Stephen Lahanas recently started a new topic on the Learning Circuits Blog Discussion Wiki. His topic is Capability-Based Content which he describes as:Capability based content is developed specifically with capability assimilation as its primary expectation outcome. This directly contradicts the majority of learning content developed today using traditional assessment-based outcome paradigms. Capability-based content represents both a pedagogy as well as methodology for content development.Not only would Stephen like to discuss this topic with others on the LCB Discussion Wiki, he's looking to get some help in building out a model and examples which can be operationalized to drive the development of capability-based content. If you're curious and/or would like to help Stephen with this project, check out the capability-based content page on the LCB Discussion Wiki.Remember, the LCB Discussion Wiki is available to any member of the LCB community who wishes to us it to raise a topic for discussion with the community. Just create a page, add your topic and you're off and running. Please also drop me a note using the form on the FAQ page so I can help you make sure your page is formatted correctly and a notice, like this one, gets posted to LCB to let everyone know your page exists.

As compared to ten years ago when there were roughly four major authoring tools, today there are a large number of different tools and different approaches to creating content. You can use standard authoring tools, rapid development tools, LCMS, simulation development tools, HTML editors, Wikis, and many others including a vast array of media creation solutions. And to make matters more difficult seems to be a constant flood of new tools. We literally have 100s of choices.So, this month, The Big Question is...Choosing Tools?Please answer this question by posting to your own blog or commenting on this post.(For further help in how to participate via blog posts, see the side bar.)Points to Consider:How does the eLearning design process need to change to accomodate such a wide variety of tools?How does the tool selection process need to change? What should learning professionals do to stay up-to-speed? Do they need to learn new tools constantly? Can they stick with a few tools?Will this trend continue? If so, then what does that imply for us?Cathy MooreMaking ChangeElearning examples are here!Jeff CobbMission to LearnE-learning Tools and StrategyClaudia EscribanoLifeLongLearningLabToo Many Tools?Karl KappKapp NotesDesign Day and the ASTD Big Question for JulyJanet ClareyJanet Clarey, Brandon Hall ResearchChoosing ToolsQuintus JouberteLearning BlogeLearning tool selection !

We are all faced with a hobbling paradox. Most agree that employees make or break an enterprise, but the HR team often seems to be constantly catching up. Business leaders complain that they have to "break in" new HR people, and that individuals with HR degrees in college are not overly useful. Finally, when business leaders do praise HR, it is an individual person who gets praised, not the department. Obviously, this impacts Training and Development efforts directly. Any real effort to develop Big Skills requires a trust on the sponsor's part and a competency on the deliverer's part that too often are just not there. And any T+D efforts not around Big Skills is just treading water for the training group.As I work with global organizations, I have recently been aware of a staggering truth. Most HR groups have no succession planning for themselves. This is true even when HR works hard to create succession planning for every other part of the enterprise.If this is true, it both provides an explanation and a surprisingly easy remedy for the Hobbled HR group. And best of all, HR is already good at it: they know the tools of identification, rotational assignments, fast tracking, retention for strategic talent, partnering with business groups on critical projects, and global exposure.We have all heard the jokes about the lawyer who died without leaving a will, or the shoemaker's children going barefoot. So maybe it is time for the doctor to heal thyself.

I was doing some benchmarking the other day between a few different organizations. One question that was asked was, what are the "no-brainer" groups of employees to train? (And there may be a second question, what are the no-brainer topics to train, like leadership, ethics, sexual harassment, etc).To me, the obvious groups are:new employees;high potential people;call center employees;sales people; andanyone who has to have certification or compliance;anyone who has to demonstrate a mastery level (like a pilot, although this differs from organization to organization).What are other obvious classes of people that should be part of a formal learning program?

