As eLearning professionals we want to take our students on a learning adventure where they come out on the other side brimming with knowledge, inspiration and staggering awe for their superhero-like trainer. Ok, maybe these goals might be a tad unrealistic. Even the best eLearning designers can sometimes drop the ball when it comes to training because we forget that what comes easily to us might not come easily to our students and maybe, just maybe we might even overestimate our students’ abilities and interest level. In order to effectively train, we have to evaluate how we present information and make it easily accessible to both novice and expert learners. The trick is though; we can’t dumb down information to the point that it sounds condescending. Remember, at one point there was a time even you didn’t understand the techniques you are now training, keeping that in mind will help direct your training style.

When it comes to eLearning, every course will be unique. Hence, the purpose of your efforts needs to be defined before you begin to plan and develop the course required to meet that end. This is done by creating an overall strategy for the eLearning project.

How do you liven up a dull room? You hang a painting or go in for a fresh paint job.  How do you wear a staid-looking dress and not look like a plain Jane? You accessorize it with a colorful scarf, a designer clutch, or a pair of killer heels.  How do you revamp your old eLearning courses so that your learners are not bored to death? You can follow the tips below.

We love visuals. In fact, we are wired to respond more to visuals than to words. That is why, we are so hooked to Pinterest and Instagram. This is also the reason why Facebook posts and tweets with images get liked and are retweeted the most. But as an instructional designer, what should interest you more is the fact that the human brain can process visuals faster than text. So if you care about creating more engaging eLearning, you MUST include visuals (and lots of them) in your courses. Visuals take away from the burden of reading through tomes of text, navigating language ambiguities, and making sense of jargons and complex sentence structures. Learn about the 10 most widely used and effective visual tools that you can incorporate in your eLearning courses:

Whether you are a training manager, learning & talent development consultant or an eLearning designer, it is now time to take a fresh look at your audience. They have changed! The Millennials are everywhere, and they make up the lion's share of your audience.

Learning is mentally taxing. So, why would you assume that your employees want to spend additional time learning something, especially when you’ve labeled it "mandatory"? Here are some synonyms that are dancing through the minds of your employees as soon as they receive your email about the new "mandatory" training course: COMPULSORY; Unavoidable; ENFORCED; Obligatory; and a horde of other disfigured words dancing in the distance, chanting: "THERE IS. No. Escape." Given your position, you may understand the significance of the course and its relation to bigger, strategic organizational goals. Your employees don’t. And your task is to pique their interest, engage them, and continuously compel them to keep on learning. This is only possible if you learn from the one trait that all ads, marketing content, and compelling stories have in common: they value their viewers’ time, their knowledge and capacity to absorb the content. Here are some simple tricks to get learners to buy into mandatory training:

If you are a training manager, you have seen it develop for quite some time now. Your learner profile is slowly but surely changing. You now see many more members of Generation Y at the workplace and taking your training programs. These are the Millennials or the modern learners who are vastly different temperamentally, attitudinally, and psychologically than their predecessors, the Baby Boomers..

In general, passion and anger don’t mix with software standards for me. I believe we’re doing good work, I think SCORM is really effective, and I hope we’re doing our part to further its ongoing success. But… we often find ourselves mired in discussions over semantics or other companies’ arguments about minutiae. Over these things, there is little need for passion and anger. If you develop an LMS or determine its functionality, though, I have a favor to ask of you. Please, please, please… do not implement part of the SCORM standard. I have encouraged many prospective customers to steer away from SCORM. I have no problem with companies that control their content and their platform electing to avoid SCORM completely if they have no use for interoperability. But if you have use for some aspects of SCORM, for your sake and mine, finish the job, complete the implementation, even go so far as getting certified. Why? Why not do just what you need? Do you really know what you need right now? Do you know your target content well enough to say that definitively? [No, you don't... you have no way of knowing for certain which data model elements are important to this piece of content.] Do you know what you’ll need from the next piece of content? What if it comes from another tool or vendor? Side effects. As you have some success with one piece of content, it will give you a false sense of security. Some other piece of content will come along and fail to function, and the reason for its failure won’t be apparent to anyone. These are the kinds of problems that will occupy you and others indefinitely. This is undoubtedly costly to your business, and not just in the short term. Your content vendors will hate you! There’s simply no logical point at which to stop. Do you need to be able to retrieve the learner’s name? Yes. What about the review mode? Well, probably, but does your content use it? What about interaction reporting? No, we have no content that reports interactions… It is a slippery slope in the worst sense. So, I’m begging. Please stop now, stop before you start to implement a part of SCORM. If SCORM is important to you (and it should be in a lot of cases), then do it right. Go all the way. I’d love for you to use our tools to do it. But even if you don’t, please finish the job.

I spent the day today working with the most minute of the SCORM minutiae. The XML Schema Definition files (XSD) that define the structure of the SCORM manifest aren’t something most people give much thought to. Mostly these files, and their associated XML header, are just copied from some other course. I’ll admit it, that’s what I do. If you take a closer look though, you’ll find that different people are copying from different sources and that the files they deliver have slight variations. Today I set out to examine these variations in detail and ensure that the versions we have available for download are the most accurate and compatible files available. I (think I) succeeded, but not without spending the better portion of the day neck deep in XML validators, reference manuals and emails to the don of content packaging, metadata and all things minute in SCORM, Schawn Thropp (many thanks by the way). To give you an idea of the types of minutiae that need to be resolved: The imscp_v1p1.xsd file imports the namespace http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace. In some files, the associated schema location is referenced remotely on the W3C servers. In other files, the schema is referenced locally in an xml.xsd file. Apparently both are valid. But, which is the best to offer for download to somebody who just doesn’t want to think about these things? The remote reference is cleaner and more inline with industry norms. However, if an LMS does strict XML validation on import in an environment where there is no internet connection, the validation could fail. The local reference is a bit ugly and requires 3 extra files to be delivered in every content package, BUT it will always validate properly. Which to choose? In keeping with the spirit of providing completely self-contained PIF files and in order to ensure the broadest possible compatibility, the local reference wins. Sure, the local reference is uglier, but it’s only the uber-SCORM nerds like me who will ever know. The rest is just copying and pasting.

