We have a plethora of software tools at our finger tips today with data analytics being at the top of the "must have" list for many businesses. But, do you ever think about intuition being in your toolbox?  Intuition is a hot topic for blogs and columns these days - especially as it relates to Big Data.  One side of the fence is cautious of people losing the skill of intuition while the other side is enthusiastic that individual intuition should be enhanced with data analytics. Let’s start on the cautious side of the fence.  In David Brooks’ column he states, "Data can’t account for everything in our experience, nor serve as the only guide for our thinking, planning and decision-making."  He goes on to list ways data analytics could create misinterpretations as well as limitations of data analytics. In another column David Brooks states, "In sum, the data revolution is giving us wonderful ways to understand the present and the past. Will it transform our ability to predict and make decisions about the future? We’ll see. " Art Langer discusses using crutches in decision making.  "… there are many great decisions that are made by people that go on intuition and "gut-feel." Irving Wladawsky-Berger talks about a few tough challenges: job and lifelong learning, rising standard of living in emerging economies, and an aging population.  He predicts that as digital technologies are applied to problem solving we will have to upgrade our intuition to use the tools. On the enthusiastic side of the fence is Jennifer Belissent.  "What can you do with this data? Innovate. And, if you don’t, your competitors will. New competitors will rise up and disrupt the status quo in all industries." Thomas H. Davenport thinks we are prepping for analytics 3.0.   "Tools that support particular decisions are being pushed to the point of decision-making in highly targeted and mobile "analytical apps." Dice Holdings has reported that there are not enough Hadoop experienced talent available because so many companies are absorbing the talent for Big Data initiatives. Regardless of your perspective on data analytics - cautious or enthusiastic - everyone agrees that intuition is critical to success.  Paul Rafferty talks about how Big Data is used by Chief Marketing Officers (CMO).  "But, it’s important to note:  it’s wise to let CMOs keep their intuition in the toolbox." Intuition can be developed different ways.  I think some people are just born better at it than others.  Maybe their parents were intuitive and so they picked it up.  Some people get it from an abundance of repeated and unique experiences.  Others get it from having an outstanding mentor who teaches them how to be intuitive. It is valuable to take a moment to understand intuition.  At any point in time, we are all doing three things that enable us to leverage our intuition: Developing situation awareness, Accomplishing a goal, and Reacting to environmental cues. Developing situation awareness:  While we are developing situation awareness, we are gathering information from the environment with our senses.  We see, hear, smell, touch, and taste.  Once we get the raw data we try to make sense of what we are sensing by looking for patterns or the unexpected.  Then, we predict what will happen next.  I know this sounds a lot like Big Data - humans are the best data analytic systems there is. Accomplishing a goal:  As we develop our situation awareness we are working towards a goal.  We could be planning, designing, monitoring, assessing, predicting, diagnosing, scheduling, explaining, or executing.  The situation awareness aides us in choosing options and making decisions as we move toward our goal. Reacting to environmental cues:  Sometimes the situation awareness will pick up on a pattern that changes our priorities.  We start a reaction - a change in our goal to address that new piece of information.  Eventually, we will probably come back to the original goal. The combination of the three activities - situation awareness, goal directed behavior, and reactions - are how we, at Discovery Machine, think of intuition.  As we live life and collect experiences we get better and better at the three steps of intuition. If we consider our own intellectual functions, there is a good place for Big Data to fit.  There is an immense amount of data available that our senses have not been designed to process - such as website statistics, credit card transactions, and clinical trials.  However, computers do a pretty good job at that.  Even though Big Data complements our own cognitive processing, as humans, we can’t stop our own development and usage of intuition.  We need to reflect upon our own cognition, learn how to do it better, and how to use tools to supplement our limitations.   Refer to this blog series to learn how experts and practitioners can conduct the introspection and articulation of intuition. Do the introspection and articulation of your thought processes.  How can your analysis get better?  How can you help other members of your team get better?  How can other members of your team add value to the cognitive processes by adding in their own introspection and articulation?  Now, how does a software tool like Big Data help you get even better at problem solving? Considering the proposed definition of intuition and where Big Data fits, wouldn’t it be interesting if we could gather data on situation awareness, goal directed behavior, and reactions - the actual tasks and decisions people are making and why?  That would give Big Data additional power since now all we are collecting is evidence of transaction. I think the next phase of Big Data will be collecting data on cognitive decision making. If you had transactional data and decision making data, what would you do with that?

