There has been fantastic comments around Learning Management System Easy of Use.  This post was based on an inquiry that I received from someone who manages their current LMS implementation that is based on Moodle with some customization.  They do customer training around products that the company sells.  They are doing a combination of virtual classroom training (via WebEx) and self-paced eLearning.  And the person who asked the question tells me: My managers have asked me to find alternatives to Moodle that are more user friendly and that are easier to update and manage. Well two days later I’m told: You will get a kick out of this though.  My supervisors told me to research LMS possibilities and narrow it down it down to about 3-5 and report back in a week and present the pros and cons of the top ones I found.  And it’s not like I have all day each day to work this either, I have little pockets of time between now and then as normally I am on the phone all day training customers.  Sure, 15 hours of Internet research will be enough for me to narrow down all the many possibilities to 3-5 (sarcasm). Now, I hate to say that this is all too common a situation.  Of course, this strikes me as completely unreasonable, especially given the complexity of what’s involve in LMS Selection.  Research that I cited in LMS Selection Time suggested that the time for the steps on average was: Gather and Specify Requirements - 5 months Research Vendors Requirements - 4 months Meet with Vendors - 2 months With several people involved.  Of course, these were enterprise implementations with many different business units and training organizations involved.  But I still believe that trying to do an LMS selection in a week (actually in 15 hours) is bound to run you into some of the Learning Management Systems (LMS) Gotchas that I’ve talked about before. The real question here is probably more about how you work with your management to get them to understand the challenge, how you might approach it, the risks of not doing a more thorough evaluation. Still are there good ways that you can short-circuit the LMS Selection Process to reduce the length of time?   Also, obviously, you can’t come back and say 11 months, when they were thinking 1 week.  And I’m not suggesting it’s actually 11 months, but it’s still more than one week.  So, how do you effectively negotiate to a level of depth that will make sense in this kind of situation? eLearning Technology Subscribe to the Best of eLearning Learning for updates from this blog and other eLearning blogs.

Ken Williams has been teaching the Vedic system of math for more than thirty years. What is Vedic mathematics? It’s a unified approach to solving math equations that is more creative and flexible than traditional methods, which have a tendency to scare off students. In Ken’s experience, once people learn to recognize Vedic patterns, anybody can enjoy math. Though Vedic mathematics is an ancient discipline, dating from 1200 BCE in India, Ken’s approach to teaching is decidedly modern. To create his Vedic Mathematics course on Versal, Ken simply imported his existing instructional videos, organized them into lessons, and added quizzes to help students achieve mastery. Over 2,000 students have taken Ken’s Vedic Math course on Versal. "Nothing else out there quite like what you’ve done," he says. More recently, Ken recommended Versal to several colleagues. Ken also created a follow-on course on polynomial equations on Versal.     Want to multiply large numbers in your head without breaking a sweat? Check out Ken Williams’ Vedic Mathematics course in the Versal’s catalog. You can also learn more about Vedic math by visiting Ken’s website, vedicmaths.org. And look out for more courses by Ken in the new year!

Most of my experience has been in adult learning and performance.  Recently I’ve been working with a startup that provides content and tools to teens and is sold through high schools.  The first course is fairly well defined and is based on a couple of books/workbooks that have been used offline. What’s been interesting to me is that it’s been hard to find just the right person to help them with designing interactive exercises and writing content in order to bring this to life online.  Actually, the first interesting question is: What do you call this role? When we’ve called it either an instructional designer or writer we often find ourselves talking to people who have a hard time envisioning the online interactions.  I’m currently calling it an interactive writer, but I’m sure there’s a common term for this in the industry. The second challenge has been that we want to find someone who can write for today’s teen audience.  The style and voice of the course needs to balance being fresh and hip but not losing sight of the importance of the topic.  We’ve talked with writers who have incredible experience in publishing for teens (magazines, books) but they don’t get the instructional and interaction aspects. So the second question is: How do you find a really good instructional designer / interactive writer who has experience with teen audiences? In the past, I’ve always been successful finding good interactive writers because I can use techniques as described in LinkedIn for Finding Expertise and the rest of my LinkedIn Guide for Knowledge Workers.  In most of those cases, I can search for instructional design + eLearning + <terms> where the terms are something about the specifics of the audience, industry, topic, etc.  It doesn’t always work, but generally is pretty good. In this case, that has not been effective.  I’m sure it’s partly an issue of not knowing the right terms to use in a search. Of course, all of this is made harder in that it’s a startup with a limited budget, so they are generally looking for people who can work efficiently (read inexpensively).  And then there’s the whole availability issue.  Still this is a common question, so I’m sure I can learn a lot about how to do this better. I’m hoping you can help me on several fronts: What are the right terms to describe the role and would work for search? Where should I be searching? How would you attack this problem? If you know someone, certainly please connect me. eLearning Technology Subscribe to the Best of eLearning Learning for updates from this blog and other eLearning blogs.

