OvervieweLearning is fast growing in India. elearning is mostly delivered in two modes — Web Based Training (WBT) and Instructor Lead Training (ILT). Computer Based Trainings (CBTs) are used these days only when standalone learning is in demand, like training on your new mobile handset or a latest gadget that you have purchased. Wherever there is a need for training a large audience, it is more economical to have Web Based Training (WBT) over Instructor Led Training (ILT). There are advantages of one over the other and using one method doesn't eliminate the other one. Overall effective elearning solutions can save organizations a lot of money and increase their return on investment, besides the convenience and accessibility offered to the learners.Roles in the elearning industryeLearning demands a variety of roles like Instructional Designers, content editors, document reviewers, Subject Matter Experts (SME), Authoring personnel or content integrators, Graphic Designers, 3D modelers, animators, LMS (Learning Management System) administrators and programmers, etc.Who needs elearning?At a high level companies/industries who require elearning professionals can be categorized into two types — product and service companies. Product companies use elearning as a medium to create product training for their customers and internal staff that use and / or work on or develop the products. Service companies take the work outsourced to them from clients who prefer outsourcing over internal development. These service companies are equipped with the resources, skills sets, and infrastructure that are required to execute these projects.Domains which elearning benefits elearning serves as a viable solution for several different domains. The aviation industry was one of the first to identify a need for having online learning and thus many of the based standards and processes were laid down by the aviation industry. In general depending on the training demand in a particular domain companies require different types of elearning solutions. An airline company or manufacturer may require training in the field of aviation, whereas a technical products company may require training in the domain of ERP, Messaging, ESB, networking, databases etc.To provide the requisite technical knowledge for a domain, Domain or Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) are to work with an Instructional Designer to create the course structure, content outline and detailed design. Applying knowledge on Instructional Design Theories, Models, and strategies the Instructional Designer structure's and fleshes out a course which is finally and integrated by graphic designers and content integrators. Finally the course is deployed on an LMS and hosted from there.The evolving industry In my opinion, several companies in the industry aren't matured in to the levels in demand. By matured I mean having established processes and well documented and tested standards and guidelines for delivering effective training solutions. Abroad, this field is at a much higher and more professional level. One of the major reasons for this is that there aren't many graduate/postgraduate courses in this field in India while there are such opportunities abroad. There may be few very good companies, but the list of companies in this field in India is very huge. eLearning is India is gradually evolving due to the initiative taken by professionals to walk the extra mile by learning from other sources and developing processes and standards based on the business needs and the market demands. This has led to the evolution of more streamlined and process based approaches which have delivered high quality professional learning solutions.Another facet of this is the out sourcing of course development from structured process driven companies who had already defined standard models due to their vast experience in the domain of creating elearning courses. An example of this is Microsoft learning who has been a leader in delivering training and certification for more than a decade. When Microsoft out sources their courses to a vendor they train and groom vendors to follow their standards and models, and in the long term this enables vendors to understand and create processes of their own. Besides this some leading elearning companies in India like NIIT and TIS have played a major role in training and grooming individuals aspiring to make a career in the elearning domain.Whats next?And thus the elearning industry in India continues to grow and mature. We need to keep watching out for how the trends change over time and what the next generation of elearning courses could be like!

A couple of days ago, one of my favourite Enterprise 2.0 and Social Business thought leaders and blogger extraordinaire, Oscar Berg, put together a rather inspiring article that I thought would be worth while reflecting on, specially, since it is at the heart of not just social software, but also collaboration and knowledge management in general. Indeed, in "Why do people share?" he comes to reflect on perhaps one of the toughest challenges to answer for any knowledge worker out there: why do you share your knowledge across? Even more so when the vast majority of people just don’t share theirs out there openly and transparently in the first place. Not even a fraction. Why do we do it then? Or, even better, why don’t we do it? Oscar points out a good number of reasons, with some rather interesting additional reading materials, as to why we are so inclined to share what we know with others without even asking for much in return: sharing as a gift, as a key motivator to increase our reputation, as we seek emotional communion, etc. etc. And while reading through the entire article, which I can certainly recommend, specially, the link to Nancy Dixon‘s superb entry on "The Incentive Question or Why People Share Knowledge", I just couldn’t help thinking myself about my very own motivations to share my knowledge across out there, whether internally and externally, more than anything else as a self-reflection exercise trying to answer *why* do I do it and why do I keep doing it, and most, importantly, why can’t I conceive a business world where we couldn’t survive without sharing our knowledge across for others to benefit from it. I can see Oscar’s points about sharing as a gift or to increase your reputation or as a method to seek that emotional communion. However, if I come to think about what drives me to share my knowledge out in the open over the last 15 years that I have been working in the corporate world, the motivators are sligthly different. To name: Knowledge Sharing is the Learning, Learning is the Knowledge Sharing Indeed, all along, and ever since I was first exposed to traditional Knowledge Management, over 15 years ago, it really hit me to think that perhaps one of the most profound key accelerators for one’s learning is that one of sharing your knowledge out there, in the open, and the more, the better, allowing others to benefit from it, contrasting it, challenging it, reframing it (What Harold Jarche has been talking about lately on Seek, Sense and Share, that another good friend of mine, Jack Vinson, captured so nicely in a recent blog post under a very suggestive heading: "Seek-Sense-Share is iterative"), instead of seeing it stagnate, inside your brain, because you never give it an opportunity to let it grow through that enriching experience of knowledge exchanges with other knowledge workers. To me, since we are all embarked on a lifetime learning experience of what we know, what’s around us, who we are, what we do and why we do it, who we connect with, etc. etc. knowledge sharing is innate to our human nature of wanting to connect and collaborate with others. We, human beings, are social beings, and as such have been bound to share what we know with others, so that our learning curve never becomes flat. On the contrary.  The interesting challenge though is how over the course of the last few decades we have been "educated" to reject such human nature and instead of sharing our knowledge not only for our very own benefit, but that of others, we have been taught how we need to protect it, to hoard it from others, because "knowledge is power" and if we release our knowledge, we release our power, when we all know it’s rather the opposite: knowledge SHARED is power. Thank goodness for social networking tools we are now, finally, starting to realise about the damage that unnatural behaviour of not sharing our knowledge across has done to the corporate world, academia and our societies in general. It’s just like we are finally breaking free from that "information is power" yoke to fully comprehend we cannot longer neglect, nor ignore, what we were born to live by in the first place: share our knowledge openly. Share out stories. Sharing is all about helping others Indeed, this is perhaps one of the key motivators that plenty of people seem to have forgotten about all along. Pretty much along the lines of what Oscar mentioned about sharing as a gift, I keep telling folks that one of the most powerful things we can all do as humans is to eventually help other human beings when they are in need, and in order to do that we would need to start by sharing our knowledge and experiences, know-how, skills, lessons learned, etc. etc. In short, by sharing. It’s all part of what Dave Snowden has been advocating all along as one of the main principles behind traditional Knowledge Management and which would still apply very much to Social Networking for Business today. In "Rendering knowledge", to quote: "In the context of real need few people will withhold their knowledge". Here is an example: no matter how