Based on the recent Big Question - Learning Technology 2015 - I received an interesting question: "Tony, what do you think of environments like Second Life? Do you think these have a great future in the world of learning for adults?" This is a topic I’ve talked about a few times.  Probably before you begin to read my predictions, it’s worth looking at: Second Life Learning Videos where I’ve collected a few different examples of learning in Second Life.  You might also look at Second Life and Learning and Second Life as a Learning Tool. There was a great recent article (found via  Gary Woodill) - Where Have All the Avatars Gone?  The basic point of the article is that despite not hearing as much about Second Life and other virtual worlds, a lot is happening where you can’t see it.  A couple of points from the article: Over 2,000 global enterprises, 600 universities, 35 international governments, and several divisions of the U.S. federal government — including the Departments of State, Homeland Security, NOAA, NASA, Army, Navy and Air Force — now exploit Second Life technology to connect with stakeholders around the world, communicate complex ideas, train and collaborate. In Second Life, the Michelin Group, for example, has an "extremely successful complex training program and interactive simulations for training worldwide employees in Enterprise Architecture. My personal experience with Second Life is that there's something really compelling about conducting meetings and events in virtual worlds.  You really feel like you are more there.  I also think there are some incredible opportunities to use things like Second Life to create virtual learning experiences very much like the experience of visiting the Plymouth Plantation or Colonial Williamsburg - without travel or cost of the venue.  Forms of this are happening already. But I also think that the current technical hurdles and learning curve is putting a damper on adoption.  It’s a bit like video conferencing systems.  If it’s not as easy as picking up a phone, then you need something pretty compelling to make it worth the headache. So to answer the question directly: Virtual worlds offer the possibility of creating some incredible learning experiences, however, Current technical and learning curve adoption hurdles make it a niche technology, thus If I’m creating a new company, product, etc., I’m pretty skeptical about basing it on these technologies. What about by 2015 to go along with the big question? My belief is that true 3D virtual worlds like Second Life will remain a bit more of a niche.  But I think there’s something that will come in from the back door that could cause significant adoption by 2015. We’ve reached a tipping point for web conferencing where it’s equivalent too and often preferable to face-to-face (Learning from Others in the Room, Narrowing Gap between Face-to-Face and Online Presentations, New Presenter and Learner Skills and Methods). I’ve predicted for a few years (Ten Predictions for eLearning 2008) that we would see adoption by mainstream web conferencing / video conferencing tools of something I would call a 2.5D environment.  Give people an avatar or picture.  Allow something along the lines of conference seating and break out rooms with separate voice streams in each.  But I’ve yet to see this materialize.  I think this changes the adoption dynamic entirely. I’d love to hear your thoughts on where this is going and where we will really see adoption for the mainstream. eLearning Technology Subscribe to the Best of eLearning Learning for updates from this blog and other eLearning blogs.

Today we’re delighted to feature a guest post from Richard Byrne, author of the popular #edtech blog FreeTech4Teachers. Every year I talk with thousands of teachers at conferences all over the world. The question that I am asked most? "How do you learn about all of this?" The answer is rather simple, I subscribe to a lot of blogs. Over the years, the way that I subscribed to blogs has changed. At first I used email, then Google Reader, and now Feedly. But how you subscribe is not as important as how you share what you’re reading. If you’re following blogs and websites to discover information for your classroom, post stories in a place that makes them accessible to students. Teachers have plenty of options when it comes to sharing online resources with their students. First consider what you want your students to do with them. Diigo, Pinterest, and similar social bookmarking tools are fine if the goal is to just create lists of resources about a topic. For years I developed Diigo lists and invited my students to contribute too. As a condition of adding to the list, students had to write a short comment explaining the value of their suggested links. When I wanted to create a more robust conversation about an article or video, I would put in a blog post. The classroom blog post allowed students to write longer comments and allowed me to thread my comments in reply to each student. But today there are tools like Versal that combine the best of tools like Diigo with the best of blogging practices. With Versal you can build online courses that incorporate text documents, web articles, images, videos, maps, slideshows, and just about any other media that you find on the Internet. When you build a course in Versal, you build it lesson-by-lesson in an easy-to-follow outline. Ask students to comment as collaborators on the resources that you share or add a quiz on the resources you’ve posted in the course. When you incorporate a quiz into your lesson, you can require that students meet a minimum percentage in order to advance to the next lesson in your course. And if you already have an existing classroom blog or website, you can embed your entire Versal course directly into that blog. Today, the Internet affords us greater access to educational resources than ever before. Help students take advantage of those great resources by sharing and building discussions around them.  

