Over the last few weeks I've been experimenting with daily online conversations. Sort of like daily office hours, but it's morphed into something more. Morning L&D Talk is the current working title. The new online app blab.im is the tool I use. The last few weeks have been an interesting test case in how this type of collaborative technology can be useful as a learning tool. There are the obvious collaboration methods that this tool can facilitate, but there are also some unintended collaborations that can take a conversation in a completely new direction. But overall it's proven valuable, and so I'll continue. The Growth of Video Has Only Just Begun Back in the early 2000's I watched the early wave of blogging begin to swell. I didn't actually jump in until mid 2005 with my blog elearndev.blogspot.com. It's been over 10 years now and there is another publishing trend beginning to swell: Vlogging. Daily vlogging channels via YouTube have already made a few producers internet rockstars in much the same way that early bloggers became publishing sensations. But vlogging is only part of the video story. The growth of YouTube, and popularity of "YouTubers", has made low cost, low quality video an acceptable medium. And with improvements in bandwidth over the years live streaming is possible at a surprising high level of quality. And at the same time the growth of mobile devices has given us LIVE mobile streaming capabilities. It's all happening so fast that keeping up can be a challenge. But if you're still watching broadcast television on a big screen TV then you most likely have not noticed this trend. It's a big shift. And it's not only disrupting the TV markets, but any market associated with the production of video content. And that includes Training, Learning & Development. It's Time to Jump in The Morning L&D Talk Show is my way of jumping in and testing how this might work out. I started by committing to doing something with video every day. That morphed into doing something with live collaborative video every day at a specific time. And that time became 8am Mountain Time. I don't claim to start right at 8am. I've committed to streaming live within the 8 o'clock hour. I may go live at 8am, but some days I don't get on until 8:30 or later for a variety of reason. But the nice thing about getting in on a tech wave early is that there are no rules. I get to make them up as I go. It's how blogging started, and it's how vlogging started. And now it's how live collaborative mobile streaming is getting started. If you are in corporate training, or L&D, join me in blab.im 8am MST to discuss the current trends and topics of the day. Some days I have a lot to talk about, while other days it's a disaster of technical issues or hackers "blabjacking" my show. But hey, nobody ever said the wild west was going to be easy. If you'd like to hear more about my adventures in tech, join me, and my Litmos colleagues, at our upcoming C3 event in Las Vegas! The post Mobile Streaming Video: The New Wild West of L&D appeared first on Litmos.

If you've been in the eLearning industry for any significant period of time you know the industry thorn that is SCORM. It was a wonderful idea at the time. It was created by smart people with the best of intentions. However, it's safe to say that the SCORM format has not stood the test of time. The internet, on the other hand, has managed to stay flexible, malleable, and powerful. Other systems locking users into a proprietary content "packaging" system have long since disappeared. Systems like the RealPlayer format are dead and gone. Flash is dead but lingers on as a zombie in certain parts of the internet. Only a few media standards have managed to win the hearts and minds of internet creators around the world. The winners seem to be the ones that play nicely with the HTML5 standard. But SCORM is not one of them. Text, Audio, or Video - It's That Simple Text, audio, and video are the media that rule digital world. There is no reason why the training industry needs a content delivery standard when the internet has perfectly acceptable standards. As long as you use text, audio, and video in formats accepted by the mainstream internet your content will work...on any device that can access the internet. There was a time, when the internet was just a baby, new formats were being created regularly by every new internet startup. Lack of interoperability forced our industry (actually the US military) to demand that a standard for eLearning be created. The expectation was that all eLearning course packages would be playable on every different LMS, and computer system in use at the time. But that was before the cloud and HTML5. The Cloud Makes Everything Digital Better Cloud computing changed everything making systems like Salesforce.com, and learning management systems like Litmos, possible. I'm not an expert in cloud computing, but I do know that standard internet media formats work perfectly across all the cloud-based systems I use. Text is supported as .txt as well as html and others. Audio files play perfectly as .mp3 or .wav. And video formats like .mov and .mp4 just work. And yes, I know there are many many more formats. And that fact alone might have you questioning my purpose for this post. The real defining element comes from browser compatibility.  Understanding what formats are supported by the most browsers will give you the best options for reaching the largest audience. Corporate training used to rely on their IT departments to maintain computing standards across all machines, but the bring-your-own-device trend is changing all of that.   Back when training content was only packaged as courses it made sense that all self-paced online content would be based on the course package as well. So, early LMSs were designed around courses being uploaded as one package. This meant creating that course package in an authoring tool outside of the LMS. Cloud-based LMSs have changed all that. Litmos gives you the best of both worlds. You can upload pre-packaged courses or create courses without SCORM from inside the LMS. If you absolutely must, there is a SCORM module that will manage your SCORM course upload. But there is also a collection of other modules supporting other media types, and even built-in interactive assessment types and survey modules. Despite being SCORM friendly, Litmos also gives you the opportunity to move away from the complexities of the standard. Leaving SCORM is Easy Moving away from SCORM will no doubt upset the large market built around it's existence. But the writing is on the wall, and has been for a while now. Moving learning content to native media formats and HTML5 will eliminate many headaches you are no doubt feeling due to SCORM. It's time to unpack your media content from the confines of the SCORM package. Just think about how you use the internet on a daily basis. Does it feel anything like the SCORM experience you put your learners through. If your learners wanted to review just one part of your SCORM course again would it be possible without relaunching the entire course? Your learners are using the internet for almost every part of their lives. And those interactions work in a very specific way. Giving them an experience that feels old and inflexible will not gain supporters for your training efforts. However creating learning content that looks and functions like normal internet content will eliminate that layer of complexity that intrudes upon the learning process. With Litmos it's easy to create training courses using media formats already supported by the internet and familiar to your learners. Start a FREE trial today and find out for yourself.   The post Free Your Training Content from the Chains of SCORM appeared first on Litmos.

