Download the Aurasma App, Follow our Aurasma channels ( #Coopgovt, Compher Social Sciences, and Northwest High School) and then enjoy the Aurasma Layered Infograph below…

  I’m really excited about running our new Masters in Learning Innovation in October. The course will be available online and can be taken either full-time or part-time. There are four 30 credit modules on: Technology-Enhanced Learning, Learning Design for the 21st Century, Research Methodologies and Case Studies of Innovation, plus a 60 credit dissertation module. The course will give participants the opportunity to explore and critique a range of technologies and to consider the implications of these for their own practice, and more broadly for learning, teaching and research. We will draw on the latest research in the field, as well as tapping in to the wealth of great free Open Educational Resources now available and piggy backing on any interesting online events that occur, such as MOOCs and webinars. The course will give participants a rich overview of new technologies and how they can be used to foster more engaging learning experiences, but also will consider some of the implications of these technologies, both for individuals and institutions. We anticipate that the course will appeal to a range of people with an interest in exploring how technologies can be used in both formal and informal learning contexts. We also aim to draw on participants’ own experiences and practice, to build a vibrant community of peers. As an incentive, the first twelve people who register for the full time course will receive an iPad Mini. So go on sign up - it will be fun! For more information on the Masters and our areas of research interest, have a look at our website  (http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/beyond-distance-research-alliance), or contact me or Pal (pe27@leicester.ac.uk) for further details. 

Have you been loyally posting your brand photos on all of your social media platforms, and just aren’t getting the loyal turnout you’ve been expecting? Do Source: smartblogs.com See on Scoop.it - InformationCommunication (ICT)

The way an online course is designed has a big impact on how engaged students will be with the material and whether they will complete the course. In this LMScast Joshua Millage and Chris Badgett discuss how to use the Fibonacci sequence for instructional design to set the pace for your course. Keeping students engaged and motivated can be a challenge for teachers, and your course completion rate could suffer if the cadence of your content does not match with students’ interest levels and how they naturally learn. If you deliver your content too slowly, students could become bored and lose interest. But if you deliver too much content all at once, students could become overwhelmed. Students are the most interested and motivated right after they’ve decided to take a course, and that motivation settles down as the course goes on and students are consuming your content. The Fibonacci sequence is a series of numbers where the next number in the sequence is the sum of the previous two numbers. Starting with 1, the sequence is 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, and so on. This sequence occurs frequently in nature, such as in the spirals of a snail’s shell and the arrangement of seeds on a sunflower. Using the Fibonacci sequence for instructional design will match well with the way students naturally learn and their interest levels. And you can build the sequence into your course by dripping content in this type of pattern, with more content delivered at the beginning of the course and then slowly spacing the content out a bit more as the course goes on. LifterLMS is a learning management system plugin for WordPress that has built-in functionality to handle drip content and engagement. You can use the system to space out your content, automatically email students to encourage engagement, and award badges and certificates for lesson or section completion. You can try a demo of LifterLMS here to see for yourself what it can do for you. To learn more about using the Fibonacci sequence for instructional design and to see a diagram of how it can be applied, you can sign up for a free LifterLMS course here. You can also post comments and subscribe to our newsletter for updates, developments, and future episodes of LMScast. Thank you for joining us. Joshua: Hello, Everyone. Welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m Joshua Millage, and I’m joined today with the very dapper Christopher Badgett. Less of the mountain man Christopher Badgett and more of the suave, debonair sort of … Is that a suit, Chris? Christopher: It’s just a suit jacket and a western shirt. I actually have three of these, that’s one of the things I do to mellow out on decision fatigue is I wear this shirt a lot. We were just at the Infusionsoft Conference. I don’t know if you realized, but I had two of the same pair of jeans and two of the same shirt. Joshua: There you go, Man. Why waste mental energy deciding what you’re going to wear? I think Steve Jobs did that, too. Christopher: Did he really? Joshua: Yeah. That’s his black mock turtleneck. That’s hilarious. Today we’re going to be talking about something kind of fun. It’s something that I’ve picked up on after going through tons and tons and tons of different courses, and it’s how to pace a course so that you leverage someone’s inherent motivation that comes with signing up for a course. I remember in college, the first couple of weeks of class you’re the most engaged and most motivated, especially if the teacher is bringing the heat in that sort of time frame, they’re telling you how the course is going to benefit you and help you and that sort of thing. So in looking at motivation in instructional design, I’ve picked up on a little math equation or sequence called the Fibonacci sequence, which is essentially a sequence that says, it’s like 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, it’s whatever the previous number is, you add it to the next number. 