I was asked what the biggest traffic sites are in eLearning that were not vendor specific sites. This was from a marketer trying to reach eLearning professionals. My quick answer was that Jane Hart’s site, eLearning Learning and The eLearning Guild would be among the top. But I really didn’t/don’t know the answer. I did promise I’d do some research and post what I found. I used Compete.com. It’s definitely not accurate as it way under reports traffic for eLearning Learning. However, after reading various sources that compared different traffic estimation tools, I was convinced that it was generally a decent indicator. Thanks to Harold Jarche and Susan Lewis (via twitter) and Cathy Moore and Dennis Wilen (via Facebook) with help on this. Cathy pointed me to questions about Alexa (Wikipedia article). Susan pointed out that none of this accounts for RSS subscription. Of course, it also doesn’t count email subscribers or twitter. So, yes … This is only rough estimating. Top Sites Using it, I plugged a whole bunch of different sites into it and produced the following graph of some of what I perceive to be the top sites. After doing this, I realized that eLearn Magazine don’t seem to have that much web traffic. In fact, according to Compete, eLearning Technology (this blog) and Stephen Downes’ Site come in higher that eLearn Magazine. Here’s a chart with those sources included: Of course, Stephen covers more than eLearning. And there are sites like ASTD that go well outside the world of eLearning. So to be clear, things I excluded: Vendor specific sites, e.g., Skillsoft Sites focused on broader topics like HR, Talent Management, Training, etc., e.g., ASTD (which has good traffic), CLO Media (which doesn’t seem to have good traffic volume) Sites that I can’t get accurate numbers separate from the base site. Learning Circuits is part of ASTD. Other Sites I tried but came out lower: Brandon Hall Learning Solutions Magazine Training Magazine Network TrainingIndustry.com ELearning! Magazine Masie.com It’s a little bit of a surprise to me some of the traffic numbers. Is this a surprise to you? What sites did I miss here? eLearning Technology Subscribe to the Best of eLearning Learning for updates from this blog and other eLearning blogs.

In honor of National Teacher Appreciation Week, we asked a few of our favorite teachers what they love about teaching. As the unsung heroes of our society, it’s only right that teachers receive recognition on one special day (at least!) for all of their incredible work.   What do you love about teaching? "In the eight years I have taught government to seniors, my experience has been different every year… In a good way! My students have amazed me with their personal growth, their evolving interest in their community and country, and their experiences after college." - Jennifer Hitchcock, Government Teacher at Westfield High School "I love it when I get a student to genuinely love science. Sometimes students feel that science just isn’t for them. But if you relate it their lives or relate it to their interests, all of a sudden they get it. Science is a part of everything that surrounds us." - Steven Iannuccilli, Biology Teacher at Xaviaer High School   What’s the funniest thing that happened in your classroom? "I am a woman of height. One day, in the middle of teaching I was standing with my ankles crossed. For no reason at all, I fell over. A student looked at me and said, straight-faced, ‘Tall people problems?'" - Jennifer Hitchcock, Government Teacher at Westfield High School "When a substitute teacher or other adults think you are a student in your own classroom." - Allison Gest, Science Teacher and Instructional Coach at Main Township High School   What’s exciting about teaching in 2015? "I find that teaching in 2015 has no boundaries. No longer are students confined to learning within a set of four walls. Now they can connect with others around the world and learn from cultures they could only read about before. The amount of information that is readily available to students is mind-boggling and readily available. If so inclined, students can learn at their own pace as opposed to being teacher-led as before. The world is now at their fingertips. The only limitation is imagination." - Deb DeJong, English Teacher at Oskaloosa Community Schools "The technology!! There are so many tools students and teachers can use to bring excitement and life into the classroom." - Allison Gest, Science Teacher and Instructional Coach at Main Township High School "The ability to use tech to reach my students in new platforms and rebrand their devices into learning tools where we learn from kids around the world and teach out to our community is pretty darn cool." - Jennifer Hitchcock, Government Teacher at Westfield High School   How is technology changing the way you interact with your students? "I find that students are more engaged when they are using technology. Because of this, I let students drive their learning. This means I spend less time lecturing and more time facilitating. It is amazing to watch them take control of their learning versus sitting back and being told what they should know." - Deb DeJong, English Teacher at Oskaloosa Community Schools  