Recently, I was watching The Wonderful World of Disney: Disneyland 60th. It was a grand celebration in a way only Disney can do. Towards the end of the special, Neil Patrick Harris donned a pair of mouse ears, took a selfie, and posted it on Twitter with #ShareYourEars. Reason being, Disney will donate $5 to the Make a Wish Foundation for each picture posted, up to one million dollars by March 14th. So I immediately started twittering. Needless to say, it wasn’t too difficult to do. I’ve been to both US Disney parks...well, a lot...and I have my share of various park anniversary mouse ears, Year of a Million Dreams mouse ears, Santa mouse ears, stocking hat mouse ears...it’s a long list. During my many happy adventures, I have often seen families with the Make a Wish sticker. It’s not the big PR event that the Nelly Negatives expect it to be, just a family with a sick child, trying to forget the realities of the real world and immersing themselves in fantasy. Trying, if just for a moment, to create "normal." The Make a Wish campaign made me think of patient engagement because Disney epitomizes it. I know, I know, they don’t treat patients, but they have the two most important aspects of patient engagement—a sick patient, and the desire to make them happy. Isn’t that the root of patient engagement? What if your patients left your office with smiles as big as the Make a Wish foundation recipients have when they walk onto Main Street, USA? So where do you start? For goodness sake, start by not treating them like sick people. Yes, they're coming to you for treatment, but they aren't a diagnosis, an infectious disease, or a terminal illness; your patients are people first and deserve to be treated as such. These people are scared, probably terrified; seeing them may be business as usual for your staff, but it certainly isn’t for the patient. Give them your full attention for as long as they need it. If you’re too busy, get someone like a nurse navigator or a counselor to talk them through all their questions. Know who you are seeing, not the ICD-10 code for their ailment. Acknowledge the caregiver. So much of the focus during an illness is on the patient, as well as it should be, but a caregiver needs support too. Who is looking out for the mom sitting in the cancer ward watching chemo course through her child’s veins? How much effort does it take to bring that mother a magazine, glass of water, or relieve her so she can go to the restroom? Caregivers need to know they are not alone. Communicate with everyone involved in the diagnosis and care for the patient (within the HIPAA laws of course). It’s important to be honest and positive, but in a way a lay person can understand. Friends recently asked me if having chemo before a mastectomy, rather than after, would get rid of the tumor and possibly allow her to avoid surgery. I’m not a doctor, but I am quite certain that isn't how it works. However, it seems that what was inferred by the doctor, or what she understood. Either way, there was a break in the communication. Don’t send someone away with false hope, only to crush them later. A doctor once put her hand on my knee and said to me, "You’re going to die someday, but not from this." It may sound harsh, but she knew me enough to know it was the fire I needed. She was right. A little humanity will go a long way. A dear doctor friend of mine believes in placing her hand over patients when delivering scary news and is known for hugging them after excellent news. Of course, each situation should be evaluated case by case, but a little human touch can go a long way. And remind them there is more misinformation on the Internet than viable information. Give them peer-reviewed articles and access to sites that have accurate and updated information. Or better yet, discourage them from doing a Google search on brain tumors! When you walk into the room of your 30th sick patient of the day, ask yourself this, "How would this interaction change if this person was my child or parent?", then adjust accordingly. Off to Tweet. The post Make a Wish for Patient Engagement! appeared first on Litmos.

