified
9. The right conditions need to be in place for e-learning to succeed
10. Just do it!

Link here...

eLearning Trends for 2004

Learning Circuits has put together a list of eLearning Trends for 2004, based on a survey of 122 organisations with eLearning initiatives underway. The survey met with some seemingly unexpected results; but upon closer examination they simply reflect greater differentiation in the applications of eLearning technologies:

"This data seems to contradict information from other industry surveys and analyst reports that say e-learning initiatives are gaining momentum. To garner insight, Learning Circuits reviewed and compared verbatim answers with those from previous surveys. The result: Workplace learning professionals seem to be more clearly defining e-learning in relation to an actual learning experience. They’re using such terms as Web conferencing, virtual classrooms, simulations, m-learning, and so on--rather than infrastructure and authoring systems, such as LMSs and LMCSs, which were mentioned in previous years."

More here...

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...

The People-Process-Product Continuum in eLearning

This paper by Badrul H. Khan addresses the process of building eLearning materials and what types of people need to be involved. His process involves two phases, content development and content delivery/maintenance. He also outlines the different roles tha tneed to be involved from planning and design to production and evaluation. A very useful blueprint for setting up a project.

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)

Are LMS's Too Limiting?

We're really pleased that this conversation is happening, though it does cause quite a bit of consternation. Learning and content management systems are great because they make learning content relatively easy to develop and administer, but they do require a lot of compromising.

"Given the marketing muscle behind the major LMS developers and their complete dominance of the e-learning space, it’s hardly surprising that many people see an LMS as “the solution” to their future learning needs. But an LMS, as available today, is not a universal solution for a corporation’s e-learning problems. In fact, an LMS is often the albatross around the neck of progress in technology-enhanced learning."

More here...

The Use of Computer and Video Games for Learning

An amazingly comprehensive 93-page report from Ultralab UK and the Learning and Skills Development Agency UK covering many issues related to computer/video games and learning. The report is a comprehensive look at existing literature and practice, a great snapshot of where the field sits at the moment.

More here... (PDF)

Synergies Between Formal and Informal Learning

Lilia Efimova is doing a PhD on 'personal productivity in a knowledge intensive environment: a weblogs case'. During the course of her research, she has uncovered some of the difficult organisational problems that arise when trying to approach learning holistically, embracing both sides of the formal/informal learning coin:

"In practice the above forms of learning are more and more perceived as two sides of the same learning process, whereas organisationally they still "belong" to different departments. Formal learning programs are planned and managed under HR/T&D umbrella, while informal learning usually addressed within knowledge management domain. This seemingly dichotomy results in a variety of learning-support efforts in a company that often are not related nor aligned. This results in lack of support for informal learning, duplicated or contradictory interventions, unnecessary costs and lost opportunities to improve quality."

More here...

Games Deserve a Place in the Class

There have been a number of articles recently that point to the usefulness of games in the classroom. This article refers to an initiative by the Institute of Education at the University of London to promote game literacy in young people.

More here...
Same topic, coverage from BBC News...

Learning Objects: A Practical Definition

Learning objects is a term that people often use, but for which there are many different definitions. Rory McGreal now provides a useful definition that incorporates the many different facets:

"Learning objects (LOs) enable and facilitate the use of educational content online. Internationally accepted specifications and standards make them interoperable and reusable by different applications and in diverse learning environments. The metadata that describes them facilitates searching and renders them accessible".

More here...

Facts and Figures in Adult Learning

Here are some interesting figures (many U.S. based) for how adult learning is faring and meant to grow over the next few years.

Link here...

Roberto Maragliano on eLearning

This is an interesting article that echoes a lot of the conversations we heard at the eFest conference... Can eLearning be effective if it doesn't just mean a change in technologies, but also a change in pedagogical approach?

"For now, let us simply say that e-Learning is a practical advantageous solution, but to a problem of which we do not yet know the full extent. We are just starting out on this: we have answers but we do not yet know the questions to which they are the answers. We mistakenly think sometimes that on-line training is a virtual version of traditional/classroom teaching. Far from it."

More here...

Categories of eLearning

We've just been sent a great resource from George Siemens that offers a compelling and structured view of the eLearning universe. It dovetails nicely with the paper we presented at e-Fest last week, stressing the importance of understand learning objectives and approaches over particular technologies and methods.