busy you may well be, no matter how much, or how little, knowledge you may have about a particular topic, no matter whether you are new to an organisation or a seasoned knowledge worker, if a fellow colleague would be asking you for help, because they may feel you may be able to help them, it is going to be almost impossible for you to neglect providing that help in the shape of sharing your knowledge. We just do it. It’s in our nature. It’s part of that equation of trusting your peers, your networks, your communities, the folks around you, the ones whose personal business relationships you have been cultivating all along and for a reasonable amount of time. And once you have shared that piece of knowledge and helped your peer(s) there is nothing more gratifying than seeing them excel at what they are already good at. It’s that feeling of knowing you have done the right thing. It’s that feeling of fulfillment seeing how those folks around you keep succeeding, because you have taken the time to help them succeed. They succeed, you succeed. You succeed, they succeed. Sharing is all about leaving a legacy behind for others to treasure Ever since I started getting involved with traditional knowledge management, then moved into collaboration, then online communities and, lately, social computing / networking, I keep telling people that one of the main key personal benefits of participating, engaging, and sharing your knowledge in social networks is that ability to build a legacy for which people would be able to remember you over the course of time. Indeed, what most other folks know as your personal (digital) brand. Part of our human nature, once again. We love telling stories, we heart learning from stories (whether our very own, or stories from those who we trust the most), we rejoice from learning what other people are doing to leave a mark behind that would help us remember them when they are gone. We treasure and nurture all of those knowledge sharing exchanges that happen on the fly, allowing the magic of serendipity to do the rest. Yet, if you look into the corporate environment we seem to have forgotten about leaving a legacy, as if we didn’t care back then, we don’t care now. Time and time again I keep talking to fellow colleagues who haven’t dived into social networks just yet about how they are missing a huge opportunity to build their own legacy for others to remember and treasure when they are gone. The fact that they keep hiding behind their mobile phones, or their favourite Instant Messaging client or, even worse, their eMail Inboxes, is not helping them much. You see? Whenever you would be ready to leave your organisation and move into your next adventure the first thing that Human Resources does is wipe out, *entirely*, such tools. And before you realise all of "your history" is gone! For good! And, even worse, without allowing anyone to take a peek at it! There goes your so-called personal brand. I know that plenty of very experienced knowledge workers would be thinking that at that time, on the verge of perhaps reaching retirement, they wouldn’t care that much about not having that legacy and what not. And, to be honest, that’s probably one of the saddest things you can hear nowadays. How can’t you care much about your last 25 to 35 years (Or more!) of a hard working, professional life, where you have spent more than one third of your lifetime dedicated and committed to one, or several!, of your passions? Really? Is that how we all plan to live our one single life nowadays to think that we don’t care about leaving a legacy behind? I am not sure what you would think, but I would tend to think it would be rather the opposite. Otherwise, what’s the point? What are we doing for our future generations to help them remember who we are, what we do, why we do what we do? Least we could do is to give them an opportunity to be exposed to that legacy based on the knowledge we have shared, who we connect with, how we collaborate and innovate together and whatever else. Imagine if in 15 to 20 to 30 years from now people would not remember who you are anymore, specially, those who you have cared for the vast majority of your lifetime. Please do tell me that you care, that you are working your way towards leaving that legacy to those behind us. For their benefit. For our benefit. For everyone’s benefit. It’s the least we can all do at this point, don’t you think? This blog post, indeed, has been quite an interesting and unexpected reflection for yours truly on what motivates me every day when I wake up to come to work and share my knowledge out there. It’s not just that urge and eager need to connect and collaborate with others, to share that common passion across with those who I trust the most, to belong to a larger mission, to share that responsibility for what we do and who we are, to own it; to me sharing is all about pushing further my own learning experiences, to never stop learning, to always keep up with that critical thinking mentality that allows me to grow both intellectually and emotionally, to help others keep excelling at what they do, understanding that if they are successful on their own ways I, too, will be successful. How by going the extra mile for them they become better at what they do and they eventually make me better as a result of it, and how, as a result of all of that, at the end of the day, it’s all about the legacy each and everyone of us leaves behind in this world so that through that collective knowledge gathering and sharing experience we help future generations to build a better, smarter world, not just for them, but for future generations. Their own future generations. Today, we are just planting the seeds for them to start collecting the harvest  tomorrow, when the time is right, but if we don’t open up enough to share what we know now, we may not reach that common goal eventually in the long run. So, why do you share your knowledge? What drives you every morning out of bed to do what you do and to care for what you care? Because there is probably something out there that you care for, right? Whether it’s your family, friends, relatives, colleagues, your work, your community, this world., etc. etc. What is it that drives you to share your knowledge and experiences eventually? What’s your legacy? Dare to share it across?

Let's come to the basic question as to what do we do as instructional designers?Understand learner profilesCreate curriculums, course outlines, storyboardsReview developed content for accuracy etc etcOver and above all this, what we should be doing as 'good' instructional designers, is to be able to suggest appropriate learning solutions based on learner need and business demands. For any of these activities a vital component is 'SME support'.In my experience as an instructional designer I have had experiences with SMEs from different domains.My first experience was to create learning content for the aviation industry. My company bagged contracts from several aviation majors like Airbus, Finnair, Snecma, Saudi Arabian etc. Here we worked on courses for audiences like cabin crew, pilots, flight dispatchers, maintenance personnel. In this industry our SMEs would be persons with aviation & training backgrounds. Working for this industry was fairly simple in one way that the syllabi or curriculums for each type of audience is globally standard with the existence of the FAA and JAA (Flight Aviation Authority and Joint Aviation Authority).A typical process we followed to:Derive the course/curriculum outlines from customer requirements and standard recommended syllabi.Create lesson plans for each lesson defined in the course consisting of the course objectives, lesson objectives, key teaching pointsDevelop storyboards based on the the lesson plans.All through the process we would work with SMEs at all stages to suggest guide and review the technical part and structure of the lessons / courses. Since this was a service based company SMEs would be paid for the time they spent on the courses and besides this we also had a full time SME always available. Work was fun and interesting as you work on topics like, flight planning, meteorology, ETOPS, aircraft systems, etc.My second experience was with working for a products company where the client and SMEs would be in-house. This is a place where i first experienced working on highly technical products and the experience was truly worthwhile. The experience with SMEs was significantly different from my previous experience. Here we had to respect SME time as SMEs were part of the same organization and had their own targets to achieve.Here we came across several kinds of SME profiles consisting of product managers, engineering team members/managers, professional consultants, QA, documentation persons and instructors. Each kind of SME can provide specific inputs related to their job which can in turn add more value to the courses and curriculum.Here the task was to :- Analyze audience needs- Perform task analysis- Create curriculums and come up with learning tracks- Come up with business scenarios and use cases- Design course outlines and develop storyboardsOnce again all this is done by soliciting inputs from SMEs. Hence the role of a SME very clearly critical for the technical accuracy of course content, while an instructional designers role is conducive to the instructional quality, structure and flow of the training.The only other perspective I see is that if IDs are expected to learn and become product experts and trainers, then they have to choose between being a training solution provider for different training domains, and graduating to be subject matter experts themselves! This is a tough choice sometimes....