I attended the Edtech day of Phoenix Startup Week last week. And today some of the presentations went live on slideshare. The CEO of picmonic gave a presentation on Starting a Company in Arizona, and was not part of the edtech track. So I'm glad I stumbled onto their slideshare and their company called Picmonic. I'm always looking for new innovative learning solutions to share with the L&D industry and this got me thinking of a lot of things. What got my attention was the scientific approach they took to solving a knowledge problem. "The "visual learning platform" delivers content in the form of audiovisual mnemonic cards that currently cover nursing, medicine and MCAT test prep." And no, these aren't just your average flashcards. Before I continue, and potentially start to rant, I want you to take a look at this video. Very cool, right? A couple brothers and a friend see a problem and research an idea to fix it. And I'd say they've got something very compelling. Applied Science of Learning At the risk of starting to rant, I need to ask a question. Why is it that 3 guys can figure this out and yet an entire industry of professionals, many with Ph.D.s cannot? It's not that I haven't seen some very interesting training solutions. But they are few and far between. Why is that? Have we become so blinded by the authoring tools, we think we need to create "effective eLearning", that we forget the simplest ideas based on research? Remember Monday's post: Text, images, and video. Let's get that right first and then figure out the rest. Yes, picnomics is a very interesting technology-based learning solution. But the underlying premise as to why it works to improve learning has been around for many years. We pay attention to and remember written words better when accompanied by graphics, than with text alone. This is not new. Remember the saying a picture is worth a thousand words? Well, it's only sort of right. Our brains work to produce meaning first before attending to the details. If there currently is no meaning attached to an image, our brains work to create meaning. We seek out familiar patterns in an effort to make meaning by connecting the new information with old information. And bla bla bla ...all the other stuff I know you already know. Here is an interactive infographic with links to all the research. Don't Bore Me! But while any related graphic is good. A novel, interesting, or even shocking graphic is better. According to Brain Rules by Dr. John Medina "we don't pay attention to boring things". We also know, and Dr. Medina reminds us, that in order to move information from short term to long term memory we must repeat, repeat, and repeat again. So, novelty and repetition are important for attention and memory. Put both of them together and you have a powerful learning tool. I don't know about you, but I've still got that visual of a knee holding up a mushroom with a rabbit sitting on top blowing bubbles and holding a spindle. Now if I could only attach the meaning part I'd be good to go. And I know the next thing my colleagues in corporate L&D are thinking. "Well, Brent, WE can't do that kind of thing in OUR business. We are in the [insert stuffy business type] industry and we need to keep things at a professional level". My answer to that is prove it! There is nothing that says "novel or shocking" needs to be a cartoon. This is just one example of effectively putting the science of learning to good use. Don't you think your stakeholders would respond to a 330% increase in learner retention? If you told them you could make that happen, do you think they would really care how you do it? This is where our jobs require creativity and innovation. Design effective imagery, and words, first. Then worry about the interactive, engaging, drag'n'drop, click-next, possibilities with the latest authoring tool. The simplest solution is often the best. I do not know the guys at picnomics but just seeing what they've done gives me hope that learning content producers will begin to take the science of learning seriously. Even if the best solutions come from people outside of the L&D industry. I'm just happy to share it when I see it. If you want to find out more about picnomics, you can find them at picmonic.com. Here is a research study done with their product and a control group. Research done on the effectiveness of picmonic   The post How to Improve Learning Retention by Over 300% - Hint: Don't Bore me! appeared first on Litmos.

Creating e-learning with accompanying voice-over is something we are seeing more and more frequently with our clients, especially when delivering compliance training. In this article, I will outline a simple step-by-step process for building a slide in Articulate Storyline that forces the learner to listen to the audio on the first visit but provides free navigation if they are revisiting the slide. One of the most common requests from those clients for whom we’re building e-learning with voice-over, is that they want to force the learner to listen to the audio within a slide before being able to click the next button. However, when the learner revisits the slide for a second time, they should not be forced to listen to the audio again. Thus allowing free navigation throughout the course once they have completed each slide. Devil’s Advocate It could very easily be argued that forcing a learner to listen to audio is an ineffective way to deliver e-learning, and to a certain extent I would agree. If you want to give the learner responsibility to navigate the course and dig out the information that they think will be useful for them, then locking down the slides so they have to listen to the duration of each can be a bad idea. The Exception But there are certain situations where forcing a learner to listen to the audio for each slide is useful, one example I can think of is compliance training. Within this form of e-learning, it is essential that the course administrator knows that the learner has completed the training, which means the company will be compliant. The Process There is a simple process you can follow to create limitations on the navigation within your e-learning course built in Articulate Storyline. What follows is a step-by-step guide on how to do this. Setup the Slide To begin this procedure, you will need to open Articulate Storyline. Let’s assume you are looking at a slide which already has an audio clip containing narration Inserted. You will also need a next button. We can always use the built-in back and next buttons in Storyline, however if you have seen any of our e-learning designs - we always like to use custom designed buttons. The same principles apply, however the execution varies slightly depending on which method you use. For the purpose of this exercise, I’m going to use custom designed buttons. Step 1) Create variable The first step is to create a simple variable for each slide upon which you plan to force the learner to listen to the audio until completion. I usually name these variables with a reference to the slide number so you can quickly find it again in future. Click the variable button on the Triggers pane Click the Add Variable button. Give the variable a name I always name the variable with the slide number and something obvious - I use the word ‘progress’ so I can differentiate this variable from any others on the slide. Choose a True/False variable Change the default setting to False This is important because when the learner arrives at the slide, we want the variable to be False. You won’t see anything change on the slide, but you have set up the variable in the background. Step 2) Add Cue Point at the end of the slide Next job is to add a Cue Point