1 and then another 1, and then the next number would be 2, because it’s adding the previous two. The next one would be 3, next one would be 5, next one would be 8, and so forth. I have found that that sequence, that Fibonacci sequence, is actually a really good pace to do drip courses in a course. A lot of people I don’t think spend a lot of time thinking about the cadence of their content. They’d spend a lot of time just thinking about the content and that’s important, but even if you have great content and you don’t think about the pacing of it, the completion rate could suffer. I think that especially in the online world when you don’t have a lot of people surrounding you, you don’t have that community that can help motivate you and keep you accountable, it’s important to understand that people when they make that action, that buy action or that enroll action, that initial action, that is when they’re going to be the most motivated, because they’ve gotten over the hump and all the psychological whatever about the course, and they said, "Yes." They told themselves, "Yes. I’m going to take this course," on whatever it is. Knowing that, you want to give them a bunch of good stuff, a bunch of stuff that’s really actionable, really important to whatever the course is immediately. You can give it more in that moment than you can a week later. I have found that using that 1, 1, 2, 3 type of methodology works with days or weeks depending on the length of your course, but I’ve even seen it with a couple really all-star web entrepreneurs who create courses. Eben Pagan does a really good job in his Wake Up Productive course where when you buy the course, you get an hour and a half video that goes through the entire where we’re headed, where we’re going, then you get the next five days, you have five fast-start videos, and then after you have the five fast-start videos then you have twelve weeks of one video a week. Christopher: Settles down. Joshua: It settles down quite a bit, but that’s manageable. I was motivated that first day, and I’ll consume an hour and a half in that first week, I’ll go through every day, and then I’ll pace out and I’ll actually want to … I like to look forward to the next video instead of like, "Oh man, this is just a mountain of content I got to mole through, and there’s so many exercises and so many quizzes and so many things." It’s more of, "Wow, that was really good. I’m going to put that into action. Wow, I’m getting benefits. Aw man, the next video’s going to be awesome too." Christopher: That’s awesome. That’s thinking like a learning management system and less like a membership site. Joshua: Yeah, yeah. That’s the thing, like when this episode goes out, what should the URL be? We’ll do lmscast.com/ … What’s a fun word? Christopher: Fibonacci. Joshua: That’s a hard one to spell though. Let’s do pace. Christopher: Okay. Joshua: Like the salsa. Christopher: All right. Joshua: That’s an easy one. If you’re listening to this in your car, you can head over to lmscast.com/pace, or if you’re on the YouTube video just look at the link in the description. What we’ll do is we’ll have a layout of what this looks like in terms of like a diagram, but I’ll also host a webinar to show people how they can build this Fibonacci sequence into their courses using LifterLMS, because our feature with our engagement functionality allows you to set this up really easily. You don’t have to do anything else, you can … Christopher: In our drip. Joshua: Yeah. You can drip the content, and then you can actually send emails out based on when that drip content goes out and say, "Hey, this video’s available now. This video’s available now. Or this course or this lesson or whatever it is is available now." I think people will see a dramatic increase in completion of their courses and engagement throughout their course, because they’re not overwhelming people. Christopher: LifterLMS has the badges and the emails and the certificates that can happen, so maybe part of that too is like, it’s okay to be a little heavy on the engagements earlier in the course, but then maybe back off as it goes, so that people don’t feel overwhelmed like, "Whoa. I’m getting too many emails from this person." That’s really fascinating. I just want to bring up in nature if you’re looking for a visual of the Fibonacci, the way the shell of a snail forms in that spiral is calculated … You see the Fibonacci sequence in nature all the time. It’s also the way the florets or the head of the broccoli form. It’s just one of those universal sacred geometry, if you will, things that exist in nature. It’s totally natural that that would make sense for learning as well. Joshua: Yeah. I found that all the courses that I seemed to enjoy and get through and implement have some sort of pacing that follows this sort of structure. They give a lot of information on the beginning, and then it kind of tapers out over time. Based on engagement though, the cool thing is you get to reset this if someone decided to sign up for another course. It’s like in email marketing, the Fibonacci sequence works really, really well for email marketing, where if someone initially signs up, you can hit them with a few extra emails than you would later down the road, but if they opt in for another eBook or another lead magnet or something else later down the road, then they’re showing, "Hey, I’m raising my hand