"A danger exists in discussing various segments of elearning: paying too much attention to distinctions across categories. The real focus and unifying theme is (or at least should be) learning – whether it is in a classroom, online, blended, or embedded. Each category presented here is most effective when properly matched with the appropriate learning environment and desired outcome."

More here...

Managing the Gamer Generation

Here is an interview with the authors of a new book, Got Game: How the Gamer Generation is Reshaping Business Forever. The book expands on Marc Prensky's digital natives/digital immigrants message with a profound wake-up call about the ways in which games have changed a whole generation of employees. It also seeks to dispel myths and clarify many assumptions about gamers, including the myth that gamers are loners:

"This is one of the huge points creating the generation gap. Gaming is actually much more social than boomers understand. A lot of it is very social, done with friends, and now increasingly, over the Internet. Maybe as a result, gamers really value other people—more than people who didn't play games growing up. They also firmly believe in a team environment."

More here...

e-Fest Presentation and Paper

I just presented a paper at the e-Fest conference entitled 'The eLearning Edge: Leveraging Interactive Technologies in the Design of Engaging, Effective Learning Experiences'. My premise is that interactive media are good for particular learning objectives and should be utlised as part of a blend that draws on the best of each media option.

The paper also includes lots of references to learning theory that substantiate the use of interactive media. Both the paper and presentation include examples of various learning games and simulations that demonstrate these principles.

View the paper... (PDF)

Click to view the presentation... (HTML)

Are You Managing Knowledge Effectively?

This is a great overview of a discipline in transition by Gartner analyst Laurie M. Orlov. It cuts through the confusion to illuminate the key questions organisations should be asking themselves about knowledge management endeavours:

"...when they peer into the knowledge management abyss, IT execs may see an initiative that is long on evangelical fervor — but short on specifics that translate into a project plan. Rather than attempting to saturate the organization with knowledge management lingo and practice, firms should ask themselves these six questions that focus their efforts on solving a specific business problem."

More here...

Favourite Books

Here are some of the books that have informed our thinking and provided inspiration for our projects:

Blended Learning: How to Integrate Online & Traditional Learning
by Kaye Thorne

Digital Game-Based Learning
by Marc Prensky

The Experience Designer: Learning, Networks and the Cybersphere
by Brian Alger

Simulations and the Future of Learning : An Innovative (and Perhaps Revolutionary) Approach to e-Learning
by Clark Aldrich

e-Learning and the Science of Instruction : Proven Guidelines for Consumers and Designers of Multimedia Learning
by Ruth Colvin Clark, Richard E. Mayer

Designing World-Class E-Learning : How IBM, GE, Harvard Business School, And Columbia University Are Succeeding At E-Learning
by Roger Schank

What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy
by James Paul Gee

Situated Learning : Legitimate Peripheral Participation (Learning in Doing: Social, Cognitive & Computational Perspectives)
by Jean Lave, et al

Cultivating Communities of Practice
by Etienne Wenger, et al

Simulations: Interactive Pretending

Marc Prensky has just released a new batch of writings, including a short paper called 'Interactive Pretending: an Overvew of Simulations' that reminds us in simple terms that simulations are really exercises in useful pretending. Simulations allow us to expose learners to situations that they might encounter in the real world some day, but cannot be easily trained in for reasons of safety or infrequency. This might range from how to fly an airplane, to how to deal with a difficult patient or how to effectively manage a natural disaster.

This paper is a good primer on the emerging area of training simulations, for those interested in learning more.

More here...

How's Your eLearning?

Another great reality check for us, this time from Badrul H. Khan. In this article, he reminds us to think of an organsation's learning environment as part of a system that includes learners, instuctors, staff and many other stakeholders. He uses the term 'meaningful learning' which echoes our concern with creating solutions that are truly effective...

Badrul writes:

"About two years back, I asked a friend if his institution was doing any eLearning. He said, "Oh, yes, we have an LMS and we are doing all sorts of eLearning stuff." I said, "Having an LMS does not necessarily mean that you are creating meaningful eLearning." He asked, "Meaningful eLearning-what do you mean?"

More here...

Making Personas More Powerful

We have written before about how valuable we find personas and how we use them in our work. We were really excited to find this great article by George Olsen that takes the idea even further, and highlights tangible ways of making personas multi-dimensional and most importantly, actionable. Though tailored towards a web business audience, educators and trainers should find this helpful, as well.