Attention teachers who make math cool: here’s a bundle sure to engage even the most number-phobic of students. These 4 Versal gadgets enable you to create interactive math problem sets that demonstrate core concepts and draw out the young Sir Albert Newton in any student. First, the new Generic embed gadget supports incredible GeoGebra math animations. Show your students how math concepts from multiplication to calculus work with visual, interactive simulations that run right in your course. The Desmos gadget offers a fully interactive graphing calculator at your fingertips. Add interactive graphs to a lesson or let your students graph equations themselves.   The Expression gadget solves the frustrating experience of formatting mathematical notation with typical text editors. No more wonky workarounds with screenshots and subscripts. The Expression gadget uses ASCII Math syntax which is both easy to input and read.   Finally, the Whiteboard gadget enables you to draw anything, including graphs, equations and shapes right within your course. Though drawings may look a bit squiggly, the Whiteboard gadget is quick on the draw and what teachers don’t appreciate saving time? You can also upload an image to draw over and record your drawing for students to playback anytime.   Looking for a math gadget you don’t see above? Let us know, we’d love to help create one!

I’ve been facilitating the Big Question on ASTD’s Learning Circuit’s blog since sometime in 2006.  Last month’s big question was Instruction in a Information Snacking Culture?  The question was all about how we consume and work with information: People seem to be spending less time going through information in depth and less willing to spend time on information. We seem to be snacking on information, not consuming it in big chunks. In Stop Reading - Skim Dive Skim and that seems to be how people consume blog posts much more these days. I've also noticed a trend towards more twitter mentions of blog posts, but less deep commenting behavior much less thoughtful blog responses. One of the comments was really telling: Reading this blog has been an example of snacking for me. I am very interested in the post and thoughts it provokes and read down the comments (skimmed) but when it came to links to other blogs I did not use them. And since many of the responses provided (in comments and via blog posts) suggested that snacking is just fine, it seems hypocritical to say - "Well that kind of defeats a key purpose of the Big Question."  But it does (and I am).  The point is for us to have an exchange of ideas around a topic.  But if no one reads the responses or exchanges ideas, then what’s the point? I personally still feel like I get value.  If there are some meaningful responses to this month’s question Open Content in Workplace Learning?, I will likely learn a lot.  Please still do respond to it.  And if you don’t know about Open Content - take this as an opportunity to learn. Still I have to wonder if we need to revisit the approach and value proposition.  Maybe we need to look at other ways of doing this? Thoughts, suggestions? eLearning Technology Subscribe to the Best of eLearning Learning for updates from this blog and other eLearning blogs.