again. I really like what you’re doing, I’m interested again." You can email them a little bit more again and then taper it back based on behavior. Christopher: That’s really awesome. In a learning management system, it’s not just about the tool, it’s about that fourth dimension of time, and that’s a really powerful rubric or metric you’re giving us to think about how to deal with time and how the learner learns and how they want to be engaged in a natural way. That’s awesome, Josh. Joshua: Yeah. I think it’s a really important concept to take ahold of, because everyone has gone through a class I think at some level where it just seemed to drag on. It was really, really boring, and that sort of thing. You could actually hide the lessons that are not so exciting when you use this, because you’re not blasting people with content, you’re not overloading them with content. You can take a lesson that’s not as fun, and you can put it into sequence maybe at the beginning where people are most motivated or later down the road, but you’ve given some people some time to digest the previous lesson, so when they get to that one, they’re ready to go. Tony Schwartz says it best, we grow through periods of intense focus, and it’s like exercise, you grow through intense weight lifting or whatever you’re doing and then rest. Then you engage again and rest, and that pendulum swing, that back and forth is really important, especially in learning, because sometimes I’ll read something, and whatever it is, marketing or spirituality or whatever subject matter that I’m reading at that point in time, and doesn’t sit in until months later. The thing about that kind of begs a question is, would I get more out of that content if I read it and chewed on it, or if I just continued to move from the next book to the next book to the next book and just pound it in my brain with more information. I find that it’s just really important to take time to process and write your thoughts out about the material and that sort of thing. That’s when the pendulum swings, and then I’m ready for the next chapter or the next book or whatever it is. It’s exciting stuff, I really like motivation when it comes to learning, because I don’t think that in the post-industrial era we’re doing a good job of … I don’t think we’re doing a good job yet of understanding how the human mind works and how we can actually observe that and then utilize that for increased learning and education. You experienced that too with your daughters, right? I mean, they’re unschooled, and they’re very motivated around what they want to learn and they take it in, right? Christopher: Absolutely. In that model, the child leads the learning. They show what they’re interested in, and like you’ve mentioned, there’s these periods of intense fascination with power tools or hammers or certain types of gardening methods or identifying plants or picking flowers, and then it kind of wanes out, but it doesn’t go away, it just continues to evolve, but definitely at the moment of introducing a new thing to get excited about, which they often find on their own, there’s this intense focus where it goes really deep, and it’s almost … I think it’s one of the things that the traditional education system doesn’t handle very well, because it’s more like a set curriculum, 1’s and 0’s, student enters the machine and so on. That’s a really cool insight you’re giving there. Joshua: Yeah. I’m sure when they first get interested in something, you can throw everything you have at them, and they’re fine with it. Christopher: Yeah. Joshua: When they start to wane, it’s like, "Well, what’s the point?" Christopher: You don’t want to force it. Joshua: Yeah. Christopher: Make the negative space for something else to come in and enter the quiver of experience and knowledge. Joshua: Yeah. Absolutely. I’m going to definitely do a webinar around this and lay out a whole step-by-step system that people can implement and use LifterLMS to pace their courses in this way. You can find information about that at lmscast.com/pace. P-A-C-E, just like the salsa. So, Chris, do you have any final thoughts for the crew here? Christopher: I think you had a really good point, just like a pro tip … There’s this expression to sell people what they want, but give them what they need. Whenever we’re teaching something, there’s often these unsexy or less exciting elements that you need to get in there to round out the learning. That maybe, like you were saying at the beginning, if there’s a few of the more busywork or less fun things to do, squeeze that stuff in at the beginning, get it out of the way when motivation’s the highest. If you’re going to put it in later, trickle it in a little bit at a time. Joshua: Yeah, like this Wake Up Productive course I’m talking to you about, he had all these quick starts or stuff that I don’t really want to do. I don’t really want to sit around for twenty minutes and write everything that’s jumbling around in my head. I don’t really want to prioritize the top ten things I need to get done in the next ninety days. I don’t. I don’t have any interest in doing that. It’s not that I don’t see that it’s important … Christopher: You just started the program. Joshua: I just started the program, so I’m doing it. You ask me in a couple weeks, I’d be like, [negative sound effect]. Then the consistency that I had with the cadence is off, and that’s no good, so I really respect Eben in what he does in terms of how he paces and designs his courses, and I think it’s really important, very important to do the same. Cool. Well, that’s it for this episode. Until next week, we’ll talk to you then. The post How to Use the Fibonacci Sequence for Instructional Design appeared first on LMScast.