Thinking about reactive behaviors, I’m reminded of a paper I read in graduate school called "Today the earwig, tomorrow man." I still love the title and was intrigued by the idea that understanding the behaviors of "simple" creatures might in some way lead to understanding human behaviors? While there is utility in understanding how insects […]

Collaboration within an eLearning team is essential to a successful eLearning project. Although eLearning development requires team work, several team members work in isolation to focus better. Also, eLearning team members may work on one document simultaneously as a remote collaboration activity. In this article, we uncover a few team collaboration strategies during an eLearning project for a more efficient and smooth work flow. ELearning development has roughly three main phases that require collaboration with team members: 1. The Design Phase In the past, the customer would request a course and the eLearning team would roughly explain the attributes of a finished course. The customer would agree to the design only to discover when the course was completed that it did not meet their requirements. Obviously, there is a lack of clear communication between the design team and the customer OR the design team and the development team. How do we take care of that? Prototyping When you prototype a design using rapid eLearning development tools you are doing two things: you develop the design in iterations and you create a quick version of the finished course to make things clear for the customer. Online collaboration plays an important role during the iterations. ELearning authoring tools have amazing features to enable prototype version control and to enable teams to add comments. You can easily ask questions like "Is the logo ok?" or "does the typography look better?". You can even invite the customer to comment and provide feedback. These can be used to edit the course early in the project life-cycle as opposed to later. Sign off your design document after all comments and feedback are completed to lock your design and push it towards development. This is how online collaboration in the design phase improves your credibility as a team and reassures the customer. 2. The Development Phase An eLearning team is a mix of diverse talents and skillsets. To make the most of the time of each of these talented members and to prevent any idle-time, enable all members to work on the project at the same time. ELearning authoring tools with built-in collaboration enable your team to work on projects simultaneously. You no longer need to package and email large eLearning work files between your team members. No need to track files using their latest version number. Authoring tools would do that for you automatically, including the exact time when changes were made complete with the author comments for the entire team to read. This form of real-time collaboration while working on the same files prevents ambiguity and confusion. Now think of how this strategy effects your workflow methodology. In the past, you may have used a Waterfall Model like the ADDIE to design and develop an eLearning course. The problem with this type of methodology is that it prevents teams to communicate with the customer during the development phase. There is a risk of getting in design confusion or disagreement again. To prevent missing out on collaboration opportunities with the customer, use the Agile eLearning development approach. This approach keeps you in constant contact with the customer and the design and development teams, enabling you to iterate and present new changes every week! Your customers can see the progress and you can ask for feedback and determine the next course of action for the project. 3. The Review Phase If you have developed eLearning courses in the past, you know how challenging it is to get hold of reviewers, sample learners and SMEs. You may have developed an Alpha version of the eLearning course and presented it to these individuals for review. They would have provided you feedback in response to screenshots in the submitted document. Traditionally, you might create an alpha version to package up for review. Stakeholders then review the eLearning in a Word document with screenshots and feedback referenced as Page 4 or that picture in a separate document. This is not a very favorable practice to sustain in this age of online collaboration tools! Involve the members of the review committee in your course authoring environment for frequent (and timely) feedback. This will not only save your time but also the efforts of your team. What’s more, no more delays in the roll out dates! Do tell us about your team’s online collaboration experiences. The post Online Collaboration for Your Teams appeared first on TalentLMS Blog.

They’ve busted 10 misconceptions about Cloud based apps. They tore apart 6 common myths about mobile learning. Now our myth-busting team has returned to take care of several pesky web design myths that eLearning portal managers shouldn’t be believing (but they do). Web design is about making your eLearning portal pretty Excuse us if we sound biased on this issue, but: no, no, no, a thousand times no. Design, as Steve Jobs famously said, is about how things work. It should help your users navigate and use your eLearning portal, not to make it look nice. Of course making it look nice doesn’t hurt, but that should never come at the expense of usability. The right kind of design is setting the body font to a size that’s legible, and having it in a shade that creates easy to read contrast with your background. The wrong kind of design is picking a font that looks cool, regardless of its legibility, and choosing a color scheme that, while superficially nice, lowers your webpage’s contrast and renders the text unreadable. Off-the-shelf templates should be avoided There’s this idea in the web design world that commercially available (as opposed to custom-made) templates are bad for you — tacky, cookie-cutter, not professional enough, etc. Professional web designers’ contempt for them kind of makes sense. After all if we all used ready-made templates, they’d be out of business. But, if you’re not a professional web designer and just want to make your eLearning portal look good fast, there’s nothing wrong about using them. In design marketplaces such as Envato and Template Monster you can select among hundreds of high quality templates in affordable prices. The key is to customize your template of choice with your color scheme, choice of fonts, logos, background, pictures, etc. High quality templates make this easy, as they come with tons of well-documented customization options. You should copy Apple / Google / trends of the day Hey, if it works for them it will work for you, right? Wrong. You’re not in the same business as Apple. You provide eLearning courses and they sell computers and smartphones. Their pre-occupation is to make their website a nice looking brochure for their product line. Yours should be presenting your eLearning content in a way that facilitates learning. Your goals couldn’t be more different. Design around your business and around your audience — not based on what’s fancy or what other succesful companies do. With one exception, of course: you should study what your competitors, in the eLearning business, do, and try to pick up the things they got right. You should be building Single-Page-Applications Single Page Applications (SPAs for short) are all the rage in web circles these days. They are essentially apps that fit in a single web page, and do all of their work through Javascript and AJAX requests. While this is a nice architecture for web apps (such as Gmail or Jira), that is apps with complex interactions that try to work as a desktop application, it doesn’t make as much sense when you are mostly delivering static or multimedia content, such as in the case of eLearning, online news media, blogs, etc. Besides, the traditional multiple-page, server-side rendered architecture has a lot of benefits still: it’s lighter on the client, it’s often faster to load, and it works well with search engines, SEO and caching. To be continued… Four web design myths busted, four more to go. Watch this spot as the myth-busting team will be back next week to finish the job. And if you have any pet peeve myths of your own that you’d like the myth-busting team to take care of, drop us a line in the comments and we’ll do our best. Cheers. The post 8 web design myths that eLearning portal managers fall for (part 1) appeared first on TalentLMS Blog.