onto your timeline. This is a better way than using the a trigger that activates at the end of the timeline, because it enables you to drag the Cue Point along the timeline and any trigger that refers to that Cue Point will still work. Click somewhere on the timeline c Tap the letter C on the keyboard. You will see a small triangle appear which a Cue Point. This Cue Point is going to be the reference that we use to adjust our variable Step 3) Adjust variable to True when Timeline reaches Cue Point #1 Our next job is to create a trigger that changes when the timeline reaches the key point we created in the previous step. Click New Trigger This will bring up the trigger wizard. Adjust the settings based on the image below: Change Action to ‘Adjust Variable’ Choose the variable we created in Step 1 Operator should be set to =Assignment Change Value from Variable to ‘Value’ and ‘True’ When should be adjusted to ‘Timelines Reaches’ ‘Cue Point’ and ‘#1’ Step 4) Change default button state to Disabled Obviously we need a button on our slide, which will be disabled when the slide begins for the first time. The idea is that this button changes from disabled to normal after the learner has viewed the slide for the first time only. Select Next button Click ‘States’ (at the bottom next to Timeline) Click ‘Edit States’ At this point we need to add a disabled state, and then we will change the state of that button to a different colour which shows a Disabled state, so that is obvious to the learner. Click New State (shown by white paper in States menu) Choose ‘Disabled’ from menu Click ‘Add’ I usually make my disabled state a black-and-white version of the colour button, and also increase the brightness and contrast so it is obviously not clickable. Change state of button by adjusting colour/brightness etc Click ‘Done Editing States’ The final step in this process is to ensure that you make the default state for that button disabled. This is really important, because when the learner arrives at the slide, we want to ensure that the button is not clickable. Click Initial State dropdown Change to ‘Disabled’ Step 5) Change state of Next button to normal when Timeline reaches Cue Point 1 Now we have correctly set up the slide, we now need to create a trigger that changes the state of the Next button to normal when the timeline reaches Cue Point 1. This will enable the learner to click on the next button at any point after this Cue Point (i.e. only at the end of the slide) Click new trigger This will bring up the trigger wizard. Adjust the settings based on the image below: Change Action to ‘Change State of’ On Object ‘Next Button’ (or whatever your button is called) To State ‘Normal’ When ‘Timeline reaches’ Object ‘Cue point’ and in the second box select the Cue Point ‘#1’ So this means that the Next button will change to Normal when the timeline reaches the Cue Point. Step 6) Add trigger to change the state of next button The next part of the process can be confusing. The reason for this is that when the timeline starts on the second visit to the slide, we want to ensure that the next button can be clicked. So we need to add a trigger to change the state of the next button to ‘Normal’ when Timeline starts - but only if the slide has already been visited i.e. if the variable equals true. Add New trigger Set Action to ‘Change State of’ On Object ‘Next button’ (or whatever your button is named) To State ‘Normal’ when Timeline starts Object ‘1.1 Current slide’ (depending on what your slide is called!) Once you have these settings correctly configured, you will need to add a condition as shown in the image. Click ‘Show Conditions’ Click blue cross List Variables If Slide04_Progress (or whatever your variable is called) Operator ‘Equal to’ Type ‘Value’ Value ‘True’ Step 7) Add trigger to Next button The final step is to create a trigger that jumps to the next slide when the next button is clicked. Add New trigger Set Action to ‘Jump to slide’ Slide ‘Next Slide’ (or any other slide you want to link to) When User Clicks Object ‘Next button’ (or whatever your next button is called) Because we have set the button to change from disabled to normal, we do not need to add any conditions to this last step. And that’s it! You’re all set! The Bonus tip Once you have set up all of these conditions within your slide, you can quickly duplicate the slide several times and adjust the variables and conditions on each slide. This will be a much quicker way of setting this rule throughout your whole course, rather than having to follow each of these instructions for every slide individually. Conclusion As with anything in Articulate Storyline, there are always several different ways of achieving the same result. I’m sure this is the case for what I have shared here, I would be keen to hear if there are any quicker ways of doing this! Please share in the comments below. If enjoyed this article, you might enjoy 5 Questions to ask Yourself Before Finding Someone to Build your Elearning Course. The post Step-by-step Storyline Guide: How to Limit Progress Within Narrated eLearning Course appeared first on Litmos.

Everyone gets busy and the fire hose of information from the internet can be overwhelming. Just in case you missed something from Litmos.com last week, here is a quick overview. Blog Posts Step-by-step Storyline Guide: How to Limit Progress within a Narrated eLearning Course This is a guest post by Ant Pugh from the UK. Here is what you'll learn: "Creating e-learning with accompanying voice-over is something we are seeing more and more frequently with our clients, especially when delivering compliance training. In this article, I will outline a simple step-by-step process for building a slide in Articulate Storyline that forces the learner to listen to the audio on the first visit but provides free navigation if they are revisiting the slide." How to Improve Learning Retention by Over 300% - Hint: Don't Bore Me! After attending Phoenix Startup Week I discovered a small company actually applying the science of learning in their learning product. By using images and mnemonics they created an impressive learning application that helps medical students master the volumes of information they are required to memorize. They've also expanded beyond medical content into other domains as they've grown. Take a look at picmonic.com. You may find that you can use the same design philosophy to some of your training. Free Your Training Content From the Chains of SCORM In this blog post I highlight the nature of our industry to "package" media content. And that SCORM has become the standard package for eLearning. However, I wanted to get everyone in training, learning, and development to realize that the internet already has successful content formats that should be mastered by professionals in our industry. L&D Talks - (aka @bschlenker office hours) Every day, at some point between 8am and 9am mountain time, I start a conversation in blab.im. It's been an interesting experience and gives me a glimpse of what the future of learning might look like. We've discussed a lot of issues in L&D Talks including VR, AR, video, mobile apps, training design, and a lot more. You can watch the recordings at my blab profile page. We recently discussed an iPhone app called Anchor. If you're interested in following me in that app we can start a conversation about how we might use it in a learning/teaching context. And of course you can also learn more about streaming video by following me on Periscope.tv. Start a free trial of Litmos.com to see how easy it is to launch your next training program.   The post Did You Miss it? Blogs and L&D Conversations appeared first on Litmos.