These are our multiple examples built around Bloom’s Taxonomy meant as a jumping off point for our imaginative and brilliant staff to use. ***Please Visit Our Other Aurasma Resources By Clicking Here*** The scene: N.H.S. Library about seven days ago. The Players: Cara, Jill, and Charles Enter Cara Cara: Hey Charles, check out this new app. It’s called Aurasma. Cara places her iPhone over an image and a video immediately pops up. Charles: ——-> (Not talking because his mind has melted as he thought about the billions of possibilities) Later that day… Charles: Hey Jill, look at what Cara just showed me. Jill: —- (Mind proceeding to melting) What is Aurasma? It’s not a QR code. It’s a QR code on steroids! Take a picture of any image and layer another image or video on top. Further, if you get an Aurasma Studio account, you can stack a website on top of the video or image you’ve attached to the original picture. Aurasma turns any recognizable image into an engaging virtual reality tool for the classroom!!! The Standard Based Bulletin Board you saw at the top was put together by @Thrasymachus, @JillCompher, and @CaraCarter. Bloom’s Taxonomy was used as the frame for the project so we could appeal to instructors on what ever level they wanted to begin using this wonderful new App. The right side of the bulletin board was dedicated to increasing school spirit. Follow us on Twitter for suggestions, tips, etc. Interested? 1) Download Aurasma. 2) Scroll through the "How to view" introduction 3) Tap the "A"-like icon at the bottom center of your screen. 4) Then touch the magnifying glass icon. 5a) In the search field, type in and search for Northwest High School’s Channel and follow. 5b) Type in and search for "Thrasymachus" channel and follow 5c) Type in and search for "Compher Social Sciences channel" and follow Good, now you can see our "Auras" below. The following examples are on our Bloom’s Taxonomy Bulletin Board. Go ahead and follow and like our channels, while you’re at it :)! Open Aurasma and point your device at the following images. Keep in mind additional actions can be taken by either single or double tapping the videos or images once they’ve been triggered. 1) Uses in Math - Double tap the image to bring the video to the forefront. Single tap the video to access a practice problem the kids can work on after they’ve checked their answer with the teacher’s example. 2) Gerrymandering/redistricting - Double tap the video to bring it to the fore. Single tap the video to access the online redistricting game that students will be assigned after the video. 3) Dachshund Narcolepsy - Double tap the poor little puppy that can’t stay awake. Single tap the now enlarged video to access the assignment. 4) Shakespeare’s "To be or not to be" soliloquy - Double tap the video to enlarge it. Single tap the video to engage the student in an assignment. Has your mind melted, yet? NO! Not mind-meld…mind melted!!! The last example is used in a different, but none-the-less important fashion: students performing a self evaluation. Double tap the video to bring it to full size and single tap to access the poll. The Google Docs poll engages viewers of the bulletin board by having them become participants in an otherwise passive tool. I’ve used a larger image of this picture because of its, sometimes, erratic nature. Your "trigger image" must have enough unique features for Aurasma to recognize the image as unique. This one, because of the small text, is a toughie to recognize…but usually works.

