Keep your eye on the big picture with these 5 questions.Post from: The eLearning Coach5 Smart Questions Instructional Designers Should Ask

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Online learning is becoming big business in the education sector. Increasing fees coupled with demand by learners for more flexible study options is creating a rapidly growing market for online courses. As can be expected most of the response to this rising demand is from institutions outside the traditional university ‘bricks’ model. And one of the most innovative of these in the UK is the Open University (OU). The Open University has since its creation in 1969 used a distance learning model based initially on printed resources (think big binders arriving in the post) but also supported by educational videos delivered via the BBC. Most of us Baby Boomers will have at some time watched an OU programme on Astrophysics or Petroleum Geology in the small hours. More recently the OU has gone online and today most of its students log into their courses via the Moodle VLE. The OU does online learning in a really big way supporting over 250,000 students at any one time. Demonstrating their commitment to online learning the OU appointed an ex Microsoft Education Products Group employee as their Vice Chancellor in 2009. His name is Martin Bean and I recently came across this presentation which he delivered at the Association of Learning Technology (ALT) Conference in 2009. It’s over 50 minutes long but it’s worth watching for the mix of insights provided by an educator that has also spent a lot of time working at the heart of the tech industry. Did you know?The OU Business School is the largest provider of MBAs in the UK, producing more graduates than all the rest of the business schools put together.

There's a more efficient and effective way to learn than study-restudy.Post from: The eLearning CoachDebunking The Study, Study, Study Myth

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Break out of the rectangular world of the computer display.Post from: The eLearning CoachHow To Create Visual Interest With Circular Photos: Case Study

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Since I have been exploring the differences between e-learning and online learning I have been using the term conventional e-learning to describe the packaged SCORM course with a built-in assessment. Conventional e-learning has come a long way in the last 10 years and there are now some excellent people developing some excellent courses but this excellence comes at a price. This infographic shows why this sort of e-learning isn’t cheap. In the UK you are probably looking at a cost of between £10k and £15k per hour of e-learning that has had the full team treatment (2012).

  I was going through my old blog on Typepad tonight and came across some interesting posts from 2005/2006 on knowledge management (KM). I’m writing an article on KM and Social Learning but before I post that I thought this post from November 2005 is a nice summary of where we were with KM back in 2005. Posted originally on ‘A Compound of Alchymie’ on 25 November 2005 There was a neat little piece by Carol Lewis on KM in The Times Career Supplement on 17th November. It went along the following lines (italics are my comments): Big Brained Bosses It’s not just the grey matter of those at the top that is of interest. Knowledge management (KM) is about managing the knowledge we all possess to further the aims of our firms. The bit about futhering the aims of our firms is insightful - and begs the question what’s really in it for us - I mean us busy knowledge worker bees? Sounds suspiciously like thought control to me "Knowledge management is unfortunately a misleading term - knowledge resides in people’s heads and managing it is not really possible or desirable," says the NHS (www.nelh.nks.uk). No point doing KM then. But the NHS seems incapable of taking it’s own medicine (it runs numerous NHS KM projects). Maybe it sought a second opinion? Actually a brief look at the NELH website shows that, like most of us, the NHS uses IM and KM pretty interchangeably. So what the heck is it? It is to "know what you know" and profit from it, according to www.brint.com. There’s that profit thing again. Is it the organisation that profits or the individual? That’s a tough one. Is knowledge the same as information or data? This is a key dispute in KM - that all too often it is data or information management masquerading as KM. See TD Wilson’s the ‘nonsense of knowledge management’. That old chestnut. Has it ever been properly resolved? TD Wilson’s paper tests the KM thing to breaking point. Does anyone use it? According to Bain & Co (www.bain.com), KM has had a chequered career. Long heralded as an essential management tool in the information age, it has grown in popularity. Bain’s Management Tools 2005 survey says that 54% of companies use it - compared with 28% in 1996 - but that satisfaction with KM is not as high as with other management tools such as benchmarking or business process re-engineering. I’m guessing they mean 54% of big companies, but then maybe KM only really ‘works’ in big companies? Fad or fashion? There are high hopes that new generation of KM systems will deliver greater satisfaction. Systems that automatically analyse e-mails and documents for useful content and associations are being developed by a variety of companies. There are privacy issues but if they can be overcome KM could finally live up to the hype. So the saviour is ICT? But isn’t that a solution to our information management problems? Maybe we need a thought control device after all - with a thought control drug developed by those clever KM people in the NHS. Then KM might really take flight.

If your learners are rebelling against long and boring eLearning, read the Axonify review.Post from: The eLearning CoachAxonify Review: An Effective Model For Online Learning