The piece includes a link to Olsen's persona toolkit that includes information on:

- Biographic, geographic, demographic, psychographic background information
- The business’ relationship to the persona
- The persona’s relationship to product and business
- The persona’s specific goals, needs and attitudes
- The persona’s specific knowledge and proficiencies
- The context of usage
- Interaction, information, sensory, emotional aspects of the user experience
- Accessibility issues
- Relationships among personas

More here...

Informal Learning - The Other 80%

This interesting paper by Jay Cross addresses the phenomenon of 'informal learning', an activity that is purported to make up 80% of a person's learning on the job. The premise is simple: learning is a social activity (lots of learning theorists agree with this idea) and learning occurs most often on the job when people go to other people for help. The paper also address concepts around how people like to learn and what many of the Web's most successful tools can tell us about future possibilities for learning technologies. Very interesting stuff.

http://www.internettime.com/Learning/The%20Other%2080%25.htm#_Toc40161516

'Knowledge Sharing' Reality Check

This short article makes the very important point that 'knowledge sharing' as an explicit or designed activity isn't likely to be nearly as successful as simply encouraging people to talk to each other when they have problems.

Read more....

Fostering a Culture of Knowledge Sharing

This article offers a great reminder that putting tools and processes in place to manage knowledge flow is only half the battle. Fostering a culture that values knowledge and encourages sharing and resourcefulness is key:

"Sharing knowledge takes effort and skill, even between two people talking face-to-face. You don't create that by writing stuff down; you create it by creating robust relationships that give people the confidence to ask questions and learn from each other, and by encouraging the disciplines of asking questions without wasting people's time, and of answering questions with clarity and power, of telling vivid stories within a shared value system. These are the things that matter, the things businesses need to be good at."

More here...

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...

The Promise of Simulations

We found this to be a well-written article on the promise (and some pitfalls) of using simulations as a learning platform. Of particular note is the commentary about when simulations are appropriate and why some past efforts have failed: "Overenthusiastic e-learning vendors have touted simulations in many areas where they should not have been used. Many companies that first adopted them were disappointed with the results. All too often, unfortunately, learning objectives were ignored in order to provide clients with the 'wow' factor. Simulations looked good, but little learning occurred."

http://www.clomedia.com/content/templates/clo_feature.asp?articleid=382&zoneid=29

Emergent Learning

It's always interesting when someone comes up with a new name for an existing phenomenon. In this case, the term 'emergent learning' has been coined to describe the bottoms-up, inter-connected approaches to learning that we're beginning to recognise in a lot of organisations. (Jay Cross, the author, even suggests that we replace the term 'e-learning' with emergent learning). But regardless of what we call it, the great news is that these grassroots learning activities no longer have to hide in the dark.

"Learning has become a core business process. Emergent learning enables us to push beyond the confines of e-learning to explore combinations with informal learning, storytelling, social network analysis, appreciative inquiry, workflow learning, conversation, contextual collaboration, organic KM, simulation, dynamic portals, expert location and blogs."

More at: http://www.internettime.com/blog/archives/001324.html

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

Online Learning and Fun

It's important to remind ourselves that our learners will only learn when they are motivated themselves to do so. A little fun can go a long way towards opening people to learning:

Click here for more...

Integrating Performance and Learning using Competencies

This is an older, but quite relevant article about aligning learning initiatives with business strategy and tangible performance outcomes.

"People are an organization’s most important value-producing asset. They represent enormous wealth for an organization and can exceed 40 percent of corporate expense. Without them nothing gets done. If people assets don’t act and re-act appropriately, then much of our financial capital, technology capital, and knowledge capital is wasted - strategy is not successfully executed, objectives are not met, mission is not fulfilled, and stakeholders are not satisfied. There is tremendous business value, competitive advantage and growth to be gained by improving how human capital is managed."

More here...

'Professionalism Online' Presentation

Phil Garing and I recently attended the ASTE (Association of Staff in Tertiary Education) Professionalism Online conference in Wellington. It was a very stimulating and interesting few days.

I gave a presentation on Industry and Education Sector collaboration (viewable here). Poor Phil had a lovely presentation prepared, but his laptop died 10 minutes before he was meant to begin speaking. We think he did a fine job, anyway, though sadly, we don't have his presentation for you. If we do manage to rescue it, we'll post it.

