Blogs are all about conversation. I just saw a post that explained to readers how to leave a comment, and I thought that might be a good idea to have that post as well and it would be a nice addition to the content in my First Time Visitor's Guide. Please, if you have thoughts or questions on one of my posts leave a comment. It shows me that you care. That it inspired a thought or a question. I learn a tremendous amount from the comments on my blog. So, please, please, leave a comment. Have I begged enough? Comment Policy I welcome comments on this blog — suggestions, affirmations, critiques, questions. I ask that your comments: are constructive and not personal or hurtful are related to the content of the post include personal connections to what the post is about. A comment which does not add to the conversation, runs of on an inappropriate tangent, or kills the conversation may be edited, moved, or deleted. I try to respond to comments fairly quickly. In some cases, I wait a little while so that other people can weigh in. How to Leave a Comment To leave a comment, just click on the "Post a Comment" link near the bottom of each post. It will take you to a page that looks something like: You can provide various bits of information so we know who you are. I'd recommend not doing Anonymous comments unless that's really important. It's pretty easy to just give a name/URL combination. This is pretty simple, so please leave a comment. eLearning Technology Subscribe to the Best of eLearning Learning for updates from this blog and other eLearning blogs.

View and download the webinar slides. View the webinar recording.     Looking for video based training for your employees? Sign-up for a free trial here ! We provide our clients with thousands of video and eLearning courses. Whether you’re targeting leadership development, new manager and supervisor training, project management, communication, computer skills, compliance or safety, we pretty much have something for everyone. So, try out some courses…have your employees try out some courses. Just fill out the short form to the right and start a free 30-day, no risk, no obligation trial! Check out the BizLibrary Collection! --> -->

Just a quick note to announce that the crew at Brandon Hall have joined up as eLearning Calendar Curators. Janet Clarey just announced it today on Workplace Learning Today. The bottom line to this is that we will all be working together to create a calendar of Free Online eLearning Events.If you want to subscribe to be notified of upcoming events, go subscribe to the Best of from eLearning Learning.If you want to help by becoming a calendar curator, please Leave A Comment.If you see events that we are missing, please Leave A Comment. eLearning Technology Subscribe to the Best of eLearning Learning for updates from this blog and other eLearning blogs.

View and download the webinar slides. View the webinar recording. Looking for online training for your employees? Sign-up for a free trial here ! We provide our clients with thousands of video and eLearning courses. Whether you’re targeting leadership development, new manager and supervisor training, project management, communication, computer skills, compliance or safety, we pretty much have something for everyone. So, try out some courses…have your employees try out some courses. Just fill out the short form to the right and start a free 30-day, no risk, no obligation trial! Check out the BizLibrary Collection! --> -->

George Siemens, Jay Cross and Tony Karrer are pleased to announce our third annual free online conference: LearnTrends 2009 - Agenda and Speakers The Corporate Learning Trends and Innovations Conference November 17-19, 2009 | Online | Free The theme/focus this year is on Convergence in Workplace Learning. We will bring together people who look at different aspects of learning and knowledge work to understand better what's going on in those areas and how we should be thinking about this holistically. I'm particularly looking forward to discussions of how: Enterprise 2.0 Communities and Networks Knowledge Management Corporate Libraries Talent Management come together to form a cohesive picture. What should L&D managers be doing relative to these related efforts? How does this impact our eLearning Strategy? Heck just discussing eLearning Strategy should be fun with the right people in the room. As always, this conference is about getting together interesting people who bring a slightly different perspective and have meaningful conversation around innovation in workplace learning. We typically get more than a thousand people signed up and at least a hundred in each session. And every year I learn a lot. To register, you must first register on the LearnTrends community and then register on the Conference Event Page. Lots of details of speakers will follow.The conference will also include the LearnTrends Innovation Awards 2009. Please see that post for details. Please Help We very much welcome broad participation in the event. Anything you can do to help get the word out would be appreciated. Some ideas: Post about it on your blog. Add it to your sidebar. Put a comment in a discussion group or LinkedIn group. Tweet about it. Send an email to your work colleagues to let them know. Wow, I ran out of ideas quick. What else can people do to get the word out?One suggestion I just received - let's use the hashtag: #learntrends to refer to things related to the group and the conference. Oh and here are some graphics you can use along with your announcement. eLearning Technology Subscribe to the Best of eLearning Learning for updates from this blog and other eLearning blogs.