I have just finished reading Fahrenheit 451, I can’t believe I haven’t read it before now! It is put in the same category as books like 1984 and Brave New World. It centres on a future where firemen don’t put out fires, but instead burn books, which are considered dangerous. It is a world dominated by mass media and pointless communication, where being the same as everyone else is what counts; intellectuals and academics are not well thought of, neither is original thought or creativity. The main character’s wife is particularly scary, she lives a hollow existence, mindlessly watching three screens of TV, with pointless dramas that she can’t even remember. Written before the Internet the book in many ways mirrors what we are seeing today, i.e. a world highly interconnected, with information coming from every direction and a danger of channel hoping and surface browsing, rather than critical reflection and engagement. You can’t walk down the road today without seeing people staring at their phones whilst walking, indeed in the taxi this morning, the driver kept checking his phone for messages, as a result missed a change of lights! Of course the rich media we now have available at our fingertips offer a fantastic variety of ways in which we can interact with materials and communicate and collaborate. I just think we need to be mindful of the dangers of over simplification and remember that we need to develop the appropriate digital literacy skills to harness their potential and we need to be critically reflective on how we engage with them and what this says about our digital identity. 

Offer Webinars and Classroom Training through 360training.com Do you have some great "in person" training that you’d like to sell as a webinar or classroom course? With webinars and virtual classrooms, you can keep the human touch and ability to respond to particular learner questions, while providing training to avid learners around the world. Or perhaps you’re looking for a way to get key content in front of learners early, before transforming it into a full-scale online course? Early feedback on content and approach can help you hone your message and create the best training. Great news! 360training.com now has a quick way for you to make webinar and classroom content available to millions of learners. Just fill out the form and tell us the name of the course, what it’s about, how much you want to charge for the course, and when you want to deliver it. For optimal results, be sure to submit your course at least two weeks in advance. We’ll pass the proposal on to our Product Line Managers based on the industry you selected. They’ll review your proposal, and, if accepted, request some additional information we’ll need so that we can pay you when your course sells, and add your course to the libraries served up by 360training.com. Reach out and make a difference—with webinars and classroom courses. - Laura and the 360 Authoring team. …

Nothing Bothers Me No, Really.  Nothingness Keeps Me Up At Night. Stanley Rosen, Friedrick Nietzsche, and I have something in common. We’re all concerned with squirrels, or rather, a world without squirrels. Ok, to be more specific, a world without context (squirrels being the context here). When I was a kid I came to the conclusion that the biggest philosophical gap in the universe could be found in the relationship between the numbers zero and one. I was in my back yard in a lower-middle income suburb of Dallas when I noticed how many freaking squirrels we had running around. One or two squirrels are fun, but close to a dozen and you might as well call it pestilence. A really cute, sometimes funny, pestilence. A cute, funny pestilence that dodged every rock I threw at it. I wanted there to be zero squirrels in my back yard. As I am wont to do, as we who are haunted by philosophical whispers are wont to do, I was caught off guard by an insane dilemma. What stopped me in my tracks was this idea that zero squirrels isn’t really close to anything. Zero was something, but also nothing. No objects, no scents, no textures, no sounds, no…things. Even when you think of complete blackness you are thinking of a color or, at least, a thing. One squirrel is closer to a billion squirrels than one squirrel is to no squirrels. Decades before I ever heard of the man, I accidentally stumbled something that Nietzsche had illuminated (note the sarcasm) a century earlier in his book, The Gay Science: We have left the land and have embarked. We have burned our bridges behind us—indeed, we have gone farther and destroyed the land behind us. Now, little ship, look out! Beside you is the ocean: to be sure, it does not always roar, and at times it lies spread out like silk and gold and reveries of graciousness. But hours will come when you will realize that it is infinite and that there is nothing more awesome than infinity. Oh, the poor bird that felt free and now strikes the walls of this cage! Woe, when you feel homesick for the land as if it had offered more freedom—and there is no longer any "land." I was like that poor bird who, when contemplating how I wish there were no squirrels, focussed more on the "no" than on the "squirrels" part of that thought. I yearned for a land that was now long since gone. Just as you can’t unsee certain things, you also can’t unthink certain thoughts. I was contemplating the infinitude and freedom of nothingness and desired the land that limited my freedom and served as my anchor. "You were aware of the number zero" you may softly remark from your Starbucks sofa. Yes, of course. What I came to realize was that the word zero was itself, ironically, a something. Zero or "nothing" are terms that point to an impossibly empty void. So we cover up this void with a something and then pretend