This question was sent to me a few weeks ago and I think it's great. The basic question is what are the best places to work. I'm sure we've all thought a bit about the different trade-offs with internal vs. external, different size/shape companies, types of industries, etc. And, I'm sure you'd love to know what other people think about this. So, this month's big questions is...So, this month, The Big Question is...Where to Work?Please answer this question by posting to your own blog or commenting on this post.(For further help in how to participate via blog posts, see the side bar.)Points to Consider:What should be considered such as innovative work, interesting projects, real impact, pay, life style, etc.?What types of companies make sense in different situations?What resources exist to help make sense of this?How does this differ for different roles such as Manager, Instructional Designer, Trainer and Authors?Does this apply in the US, UK, India, etc. equally?If you aren't at a "best place to work", how might you make a transition?Alternatively, feel free to tell us what's good and bad about your current job and what you are considering and why. I'm sure that everyone will be interested in these varied perspectives.Participating Blogs: Once you’ve posted your answer on your blog, please report your post using the form below. Your post will be added to the list within the next 24 hours (hopefully sooner) that will appear below the entry form.NOTE: If the forms do not appear below, please hit your browser’s refresh button. If the forms still do not appear, please use the Dear Blogmeister form which can be linked to from the top of the sidebar.This list can also be viewed by clicking here.We have created a del.icio.us tag for The Big Question. Please feel free to bookmark your participating post, your comment rss for your post, other web-based resources you feel relate to the June 2007 Big Question to del.icio.us using the tagtbq-september07 You can go to the del.icio.us page for this tag by clicking on the image to the left.ENJOY THE CONVERSATIONS!

I periodically get feedback from people on the value of having the varied perspectives that come in through the Big Questions. I'm sure that participants have seen that value as well (although it likely differs from month to month).I also wanted to point out that a recent T+D article Learning and Networking with a Blog used perspectives from the October 2006 Big Question - Should All Learning Professionals Be Blogging?You can see a bit more of the article that got deleted at: Learning and Networking with a Blog (Deleted Scenes).

Can one create a great educational simulation around ethics?One should be able to in theory. One point of Sim is to make an experience that allows people to see the consequences of their Actions in a safe environment. If you made a pure "ethics" sim, however, then of course students would just always "do the right thing." It would be as useful as the official Enron Ethics Handbook.Rather, my own thinking goes, one would build a life sim, or a business sim. One would challenge students to some realistic activity, and then toss in some ethical problems along the way.But then what? Would it be a challenge to recognize ethical problems, or would they be obvious? If they were obvious, is the best game play thing to always do the right thing, to accept an "ethics" friction? Or would they somehow represent interesting choices?Would you ever make people go bankrupt for making ethical decisions? Would you ever create a situation where people made some ethical compromises and were better off for it? Would the ideal strategy to be a little immoral? What is the role of realism vs. learning objectives? Can karma have the properties of an accumulator, where one might be able to work off debts? Can this moral ambiguity exist in an environment supported by corporations, for whom ethics have to be black and white?Can one's negative actions create indestructible demons waiting to spring upon one, perhaps visualized in a heads up display (HUD)? (In WILL Interactive's branching story on Sexually Transmitted Diseases, drinking too much eliminates options for getting out of a high pressure situation; in Tropico, where you are the president of an island-state, you can put off elections, but that increases discontent of your people that might rise up in arms.)And, would you want to seduce people into becoming bad? Would you engage in moral entrapment? Would you want to pull people to the dark side, and then surprise people with a mirror of themselves? Is this a matter of aligning strategies and tactics? One's degree of morality becomes a strategy that has to work into a larger context? Cheat, but only in certain industries?Would the ethical problem really be just a single solution puzzle, like the beer game? Would students go through it once, be tricked, and then never be fooled again? Would older students tell younger students "the solution?"Likewise, how might one deal with ethical violations in others? What if a great salesperson committed slight moral breaches? Do ethical violations spread in a chain reaction if not stopped? Are ethical violations contagions to be caught and spread? Or is there a balancing loop? Might one set up a containment strategy around a necessarily or incurably corrupt group? And how do you even find ethical violations? Does it require an act of probing? And if you were a manager, would you be concerened if an employee playing the sim engaged in highly unethical behavior? Aren't sims supposed to be safe places?All of this talk is academic, to some degree. The most important design consideration is that corporate sponsors can't even acknowledge that breaches of morality might have anything but bad consequences. It might be a paradox of this industry that in areas where sims could do the most good, they might not be able to do anything at all.See selective enforcement or breaking of rules: the critical skill that no school or training group will even admit exists.