Developing training for a limited number of learners with similar backgrounds is very different from developing an eLearning program for a widely dispersed audience with varying experiences, language and cultural backgrounds. How do we tie the learners together to receive the eLearning course positively? In this article, we share some motivating tips for your learners. You may have plenty of eLearning design and development tricks up your sleeve, but developing eLearning programs for large audiences can be challenging. Also, creating programs that catch problems is also required for massive audiences. The problem in these types of learning programs is not only that the learners are unknown to you, the course facilitators are also foreign. You need to create a concrete and a self-sustaining eLearning course. The idea is to maximize learner participation and minimize course drop outs. How do we establish this degree of motivation? Here are the tried and tested strategies that will motivate your geographically distributed learners: 1. Formative Assessment Formative assessments are brief assessments interjected regularly after a couple of topics in a chapter. These help learners revise and recall facts learned up till the current point. Allow your learners to communicate with the course facilitator at these formative assessment points. Short essay type reflections questions is also a great opportunity for the learner to receive feedback from the facilitator. Integrating formative assessment points like these encourages your learners to be in touch with their facilitators, thereby removing the feeling of alienation and isolation. For example, shorten a long topic by dividing content into five subtopics. Add mini-assessments after each subtopic. Then add a longer assessment at the end of the entire topic. This step will also help reduce drop outs. 2. Progress bars We all love progress bars, especially when reading or learning a large volume of material. We want to know our current position in the material and how far we need to go. Colorful progress bars are very motivating to complete. Learners stay on task and complete it to begin another one. Informing learners of how many more slides to go before they complete the session is also a good example of progress update. 3. Gamification Gamification is no longer a new phenomenon. It has proven to be an excellent sales and marketing strategy. Competing with peers is a part of human nature. Leaderboards, combined with a point system for successfully completing eLearning activities, increase the degree of participation and the will to compete. Learning becomes a game and learners want to be a part of it. For example, assign unique badges to the leader, managers and guides in your eLearning course. 4. Badges Role-based, achievement-based, performance-based and personality-based badges are very exciting for learners. Badges, when associated with points, become a potent recipe for extrinsic motivation. Badges provide a sense of accomplishment and encouragement to take up the next challenge. Learners are willing to share their leaderboard ranks, their badges and their points on social media. There you have it! Instant marketing for your eLearning across the globe! Badges make learners proud of their achievements. Motivating learners has become increasingly challenging. Harnessing the attention of your learners for extended periods is only possible if your learning management system has several features that allow you to integrate these 4 motivating strategies. Talk to our support team from your TalentLMS account to learn how to make these changes and get your eLearning course ready for global learning! The post 4 Motivation Strategies for eLearning Environments with Massive Learners appeared first on TalentLMS Blog.