As you may have seen it already, once again, I am on the move. This time around to Zurich, Switzerland, to go and present at the Joint Alumni Conference - JAC 2012 event, perhaps on what may well be one of the most important and relevant speeches I may be delivering to date, around the topic of "The Future of Work in the Age of Social Business", which is turning out to be one of my favourite topics to talk about at the moment, for that matter. Over the last few weeks I have been working on the dissertation itself for this particular event and time and time again I have been thinking about different ways of how I would introduce the topic to such a rather selected audience. Who would have told me then though that, despite all of the various different iterations I have been working on so far, I would be going eventually for the one I fully experienced during the course of today, on my way there, as perhaps one of the most powerful introductions on Social Business I have done to any presentation I may have delivered so far in the last few months. As part of the series of "Social Business Is People to People Business", here’s the next take of what living social is all about. This time around with an unexpected surprise: Iberia. The future of work is social. I haven’t got a doubt about it. And, after today, even more so. The future of work is going to be exciting, too! It’s going to help knowledge workers become more empowered, more autonomous, more trustworthy, more motivated and engaged, more open and transparent than ever before carrying out important, meaningful and purposeful knowledge work. Work that they care for, work for which they have built certain attitude to do it just right, in short, work that aims at perhaps the panacea of what doing business nowadays should be all about: delighting your customers.  After today’s experience, which I will start detailing shortly, I am 100% convinced that we are not going to have it any other way. On the contrary, we, customers in general, are going to start aiming higher and higher at what excellent customer service should be all about. And we are perhaps going to start demanding it more and more as well! And rightly so, to be honest. It’d be about time, too!, don’t you think? Here is why … Here is another story as to why the future of work is social.  If you have been following this blog, and my various social networking interactions over the course of time, you may well remember how I get to travel quite a bit for work and throughout all of those years I have been on the road, or up in the air, I keep having a good number of unpleasant experiences, in general, to the point where I have learned to develop lots of extra patience, resilience and perseverance in order to learn to live with it and move on. Well, today it was different. Totally different. Today, for the first time, in a long while, I have been having one of the most gratifying customer experiences I can remember as a road / air warrior. And all of that with what it is turning out to be one of my favourite airlines out there: Iberia.  As I keep writing this article further along, I am sure most of you folks out there would be thinking that I am crazy, right? I mean, Iberia? Really? Iberia is your favourite airline nowadays? Are you really sure? Well, yes! And here’s the reason why… excellent customer service through a rather unexpected channel: Twitter. Indeed, like I was saying, earlier on today, I was supposed to take a plane from Madrid to Zurich arriving about early afternoon to then get everything ready for tomorrow’s presentation at JAC 2012. Everything was going according to plan. No delays, no additional, last minute problems. Just everything perfect. For a change. So we get on the plane, take off and about one hour later, approximately, the captain tells us that the two systems that regulate the cabin pressure of the plane both broke and we needed to lower our altitude to the point where eventually we needed to divert our course and head to our nearest airport, which, at the time, was Barcelona. The tone of the message was rather reassuring and calm, so everyone did just that: remain calm. And perhaps a bit defeated that once again something did eventually happen, although without further consequences. Something for which I am very grateful altogether on its own! So there they went, all of our intentions to arrive on time In Zurich on another uneventful trip. We got off at Barcelona airport and this is where the story begins and where it’s changed completely my view of the airline itself. When we all arrived to the airport all of the passengers headed to the Transfer Desk to see what was happening and to find out plenty more details as to whether we would be able to fly again that evening or in the early morning. I didn’t. I decided to remain, lag behind and instead get my iPhone up and running and go into Twitter. After all, I was supposed to meet up a group of colleagues to catch up and needed to tell them I was going to be running late and perhaps not make it altogether, if we were going to leave the next morning. So I told everyone what happened, about the incident, about how everyone was all right, about how we all remained calm (Despite the good amount of recent events that have been reported in the press that I am sure we are all far too familiar with for multiple other airlines) and how we were all waiting for things to happen…  At that point, it occurred to me that I could query @Iberia and see if they would know what was actually happening. What was the failure about, how long we would need to wait for something to happen and whether we would be leaving for Zurich eventually, after all. And lo and behold within a few minutes I got a lovely response back from the @Iberia folks confirming the problem, how they found out from their colleagues they were sending another plane from Madrid to Barcelona and how about one hour later we would be taking that one from BCN to our final destination and how everything was going back to normal. And there I was, from feeling a bit uncomfortable, tense, perhaps a tad too nervous about what was happening, waiting for more news to come through, I got all I needed: the right information to reassure me (us all, in the end) we were being taken good care of.  From there onwards, I no longer felt that I needed to go to the Transfer Desk to inquire any longer. Word started spreading pretty quick and before we all knew it we were all enjoying a refreshment waiting for the next flight to arrive. And it surely did! 35 minutes ahead of the scheduled time we were told! Once again, that distress, uncomfortable situation of not knowing what was happening, which is usually the feeling one has when travelling, was transformed into excellent customer service and all of that thanks though a delightful exchange of tweets, not just with the folks behind @Iberia, but also a couple of other folks (Aviation enthusiasts for that matter, who were tuning in on how the plane got diverted for no apparent reason), and also my own social network(s) who all kept me entertaining sharing glimpses of what was happening to them while they interacted with me to confirm whether I was ok and being taken care of, which I was.  Yes, I can imagine! I am sure you may all be thinking this success story is an easy one. I mean, so easy to keep your customers informed about what’s happening, right? Specially, while they are on the move… Well, the thing is that it’s not happening as often as it should! Like I have mentioned above, I travel quite a bit throughout the whole year and this was the first time any airline tuned in on to their social channels (Twitter, in this case), to go the extra mile and help their customers get comfort after a rather interesting incident which turned itself into just another anecdote, which is essentially what happened after we got the information we needed. Now, imagine this whole scenario without having social technologies helping out. Imagine the chaos of several dozens of people piling up, complaining about their own rights, about having good information on what’s happening, about their vouches for refreshments while the wait ensured, etc. etc. Yes, I am sure it’s not hard to imagine. It would have been a complete chaos. Mayhem unleashed. And yet, a couple of exchanges with @Iberia through Twitter and we are all good. Yes, just that, 2 or 3 exchanges in Twitter and we are back in business! Needless to say that this success story, just like it did for Movistar a little while ago and that I have blogged about over here, can only mean something, something that we all seem to take for granted, but that, time and time again, it’s incredibly difficult to gain and enjoy for much longer nowadays as we have all become rather disenchanted: customer loyalty and employee engagement. Because you know, happy and engaged employees surely help cultivate happy customers. Each and every time. Indeed, thanks to that helpful exchange on Twitter, one gets to comprehend how the future of work is social, how Social Business is all about people to people business and how customers don’t interact with brands to get their problems addressed and fixed and their needs met. Customers talk to people, people who take ownership of their customers’ problems and whom, within a matter of minutes, ensure that problem has been taken care of and a proper resolution is on the way, depending on the context, obviously. Essentially, no matter what people out there may well say, that’s what customers care about. Perhaps not so much about engaging with those brands per se, but more talk to people to have their problems solved, so that they can move on. And since that’s just what has happened to me that can only mean one thing: my new favourite airline out there to do business with is … @Iberia. Just another business that has embarked already on that fascinating journey to become a successful socially integrated enterprise. In short, another business that, finally, shows and demonstrates fully, by walking the talk with these social technologies, how to care about their own customers: From people to people solving their problems by making them their own, while finding a solution in a timely manner. That, folks, is what a Social Business is all about! And, I do realise that this may well be just an isolated occurrence, so we will have to wait and see about that! But, for now, once again, Iberia is showing everyone the way… It’s now up to us to follow suit. [ I already have, by the way. They just landed themselves a new, happy AND loyal customer ]