From the get-go, we’ve aspired to make online learning not only accessible to all teachers and highly interactive, but open. Meaning that the lessons and courses aren’t just available via Versal.com, but are embeddable in virtually any website or blog (and are downloadable as a SCORM package). Today, we’re continuing along this path with two developments designed to offer new ways to make Versals portable. The first is the official beta launch of our Versal Chrome App. We’ve been testing the app in classrooms around the U.S. over the past two months, and the feedback has been inspiring. Whether you’re using Chromebooks or the Chrome browser in the classroom, it’s now exceptionally easy to share Versal lessons and assignments directly with students in their everyday learning environment. Start here to learn more and give it a try. The second, the launch of Learning Tools Interoperability™ (LTI) integration, is not just a technical milestone for our internal team but a development that is among the most requested by Versal teachers. Across the world, districts, schools and teachers rely on Learning Management Systems (LMSs) to assign projects and homework, grade student work, and manage their progress. While some LMSs offer teachers the ability to upload PDFs, documents and videos for students, Versal’s rich authoring platform offers teachers the ability to create dynamic and interactive lessons plus curate the best learning content on the Web - all in one canvas. For teachers experimenting with project-based learning and blended learning, Versal is ideal. With LTI integration, teachers may now easily embed a Versal assignment directly within their LMS. This will free up students to complete assignments without ever leaving the application and offer teachers direct insight into a student’s progress. We’re currently working with many of the most popular LMS platforms to customize our integration for even more seamless congruency between the apps. Stay tuned for details. In the meantime, if you’d like to integrate your Versal creation into your own LMS, check out this quick Versal course with specific tips for Schoology, Edmodo, Blackboard and Canvas.   We’re excited to hear what you think. Please share your feedback by emailing support@versal.com, or post ideas to our new idea bank. And if you’re attending the annual CES show this week, please say hello! Versal CEO Gregor Freund will be speaking at the CES/TransformingEDU on a panel titled "Meet the Pioneers" at 1:50 p.m. Pacific on January 8th at the Venetian, Level 2, Bellini 2006. Our team is also available for private meetings through Thursday. Email allison@versal.com for scheduling.

We’re honored to share some very exciting news: Discovery Education today announced the launch of five newly created interactive training courses - powered by Versal. In the press release, our CEO Gregor Freund summed up our enthusiasm: "If you browse through all of the educational content and services provided to schools by Discovery Education, it is of the highest quality and very engaging. Educators around the world rely on Discovery Education to provide engaging content for their students and professional development that helps them effectively integrate digital content into the classroom and grow their instructional practice. We are very honored to be selected as their in-house publishing platform." Robert Onsi, Senior Vice President at Discovery Education said: "We at Discovery Education are always looking for new ways to support educators’ efforts to seamlessly integrate our services into classroom instruction. After thoroughly reviewing many publishing platforms, we were proud to select Versal as the publishing platform partner for these interactive sessions. Through these easy to build courses, educators can quickly and easily learn about the powerful content at their fingertips." Designed to guide educators through the dynamic features of Discovery Education’s digital resources, the courses include video overviews and step-by-step guides created exclusively by members of Discovery Education’s professional learning community, the Discovery Educator Network (DEN). Read more in the press release here.

Background / Requirements I’m just starting consulting with a company that has a single course (might eventually be broken into a few different course) that needs to be delivered to an audience of 600-1000 partners as part of a larger certification process.  Thus, they need to be able to report back out who’s completed the courses.  Courses will be authored using a Rapid Authoring Tool.  This may grow to be a little bit more than this, but likely not much. So, that’s a pretty simple set of LMS requirements.  It worries me just a bit that I might be missing something important that will turn into a Learning Management Systems (LMS) Selection Gotcha? Fast Selection And while this wasn’t the basis for the post One Week to Select an LMS - No Way, it’s a situation where I’m not seeing the need to spend a lot of time going into a detailed selection process. But it’s almost like my background with and knowledge of all the different LMS products (see LMS Satisfaction Features and Barriers, Low Cost Learning Management Systems, Rapid Learning Management Systems and Open Source Learning Management Systems) feels like it’s hurting me in this task.  Current Thinking So, without a lot of thought, here’s what I’m currently thinking and I hope folks will weigh in… I was a little surprised when I realized how much some of the mainstream SaaS LMS products (Articulate Online, Learn.com, etc.) would cost.  Something like $500/mo.  And we wouldn’t really be using much of the functionality. We are definitely considering doing something like a hosted Moodle solution.  Pricing is very attractive on some of these.  However, the interface and user interaction doesn’t quite align with what we want.  Still , it’s definitely in the running and other than interface, I’m not sure what I’d get with other LMS solutions that I don’t get with Moodle.  I’m also looking at whether we could just put the content on one of the social learning hubs such as LearnHub, Coggno, odijoo which seem to offer a way to put this up for a very attractive price (Free).  We have the advantage that the content here is not sensitive, so if someone else took it, more power to them.  I don’t have direct experience with these systems and worry a bit about the risk associated with doing it this way.  Thoughts?  Anyone have much experience using these social learning hubs for that kind of purpose? What else should I consider? eLearning Technology Subscribe to the Best of eLearning Learning for updates from this blog and other eLearning blogs.