Welcome to the second installment of the series, in which our fearless myth-busting team is back to tackle a few more of those pesky web design myths that eLearning portal managers fall for. So what are y’ all waiting for? Let’s get busting! 5. Web design is some kind of art We can’t answer with a big enough NO here. Web design is a kind of craft — which is a totally different thing. While a painter is totally free to paint whatever he wants, from triangular faces with one eye and two noses (Picasso) to merely smudging paint on the canvas (Pollock) to "express themselves", web designers are supposed to, first and foremost, serve a business need in the best way that they can. Your job, as an eLearning portal designer, is not to make the webpage look good or to express yourself. It is to make the page easy and pleasant. In other words, you’re there to help sell those eLearning courses and to present the training content in an intuitive and engaging way. Both goals are better served by putting your artistic ambitions aside and thinking in more practical and utilitarian terms. (See also myth #1 in the previous post about whether "Web design is about making your eLearning portal pretty"). 6. As an expert you don’t need user feedback As a matter of fact, you do. No matter how many years of experience you have in web design, if your users don’t like what you’ve built, then you’re toast. And "years of experience" themselves can be deceiving too. If your experience is in building bank websites, for example, you might not be familiar with what it takes to design an eLearning portal for kids. Heck, even if you’ve been designing eLearning portals for many years, you still might not have kept up with recent trends considered de rigueur for any modern website. Experience also creates blind spots. Something that might be second nature to you, the web-browsing veteran, might be challenging or difficult to grasp for your users. Many computer users, for example, are having difficulties with something as simple as the notion of nested folders. To get a feeling for how people perceive and use your webpage, ask your users for feedback — including soliciting feedback from friends and co-workers while your website is still under development. And don’t neglect to incorporate user feedback in your design updates. There’s nothing worse for an end user that feeling that his pain points are not addressed. Ignore your users’ complaints, and you’ll end up losing them to a competitor who does listen. 7. You can just rely on users to tell you what they need While discussing the previous myth we advised you to listen to your users. And you should. But you should also think above and beyond what they tell you. You should take their complaints into account, of course, but only after you’ve examined them carefully. Some of your users’ complaints would take too much effort to implement while benefiting only a small percentage of your user base (thus diverting valuable resources from other development efforts). Others would be based on totally idiosyncratic preferences, and would annoy most other users if implemented for everybody. And some would just plain be bad ideas. Ideally you want to keep the user suggestions that are easier to implement and have a positive impact for the largest number of users. Then there’s the fact that while your users might be good in recognizing what bothers them about your webpage, they can’t be relied upon to tell you how to take it to the next level. In fact there’s a famous quote by Henry Ford about this very thing: "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses". To turn your "horse carriage" first iteration offering into a competition-trumping "car" you’ll need to come up with a few good ideas yourself and know how to combine them into a coherent new vision. 8. Web design is an one-off process Contrary to what many developers believe, web design is not something that you do during the early stages of a web project. Rather, as all stages of development should be, it’s an iterative process — part of an endless cycle of feedback and improvement. While digital files might not rot or need renovation, as a building would, they still decay with time. Especially in the fast-paced, trend-based world of the web. Can you imagine Apple or Microsoft still having 1999-era designs on their websites? No? Good. Neither should you be able to be content with having a 5 or 10 year old design. It’s not just a case of changing aesthetic trends (gradients and organic elements giving way to "responsive" images and minimalism): there are also new technologies evolving all the time. Eleven years ago, when Gmail came out with its pioneering use of XMLHttpRequest there weren’t any single page apps around. Now it’s all about single page apps and AJAX. 5 years ago Flash was still widespread. Nowadays even Adobe has abandoned the technology. To stay ahead of the game you should treat your design work more as a work-in-progress than some "final" fossilized artifact. Delivering smaller fixes and adjustments every six-months or year with more substantial updates every couple of years would be a good rule of thumb. And with that… …we conclude our web design myth busting session. Of course we merely scratched the surface, as there are many more myths and cargo-cults in the web design and development world. We might cover some of those in some future post. Until then, if you have any pet peeve, eLearning-related myths of your own that you’d like the myth-busting team to tackle, drop us a line in the comments and we’ll do our best! The post 8 web design myths that eLearning portal managers fall for (part 2) appeared first on TalentLMS Blog.