Blogs for Learning

This article from the Australian Flexible Learning Network looks at how blogs can be leveraged to create meaningful and engaging learning experiences:

http://learnscope.flexiblelearning.net.au

It also offers a useful piece of advice:

"I strongly believe (and I say this to all my colleagues) that if you want to get up-to-speed in your field, just subscribe to the weblogs in your domain and read them everyday for at least six months. I can confidently say that this works as people who have tried it out tell me that they are learning a lot."

We'll add a list of links to this blog soon!

What is Workflow Learning?

This is a great introduction to the concept of Workflow Learning, written by the person who coined the term, guru Jay Cross.

Here's a cute excerpt:

"A buff venture capitalist in a designer suit steps into my elevator. Soon she asks, 'Workflow learning? What's that??

I reply: 'That's something you won't have to ask five years from now, for by then Web Services and the integrated, real-time enterprise will be commonplace. Learning will have become a core business process. It?s what will connect humans to their work. "

The rest of the column is on the main page of eLearning Magazine, for now anyway:
http://www.elearnmag.org/

Project Management Blogs

This is an interesting piece about using blogs for project management in a potentially transparent way. Does it make sense to allow project teams to publish internally about how projects are going? Is this type of openness liable to make everyone more productive? It would definitely be an interesting experiment...

More at: http://www.cio.com/archive/051504/work.html

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...

Storytelling at Work

There has been a lot of buzz lately around the idea of storytelling in the workplace. This great new resource covers not only why to use story, but how to use story, as well:

http://www.storyatwork.com

eLearning is Not Knowledge Management

This is great, a four-year old piece by Verna Allee that foreshadows all of the hot thinking right now, particularly around social networks and emergent learning. Specifically, she talks about what eLearning providers need to understand in order to create real intellectual capital:

"For elearning providers to really support knowledge management, they would expand their focus to learning communities and link to the real-time knowledge object repositories that people use in their daily work. A more complete knowledge focus would mean having the capacity to:

- Connect people to people in ways that build learning communities

- Support learning communities in creating knowledge objects

- Connect to those knowledge objects in elearning modules

- Create expertise and learning profiles of the community..."

We had the pleasure of seeing Verna speak at a SmartNet event here in Christchurch recently -- great, high-level strategic thinking.

More here:
http://www.linezine.com/2.1/features/vaenkm.htm

Supporting Enterprise Knowledge Management with Weblogs

This presentation was presented at the Computers in Libraries 2004 conference as a roadmap for how to use weblogs (blogs) like this one as knowledge management tools.

"...the benefits of using weblogs for individual knowledge creation as opposed to using larger KM solutions selected from the top down, and the implications for IT of an information ecology with a diverse set of people using different technologies for publishing data in a distributed manner all over the intranet."

More at:

http://urlgreyhot.com/drupal/cil2004

Scalability and Sociability in Online Learning Environments

This is an interesting approach to learning theory, mapping different learning theories to different levels of Bloom's Taxonomy (a fancy approach to categorising different types of learning, i.e. knowledge, comprehension, application, synthesis, etc.). So behaviourist approaches might work really well at certain levels, for instance, but social approaches are a must at the higher levels.

"Behaviorism, cognitivism, and social constructivism present significantly differing views of the educational universe. And though persuasive arguments are made that integrity of character requires an educator to adhere permanently to one view or another, I believe an individual's choice of a learning theoretic view of the world must always be as transient as it is pragmatic."

So, really, blended learning must also be about blending learning theories, as well.

More here:

http://www.reusability.org/blogs/david/archives/000527.html

The Future of Work

Comparing the evolution of human society to the evolution of the workplace, author Tom Malone suggests that lower communication costs are changing the face of the modern workplace:

"Near the end of the 20th century, it became possible for the first time to exchange the detailed kind of information necessary to coordinate a business on a very large scale even as lots of individuals made decisions for themselves. When communications costs fall it becomes possible for vastly more people to be well-enough informed to make decisions instead of just following orders from their uniquely well-informed superiors."