George Siemens, Jay Cross and Tony Karrer are pleased to announce the first ever LearnTrends 2009 Innovation Awards. These awards are designed to recognize the products, projects and companies that represent interesting innovations in use of technology for Corporate / Workplace Learning and Performance. Winners will be announced and will be asked to do short presentations during the conference.Deadline for submission is: October 30.You can see details of what we are asking for in the form below.To apply for an award, please fill out the: Submission Form If you have questions, feel free to Leave a Comment or drop me an email: akarrer@techempower.com Please Help We very much want to get nominations from all corners. If you can help us spread the word about these awards, that would be greatly appreciated. Think something is innovative - please let them know about this. Post about this on your blog. Tweet about it. Any help would be appreciated. Here are some graphics you can use: eLearning Technology Subscribe to the Best of eLearning Learning for updates from this blog and other eLearning blogs.

Harold Jarche had a great post If learning was free that raises questions that need to be continually asked by learning and development around the issues of Free. In the Business of Learning, I compared publishing and learning. Big publishers are having problems as the cost of distribution goes towards zero and as that brings along a ton of competition from the low end. Learning as a publisher of courses, content, etc. is facing the same thing. There's a lot of other content out there. How differentiated is the content that we produce from all of the Free Learning that's otherwise available? Is our content really that much better? The typical response of large publishers is that their content is better. And yes, Britannica, New York Times, etc. that have paid, professional editors, writers are better quality than alternatives for the specific content that they cover. But all major publications have limitations in that because of the cost, they have to go after large audiences and they need to stay at higher level topics. They can't afford to go into depth in niche areas because the costs would be too high for the return. Harold is drawing a parallel with Advertising. When you produce advertising for massive distribution on network TV, you can afford to spend a lot of time and money to produce the ads. However, when you begin to go after small, niche audiences, then low cost production becomes important. Harold tells us: Anybody see a parallel here with instructional systems design or curriculum development? These processes take time and money and once the investment is made, nobody wants to do it again. Web media can be created quickly and, if designed in an open manner, can change according to the needs of learners and facilitators. For instance, we developed the Work Literacy site in about a week and at no cost. It was added to and modified by the participants. Everyone was an unpaid volunteer. Total cost: zero. What Harold is raising is that there are going to be lots of free learning that is going to compete with our the more costly paid learning that learning organizations will continue to produce. Free learning can come from groups like Work Literacy that provided a large online learning experience for free, or from LearnTrends that produces amazing content like LearnTrends 2009 for free. It also comes from all the subject matter experts both inside and outside your organization that are continually producing content. Free Learning may not be as high a quality - although I would claim that LearnTrends and WorkLiteracy filled niches. And sure if we spend time and money to produce courseware, it will be better than the stuff created by a subject matter expert with a rapid elearning tool. And there will continue to be times when the payback for better quality content will justify the cost. But … The reality is that focusing our attention on publishing higher quality content - being at the high-end of materials - will mean that we are Marginalized. And let's not sugar coat this.So rather than passing out clubs, we really need to embrace Free Learning: Pull free learning together and deliver it into the organization. Help people find free learning that you've not yet aggregated. Teach people new learning skills. Leverage the actions that go along with free learning to add value back into the organization. Embrace, facilitate, support, connect, leverage free learning. Please help - I'm looking right now for examples of organizations using open course content (e.g., OCW, OER) as part of their internal learning. If you know of examples, please contact me.Free Learning ResourcesI took a quick look on eLearning Learning to see what it has to say around Free. It was interesting to see all the different kinds of finds there are by visiting related pages like:Free ToolsFree WebinarsFree ResourcesFree CoursesFree CoursewareAnd one item that comes to the top a lot is ZaidLearn's post University Learning - OCW - OER - Free - worth checking out. eLearning Technology Subscribe to the Best of eLearning Learning for updates from this blog and other eLearning blogs.

View and download the webinar slides. View the webinar recording.   Looking for online training for your new managers and supervisors? Sign-up for a free trial here ! We provide our clients with thousands of video and eLearning courses. Whether you’re targeting leadership development, new manager and supervisor training, project management, communication, computer skills, compliance or safety, we pretty much have something for everyone. So, try out some courses…have your employees try out some courses. Just fill out the short form to the right and start a free 30-day, no risk, no obligation trial! Check out the BizLibrary Collection! --> -->