"If content is king, then context is god!." - Gary Vaynerchuk This statement is fairly common, but it may be hard to understand why. The origin of the statement comes from marketing. The old adage that marketing is content has been undermined by more tailored approaches, understanding the audience and providing specifically appropriate context. This takes a different twist for learning. Among the findings in learning is that learning is better when done in context. You may have heard that you should study in the room you’re going to be tested in. In short, if you learn in a context like the one you have to perform in, your performance will be better. If you want people to be able to do new things, you have to put them in a situation to perform the new thing, and give them a chance to practice. That’s what a designed learning experience is. But there is a lot going on here. Do Abstracts Work? Abstract learning doesn’t transfer to other situations. You might think that learning in the abstract gives you the flexibility to transfer to other situations, but it doesn’t work that way. What you get is the ability to perform on abstract problems, but not to apply it in particular contexts. It just doesn’t get activated. You can’t get good performance from abstract problems. (See: too much of what happens in school.) So, if you need transfer across contexts, you need to learn in a variety of contexts that span the space of potential application. You don’t need to learn in all the contexts, but in representative ones that cover the space. So, for instance, if we want someone to learn to negotiate, we might practice it in a compensation discussion, a vendor negotiation, and a project role. You thereby increase the likelihood that the learning will be accessed and used in an appropriate situation. How Does the Brain Work With Context? What underpins this is that our brains abstract across the contexts to decouple the things that can change from the things that define that this is a situation for the topic. So the negotiation basics of a goal, and an entity you have to convince to provide what you need to achieve your goal, don’t vary, but the goals and the entities and constraints will. There are elements that signal that this is a situation that calls for the particular ability being developed, and others that can change. If we choose the right contexts, the learner’s brain will learn to recognize the trigger conditions for the ability, and the elements that can change without affecting the requirement to execute. This also includes situations that suggest how to adapt the skill to different situations where it’s still relevant. Selling cars is different than selling computers, but some elements stay the same and some differ. If you want generic sales skills, you have to train across products and services. If you want car-selling skills, you just have to train across different cars, perhaps minivans, sports cars, sport-utility vehicles, etc. How Do We Choose Appropriate Context for Learning? This means we have to carefully choose our learning contexts. Ideally, we have existing situations we can leverage. Or we can anticipate the appropriate situations. And, again, we have to choose ones that are representative and will support decoupling the necessary components and making a robustly transferable skill. (And contextualized practice is what makes a difference in ability to do, not the ability to recite information!) One of the things we do in learning is create contexts to practice in. We can run role-plays, or scenarios, or even serious games and simulations. The point is to minimize the difference between the learning event and the performance environment. And, the more that is at risk for performance, the closer we need to go. So, in medicine and aviation for example, when lives are on the line, there are a lot of simulations and mentored practice. And developing the context doesn’t have to be completely rigorous. While simulations and virtual worlds can create really deep immersion, the minimum necessary contextualization is often a better idea to both provide support in abstracting and transferring to other situations. (It also works to be more cost-effective too.) We know that extraneous content can interfere cognitively, so working on the elements that will convey a context and the triggers for the action are more important than a full rendition. How Can We Leverage the Context of IRL? One of the opportunities we are increasingly seeing, however, is not creating context, but turning real performance contexts into learning opportunities. Learning in the work is becoming possible. We can detect and understand where the learner is, and provide support. So, either in a particular physical location (say a library or an office), or at a particular place in a piece of software, we can have a learning challenge. The advantages to contextualized learning are several. First, if this is the real context, we are minimizing transfer distance. We can mimic a real situation in a context it would actually emerge in. As a consequence, we also do not need to provide as much content to convey a particular situation. And we do this naturally in developing on the job training and mentoring. But we can take it further. Increasingly, our software can be aware of our situation. In a software program, it can know where a learner is. If that’s coupled with what a learner knows, the learning can be personalized to the individual. Even more generically, however, we can provide a sample task to perform as a refresher. Don't Confuse Performance Support and Learning Be aware, however, that there is a difference between performance support and learning here. We have systems that can know what you’re trying to do, context-sensitive performance support, that can provide hints and tips about what’s required in this situation. Similarly, we can just access a ‘how to’ video about this particular tasks. In both cases, learning isn’t the desired outcome, the goal is to get the job done. This is very valuable, but it’s not necessarily learning. A separate situation would be required to layer on some additional information about how and why this is the right solution before it could be considered learning. This brings us back to marketing: the right content to the right person (and more: at the right time and right place on the right devices…). What is required are content models to get more granular, and content engineering to deliver it in systemic ways. And these capabilities are now available, and it’s time for learning to catch up with marketing and start treating content as a discipline. Going forward, mobile is going to be supporting both contextual learning and performance support. Increasingly, the sensors provided with these devices can assist systems to detect a user’s situation in more than one way (e.g. not just location), and provide specific help because of where and when you are. And, coupled with an understanding of your learning goals, they may well be able to make contextualized learning available as well. While content is critical to support learning even in contexts, being aware and leveraging context can mean new opportunities to improve the learning, and performance, outcomes. The post Understanding the Importance of Context in Your Learning Solutions appeared first on Litmos.