I’ve spent the last couple weeks researching, and parts of the last several months pondering, whether it would make sense for us to open up our licensing. Obviously this is a fundamentally important decision for a small company like ours. When I get into fundamentally important decisions, two of the things I really like to do are… Go to the people I respect on the web and look for relevant thoughts, we’ll call these folks "the anchors". People like Seth Godin and Joel Spolsky often write things that resonate for me, and so I go and "ask" them virtually what their thoughts on the subject are. Put the thought through "the public eye", or at least pretend to do so. Mike and I often ponder how a decision we would make would play out publicly. This isn’t to say we’re unwilling to make unpopular decisions. To the contrary, we’re happy to do so. But we have to feel comfortable enough with our rationale that we’re willing to share that rationale publicly. It is, in some ways, comparable to the "do no evil" edict Google issued upon themselves long ago. [Pausing for a moment to caution the reader... this is a complicated issue for us... I'm sharing a lot here, so this post will undoubtedly be longwinded. I apologize now and offer you the right to bail at any time.] Full Disclosures This is a for profit business. We are in the business of making money. We have no doubt that the SCORM Engine is the best SCORM delivery mechanism in the world, and we believe that broader usage of the SCORM Engine will increase the utility of online learning as a whole. We want as many people and software applications as possible to use the SCORM Engine. By accomplishing the second point, we hope to benefit. See point 1. Why we wouldn’t do it We are here to make money, and I’m not convinced that we can make more money by giving away our software to a portion of the community. The anchor: Jason Fried, 37signals. One of many articles he’s written on the subject of making money relates here. In my words, he’s admitting what I did in the "Full Disclosure" above… we’re in this to make money, and the way you do that is to "charge your customers" for the right to use your product. The open source zealots have failed to convince me that software should be unencumbered. I’ve read a lot of open source propaganda over the last few weeks. Richard Stallman, for example, espouses the virtues of what I prefer to call "unencumbered" software (he calls it free, as in libre). I get that to a degree, but it isn’t compelling to me. I’ve grown up around software that was closed source, admittedly. He makes an argument along these lines, "If your toaster breaks, you are able to make an effort to fix it… You know how it works and can address problems." Well, here’s my thing… if my toaster breaks, I’m the guy who goes out and buys a new one. I don’t care all that much if the innards, the core parts, are inaccessible. Sure, I like certain things to be transparent and direct, but I don’t insist on having diagrams of the inner workings. Why we would do it Greater penetration An open source version of our product would eliminate the cost barrier and allow more, potentially _many more_ applications to make use of the SCORM Engine. Open source is customer friendly… and we are too. Incentives for an open source provider are well aligned with customers’ needs. (Red Hat regularly espouses this virtue.) If an open source provider fails to provide useful, valuable services, then that customer will cease to pay for those services. In the traditional model (term licenses), the software provider can require that payment. Questions we’ve been asking ourselves Q: Would making the SCORM Engine open source (say, GPL), increase adoption significantly? A: Likely. Moodle, Sakai, Dokeos, and any other GPL LMS would likely (or at least should) integrate it at that point. Q: Would open source adoption increase revenue substantially? A: Doubtful. If the SCORM Engine were part of Moodle, for example, would any Moodle user come to us for a support arrangement? Or would they go to a Moodle host? Would we continue to appear to be a distinct entity in the eyes of a user? We don’t think so, and given that, what’s the positive impact for us? (It is, after all, about us, in some respects.) Q: How could we provide this service to Moodle-type products while maintaining our sovereignty? A: We can (and will) offer a pre-built Moodle plugin, in addition to other plugins that integrate out of the box. Pricing and usage options have yet to be determined, but we want to solve the SCORM problem for the open source LMSs, or at least those willing to integrate with a non-GPL product (it would be separate). Q: Do we live up to Red Hat’s definition of providing value? Is the work we’re doing after software delivery important enough to merit the ongoing fees we charge. A: We’re confident that we do. Our willingness to solve problems that may or may not be of our making is valuable. Our contribution to the evolution of the standards is real. And our products continue to evolve and solve a difficult problem. If nothing else, having us on call eliminates the need for our customers to own SCORM expertise. Q: How do you justify costs to someone who has elected to go with an open source software solution? A: For this and other reasons, we intend to offer a hosted solution (the SCORM Cloud), one that will have the SCORM Engine’s fantastic compatibility in addition to pre-established connectivity. Down the road, the ability to share information between LMSs as accepted by our customers could allow this to be the first step toward centralizing best of breed content delivery in a way that many LMSs will use. Conclusions We want to find ways to work with open source software providers. We absolutely recognize the value they provide and their increasing relevance in our industry broadly (software) and specifically (online learning). We believe the SCORM Cloud and associated connectors (plugins or modules for Moodle, et al) will allow us to integrate with these software packages in a way that allows their users to take advantage of our best of breed content delivery. This service, we believe, will be worthy of the associated cost. I hope the snapshot of our approach here is useful. Electing to maintain our current licensing structure was not a trivial decision for us… it was considered carefully. Building a piece of software (SCORM Cloud) that will allow us to service these products (and others) effectively wasn’t trivial either. But as I’ve mentioned on Twitter the last few weeks, I’m feeling pretty good about the approach and the initial levels of interest.