I worked with a company that created aviation training and my transition to software technical training was met with several challenges. For one thing initially I did NOT understand the products by just reading up ILT and documentation. We started with conversion courses that put me into the comfort zone. Converting ILT to WBT was the perfect thing for someone like me with no prior experience in the use of such technical and complicated software products.The products were based on SOA and had concepts, (as deep as the Java language) to be understood in order to be used; finally there was the implementation part, the so-called production environment, where the customer implements the product in his organization, which the ID cannot see or imagine!The next course we got into got us chewing up every bit of our left over nails and wondering where we could run and hide. This was a newly acquired company that had a great product but no available documentation or training! And that was just the beginning of another whole journey of a course development cycle, as our SME was in another country from a 3rd party company. The company that was acquired had outsourced all of the work to this company and most of their expert team within the company were laid off or had left! This is where I began to realize how product knowledge becomes critical to your success in a product company irrespective of the role you play. The company looks to make everyone product literate so that it helps do our tasks with greater insight.The SME RealityIn time, I realized that being part of a software products company was one of the most challenging things for an ID. Contrary to common belief that since I was part of the same company that creates the products, I should have greater access to SMEs, the reality was exactly the opposite. The product teams are so deeply involved in their project schedules that they would never commit to providing us with a single person as a SME! Moreover, the product was so big and complex that it would take more than one individual performing a specific role to be able to give you all the information about features and facets to the product. Whew!Dealing with the situationOver time I learned to deal with a situation like this and following here you will find only solutions, so I can conclude this post on a positive note! Let's start with what are all the things we need to do in order to be able to plan and execute such complex courses successfully. In this post, I will only focus on the gathering of information and their sources. I plan to write more posts on how to analyze and segment this information to be able to produce effective courses for such products.Accessing information typesThe first thing you need to do is to identify and get access to all the available types of information within such a setup. Here is a high-level list of such information.Documented Information- You need to have written information in the form of blogs, wikis, documentation, feature design documents, course/ILT material to start learning stuff.Product Trainings - Look out for and get enrolled to any relevant product trainings that get scheduled. Do check on whether it is a high-level functional training, giving the benefits of the product and its features, which will be useful to your job, or a deep dive session, which will be mostly irrelevant to you.Hands-on Product experience - You need to install the product or get access to an environment and be able to implement and use the features of the product from a task point of view, over just playing around with the features casually. Learn the product with a specific goal in mind like create a process to take a purchase order using the product, and get it running. This will not be easy and you will need to get guidance from someone here.Implementation information - You need to have scenarios/use cases of how the product is used in the customer's setup or the so-called production environment. You have to be able to visualize the setup at a production environment and how the customer will use the product.Value added information - You need to have information about the real-time problems faced by the customers while implementing the products (remember all software products are never bug free and their real-time performance can only be assessed in production)That looks like a short list with just few high-level points, but believe me getting all this to get your course out is undoubtedly a herculean task, given that you also need to do your usual ID work, of audience analysis, task analysis (which I will cover in later posts) over and above all this. That's one of the reasons I decided to start blogging as it helps me to get thinking on a way to work these things out.Identifying your sources of informationGiven the challenges to getting these different information types, you need to identify the sources of such information. Well who else but multiple persons playing different roles on the product within the organization can provide such information? Let's identify the roles:The Software Engineer/DeveloperA great source of technical information to understand the product features and how to work with them. Ask them all you want to know about the product architecture, how components work with each other, where to find certain options/features etc. They also understand conceptual information a great deal, so leverage on it!Words of caution- They usually always know 'how' to do things but not necessarily 'why' you do things 'that' way and not any other way.- Sometimes due to the way the team is organized and time constraints, certain developers would only know some of the features/aspects and not all. So you need to find the right persons for your course.- They also may have no/limited knowledge on how the product is used in the real-time or in production.- They have little or no knowledge about how important a product/feature is to the audience and a particular role.The Quality Assurance engineerA great resource to ask about how the product installs, what environment it uses, what are the bugs/problems with the product currently. Ask them questions about concepts, test cases, what works what doesn't and why. They are also a good source of conceptual information and would be familiar with the product architecture and how it integrates with different components.Word of caution - Similar limitations to the development/engineering teams.Both Dev and QA folks are usually high on technical product knowledge and the workings of the internals of the product, rather than the implementation and functional perspective.Product ManagersThey are great resources for customer information, customer profiles, product positioning, correct terms to use in your courses and documentation, and how to present the product to the audience. Remember that product companies often use training and documentation as a means to subtly market the product and make it look more attractive.These are the people you should be asking the ‘why’ questions. For example: Why do we need this feature? How else can this task be accomplished or is this the only way?They can also point you to the right resources, collaterals, product demos to customers, etc. They have a good understanding of the functional working of the products and their integration with other products.You can ask them about how a customer uses the product, what features they use more often, use cases/scenarios, common problems etc. so that you can prioritize your content and improve relevance of the material.Word of caution- Do not expect them to know the internals and the workings of the product features to the same level of Dev/QA folks. The Dev/QA guys are the techies and only they can get you such information.Consultants and Professional ServicesThese folks are usually the implementation