like that something that points to a nothing is an adequate stand in for the void. We cover over the Fear and Trembling that awaits us in the the void of nothingness with a something. We don’t want to peer at the nothingness and fully contemplate it, so our manhole cover is a word that shields us from the pit. The shield makes us feel better because we’re good at pointing at things. After all, God spends six days essentially dividing things and naming them. Later on in the Book of Genesis, Adam is allowed to name all of the animals. Naming is a way to divide one thing from another and, in a sense, conquer it. Using a much less exalted example, when we call people names or label them, we’re making an attempt to have some sort of power over them. Its the same with the void. We call it zero, nothingness, a void, etc. in an attempt to pretend that we understand it. Like Wittgenstein suggests, we like to cover over the chaos that is reality with words that anchor the instability. When you take away the facade of zero, there is no horizon or context to that emptiness. For example, when you say that you have zero cans of soda your context is "cans of soda". You aren’t saying you have nothingness in your fridge. You’re only saying that within this context of things, there are none. So the context anchors down the meaning and your sanity to allow you to move on to the next event in your day. Take away the horizon or context and contemplate zero and you get an infinity of barely tangible zero-ness. It’s truly frustrating! Even as I write about "zero-ness" I seem to be covering over the thing I’m trying to reveal. It seems that the emptiness also empties whatever tries to fill it. Socrates says something similar in the Phaedo when he considers that a short stick gets its "shortness" from being compared to a longer stick. Place that same short stick to an even shorter stick and it becomes long. Its shortness and longness are found within its existence…its very being. But what if the "short stick" was the only stick in the universe. Without the context of other sicks, that stick would lose many of its characteristics including its shortness (at least as it related to other sticks). Now take away sticks altogether. When a stick loses its "stickness" you can begin to see my insanity. A non-stick is much like zero. Its a something that points to a nothing. It’s a covering up of the chaotic foam that is the foundation of all thought and being. It is Heidegger’s Being (capital B) because it is everything and nothing. It is what the painter tries to both paint over and point to by painting over the blank canvas. That blank canvas, when left blank, embodies all possible paintings, but it is also blank. The second we commit ourselves to painting, we limit the message but also make it more "real". We seem to need parentheses over every inch of our lives because they allow us to focus on what might be. But when we’re confronted with a thing without a horizon and without a subject (like zero) the mind begins to reel. It really bothers me and when I go to my favorite philosophers, they don’t seem to help. They just seem to substantiate my cluelessness. Since all language seems to be self-referential, a (non)concept like "nothingness" pokes a hole in that system and the string begins to unravel. …which reminds me of how much I hate those squirrels that got me on this train of thought to begin with so many years ago. Filed under: In The Classroom Tagged: adam, Book of Genesis, Gay Science, god, limits of analysis, Nietzsche, Phaedo, phenomenology, philosophy, plato, Squirrel, Stanley Rosen, Starbucks, zero

So I have now been using my iPad mini in earnest for a month. It has already become an essential tool that goes everywhere with me! I use it for most things, browsing the Internet, reading blog posts, and of course answering emails. The SpringPad App is fantastic as a way of curating and organizing materials. I am finding that I am reading more blog posts as a result and have categorised things for different purposes (blog posts, videos and audio, teaching materials, etc.) I can’t imagine now how I coped without it! It is funny how we integrate technologies into our practice and how this sometimes takes time, before one has that ‘Ah hah’ moment. I think iPad minis have fantastic potential in a learning context; enabling learners to learn anywhere, anytime, as well as for use in fieldwork, etc. The range of Apps available is simply staggering and the interface is good, very easy to read from. The big advantage over the iPad is the size and weight; the iPad is just too heavy to my mind. Also it has great battery power, another plus. For me this is truly a disruptive technology (Christensen 1997), a game changer, something that fundamentally changes things. It will be interesting to see what emergent research work on the used of these types of devices shows. Terese Bird in our team has just completed a JISC-funded project PLACES evaluating the use of iPads in our Criminology Masters. The evaluation was very positive and showed the benefits of these types of devices, in particular enabling the students (who are often working in dangerous parts of the world, with little or no Internet access) to have access to all their course materials. I think iPads/iPad minis also have hugh potential for professionally based courses, for example Medicine. Here are some useful links on using the iPad for learning:  EDUCAUSE report on 7 things you should know about iPads  Learning with iPads The iPad as a tool for education - a case study Educational use cases from a shared exploration of e-books and iPads  References Christensen, C. (1997). The innovator’s dilemma: When new technologies cause great firms to fail. Harvard, Harvard University Press.              