If you follow Versal closely, you know that we’re very enthusiastic about the promise of blended learning - the concept of mixing online and classroom experiences. Instructional dynamics are changing, and teachers are actively seeking new tools to connect with today’s "app generation" as they enter the classroom. At the beginning of 2014, we surveyed over 400 teachers to better understand their perspectives on teaching with technology. Last month, we had an idea: let’s run the same survey again and see how things have changed. We were struck by several of the findings and trends. So we created an infographic illustrating about how teachers are using technology to adapt to this new generation of students. (See the infographic here and more detailed Teaching Digital Natives Data.) It’s clear that the use of technology in the classroom is on the rise. We’re not surprised - we started seeing a significant increase in teachers signing up for Versal late last summer. Our latest survey validated what we’re seeing in the market: technologies that empower teachers are rapidly gaining popularity. One encouraging finding? Teacher awareness of flipped classrooms rose from 58 to 73 percent. The fact that nearly three-quarters of all teachers surveyed are aware of the flipped classroom model indicates that online learning is now something teachers think about as part of their planning. This is supported by the growing number of teachers interested in creating online courses and lessons - up 8% year-over-year. We believe these changes are just the tip of the iceberg. Versal has the potential to accelerate this shift with easy-to-use gadgets that make it dead simple to create engaging, interactive curriculum. By empowering teachers to engage students in new and exciting ways, technology will continue to transform the way teachers teach and students learn. Blended learning will become the norm and we hope to be at the center of that transformation. Take a look at the infographic and let us know what you think. More specifically, how do these findings align with your experiences and what you hear from colleagues in the teacher lounge? Card