More at: http://www.fortune.com/fortune/fastforward/0,15704,611068,00.html

Constructivism and Online Education

This is the first entry in our new category, learning theory. We find it incredibly interesting to see how ideas about learning that have been around for decades are finding a home in the eLearning universe. Constructivism is one theory that is often bandied about in online learning circles, but how often are learners really constructing their own knowledge? This is a paper by Peter Doolittle from 1999 that addresses the opportunity and scores online learning across various constructivist dimensions.

http://edpsychserver.ed.vt.edu/workshops/tohe1999/text/doo2s.pdf

Learning in Communities

This is a great article by Stephen Downes covering many of the basics related to fostering community, and reminding us just how powerful a learning tool they can be.

He also makes some great points about the practice of tacking 'community features' onto courses, only to have the communities die when the course ends. His proposal is that the community be central to the learning experience and traditional course content peripheral. Interesting ideas.

http://www.learnscope.anta.gov.au

The Problems with Training (and What to Do About It)

This essay sums up a lot of important principles in the creation of training, mainly related to motivation and engagement. The authors, Scott Berkun and Vanessa Longacre, ran training events at Microsoft, so you could say they've had a bit of experience...

"...we learned that there are two essential ingredients in great learning experiences: A team of smart energetic people committed to doing something good, and a thoughtful plan, crafted with creative energy and smart logistical planning."

More here:

http://www.uiweb.com/issues/issue29.htm

KM and Training Presentation

This is a presentation we gave on Thursday Feb 19, 2004 as part of our eLearning Solutions series. This presentation addressed the evolution of knowledge management and training, as well as the need for one overall strategy for the two of them.

Click to open file in your browser (or right click to save)...

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

More on Learning Games

From our Updater Newsletter:

In our last version of the Updater, we discussed how learning games are emerging as a promising platform for motivating learners, particularly younger learners who have grown up in a rich, multimedia world. In this issue, we will discuss some of the issues and challenges associated with creating learning games.

The typical response to a suggestion about creating a learning game is, "Oh, but games are so time-consuming and expensive to create!" After all, we all know that most video game projects cost millions of dollars (in the U.S., the video game industry makes more money than the movie industry!) and take years to complete. Large projects require animators, programmers, sound effects specialists, musicians, background artists and many other skills. But when we think about what a game really is, we find that there are other ways we can challenge and engage learners, without necessarily going to a lot of expense.

Some organisations have opted for very simple approaches, integrating training content with simple flashcard-type games, using Solitaire or a trivia format. The truth is that learners enjoy these games, particularly learners who grew up with card and trivia games. Admittedly, this sort of simple implementation may not hold the same allure for your typical 3D shooter player, but it's a start.

But money and time are really not the biggest challenges associated with creating learning games. In his book, Simulations and the Future of Learning, Clark Aldrich explains that one of the biggest issues with converting existing training content to a learning game is that most training is linear whereas games are, by definition, open-ended. The whole idea behind a game is that the player can control the way the game unfolds, as well as the outcome. So creating a learning game often means starting from scratch, developing the learning content with the games platform in mind.

As the title of his book suggests, Aldrich primarily writes about simulations, a category of the video game industry that is quickly emerging as an intriguing approach to e-learning. In fact, the best-selling game of all time is the Sims, a simulation game where the player gets to raise a sim family, from feeding them and getting them jobs to furnishing their house. It doesn?t take much imagination to think how such a game might be leveraged to teach all sorts of subjects, from sociology to architecture.

Blockbuster games aside, simulations can also be built on a shoestring. For instance, it is not too difficult to build web-based simulations that employ a branching scheme, whereby the learner is presented with a set of options, picks an option, sees the outcome of her decision and has the opportunity to try different approaches until she finds the right one. This is actually quite a powerful learning device, as it places the learning in a real-life context and provides opportunities for both success and failure. Teamed with audio, video and/or animations, these simple simulations can be very engaging learning experiences.

As we mention above, the team at Synapsys is working on a couple of these simulation projects. We?ll keep you up-to-date on our progress in a future Updater.

Blended Learning and Business Change

This is a semi-introductory article on blended learning, but includes interesting results of an IDC study of fifteen organisations that have undertaken blended learning. Included are some helpful guidelines for developing a blended learning approach, focused on ensuring business impact.

http://www.clomedia.com/content/templates/clo_fairfield.asp?articleid=349

eLearning Trends for 2004

This article makes a number of predictions about eLearning in 2004, including speculation that more companies will outsource the creation of custom courseware and simulations will be the learning platform of choice:

http://www.darwinmag.com/read/120103/elearn.html

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

Designing Emotional Impact Into eLearning

This is a very interesting article from eLearn Magazine that points out how much more effective eLearning can be if it is designed to trigger positive emotions.