Fall is a little misunderstood. While summer might be more fun and winter might be more majestic, this little season still has a lot of things going for it. Those autumnal colors on the trees. Halloween. Thanksgiving. Black Friday. And -my favorite- enjoying a cup of hot beverage at home while checking out the goodies brought to you by the latest TalentLMS update. So fill your cup of hot chocolate, and let’s have a look… Bring your own Videoconference TalentLMS already offers an integrated, free videoconference solution that covers most common use cases (and is absent in most other LMSs). Handy as it is, however, it’s still a basic affair that might not cover the needs of larger or more specialized deployments. That’s why, starting from this release, we are letting you integrate third-party videoconference options such as GotoMeeting /GotoConference or your own BigBlueButton based solution.   This update also brings a, much requested, indication of the users that have joined a videoconference, which makes it easier than ever to track the attendance of your conference sessions. Custom pages after login To help you brand your learning portal to the web at large, TalentLMS allowed you to create a custom intro page ("custom homepage"). This release expands on that feature by letting you build pages meant for your logged-in students. This gives you the ability to include any custom content you want alongside TalentLMS’ UI pages and your courses. Portrait Certifications A small but oft-requested feature: you can now create certificates with portrait orientation alongside the regular landscape ones. For your convenience, we’ve even made the whole process automatic; as long as your certificate’s background image has a longer height than width, "portrait" mode will be enabled by default. Improved Search Search has also been revamped in this release, and is now offering additional handy information alongside your results. We also snuck in an always available search option for the instructor’s interface, allowing instructors to jump from course to course from any point within TalentLMS’ UI. Extended course completion rules As with several other features in this release, this one comes as a response to a common user request for optional course units. TalentLMS now allows you to use a collection (subset) of units as your course completion condition — thus rendering the rest of a course’s units optional. Attach files to user profiles via Groups or Branches In our previous update we introduced the ability to attach files to user profiles. In this one, and in the same manner, you can also attach files to Groups and Branches, and have them available for all users of the respective group or branch. It’s a handy feature for stuff like notices, guidelines, forms to be printed out and mailed back, etc. Login as another user As an administrator you will often be asked to help students performing certain tasks or debugging some issues with the TalentLMS UI — for which it would be helpful to be able to see a user’s homepage exactly as they see it. Where other LMS platforms have you mess with screen-sharing for this purpose, the new version of TalentLMS lets you login to any user account from within your administrative interface. Switch to another branch. Easily. Branches ended up as a very popular feature of TalentLMS, and in this release we’ve paid special attention to them, adding a number of usability improvements and new options (like the aforementioned ability to attach files to all users of a branch).   For users that are members of multiple branches, getting from branch to branch used to be a chore. Not anymore. We’ve made it easy to jump between all the branches that you belong to. And if you try to login from a branch you’re not allowed to, the system will give you the rundown of the branches you can actually use. Default course view mode Are you a grid or a list person? Whatever you are, as a TalentLMS instructor you now have the option to impose your preference upon all your new learners. As a super-admin, move to Learner mode and select either Grid or List course-view mode, and it will be set as the default course view mode for all new users. UX enhancements In previous versions of TalentLMS there were two ways to access user info, the user’s profile page and the user’s progress report page. In our quest to make TalentLMS ever easier to use, we’ve combined these two overlapping features, letting you access all user related information from their Progress report page — a one-stop-shop for user info, as our marketing department calls it. We also redesigned the introductory course to make it more informative and more appealing. Give it a try, even if you’ve gone through the old one. Mobile app beta program Last but not least, we are soon launching a beta program for TalentLMS’ mobile app. The app, initially targeting iOS devices, has been in development for several months and is finally mature enough to undergo real world testing. Anyone wishing to participate in the beta process can send us an email to iosbeta@talentlms.com. We’ll be revealing a whole lot more information about the TalentLMS app in the upcoming months, from its design and functionality to the ways we think it will enhance your training, so stay tuned! No installation needed Phew. Merely reading about all these exciting new features should keep you entertained for a couple of autumn evenings or more. But even better, thanks to this "Cloud" thing, all are available immediately — no installation or configuration required. Enjoy the new release, have a happy Halloween (or whatever holiday is available where you live), and let us know if there’s something that you want to see next in TalentLMS. The post Fall update for TalentLMS just landed on the Cloud appeared first on TalentLMS Blog.

Social intelligence, or SI, deals with situational awareness and meaningful interaction. A socially intelligent individual is able to work well with others and understand the dynamics within a group. They can have a high degree of self-awareness, which allows them to use their confidence and insight to be a team leader and a team player. By immersing learners in social situations and encouraging them to examine their communication skills, social intelligence can be cultivated in online learning environments. Basic Principles Of Social Intelligence According to the Social Intelligence Institute, a research and education organization, Social Intelligence consists of four key principles. These principles should be the center of any Social Intelligence eLearning strategy: 1) Respect for others Everyone has a different viewpoint or opinion. eLearning groups are, in many ways, a microcosm of society as a whole. You have people from various walks of life, with cultural and educational backgrounds that are wholly unique, coming together to achieve a shared goal. As such, there should be an understanding that every learner deserves respect and consideration. Even in virtual learning environments where there is less face-to-face communication, each individual has feelings and thoughts that they are bringing with them when they attend the online courses. 