guys who go to the customer and help them install and implement the product. They also have a subtle marketing role associated to their portfolio. Their role is a post marketing strategy that serves as a benefit to the customer for implementing the product successfully, but also comes at a price.Though consultants and Professional Services vary in terms of the level of their expertise on the product, Professional Services being quite superior, these people are the right ones to give you implementation related information, best practices, do's and don't, tips and tricks etc. They usually know and understand all facets of the product related to the implementation. They may also be able to give you a greater insight into the workings of the product with other products/third-part software/plug-ins etc. These are also the right people to ask the ‘why’ question to.Word of caution- They may not know the product internals but understand the functional and implementation perspectives very well. Another downside is that you almost never get access to these guys, as they would always be onsite! You may try connecting to them through email.Product SupportThese guys take the calls for the customers who have paid for support on the product and help them resolve issues post implementation. This can be compared to a maintenance support role, where the customer using your product may have problems issues, questions, complaints, etc. The kind of information these guys would be able to give would be product bugs, common problems faced, troubleshooting information.Word of caution- Same as consulting/professional services.Note that Consulting/Professional Services and Support roles may not be distinct in all organizations as their structure may vary. You may need to identify folks by the roles they play and decide which category they fall into in my list above.Experienced Technical Writers/Trainers/InstructorsThese people are good resources because they learn the product as a result of their job and experience. They also often have hands on knowledge of working on the products. They are good people to consult on prioritizing the information you have, segmenting it, organizing and structuring it. There you go you have more help!Word of caution- Do not treat these peoples knowledge on the product as final. Use the previous resources for that.Wrapping upI just realize how huge this post has become, given that i don't get enough time to blog more often, I tried to package a lot into one blog post here.So to conclude on the above,- Gathering information in software product setups usually comes from multiple sources and never from a single SME.- People give you information based on their exposure to the product and their experiences. You need to filter out the right information by studying your audience and the tasks they will do using the product.- The above information types and sources may vary depending on company organization and their way of functioning. Several times, due to policies etc you may or may not have access to certain kinds of information.It is also important to ask the right people the right questions based on their roles, else it would seem like harassing them to give information on a domain that is not part of their key job role. So respect that and choose the right way to do this. Finally, make an effort to work your way through by making the right contacts, building a rapport with the right people and getting what you need. A good and professional personal rapport can add a whole new dimension to getting information! Remember good and effective communication can get you places…

As you may have seen from my recent live tweeting from over the last couple of days, I am returning back home from Zurich, Switzerland, one of my favourite European cities, after having presented at, and attended, the excellent Joint Alumni Conference 2012 event on what I think has been one of the most inspiring events that I have attended in a while. More than anything else, because it’s been a rather eye-opening experience for yours truly with regards to where we are with the adoption of social software and that social business transformation that a bunch of us have been advocating for for a few years now. I know that most people out there reading this article would not believe it, but those of you who may be thinking that we are done with the job and are ready to move along into the next thing could not have been more wrong! Ladies and gentlemen, Social Business is just getting started! And it’s a good time for us all, social computing evangelists and enthusiasts, to get out of our lovely, some times desired / needed, 2.0 echo chamber(s) and comfort zones and get to experience the business world in full force, because it’s completely different than what we think it is. There is still a lot of work to be done and we have only just scratched the surface. Roll up your sleeves, because we are not done here just yet. By far!  Yes, indeed, that has been the main ah-ha moment and massive wake-up call that I have been having while attending and presenting at JAC 2012. My fellow colleague, and good friend, Paivi Raty, invited me to participate on this event to talk about the topic of "The Future of Work", in general. To talk not only about the subject of Social Business and its impact in the corporate world, but also to talk about general trends of what’s happening with the traditional concept of both work and the workplace, with knowledge workers and the various generations, with mobility, with innovation, with leadership, etc. etc. As with all of my recent public speaking, I didn’t make use of any slide-ware to deliver the dissertation, but I did record it and those folks who may be interested in listening to it can download the .mp3 audio from this location (You may want to turn up the volume a bit since it came out a bit too soft!) I must confess that for a couple of months before the conference event took place I was a bit apprehensive, as well as incredibly excited for the opportunity, of course, more than anything else, because, if I recall correctly, it was the very first non-technical conference event that I participated in for a long long time, never mind related to Social Business, and I wasn’t really sure whether I was going to fit the profile or not, but since they say that in order to keep improving one self, one has got to throw one-self into the lions and leave that comfort zone I accepted the invitation and decided to go for it. And now that I am, finally, home, while reflecting about what I learned, it was a good decision. A very good one, actually.  It helped me understand how both the IT and the Business worlds are living separated lives in two bubbles that don’t talk to each other, necessarily. It helped me understand how that lack of communication between IT and the Business is not going to be much more sustainable in the current times we live in. It helped me understand as well how if IT would listen to the Business on the many various different challenges, problems AND opportunities it faces and if the Business would try to understand how IT could help address the vast majority of those, we would ALL be in a much much better position. It, finally, helped me understand how we need to start building a much more cohesive ecosystem where we would be combining both business and IT as part of the same equation: as ONE single entity, facing the same challenges, but also the very same opportunities. And I am just not talking about the dichotomy we see inside companies between the needs and wants of the business and the prerequisites and requirements from IT. I’m talking more about the fact of how the IT industry needs to start leaving its own comfort zone and start mingling further along with the rest of the industries, because, right now, there seems to be a huge disconnect between the two. In numerous occasions, while engaging in various different conversations at the event, talking with business leaders about their own firms, their strategies, their many challenges, etc. etc. I couldn’t just help thinking how for a good number of them technology could have made a huge difference in helping address them and find a solution for them. Yet, because both worlds don’t talk to each other, they both keep missing out from one another and therefore from these wonderful opportunities to keep innovating by making a difference. It needs to stop. And soon! Just as much as something else that I witnessed while at the event that I thought was rather remarkable: the huge disconnect between the IT / Business world and the world of Academia. I am hoping that I would be able to get hold of the presentations that I attended from a couple of professors from various universities who shared their insights and research on some really fascinating topics, because not only were they incredibly inspiring and rather resourceful, but they highlighted a bunch of really mind-blowing research that’s been done on how the current role of Leadership needs to change and adapt to face a brave new world. Covering both natural, born, networked leaders, to executives reaching all the way to the top. Incredibly inspirational research as well on how we need to shift gears on how we are viewing professional development in the corporate world, moving away from that extra focus on weaknesses of your knowledge workers into just focusing on their strengths to help them excel and achieve more at what they are already good at! Yes, the well known positive psychology and positive leadership. Lee Newman‘s on this topic was just brilliant! Like I said, lots of really good insights that I took away with me on a wide range of topics: Leadership, Healthcare, Finance, Sustanability, etc. etc. and that have made me realise I need to make a much more conscious decision from now onwards to start attending more business related events rather than just technology driven ones.  