"The problem is not the technology, the problem is that nearly all of the [e-learning] environments I know metacommunicate dreariness and boredom, and they only address the cognitive part of learning."

http://www.elearnmag.com

Top Ten Tips for Implementing eLearning

This is a great summary of ideas by Jane Knight, founder of the UK's eLearning Centre (lots of really excellent stuff on this site). She takes a no-nonsense, make-it-happen approach to eLearning, focusing on learning and collaboration -- definitely a breath of fresh air!

http://www.ncc.co.uk/ncc/myitadviser/archive/issue24/people.cfm

Workflow Learning

We are posting this presentation by Sam Adkins for both the message and its medium. The content is very interesting, addressing the phenomenon of informal learning and how prevalent it is in workplaces (backed up by several studies). In addition, the presentation has been exported from PowerPoint to the Macromedia Breeze platform allowing for synchronised voice-over along with the slides. You'll need a pretty fast connection to get all of the audio, but should be able to view the presentation regardless (no plugins required).

http://macromedia.marketing.pr.breezecentral.com/p29338483/

Synapsys Presentation on Training Effectiveness

We delivered this presentation on Dec. 11th as the first in our series of eLearning solutions seminars. In this one, we discuss what effective training means and how to measure effectiveness, including the pros and cons of quantitative vs. qualitative approaches to measurement.

Click here to launch the presentation in your browser...

What We Can Learn From the Video Game Industry

The following is a summary of an online discussion about the power of the video game platform in the creation of learning environments. The panelists are two academics, author Marc Prensky (Digital Game-based Learning) and an American high school student, code-named Cory. There are a lot of interesting tidbits here, most notably about motivation and the power of community, collaboration and competition.

http://www.iaete.org/soapbox/summary.cfm

Aligning Training with Business Strategy

This is a subject near and dear to our hearts and one that is now getting a lot of attention: the importance of aligning training to business strategy and looking for real changes in behaviour and improvements to the bottom line. This article is a discussion about ROI to some extent, but its strongest message is the importance of executive involvement in training decisions.

http://www.optimizemag.com/issue/026/roi.htm

Getting the Most Out of Blended Learning

This article has a provocative title, "Four Blended Learning Blunders and How to Avoid Them", but it's really a primer on the best way to approach blended learning projects. It echoes many of the principles we believe in, like aligning training with business strategies, using the right delivery methods, etc.

http://www.learningcircuits.org/2003/nov2003/elearn.html

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

Personas Development

This is one of the best articles we've seen on the development of personas. If you're unfamiliar with the term, 'personas' are a tool used by software/web and educational designers to better understand their target audiences. It is an excellent way for the entire development or training team to visualise the individuals for whom they are building solutions.

At Synapsys, we take the paradigm a step further, leveraging the personas to create scenarios that inform our planning process. This article isn't training-specific, but quite useful nonetheless.

http://www.infotoday.com/online/jul03/head.shtml

Blended Learning Boosts Productivity

A new study by NetG shows that blended learning can offer a substantial improvement on productivity over methods that employ just one delivery option:

http://www.learningcircuits.org/2003/mar2003/newsbytes.html#1

Synapsys Presentation on Educational Design

This is a presentation that we delivered to the Association of Technical Communicators in Christchurch, New Zealand on October 31st, 2003.

Many of the topics sparked lively conversation, particularly those related to leveraging opportunities like learning games for populations of learners who aren't motivated by traditional methods.

Download the presentation (right-click this link to save it to your hard drive)

Managing the Synchronous Blend

This Learning Circuits article focuses on leveraging technology to create the best blend of synchronous training events (face-to-face, virtual classrooms, video conferences, etc.). Perhaps most importantly, it addresses the issue of facilitation, a powerful learning tool that is often overlooked when organisations opt to pursue eLearning approaches.

"The right blend creates a learning process rather than individual events with a common theme. Each segment of the blend is equally important and relevant. Make sure the design communicates to participants that their individual success depends on them completing each step of the process."

http://www.learningcircuits.com/2003/oct2003/hofmann.htm