Getting Where You Want to Go. Are you into creating things that help people learn? Would you like to create these learning experiences online, so that people all over the world (or all over your office) could use them? Are you looking for an efficient way to make great online courses? Then read on! You might have come across this term before, Learning Content Management System (LCMS), but never given it much thought until now. Not to worry, this blog can help explain you the meaning, importance, and capabilities so you can be the judge if an LCMS is what you need.   What is a Learning Content Management System (LCMS)? A learning content management system is a piece of software that not only helps you build online courses quickly and easily, but provides a centralized framework to organize and re-use all the great stuff you built for one online course, but might like to also use in another. Because LCMS software is centralized, multiple people can collaborate on the same project. Hosted LCMS solutions like ours are accessed over the internet, giving you on-demand enterprise-grade systems without the headaches and hassles.   Who uses Learning Content Management Systems (LCMS)? Learning content management systems are used by people who want to build online courses. These include trainers, managers, subject matter experts, veterans in their industry looking for ways to share their knowledge, authors, instructional designers, and e-learning professionals. With an LCMS, you can package up content into interactive online courses and deliver a fun and effective learning experience. As you are the judge of how the content should be assembled and delivered, you can personalize each module based on your course learning objectives and training needs of your target audience.   Why do they use a Learning Content Management System (LCMS)? Top reasons for using a learning content management system include the desire to efficiently create and maintain a lot of content. This is important both for organizations, and for subject matter experts looking for ways to extend their reach and possibly establish their own brand and online store for training. …   How do I get started? Download one our free or freemium packages. Install the content builder. Then log in with your username and password. An internet connection with standard bandwidth is sufficient to run our LCMS. Be sure to check out the movies and manuals to help get started.   How long will it take to build a course? Many people believe that building a course would require much time and effort, but this is not necessarily true. If you’re using our learning content management system, building a course is easy and simple and can take just minutes to build. The content builder has pre-defined scene templates and course configuration templates to help get you started quickly. There is no limitation to the scenes and content you can add in your course. You can import power points, video, flash objects, audio clips, and graphics in LCMS and use them whenever you want. You can associate these assets to multiple course(s), which makes life easy and saves a lot of time. Our assessment engine makes it a snap to build quizzes and exams. We offer a choice of over 100 course policies that can be turned on or off with the click of a button—giving you plenty of power with zero programming required. The fun part is when you have all your scenes and content plugged in the given placeholders—and it’s time to preview your creation. The learning content management system also allows you to preview your course as many times you want and when you want. You can have a firsthand look at how your course would look when complete and you can always go back and make changes, if needed. Once you are satisfied with the course, you can publish your course to your learning management system and your own employees, or you can "make an offer" to have a vendor like 360training.com market and sell your courses, or you can publish those courses to your very own storefront. So whether you are looking to create online courses for your organization, sell these courses for royalty, or sell the courses in your own storefront, the LCMS has all the necessary tools and features to serve up an amazing online interactive course. - Wesley Leal and the 360 Authoring team.