Specially, in the area of social business and social networking for business. I just felt that I kept missing the business part for far too long! It may well seem like our job is done, like I said above, specially, those folks who may have been heavily involved with driving such social business transformation at their own organisations, but I am starting to think that’s no longer enough. The ecosystem, yes, that one I blogged about a while ago, needs to GROW and fast! Stagnation is perhaps the worst thing that can happen to any kind of movement. If it doesn’t find a way to develop new trends of thought, if it doesn’t evolve, if it doesn’t continue to challenge the status quo of the corporate world in general, we are not going anywhere. We need plenty more cross-breeding. We all know that the business environment needs to change, but I am starting to strongly believe that it needs to change with a purpose: not just that one of aiming at sustainable, and profitable growth for everyone, not just a few, but also how it is going to reflect into our societies, where we are all starting to sense how the business needs to come closer to our society in general, in order to provide us all with an opportunity to strive for a better world, not just for us, and our children, but for many future generations to come! For far too long the corporate world has been totally disengaged with taking ownership and responsibility for how it can help societies flourish and boom in a sustainable and resourceful manner. It’s just been far too focused on amassing huge profits, power and greed for the benefit of just a few, while destroying the resources, and the planet, for that matter!, we all live in. And if there is anything that I am starting to strongly believe in is how Social Business can help glue both the corporate world into our societies to become ONE. That single one entity that each and everyone of us, humans, continue to build, nurture and cultivate over the course of time. More than anything else with the growing urge for businesses to drive societies into becoming much more sustainable, profitable, relevant, purposeful, educated, meaningful, etc. and for societies to help businesses re-find a new purpose where that power and greed that I mentioned above both stop being the main key drivers. Essentially, what Don Tapscott brilliantly stated at his recent TED Talk: Business Can’t Succeed in a World That’s Failing. There is probably a whole lot more that I could talk about from what I learned about this event, but perhaps, instead of doing just that I will stop for now, thinking that several reoccurring themes will pop up again in upcoming blog posts over time, I am sure. But, for now then, if you would want to learn some more about what the event was like you could have a look into this .PDF file that I have created with all of the live tweeting I did during the course of the day and perhaps witness, a bit more in detail, why it’s probably a good time now for both the IT and the Business worlds to come together, one step closer, to help us all realise that business and societal transformation that we all know we need to go through, but that we keep postponing time and time again hoping it will fix itself on its own at some point. It won’t. The clock is ticking and we are running out of time. If you ever thought that social business was all done and dealt with, think again please, my fellow social computing evangelists. We are just getting started! And we better begin to hang out there a bit more to keep spreading the message, which is, I guess, what true social business evangelists need to be up to nowadays, specially, outside our very own comfort zones. Don’t you think?   Luis Suarez Live Tweeting Highlights from #jac12 Event, Zurich, September 2012 from Luis Suarez Exciting times, indeed! Time now, for me though, to prepare for the next business trip that will take me, over the next two weeks, to Apeldoorn, The Netherlands, Brighton, UK, and, finally, Montpellier, France. But more about that business trip in upcoming blog posts … 

You can start planning the design of your course once you have the requisite information. You can decide what is 'sufficient' based on some of the following points:1. You have information about your audience profiles.2. You have the business problem that needs to be solved.3. You have the product available for research.Once you have answers to the above, you can start making your course/curriculum plan. Though you might have heard these terms before, I will attempt to define them from a perspective that is more generic.Curriculum: A curriculum is a set of courses that are logically put together in order to provide a complete training solution for a single product. For example, you may have a single curriculum for an entire product, like a curriculum for learning how to use Adobe Photoshop CS4.Course: A high-level tangible task that a learner needs to accomplish in order to use a single or multiple features a product. Again this would depend on the complexity of the feature/s. So we can divide our curriculum to contain both basic and advanced courses.For example, our Adobe Photoshop CS4 curriculum may contain the following courses:1. Adobe Photoshop Basics2. Using Adobe Photoshop to Edit Bitmap Graphics3. Adobe Photoshop Advanced Concepts4. Creating Special Effects Using Adobe Photoshop5. Automating Tasks Using Adobe PhotoshopWhat have we done so far?- Identified the curriculum and what it aims at achieving- Based on the goal of the curriculum, we came up with a list of courses which are essentially task basedNow let’s get on with the rest of the task. Our goal is to create a curriculum and define the courses that would enable certain audience profiles to perform their activities effectively using the tool Adobe Photoshop. Here are the next steps.Identify your audienceIn order to design your curriculum, you need to know the roles your audience play. For example, let’s consider the following different users of Adobe Photoshop:1. Visual/Graphic Designer2. Photographer3. Usability engineer/GUI specialistDesign your objectivesThe next step is to define your course objectives. You can start with defining your terminal objective which you will further break down to the level of enabling objectives. The terminal objective is the high level objective that your course aims at achieving. When you analyze your terminal objective your break it down to the constituent tasks that enable the achievement of these objectives. These are your enabling objectives.Thus task analysis is a top down model that enables you to drill down from a course level to the level of identifying the lessons or modules or even the topics, that will constitute your course. It is a drill-down cycle, where you can continue this process till you have the most simplified unit, which could be a single task that the learner can learn to execute in one go.So let’s take a single course out of our list above and analyze the objectives.Course Name: Adobe Photoshop BasicsTerminal Objective: To familiarize the student with the basic concepts and tools available in Adobe Photoshop.Enabling Objectives:By the end of this course, the student should be:1. Familiar with the basic concepts of Adobe Photoshop2. Familiar with the menus and tools provided by Adobe Photoshop3. Able to use the user interface of Adobe Photoshop effectivelyNow the following enabling objectives each could be converted to a lesson:1. Basic Concepts of Adobe Photoshop2. Tools and Menus of Adobe Photoshop3. Using the Adobe Photoshop User InterfaceYou can use this method and continue to drill down based on the need. Now we’re almost done.Delivering your courseFollowing this, you can plan your course delivery method. Decide what will suit your audience better. Whether they would prefer to have online courses or instructor-led or blended. Typically it makes sense to deliver simpler and more conceptual courses online, but keep the advanced task oriented ones for an instructor-led course. This does not mean that you cannot make effective complex online courses, as you can come up with various strategies to make the courses engaging as well as effective. Scenarios and use cases are most effective for technical product training.Here are some sample curriculum and course design templates.Dr. Tony Karrer's blog post on Course and Courseware Fading - The Future of learning gives a more futuristic point of view to this model of traditional courseware.