As part of the Big Question this month Open Content in Workplace Learning?, I’m exploring whether Open Content can be used by for-profit companies.  And, since Open Content comes in under the Creative Commons license structure.  Actually, I’m curious if Open Content ever is not Creative Commons?  It’s by definition Open, but theoretically you could choose a different open license. I’ve just never seen it. In any case, to understand the use of Open Content, it’s important to understand Creative Commons licensing. Creative Commons Licensing Terms Creative Commons licensing terms.  All CC licenses start with: Attribution (CC-BY) - Allows others to copy, distribute, display and perform a copyrighted work - and derivative works based upon it - but only if they give credit. All CC licenses contain this condition. Licenses may have one or more of the following permissions or restrictions: Non-Commercial (NC) - Allows copy, distribute, display and perform a work - and derivative works based upon it - but for non-commercial purposes only. Share Alike (SA) - Allows others to distribute derivative works but only only under the same conditions as the original license. No Derivative Works (ND) - Allows copy, distribute, display, and perform only verbatim copies of the work, but not make derivative works based on it. These get combined into one of six licenses: Attribution (CC-BY) Attribution Share Alike (CC-BY-SA) Attribution No Derivatives (CC-BY-ND) Attribution Non-Commercial (CC-BY-NC) Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike (CC-BY-NC-SA) Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) Licenses on Open Content I took a bit of a sampling of various sources of content found via the OER Commons and from the OCW Consortium: SERC - CC-BY-NC-SA Learn NC - CC-BY-NC-SA MIT OpenCourseWare - CC-BY-NC-SA Utah State OpenCourseWare - CC-BY-NC-SA, but some specific courses such as Intro to Instructional Design has a CC-BY-SA Johns Hopkins OCW - CC-BY-NC-SA Notre Dame - CC-BY-NC-SA The Open University - CC-BY-NC-SA There’s a definite pattern here.  Most of the OCW content appears to come under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Licence.  There were a few exceptions such as Stanford Engineering Everywhere with a CC-BY license. But, I think this really turns into a question of the implications of CC-BY-NC-SA. Implications of Noncommercial Use Creative Commons noncommercial licenses disallow "commercial use" - i.e., they preclude the use: … in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation. From what I’ve read, it’s intentionally fuzzy what this exactly means and I am by no means an expert (or a lawyer) around this stuff. Creative Commons themselves conducted a study to understand commonly held interpretation of this definition - which is itself important from a practical standpoint. The study itself tells us that people generally consider the following unacceptable: Promotional use (advertising) Use makes money Perception is that greater scrutiny is required as you move from: Private or individual, Charitable or social good, Non-profit, For-profit In other words, generally use by an individual (i.e., self-study is considered okay).  If it’s for a charity, social good or non-profit, you are generally safe if you are not making direct revenue / donations from it. I interpret that putting up links as a means for employees to access the content themselves would generally be considered safe.  I would be curious if anyone disagrees with this.  Of course, you can always find a corporate attorney who doesn’t want to do that even, but you probably can’t access common websites from that company either. Here’s the tricky questions.  Maybe there are clear cut answers, I just don’t know what they are.  What if I want to use the course content or part of the course content to teach employees or partners behind the firewall.  Is that commercial use? A question from the study: "Work would be used by a for-profit company, but no money would be made" Definitely commercial - ~33% Can’t say - ~40% Definitely noncommercial - ~27% Shows that people are generally split on the question of whether the scenario I describe is considered commercial or noncommercial.  So it’s a bit of a gray area.  And likely it’s even fuzzier based on whether you are linking, copying, modifying, etc. Any thoughts on the practical answer here?  If I want to create eLearning for use by my employees, can I use CC-BY-NC content as part of it?  Under what conditions? Implications of Share Alike Share Alike has some interesting challenges in interpretation for this situation as well.  From the Creative Commons FAQ: If you are combining a work licensed under a ShareAlike license condition, you need to make sure that you are happy and able to license the resulting work under the same license conditions as the original work. This suggests that if you use ShareAlike licensed materials in a course for your employees, then the resulting work must be licensed the same way.  There’s a lot of gray around this as well.  First, likely the course is being provided only behind your firewall.  There’s nothing specifically that I can see that says you have to distribute the resulting work or make it widely available.  However, there is a clause that causes a bit of concern: You may not impose any effective technological measures on the Work that restrict the ability of a recipient of the Work from You to exercise the rights granted to that recipient under the terms of the License. Of course, the license would allow anyone with access to the work to distribute it themselves.  Thus, an employee could theoretically make a copy and distribute it.  Doubtful that an employee would do this, but since it would be consistent with the license, I’m not sure you could pursue. In practice, I’m pretty sure you would want to approach the use of this content a bit differently.  If you are taking ShareAlike content and either using a subset or modifying it, you might just want to create a derivative work that is ShareAlike on its own.  It can be fully redistributed, and you wouldn’t care.  Then you can link to that work within your broader course. It’s somewhat a loose coupling of content, but it is consistent with the spirit of the ShareAlike license.  Create new, public works based on the original work.  Don’t put stuff in that new work that is specific to your organization that you don’t want shared.  That creates a new ShareAlike work.  And you can link to a public instance of that. If you think about it, having a large collection of these smaller chunks that could be used by employees probably could provide value to others. Question for Images and Other Content Of course this same question comes up about a whole lot of other content.  For example, Flickr provides access to images according to Creative Commons license.  See Flickr Creative Commons.  The images under the Attribution license obviously give you a fair bit of freedom to use in your eLearning.  How about those under Noncommercial?  Can you put one of those images inside your internal corporate training as long as you provide attribution? It’s really the same question as the noncommercial use as described above. ShareAlike would seem to be a bit problematic for images.  You are very likely using it as a copy inside the course.  Doesn’t that run you into the problem described above? Help Again, I’m by no means an expert on this stuff, nor an attorney.  But what would be good is to have some people who know more about this weigh in with help on how to proceed. I’m also curious to find out what corporate attorneys are deciding around this? eLearning Technology Subscribe to the Best of eLearning Learning for updates from this blog and other eLearning blogs.