2) Honor different perspectives To possess social intelligence, we must first understand the "what" and "why" behind the perspectives of others. What is their belief or idea, and why do they hold this assumption? Every learner is viewing the situation from a different perspective, as they each have their own experiences, skills, talents, and insights. Social intelligence does not necessarily require acceptance or understanding of an opposing viewpoint, but honoring the fact that we are all entitled to our own perspective. 3) Behavioral awareness We all have the right to feel whatever we choose to feel. However, we must also be aware when automatic behavior comes into play. This behavior does not involve forethought. We simply think or act based upon assumptions or ingrained beliefs. When we develop the ability to become aware of this automatic behavior, however, we can then modify these behaviors to achieve more desirable outcomes. 4) Effective decision making Learners must comprehend that every aspect of their lives, including social situations, involves decision making. More importantly, every choice they make leads to consequences, both good and bad. If we are working on a team to develop a project, we must make the decision to cooperate or work solo, to lead or to follow, to roll up our sleeves and jump into the process or stand on the sidelines. 4 Tips To Use Social Intelligence In eLearning 1) Develop collaboration exercises to build communication skills One of the most important aspects of social intelligence is knowing how to communicate with others. You can help your learners develop their social skills by creating online collaboration exercises that place them in a team environment. This allows them to build their teamwork abilities, active listening skills, and conversational skills. If they have an idea they would like to share, they will have to effectively articulate their online experiences and insights in order to be productive members of the group. They must also be able to listen to the thoughts and ideas of others to benefit from their personal experience and talents. 2) Use eLearning scenarios and simulations to encourage self-regulation Self-awareness and regulation is a big part of social intelligence. eLearning scenarios and simulations give learners the opportunity to make choices and experience the consequences of those choices first hand, without any risk involved. If they embark down a branching path that may lead to an unfavorable outcome, they have the ability to question how their emotions, ideologies, assumptions and other mental processes impacted their decisions. They can then modify their behaviors to achieve a desirable outcome and monitor their emotions more closely. In many cases, learners soon discover they weren’t even aware that their feelings had such an effect on their performance. 3) Encourage online discussions that explore unique perspectives Create online forums, social media pages, and course blogs where learners can meet and share their thoughts and opinions with their peers. Not only can they address questions or concerns they may have, but they are able to interact with others and view the topic from a different viewpoint. This also teaches them the importance of showing respect for opposing perspectives and adhering to societal standards. In other words, they quickly learn what is acceptable in social situations and what is not. Set up specific netiquette rules that every learner must follow and stress the fact that everyone is entitled to their own opinion. 4) Focus on active listening skills Effective articulation is essential, but one should never underestimate the importance of active listening. Active listening differs from hearing, in that the words are actually understood, processed, and reflected upon. It can be integrated into virtually any eLearning exercise. For example, you can ask learners to paraphrase the main points after listening to a virtual presentation or participating in a group conversation. Provide reading passages that are followed by a series of online questions which test their comprehension, or have them develop a blog post that summarizes the main ideas of the online lesson. Even asynchronous eLearning courses can become interactive and collaborative online experiences by using these social learning tips. Just make certain to research your audience beforehand to gauge their tech-savviness, so that you can choose the right online platforms that are ideally suited to their needs. Interested in learning more about social learning implementation? Read the article The Impact of Social Intelligence In eLearning to learn how Social Intelligence affects eLearning. The post How To Use Social Intelligence In eLearning appeared first on TalentLMS Blog.

Instructional designers are really becoming a one-man-band. If you are an instructional technologist, you must have worked in a team where you seek the assistance of a project manager who orchestrates the graphic designer, the interactivity programmer, the SME and you, to create one course within the span of three to four months. Nothing "rapid" about that, as you can see. In this article, we will provide you with the skinny on rapid eLearning and how it makes an instructional designer a one-man-band. Bersin and Associates in the year 2004 created the term "rapid eLearning". They demonstrated that rapid eLearning is eLearning development that takes less than three weeks to develop. The SME is the primary source of the content - this could be a research-based source, a spin-off from a lengthier course, knowledge of the instructional designer, or an expert’s. The content is usually ready in the form of Power Point slides. The rapid eLearning development tools have general and some specific features of eLearning development. For example, assessment and feedback providing, community collaboration, learner and instructor tracking, and interactivity building are already available to the instructional designer. The top distinguishing factor of the rapid eLearning phenomenon is the completion time of the entire course in an hour or less. Rapid eLearning Development Advantages Traditional eLearning development is differentiated by the time and personnel needed to complete one course. A typical one hour of eLearning has approximately 73 to 220 hours of development behind it. But, an average eLearning course requires a maximum of 33 hours of development time. Now that’s a significant time and resource differentiation! This