The language for technical courses should be fairly simple, straightforward and formal, as the content is most often action or task oriented. A few general guidelines to write for such content are:Don't use irrelevant jargon to decorate your conversation. Doing such things will not help engage the learner, but distract his focus from the objective. Instead use short but relevant scenarios and examples that help the learner relate to their job. Relevance is a great attention grabber. For example: As an administrator, you are required to assign permissions to various users based on their job roles. Look up the master list of users, and assign the users to their roles using the User Administration tab.Always start the instruction step of a procedure giving the location of the object on which an action needs to be performed. For example: In the Volume Control dialog box, select the Advanced button.Always give the result of the action at the end of the step soon after the instruction. For example the result of Step 2 would be, The Advanced Controls for Volume Control dialog box opens.Use third person when it comes to technical documentation, but you could selectively use the second person. When it comes to online courses, try and keep a conversational undertone with a conscious effort to keep the seriousness of the topic. This would change if you are creating a story based learning course built around a real time scenario.Follow your style guide, but keep in mind that when you write for online learning you need to bring emphasis to certain words using styles. Certain times style guides do not address the needs of online learning courses. For example: In the Volume Control dialog box, select the Advanced button.Avoid using pronouns often in sentences when you are trying to indicate an action. For example: The sentence, Look up the master list of users, and assign them to their roles using the User Administration tab, is confusing over, Look up the master list of users, and assign the users to their roles using the User Administration tab.Use contractions where they help make your sentences more concise, as unnecessarily long sentences can also be distracting.Avoid using the gerund form of verbs unless absolutely necessary. For example: Use Run the setup file over Running the setup file. Always keep these guidelines in mind without forgetting that you don't want to sound like a robot and you need to do everything that will help your audience learn complex technical topics better .

It’s been a bit over two weeks since the last blog post I put together over here, where I was celebrating "The Joy of Business Travelling", and just as I got back from my next business trip, that, this time around, took me to Apeldoorn, Amsterdam, Brighton and Montpellier, I couldn’t help thinking that the sentiment behind that original entry is now even more accurate than ever! So much so that this time around I decided to keep quiet  on the blogging front on purpose and, instead, enjoy and get the most out of the face to face conversations I have been participating in with a wide range of Social Business evangelists and Social Collaboration enthusiasts, amongst several other people. And what a couple of weeks that have gone through so far! My goodness!  My head is still spinning along, but I suppose now that I’m back at home, it’s time to pick things up again and keep up with the blogging mojo. And what a better resume than talking a little bit about one of the main conversations I have been having in the last few weeks: Has Social Business matured enough compared to, say, two to three years ago? Where are we? Have we made any progress? What’s the state of Social Business today? Is our job now done and dealt with and perhaps time to move on? While most people would think either way, that is, either direction, I tend to think we are somewhere in between. And here is why…  There was a time when a business decided to embark on that fascinating and truly empowering Social Business journey that the conversation would usually start with something along these lines: "Yes, I want to have a Facebook for the Enterprise (running behind the firewall) and I want it yesterday!", or, my favourite one: "What’s the ROI of Social Media? Show me the money, please, or stop bothering me with all of this social nonsense". You know how it went; we, social computing evangelists, used to spend most of our time, energy, effort and hard work trying to set the right stage of how things may well get off to a good start. Perhaps you wouldn’t need to have a Facebook like solution in the first place, perhaps instead of focusing on the low hanging fruit of measuring the means to a goal, you should focus instead on that goal itself and how to improve your overall business performance, and so forth. You know the gist. I am sure we are all just too familiar with it. That used to be our day to day battle horse. And still is, perhaps, in some parts of the larger business world. However, the conversation is changing. And it’s changing for the better, in my opinion. More than anything else, because apart from the long awaited promise of a better, more sustainable, healthy growth driven business world, it’s also starting to demonstrate the maturity of the industry and the quality level of the interactions themselves. Yes, we may still be suffering from a too heavy technology focus (Mostly due to our eternal tech fetishism that we have been having for decades), but the reality is that Social Business is finally way underway to enter the next level of maturity. At least, if I judge from the recent sets of conversations on the topic that I have been having both online and offline. Take, for instance, the subject of Facebook, and how for a good number of years a bunch of us have been using Facebook as that easy way to convey across the power of networks, as that new model of conducting business, because everyone could relate to it. You know, it’s 1 billion users, after all. Well, that’s certainly changing and the current sentiment towards Facebook itself is inclining itself more towards acknowledging the huge damage it’s caused all along, more than the various benefits, on the conversation on becoming a successful social business, that it’s no longer pretty. Take a look into this superb blog post that my good friend Megan Murray, the one and only, has put together a little while ago under the rather thought provoking title "Why Facebook Is The Worst Thing That Ever Happened to Social Media". Both the article and the excellent commentary are precious in helping set the stage of why we are, finally, breaking free from the Facebook copycat yoke and we are not coming back! Lucky enough, businesses, in general, have finally understood as well that they don’t need to have an exact copy to mimic Facebook’s behaviours behind the firewall. This Social Business journey is something bigger, something major, a huge business transformation of how work gets done. And, in most cases, people are realising they no longer need Facebook as a helping hand to deliver those messages. It’s down back into a culture shift, a new mindset, about inspiring a new wave of working habits where people become more open, public and transparent. Where trust, co-ownership and co-responsibility, along with engagement are key traits that would keep inspiring and driving that social business transformation and, finally, it’s happening at a time where we are looking away from Facebook. It’s no longer there for most of us. At least, in a business context…  And then, further along on that Social Business maturity journey, we bump into the other theme that has also shown a huge transformation on its own to the point where I bet a couple of years ago it was the unthinkable and yet, fast forward to today, it’s happening all over the place, that is, that shift away from just questioning the business value of Social Business by asking the sempiternal "What’s the ROI of Social Media?" and progressing into the How do we do this? Indeed, moving away from the What? and Why? and diving straight through into the How do we make it happen? What business problems do we want to address and fix accordingly? How do we keep improving our overall business performance? How can we keep delighting our customers, our very own employees with that so-called engagement mantra? How do we, eventually, become more effective and productive at what we do by working smarter, not necessarily harder?  