If your course development projects are taking longer than a week or two you may need to rethink your strategy. In many cases I'd argue that your first course release should take less than a day. But I'm also practical enough to know that every situation is different. And there are many factors, outside of the course designer's control, complicating the process. It's  release a course within a day because the content already exists. The cry for training on topics with existing content usually grows from lack of access. In which case simply uploading the content in it's existing format is good enough to get started. And that's why you can launch a course in less than a day. It's possible. The Marathon I often refer back to the early days of CBT, WBT, and eLearning development. Those were the days of the development marathons. I remember them well. It's how we all learned tools like Authorware, and Toolbook. Most courses took 6 weeks to 6 months, or longer, to design, develop, test, and release. And it wasn't just eLearning developers that required so much time. Every other type of software development was equally time-consuming. But then the internet arrived and changed everything. Today app developers have updated their processes. Developing software systems for the internet presented a completely new set of both challenges and opportunities. Without the need for floppy disk, or CD distribution, software teams could release new updates, features, and bug fixes quickly and easily with little to no disruption to the user experience. They no longer needed to develop within 12-18 month release cycles: The marathon. Teams of software developers adapted to the changing landscape of technology brought on by the internet. elearning development teams have been slow to embrace this change. Even when simple to use, powerful, and flexible SaaS based learning management systems like Litmos arrived, the practices and processes of developing courses remained mostly unchanged. The idea of what software can be changed while the idea of what a course can be did not. The marathon process of eLearning development mostly remains "one and done". Meaning we create a course as a product and after it's release we forget about it and move onto the next course. With software development the work of development is never "done". And this is the mindset that eLearning developers need to adopt. Courses should never be done. They should be continual works in progress. If we are focusing less on training products and more on supporting the learning process then why not rethink how we create our learning solutions? The Sprint The idea of a development sprint is exactly what it sounds like: Get from point A to point B as fast as you can. Slow and steady no longer applies. The concept was originally created at Google ventures. Here is how they begin to describe the sprint: "The sprint is a five-day process for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing ideas with customers. Developed at GV, it’s a "greatest hits" of business strategy, innovation, behavior science, design thinking, and more — packaged into a battle-tested process that any team can use." - Google Ventures, Sprint Obviously there is more to a sprint than just the ability to act quickly. My favorite part of this process is the concept of combining so many elements of product development into that short period of time. The learning industry draws from many different disciplines, and we discuss them quite a bit. However I rarely here anyone speak of putting all the pieces together. I've heard people talk about brain-based learning. I've heard of emotional learning. Research based learning is popular. Learning based on cognitive psychology and what anthropology may or may not have to do with our work. We talk about a lot and that's good. But I have heard few, if any, discuss how all the elements of training, learning and development, work together in creating a learning solution. The specific tasks of the sprint created by Google ventures is obviously not exactly how it should be applied to course development. The tool provides a good framework for us to start with. It's been tested and proven success for other businesses and products, and I see potential in adapting our development processes to something similar. I have created courses in less than week, but I've never specifically used the GV sprint process. However, I've done enough course development to know that it feels like a useful framework that our industry can leverage. Let me know what your thoughts are. And if you are already doing something similar I'd love to hear about your experience. Don't forget to register for the Future of Learning C3 event coming May 9-11 to the Wynn in Las Vegas!   The post eLearning Development is a Sprint Not a Marathon appeared first on Litmos.