time and resource reduction in essence is called "rapid eLearning" development. It also makes this trend popular and widely adopted by large and small firms who want to manage their organizational knowledge in the form of ongoing-learning without the need of an external instructional development team. Hence saving costs, time and even turn-around rates. Let’s look at the advantages closely: Rapid eLearning is a rapid response to an organization’s learning needs. It involves decreased development time because of the built-in tools available in the rapid eLearning development software or learning management systems. The learning curve is also short when using rapid eLearning development tools. In terms of affordability, both rapid eLearning development training and the cost to own and manage a rapid eLearning development system is significantly lower than outsourcing an eLearning program development. The ROI is consequently higher when adopting a rapid eLearning development course. Less development time is needed. Training responds to unique and immediate needs of managers. Rapid eLearning development systems enable greater control over maintenance and updates. And this can be done in-house! Compare this to the outsourced, standard eLearning projects, where external vendors would update and maintain an eLearning program with associated costs. Shorter training time leads to greater motivation to register and complete the training on time. Rapid eLearning Development Disadvantages One of the greatest disadvantages of rapid eLearning adoption is the lack of complete training to use rapid eLearning tools - leading to a less than desirable or professional look and feel of the eLearning programs. Put it this way, if you achieve something quickly, you tend to compromise on quality by cutting some corners. Nowadays, instructional technology tools are so robust and user-friendly, that the quality of eLearning courses created truly depends on the degree of usage of the rapid eLearning development tools. Too many times we see courses that had a previous life on Power Point slides but now have a new lease through rapid eLearning development tools. Where is the promised interactivity? Is the NEXT button the only interactivity you have? Is your new "rapid eLearning" course stuffed with irrelevant multimedia? It is not uncommon for in-house training developers to create eLearning programs that are bursting with videos and animated objects in an attempt to look "professional". This approach marks the greatest disadvantage of rapid eLearning development tools and programs. How can you resist the urge to convert text-heavy Power Point content to text-heavy eLearning content? If you remember to incorporate just one winning feature in your future rapid eLearning course, you can counteract many problems associated with in-house rapid eLearning development. This winning feature is called Storytelling. You need to look around your work environment to capture stories that occur daily in the form of events, incidents and accidents. Create a storyline based on daily events. Who are the people involved? A manager, a sales representative, a new hire, a business developer or a technical expert? Create the story around these characters that exist in your organization. Now embed the content around the story and your characters. Rapid eLearning development tools have character, background, action, interaction and many other capabilities. Convert your storyline into powerful eLearning scenarios using these tools. And while you are at it, enjoy naming your characters and developing their characteristics. Tell your learners about your characters. This approach is not very different from comic writing or play-writing. Involve the team that needs to be trained to get ideas about storyline and characters. Bring your text-heavy content to life by having real-life characters enacting mistakes and finding the right solution. This strategy is the secret behind professional looking standard eLearning programs. A little creativity and a trip beyond the comfort zone knowledge of rapid eLearning development tools will alleviate any perceived or forecasted disadvantage. Your best Strategies for Rapid eLearning Development 1. The Four Questions Before beginning the rapid eLearning development project for your organization, ask the following four questions: i) What skill, behavior or attitude do the learners need to master? ii) Within what time frame? iii) Is there any pre-existing content or does the knowledge exist within managers and other experts within the team? iv) Which authoring tool is suitable for this project? While the answers to the first three questions are readily available, the last one can be tricky. Avoid getting overwhelmed by the quantity of rapid eLearning development tools available. You can try your hand with our easy to use TalentLMS. 2. Conquer the Content Don’t get bogged down into the details of your text-heavy Power Point slides or PDF. Don’t let it overwhelm you. Have the target team’s manager that needs training divide the content into: Mandatory: This will become the learning objectives of your rapid eLearning program. This content will appear in the form of character dialogues and interactive feedback. Your formative assessments (assessment at the end of each chapter) will comprise of mandatory content. Good to know: This content will support the mandatory content. It will be used for "drill and practice" or reinforcement exercises. The material will be present in the summative assessment (a summary-type exam that is comprehensive and occurs at the end of a unit). Extra resources: This content will be available at the end of a chapter or a unit in the form of "Resources". Keywords: These will be explained as one-liners at the end of the unit as "Glossary". Your best bet is to create one main character that guides your learners to knowledge resources and through feedback. Create one storyline for each chapter and have the characters explain the practical use of the content to the learner. Let the characters do the narration. Transport your learners to the real-world scenario as a LIVE experience. Capturing and retaining learner attention is the main forte’ of an eLearning program. Stories and a game-like learning environment are definitely something to look for. Now that you have conquered the content by dividing it into the right categories, what’s next? 3. Explore the Interactivity Features of your Rapid eLearning Development Tool Now that you have the content lined up and your storylines ready, it’s time to bring them to life. Learning how to set interactions, enable learner actions and capturing learner-variables is the key to accomplish rapid eLearning programs in the most professional manner. Most rapid eLearning development tools provide these three capabilities