There is a new field emerging, dealing with interactive content. I have created examples of it and written books about it, as have many others. But there is no universal name for the space (as in, "For our next program, we will use a ___ approach, or I am going to a conference to learn more about ____").Here are the top ten: 10. Virtual Experiences: Pros: Captures the essence of the value proposition. Cons: Overlaps with Social Networking (see below).9. Games: Pros: Unambiguous; unapologetic; makes the core point of learning by playing. Computer games (a subsection of all games) are a 10 billion dollar industry, therefore computer games should be in classrooms (other people say it more convincingly than I do). Cons: People play lots of games anyway - what is the value of forcing them to play more; too diverse; would you want your doctor to have learned from a game? 8. Simulations: Pros: Scientific; accurate; really serious. Cons: Includes many approaches that are not instructional (weather simulations) nor engageable; implies one hundred percent predictive accuracy.7. Social Impact Games: Pros: Convey the nobleness of the cause. Differentiates from the default notion of games as not having a (or having a negative) social impact. Cons: Still emphasizes the tricky word of "games;" doesn't fit in corporate or military cultures; has any social impact game actually had a social impact?6. Practiceware: Pros: Emphasizes the core of practicing to learn skills. Recalls model of batting cage and driving ranges. Cons: Franken-word; doesn't include a lot of puzzles and more awareness-raising activities; sounds vocational.5. Game-based learning/digital game based learning: Pros: Spells everything out - game AND learning - any questions? Cons: Sounds dated and academic. Serious Games? In e-Learning Guild's landmark (and live/ongoing) [survey] of 1,785 corporate, military, and academic practioners, most suggested not using the "serious games" name.4. Immersive Learning Simulations: Pros: Hits all of the key points. Cons: Doesn't roll of the tongue. Name sounds a bit redundant (wouldn't any two of the three words work just as well?).3. Educational Simulations: Pros: Sponsors like it. Cons: Sounds hard and perhaps too rigorous for casual students.2. Serious Games: Pros: Nicely ironic; students like it; press loves it - loves it (I mean NY Times and Serious Games should get a room); researchers use it as a way to get foundation grants; most popular handle (see unscientific but anecdotally consistent poll results above). Cons: Sponsors hate it; instructors from academics, corporate, and military hate it; emphasizes the most controversial part of the experience - the "fun" part (i.e. the game elements); often too conceptual (you would never call a flight simulator a "serious game."). Most examples of serious games are neither very serious nor very good examples of games; For better and worse, the successor to edutainment.1. Sims: Pros: Attractive to both students and sponsors; captures essence; fun. Cons: Also includes computer games in general, as well as one very famous franchise.Some of the other names include: action learning simulations, performance simulations, interactive strategies, and activities based training.Social Networking?And then there is the question of to includes Social Networks or not? Pros: Most people lump Second Life and World of Warcraft into this area on their own. Con: Social networking and simulations should be used very differently and have different value propositions (see Top Ten Missing Features of Second Life). But including social networking adds words such as world, life, or environment, and sometimes virtual.