If you spend anytime on the web, specifically looking at product or service sites, you probably have noticed some interesting capabilities.  For instance, you can specify a search term, and then get options to customize the view based upon a number of criteria such as size, price, brand, and more. Even more interesting from a ‘user experience’ standpoint are recommendations, where your previous behavior leads to some specific suggestions for you. This is the future of content; customized, personalized, even adaptive. This customizability and adaptivity is not what we see in the eLearning space. There are a few examples, companies like Knewton and such, but by and large our courses are monolithic objects of code. They aren’t accessible in small bits, they can’t be reassembled in different ways, and they are hard to manage.  We can do better. The New Reusable Learning Content Let’s get a little clearer about what we’re talking about, specifically for learning. There’s been much talk about the value (or not) of reusing or repurposing content. Here, the point is to make content flexible so that it can be combined in different ways to meet different needs.  And the benefits here are to reduce redundancy and increase opportunity. So, in a typical scenario, content comes from marketing about a new product or service. It may go through engineering or operations to add detail.  But what happens then is that the same information goes to sales training for development, but it also goes to customer support, and to technical communications, and maybe even customer training. There’s training and documentation being created all from the same source material, but likely with redundancies. Another situation is that content is created to create a particular need. So, in the course of developing training, a job aid is created to help comprehension and serves as a guide for practice.  This particular content would be valuable to be accessed by the learners after the class, when they’re performing, but it’s not systematically thought through nor automatically made findable.  This could be internally, or as a more comprehensive customer solution from elearning providers, but the point is that it is a missed opportunity. And yet another situation is the familiar legacy content.  When I ask at events whether anyone has content hanging around that’s out of date or no longer accurate, but it’s still available, I always see hands.  There’s no process for managing content in a particular way.  Yet without a systematic process of content review, people can get confused about what’s up to date, relevant, and more. In web marketing, these problems are being increasingly handled in a mechanism called content systems, composed of content strategy, engineering, and management.  They’re working towards intelligent content, content that meets what Wayne Hodgins once termed the ‘right stuff’: the right content to the right person at the right time and the right place in the right way on the right device.  Think of this for learning: would you love to have a learning experience that was uniquely configured for you?  That’s the possibility.  So what’s involved? A Custom Learning Experience Built Just for You One of the first steps is getting more rigorous around content. We need content definitions and descriptions that allow us to know what we have and how to access it.  Then we need to have systems that support hosting and delivering this content in rich ways. Finally, we need to have a strategy about developing, delivering, and managing the content. To start, we need a tight level of granularity.  I’ve previously suggested that the right level of granularity can be approximated as ‘the smallest thing you’d give one learner versus another, depending on their performance’.  A more systematic approach is to talk about content from the perspective of its learning (or performance) ‘role’. That is, to be clear about whether it’s an example, practice, concept presentation, job aid, or more.  And yes, that means we must be more discrete in our content development. We must also be very specific about describing this content, since we will want to pull it together by description, not hardwired together.  To do this will require rigor in tagging.  We need to describe learning role, topic, context, media, and more.  This is the role of a content model, to determine what types of content are needed to fulfill the learning and performance roles we expect. What is the full suite of content needed?  This will differ by organization, with a publisher having different needs than a B2B company, etc.  With good structure and good descriptions, we facilitate search as well as more flexible content, able to populate different business models and use cases. Adaptive Content Using Rules The ultimate goal is to be able to personalize content and make it adaptive. We want to be able to call up content by labels, so we could grab an <example> about <product X> in <context Y> with <video> by rule, and then combine rules to sequence content into courses for different roles on the same content, and vice versa, rather than have to develop them separately. Going forward, we will be able to have rules that provide simpler problems if the learner is doing poorly, and advance them more rapidly, to take advantage of context, and more. At the same time, we can also be more specific about what constitutes a ‘good’ example, practice, etc.  We currently are too lax about the details about what constitutes a really good learning component. So, for instance, a good example wouldn’t be missing elements like cognitive annotation, etc. Here’s an opportunity to address those gaps, making content templates about learning, rather than just window-dressing. We also need to have systems that can host content, descriptors, and rules, and combine and deliver the content as dictated.  While the LMS can still serve the courses and manage competencies & users, the content itself may well be launched from a content management system, perhaps leveraging the content system likely already in use by marketing!  There are fundamental capabilities and increasingly we need to think about integrating technology in systemic ways to combine capabilities for new needs. Learning Content Lifecycle Management Finally, we need people and processes.  We need to make sure that the content lifecycle is covered, from initial strategy to deletion. Who has responsibility for what’s said, for how it’s said, and when it needs to be updated?  We need to determine what services content delivers, and how we’re going to get there. We need people to determine the tagging scheme, content model, and ultimately write the rules.  And, of course, we also need people who have the job of creating the content! This is an initial step in going beyond the silos.  Properly done, this includes content coming from related business units like technical communications and customer services.  While initially it can focus on learning and performance support, eventually all content should be systematically addressed. And let’s be clear, this isn’t going to happen overnight. We are still in the infancy of custom content development. The point is to start planning and working now on getting to the point where you are using content in more systematic ways.  The short-term benefits are in having a more structured approach to content, such as a finer granularity and a deeper definition around the learning content component.  The longer-term benefits are in laying the foundations for delivering a more complete learning and performance solution, internally empowering more successful outcomes and externally creating a more complete customer experience. It’s time to be intelligent about content, so we can start getting the advantages of intelligent content. The post Thinking Differently about Learning Content Development and Maintenance appeared first on Litmos.