with minimal coding for novice and some coding for advanced eLearning developers. Let’s look into these capabilities: Interactive graphic user interface: If you have used templates for Power Points, you are definitely familiar with the satisfaction associated with the clean look and smooth navigation. Rapid eLearning tools offer a multitude of templates and navigation themes to choose from. This allows you to not design your own navigation system, saving your precious time. A simple graphic user interface is necessary for locating topics easily. The goal is to avoid the "lost" feeling your eLearners can feel when navigating your course. Customizable actions: Actions and reactions in an eLearning program give a sense of power and control to the eLearner. Have the learners click on images to have an explanatory text pop out. Or provide opportunities to select different options that lead to different consequences. Your rapid eLearning development tool will have many action choices with customizable parameters. Managing learner variables: Clicking a button or hovering a mouse, entering text or selecting an option, all these generate variables that need to be captured and lead to the correct response. While this may sound complex, it really isn’t. Your rapid eLearning development tool will have plenty of support in the form of the Help menu. When you combine actions and variables, you create a situation and you propel your story towards its goal. The more you use these capabilities, the more ideas you will get to improve interactivity and emulate the work-context of your learners. You can also create learning-goal based games using these rapid eLearning capabilities in less time. This article focused on strategies to minimize the disadvantages associated with rapid eLearning development tools so that you can capitalize on its advantages. The key is to understand the use and function of most features of your newly purchased rapid eLearning development tool. Seek the help of the support staff of your tool by sharing with them the screenshots of your problems. You will be surprised at how quickly you can resolve your issues in this manner. Do share with us your rapid eLearning development experiences. The post Advantages and Disadvantages of Rapid eLearning appeared first on TalentLMS Blog.

Many organizations are increasingly offering their training programs to a worldwide learner base. This practice enables organizations to expand their brand globally, gain recognition and demonstrate their business practices to potential clients. In this article, we share four ways to convert your existing eLearning programs into globally extended courses. Statistics tell us that there are more than 2 billion potential eLearners worldwide. Instruction design strategies need to adapt to the growing number of learners per course. eLearning courses, when extended beyond the borders, provide additional income for corporations and training centers. For this reason, the concept of developing a wider learner base for the eLearning environment is becoming an increasingly common practice in organizations. If you have existing eLearning courses, you can easily tweak them to cater to a geographically dispersed audience. 1. Upgrade the role of a facilitator Due to varying learning styles and preferences existing in the wide audience of an extended eLearning environment, there is very little opportunity to cater to everyone’s needs. This makes it necessary for instructional designers to create alternative methods for eLearners to receive feedback from their facilitators. In order to improve the online learning experience of the worldwide audience, elevate the role of a facilitator from the course mentor, to a guide and consultant. This enables the eLearners to receive guidance, tips and enrichment in achieving their learning objectives. The best way to do this is to establish a rapport between the learner and the facilitator. Effective strategies include one-on-one communication through email to introduce each other. Breaking the ice between the facilitator and the learner is the key to being available when needed. The idea is to create a comfortable environment that makes reaching out between learners and facilitators easy. 2. Provide choices for compulsory and optional learning activities When developing assessments and activities for a massive audience, aim for a medium-level difficulty. A one-size-fits-all approach is rarely beneficial for an extended eLearning environment. Provide options for the learners to choose when working on activities. Those with average achievement levels will work on activities they are comfortable with. Learners who are over-achievers will try to complete all levels of activities. Adult learners strive on autonomy. Move the control from the facilitator to the learner so that the learners are responsible for their own learning. Flexibility in tackling the order of the chapters enables learners to complete the chapters they are interested in before the others. This way you create a satisfying learning experience for all audiences. 3. Enable automatic grading In order to create an efficient extended eLearning course, create closed-ended activities that quickly grade your learners and inform them of their progress. This frees up the facilitator role for providing quality feedback and reflection services. When facilitators have their time freed up, they can focus on learner feedback on the course and help organizations improve the course. A great way that does take a lot of time initially but saves more time in the long run is to create a grading scale rubric. In this rubric you explain the desired quality expectations and vice versa and their associated grades. 4. Create synchronous and asynchronous activities An instructional design for an extended course should comprise of both synchronous and asynchronous learning activities. Asynchronous assignments and projects require learners to upload multimedia and slideshows for grading. Synchronous activities enable the development of online work groups or online teams that discuss, share and exchange information. Providing a combination of such activities creates an enjoyable learning experience. Here’s something pro active facilitators could do. Find a group of strongly motivated and overachieving learners (through classroom and assignment performance) and make them leaders of several working groups. This ensures that each group has at least one member who can guide them towards the learning objectives. eLearning courses are quickly reaching out to a global learning audience. Instead of a redesign process, use these four tips to quickly create extended eLearning courses to positively represent your organization. The post 4 Ways to Tweak your eLearning for Extended Audiences appeared first on TalentLMS Blog.