My good friend, and fellow colleague, Peter Bejlerrup, shared with me one slide a little while ago that describes quite nicely such transition and transformation, specially, with one of the main challenge groups when the first initial round of conversations about Social Networking for Business kick in: Executive Management. Here it is, so you can have a look:    Indeed! Is that something that folks out there could relate to already? Do you reckon? I am not sure what you would think, but if I have to judge by the good number of conversations that I have been having in several of the business trips I have done this year, the conversation has matured, it’s evolved, it’s moved beyond the point of trying to come up, time and time again, with whatever the excuse, instead of exploring the full potential that it can unleash into transforming business as we know it today; it’s moved on from stopping by questioning everything into figuring out how it’s going to improve overall performance, increasing customer satisfaction, both employee and customer engagement, talent management, knowledge transfer, innovation, the bottom line, open collaboration, and whatever else your main business objective may well be. In short, the conversation has shifted from that technology focus into a business focus, what it should have had from the beginning, but that we are finally playing good catch-up with it.  This is exactly the main same argument that other folks, like David Armano, have addressed just recently on where we are at the moment and how we may have witnessed the starting point of something bigger, much bigger. In a recent article under the heading "Technology Will Only Solve 1/3 of Your Social Business Problem" he quotes brilliantly:  "The dirty little secret in the technology world is that technology, even really good technology looks automated but in reality requires people to make it work" Spot on! In fact, David develops further what he calls The Three P’s of Social Business, which for those of us who have been doing Knowledge Management for a bit over a decade now, would sound far too familiar: Platforms (Technology), Process and People, as shown and illustrated on this graphic: And this is when I am really excited about witnessing this giant leap forward, or, better said, giant leap backwards, because we are, once again, having that unique opportunity to get things right this time around, since we didn’t have much success with KM back then and it could mean that things may work out all right this time. I am very hopeful we will. In fact, I will be able to confirm that maturity level of Social Business moving away from just a technology focus next week when, for the first time ever, I will have the chance to attend the Knowledge Management event of events, KM World 2012, where, if you look into the programme itself, you will see more topics, conversations, dissertations, presentations, speeches, workshops and what not, around the world of Social than ever! To me, it’ll be a confirmation of whether both of my passions, KM and Social Business, would collide and destroy each other, or, instead, whether they would be capable of co-existing, learning from one another, build further up on each other’s strengths and eventually shake the business world into becoming what KM attempted once trying over 18 years ago. The stakes are high, for sure, but so is the passion and excitement about both worlds finally reuniting to strike for a common goal: improve our businesses’ overall performance through meaningful, purposeful, engaged, sustainable and responsible growth. The one that matters. The one that will make this world a better place to live for everyone. Not just a few.

BackgroundI recently read this post by Tony Karrer discussing the development of what we traditionally call pure courseware versus the creation of Reference Hybrids Shift in eLearning from Pure Courseware towards Reference Hybrids. Though posted in 2006, this post seems very relevant even today and I feel like I have a lot to say about the probable solution to the discussion that this course brought out.Citing past experienceIn one of my previous organization, our management was looking at buying a rapid elearning tool that would make the creation of courses faster and easier. Now thats the impression the general audience has about rapid elearning tools, and is also the obvious reason why they think that buying the tool will solve all their training problems. Exactly what the vendors would love you to believe when they sell their tool. But, I think it's time we start being more realistic and start looking at what it is that we really want, and not conclude on using rapid elearning tools without understanding the essence of what they are equipped to deliver. Another post by Tony - What is Rapid elearning? really brings out the reality and I suggest reading this to get a better understanding of rapid elearning.So there after me and my team, who believed that a custom made course design could be used to deliver the same business goals managed to convince our management over time, that we could deliver what the tool promised and much better, as we already had the basic framework for a custom course template (in HTML, JavaScript and Flash) in place by then. Now that was a successful transaction there as our instructional designers were happy that they would continue have the opportunity to design interesting strategies that would enable achievement of the training objectives and also engage the learner. I do not mean to say the available rapid elearning tools cannot create engaging courses but there are issues when you do get down to a lot of specifics. Janet Clarey's post clarifies this point better .What's the point I'm making here?Now let's get to the point without digressing from the main topics that were discussed in Tony's posts. The bottomline is that we need to look at training from a more holistic point of view than just arguing about what is phased out and what isn't. The point is, that we started making traditional courseware at one time and it worked pretty well. But when we evaluated the courses, overtime we found that there were several gaps in spite of all the instructional design strategies that went into creating the courses. Then we started asking questions like why is this not working, what did we miss out on, is this kind of courseware not working? And then boom, it strikes us that we need to change the way we do training. Maybe the 'traditional' way is not working because learners just want on-the-job, just-in-time and on-demand training. We should be able to give learners what they want, when they want it, and in whichever format they want it. Then came the age where we started believing that mobile learning was the next big thing. But please let me know how effective mobile learning has been? I am really curious as to me, it seemed completely unrealistic to believe that people could learn how to do their job from a tiny screen on a handheld device! Maybe this is because I am a digital immigrant species and not a digital native. Please fill me in here.What's the solution?Now, let's get specific and categorize all the random thoughts that I listed above. We're talking about 'traditional' courseware versus reference hybrids like just-in-time and just enough learning. My answer to this though is to remove the 'versus' part and start looking at an entire training solution.First let's set our goal. We have an audience that needs training on a particular topic. You need to study your audience profiles to be able to come to a consensus about what modes you need to deliver the training.Example Scenario 1: If you are designing training for teens to learn about using a specific 'cool' gizmo, you would be missing the basic point if you think of making formal training online/computer based training for this. This kind of a situation demands what you call just enough and just in time.Solution:So we can provide the following information:Give a quick primer on the gadget and its capabilities.List the features that enable this.Cover the procedures to use the features.Then link up this information to the feature of the gadget only when the learner demands it. The reason for this being, that most probably this person is a gadget freak and will figure it out if the product is intuitive enough.Now what if the product is complex to use? Well then you need to put more effort and probably make the information more easily available at the right time, but certainly the 'coolness' of the gadget and how well it sells to these dudes primarily depends on how easy it is to use.Example Scenario 2: You need to make training to enable learners to be able to use a particular software application on their job. Your audience is technical and don't need to learn the basics of using such applications. They need to know what does your application do to make their job easy.Solution:Here goes...Plan a training curriculum which would be a combination of:Formal classroom or full fledged online training supported by relevant interactivitiesHands on exercises using scenarios that would be relevant to their roleFormal documentation including context sensitive helpNow this is serious training and your customer will buy and continue to use your product provided you provide a complete solution package. This is a scenario where I don't think only reference hybrids would work. They can only be a part of the whole solution but not sufficient to provide enough training to a customer using your product in their enterprise where even the customer's business depends on the performance and usability of your product.Let's get real, this is a reality and thus I choose to differ in saying that we cannot choose one over the other and say there is a shift in the strategy. I would like to hear what everyone has to say here...