There is a pact between corporate students and corporate trainers (and, I think, IT, budget holders, the lawyers, and middle management) that essentially says, "We all know that training does almost nothing. Given that, let's all agree to make it as frictionless as possible so that we can all check off that necessary corporate requirement and get on with our 'real' work."This was the motivation for "e-learning" back in 1999. "Given that training was useless, let's make it cheap and convenient." The biggest sponsors of e-learning were the corporate managers who most opposed learning programs. The vendors who did well offered the most titles as cheaply as possible. Today, most organizations only bother with level one analysis of training. "Question one: did we make the program as convenient and easy as possible? There is no question two." And stunningly, in a recent eLearning Guild's report, managers of educational programs from both academics and corporate, when asked about relative importance in a learning program, ranked ease of deployment (57.4% said it was very important and 37.2 said it was important) over every other category, including provides a strong return on investment (34.6% very important/ 41.4% important) and fun and exciting for participants (50.2%/28.4%).The newest attempt to reduce the friction of learning to all stakeholders may be epitomized by the informal learning movement (which is happening if we choose to label it or not). "People learn what they need on the Internet. Who needs an LMS when you have Google?"Simulation people disrupt that pact at all points. Students actually have to put some skin in the game, and experience intellectual awkwardness (which they hate). Trainers have content that does literally change behavior, so now they have to be extra careful it is the right content, and they actually have to learn how to measure the impact of formal learning, something they have never really figured out. IT, in some cases, has to now justify why some employees have old browsers, bad connections, and no sound. Middle managers have to free up the participants to actually learn (which means offloading work and not just letting it pile up in their absence). Any new program can be killed by any member of the pact who feels that the deal is changing. We may be at a point where real formal learning is the enemy of everyone (but the organization's shareholders).There are exceptions, of course. There are environments that truly value formal development programs. These are the groups that say (in a riff on the more famous phrase) "train hard, manage easy." That seems better than, "if you pretend to teach me, I will pretend to learn."

We've somewhat lost our fearless Blogmeister, Dave Lee, so we've not been doing the Big Questions the past few months. I'll be doing the moderating. But, we are starting again ...The Big Question for December is:What did you learn about learning in 2007?To help you get started, you might want to look back at some discussions going on last year at this time with a similar kind of question:December 2006: Past experiences. Present Challenge. Future Predictions.I personally am going to be looking back at some of my blog posts and look for those "aha moments." There were quite a few, but it's always good to go back and look.January's Topic:Predictions for learning in 2008How to Respond:We are going old-school on this, no forms.Please post on your blog or put thoughts in a comment.If you post on a blog, please include a link to this post. Ideally, you would also include the Big Question logo. After you post on your blog, leave a comment on this post with a link to your blog post. Periodically during the month, I will add you to the list below.By the way, if you can make it as easy as copy and paste for me, that would be great. Otherwise, the links may not look great, but everyone can still get there.Good stuff already coming in!Posts So Far:eLearning 2.0 for Law Firms - What did you learn about learning?RÉCIT de la Pointe-de-l'Île - Question difficile - (I only understand the title of the post - someone let me know if this is okay to link to).Karyn RomeisIgnatia WebsHamilton NotesWendy Wickham (an Edublog Nominee) - My cursory, simplistic responseClive Sheppard (another Edublog Nominee) - Most of ItTony Karrer (another Edublog Nominee) - My Aha Moments in 2007The big question: what did you learn about learning in 2007?René Meijer - The Echo of TeachingClark QuinnKapp Notes: ASTD's Big Question for December: New LearningHow to leverage a Network: What I Learned in 2007Mark FrankHarold JarcheStephanie Sandifer - well done I might add!Jack PierceTom HaskinsMarianne - new blog for me, but really enjoyed the thoughts!Marcel de Leeuwe - Pecha Kucha answerWhat Did I Learn in 2007?Kerry McGuireJoel Adkins Malinka IvanovaNicolaNorman Lamonte-Learning JourneyJay CrossGeetha Krishnane-Learning JourneyCammy BeanWill to LearnAnil MammenChristy TuckerG-Cube SolutionsJan Van BelleDan McCarthyASTD CascadiaMary Hillis