SXSW Interactive is a massive event. Even writing that statement doesn’t feel like I’m doing justice to the size of the event. Most events that I attend are confined to one location, like a hotel conference center or complete convention center. But SXSW is large enough to take over a convention center, an events center, and several hotel conference centers...and just about every available open space in between. The Corporate Houses of Downtown Austin The entire downtown of Austin Texas is completely taken over by "houses". A house is a building or area completely designed, sponsored, and some times built, by one company. The space is fully re-branded with the company logo and is filled with demoes, mini stages for presentations, food trucks, and/or full bars. As an example, on my first evening Gina Minks took me to the Dell house. We got there just in time to see the end of a session led by the leaders of Dell labs. Dell had a focus on VR to show off the strength of Dell computer systems driving the VR experiences. I tried to visit as many houses as I could but I’m certain I missed a few. I spent some time at the Mashable house, the IBM house, and the Samsung house. All showing off products, and new cutting edge tech. The Dell House and The Lonely Whale VR Experience After attending both CES and SXSW this year, I can honestly say that VR is the next big thing in learning experiences. At the Dell house I had the opportunity to experience VR as a learning experience. Dell's and it's Social Good Advocate, Adrien Grenier, partnered to create quite an amazing experience. The VR experience for the Lonely Whale project included active seating that moved and reacted to the VR movie. So not only did you get the visual experience but you also had the sensation of tipping forward and back and feeling bursts of air at just the right moments. It was quite a compelling experience. Watch this short youtube video to get an idea of what it takes to create a learning experience like The Lonely Whale. I don't expect to see fully activated seating in training rooms any time soon, but that element of the experience was just an added bonus feature. The reality is that VR is now inexpensive enough to become a legitimate technology based learning solution. I see the VR learning experiences of today as being where computer-based training was in the late 80's. The technology of learning in the 80's was just beginning to handle multi-media.  Producing CBT was time consuming, costly, and difficult to prove ROI for corporate training purposes. But today we are able to create eLearning courses fast and cheap with more features, and capabilities than learners even need. VR is going through the same cycle with regards to the L&D industry. I predict in 5 years we will have at least one authoring tool available for instructional designers to quickly and easily produce VR learning solutions. The Qualcomm Augmented Reality Experience AR (augmented reality) is growing as fast as VR, but just not getting as much press. Qualcomm built a small museum based on AR technology within the Mashable House. The idea is that you can supplement a real world experience with a layered virtual experience on top. This is possible using mobile devices with cameras. The system recognizes an object or structure and triggers the digital layer of information to be viewed on top of the real world image being shown on the screen. The IBM Cognitive Studio House The IBM Cognitive Studio was filled demos showing off Watson. It's hard to explain Watson, and how it may or may not impact our industry. But I will say that without a doubt it will have a significant impact. The IBM Studio experience started with a questionnaire so that Watson could learn a little bit about you. That information was coded into a wrist band. As you walked through the studio you could wave your wrist band at an exhibit and you would get a customized experience. They even had a bar that would create a customized drink for you based on certain preferences identified in the questionnaire. You could play Rock, Paper, Scissors against a robot or have Watson analyze your personality based on your twitter feed. But my favorite part of the IBM Cognitive Studio was interacting with a robot named Pepper. While talking to the IBM engineer about Pepper I could see that she was "listening". It's head was turned slightly with it's big eyes watching us as we talked. Then Pepper asked me for a fist bump. On my first try I only tapped it's robot knuckles and nothing happened. The engineer explained that it was okay to fist bump Pepper as hard as you might fist bump with a human. So I did and Pepper responded by blowing it up. It made me laugh and so it asked if I wanted to fist bump again. That's the one I recorded above. Pepper is obviously a robot, and obviously not human. And that's what made it so strange to actually feel a personal connection with Pepper. The engineer spoke to Pepper as if it were a living thing and so it just felt like it was part of our conversation. And after the fist bump, things got weird. After talking with the engineer for a few more minutes Pepper said, "You look like you could use a hug". The engineer said, "go ahead and give Pepper a hug." And so I did. And it was strangely comforting. Pepper could nuzzle her head into your neck and shoulder and wrap her arms around you. I gotta be honest. I enjoyed the robot hug. Capture the Data of Experience Representing the L&D community at SXSW was Craig Wiggins and Margaret Roth presenting a session on xAPI. They also presented their session at SXSWedu, and I was told it was well received. It was fun to hang out with Craig at the event and learn more about xAPI and how it’s currently being used. Here’s my take on xAPI. As far as I can tell, the biggest roadblock to an xAPI implementation is getting access to non-learning systems to insert the code for generating xAPI statements. I mean, some training departments still struggle with getting access to basic IT resources. So, figuring out how to request coding updates to critical business systems may prove challenging for many. And building an LRS is relatively simple as far as I understand it. But building a system to parse all the data and make it meaningful is harder. I feel like much wider adoption of xAPI needs a kickstart by a big enterprise. Its probably going to take a large software developer like Microsoft, Apple, IBM, or Salesforce.com, or another. And this is only supporting the learning experiences within software. xAPI can and should be collecting other data as well. Specifically data from the internet of things. But basically from any device, or software, that currently collects data about performance in some way or another. It's obvious that xAPI is building momentum within our industry, but widespread adoption still is a ways off. But maybe not as far off as we might think. There is a lot more to SXSW than what I can reflect on in a blog post. SXSW Interactive is a non-learning community event filled with excellent learning experiences for everyone interested in technology. And everyone should be interested in technology. I would highly encourage my colleagues to attend at some point in their careers. Don't forget to register for C3 coming up April 9-11 at the Wynn in Las Vegas. The post The SXSW Interactive Experience with L&D Perspective appeared first on Litmos.