I received a question that I've heard in many forms and I'd like to ask help on this. I am looking for some advice about whether or not my choice to use Dreamweaver with learning extensions (CourseBuilder + Learning Site) is a good idea or not.  I understand that Dreamweaver is not SCORM compliant (or at least it wasn't). The reason why I thought it would be good to use, is because I work for a small company, and I am the only Technical Writer / eLearning Developer, so needed something simple and straightforward to use, but that could also offer me flexibility to design my own modules.  My modules are going to take a previously written training guide and turn it into an online interactive format.  It will need to have Forward & Back buttons, interactive exercises, tests & quizzes integration.  We don't have an LMS at this point, but we may need to track it in the future. Also, Dreamweaver is relatively cheap, so I could make a good case to my managers to buy it for me.  There's also good help material available online, and there is a good book written by Michael Doyle "Dreamweaver MX e-Learning Toolkit" (although it was written in 2003). I do use Camtasia to create my training videos, but have heard that Adobe Captivate is a good product as well. Dreamweaver appears harder to use than other eLearning tools I have seen out there, but I appreciate its flexibility. So, first, let's admit that many people in our industry are pretty much solo developers of eLearning.  They have to do everything on their own.  And they also are not building that much eLearning day-to-day, so it's pretty common to have to go through figuring out what tool to use.  And because they are solo, there's no time to spend evaluating a bunch of different tools.  Yes, I could download the free trial version and try it out, but that would take a fair bit of time.  At the same time, if I don't make a good choice, I could be suffering a lot of unnecessary pain.  Sound familiar? So can you help me (and the reader) out? Decision Process? If you were this person, how would you go about selecting the tool to use?  Given there are a lot of Rapid eLearning Tools and Software Simulation Tools out there, how do you choose which tools to consider?  How would you decide which to download and trial?  Anything else you would do to make this decision? In terms of the specific tools here, any suggestions?   Dreamweaver?  Camtasia?  Adobe Captivate?  Articulate?  What others jump to mind? Thanks, in advance. eLearning Technology Subscribe to the Best of eLearning Learning for updates from this blog and other eLearning blogs.

Interesting post by Vic Uzumeri where he responds to a question that I asked him.  I'm going to also address the broader concept he raises about Work Networking.  But in this post, I want to consider: We developed CoSolvent because we couldn’t find a reliable way move rich media (typically video) to and from the individual subject matter experts (SMEs) and managers among our various corporate training clients. Living near Hollywood and the many different production companies and studios, I've talked to and worked on several projects that were digital asset management systems.  This includes working on the software the runs sites like Nasa Images.  So, I'm pretty familiar with the issues of digital asset management (DAM) and having to move large and manage large media assets. Vic provides the following list of reasons that companies use his digital asset management software for eLearning projects: The companies that employ our target audience strongly discourage employees from putting company assets on ‘public’ sites. Workers often didn’t want their co-workers to see their materials until they had a chance to approve them. People often work with collections of related, but dissimilar materials.  We wanted to accommodate all types of video as input. What's interesting is that my impression is that most corporations don't have that much of an issue with digital asset management and that these concerns are there, but not enough of an issue for people to jump on these solutions.  Am I wrong on that?  Is there a need and desire for software or software as a service that provides digital asset management as part of eLearning projects?  Does the LCMS already provide this for you?  Does your enterprise content management solution provide this for you? I do know of a couple of large corporations that do a good job of cataloging and organizing the digital assets - images, digital videos, documents.  They have hundreds of hours of courses.  And there developers are geographically dispersed.  Even still, most of these companies use relatively simple organization methods and the issues are getting developers to contribute assets, catalog them and then provide effective search and browsing.  In one case, they use a fairly rich enterprise content management (ECM) solution (a corporate-wide solution). By the way, my impression is also that the digital asset management that comes with LCMS solutions is pretty limited.  Theoretically, this provides this same ability to organize digital assets so they can be shared by developers.  In practice, once things scale up, it becomes pretty hard to keep it organized and effectively find the assets you want. I have heard a common lament that large files cause a little bit of an issue in that many IT departments limit network storage because of the need to provide robust back-ups and retention.  But using a storage as a service model with these large assets outside the firewall doesn't make much sense in that there's also often a restriction on network traffic. The workflow and access restrictions are there.  You don't want people seeing your stuff that's still in development.  There's some course content that should not be accessible outside a particular group.  Again, most of this gets handled by standard network folders and permission structures. Oh, and let's not forget that a lot of companies are Using Sharepoint for the exact purpose of organizing the efforts and assets of learning development. Maybe it's because I have not run into these situations, but my impression is that there's not that much need for digital asset management solutions around eLearning and that you are probably already served by your LCMS, enterprise content management, or SharePoint if it is an issue. Please share your experience and knowledge around this. eLearning Technology Subscribe to the Best of eLearning Learning for updates from this blog and other eLearning blogs.