This post is a new kind of thing for me. Dr. Joel Harband wrote most of this post and I worked with him on the focus, the content and a little bit of editing - actually I couldn't help myself and I edited this a lot. So this is really a combined effort at this point. As you know, Text-to-Speech is something that's very interesting to me and Joel knows a lot about it as CEO of Tuval Software Industries maker of Speech-Over Professional. This software adds text-to-speech voice narration to PowerPoint presentations and is used for training and eLearning at major corporations. Joel was nice enough to jump in and share his knowledge of applying text-to-speech technology to eLearning. Please let me know if this kind of things makes sense and maybe I'll do more of it. It certainly makes sense given all that's going on in my personal life. Text-to-Speech Poised for Rapid Growth in eLearning Text-to-speech (TTS) is now at the point where virtual classrooms were about 4 years ago when they reached a technological maturity where they were mainstream. It took a couple more years for me to say (in 2009) that virtual classrooms reached a tipping point. Text-to-speech has reached the point of technical maturity. As such, we are standing at the threshold of a technology shift in our industry: text-to-speech voices are set to replace professional voice talents for adding voice narration in e-learning presentations. Text-to-speech can create professional voice narration without any recording which provides significant advantages: keeps narrated presentations continuously up to date (it's too time consuming/expensive to rerecord human narration) faster development - streamlined workflow lower costs. It's being adopted today in major corporations, but it's still early in the adoption cycle. That said, at a developer’s conference in 2004, Bill Gates made the statement that that although speech technology was one of the most difficult areas, even partial advances can spawn successful applications. This is now the case for text-to-speech: it’s not yet perfect, but it is good enough for a whole class of applications, especially eLearning and training. The reason is that most people learn out of necessity and will accept a marginal reduction in naturalness as long as the speech is clear and intelligible. There's a lot going on behind the scenes to make text-to-speech work in eLearning. Like most major innovations it needs to be accompanied by a slew of minor supporting innovations that make it practical, easy to use and effective: modulating the voice with speed, pitch and emphasis, adding silent delays, adding subtitles, pronouncing difficult words and coordinating voice with visuals. Over the course of a few posts, we will attempt to bring readers up to speed on different aspects of this interesting and important subject. The focus of this post is around the quality of Text-to-Speech based on Natural Language processing. Text-to-speech Basics To understand how to think about text-to-speech voices and how they compare, it's important to have some background about what they are. Text-to-speech (TTS) is the automatic production of spoken speech from any text input. The quality criteria for Text-to-Speech Voices are pretty simple. They are: Naturalness Intelligibility Due to recent improvements in processing speed, speech recognition and synthesis, and the availability of large text and speech databases for modeling, text-to-speech systems now exist that meet both criteria to an amazing degree. A TTS voice is a computer program that has two major parts: a natural language processor (NLP) which reads the input text and translates it into a phonetic language and a digital signal processor (DSP) that converts the phonetic language into spoken speech. Each of these parts has a specific role and by understanding a bit more about what they do, you can better evaluate quality of the result. Natural Language Processor (NLP) and Quality The natural language processor is what knows the rules of English grammar and word formation (morphology). The natural language processor is able to determine the part of speech of each word in the text and thus to determine its pronunciation. More precisely, here's what the natural language processor does: Expands the abbreviations, etc to full text according to a dictionary. Determines all possible parts of speech for each word, according to its spelling (morphological analysis). Considers the words in context, which allows it to narrow down and determine the most probable part of speech of a word (contextual analysis). Translates the incoming text into a phonetic language, which specifies exactly how each word is to be pronounced (Letter-To-Sound (LTS) module). Assigns a "neutral" prosody based on division of the sentence into phrases. This will make more sense by going through examples. And this also provides a roadmap to test quality. We’ll compare the quality of three TTS voices: Mike - a voice provided by Microsoft in Windows XP (old style). Paul a voice by NeoSpeech - the voice used in Adobe Captivate. Heather a voice by Acapela Group. Actually, let me have them introduce themselves. Click on the link below to hear them: I'm Mike, an old style robotic voice provided by Microsoft in Windows XP. I'm Paul, a state of the art voice provided by NeoSpeech. I'm Heather, a state of the art voice provided by Acapela-Group. So, let's put these voices through their paces to see how they do. Actually, in this section, we are going to be testing the natural language processor and its ability to resolve ambiguities of parts of speech in the text. 1. Ambiguity in noun and verb "Present" can be a noun or a verb, depending on the context. Let’s see how the voices do with the sentence: "No time like the present to present this present to you." Mike Paul Heather Paul and Heather resolve this ambiguity with ease. Another example: "record" can be a noun or a verb: "Record the record in record time." Mike Paul Heather Again, Paul and Heather resolve this ambiguity with ease 2. Ambiguity in verb and adjective The word "separate" can be a verb or an adjective. "Separate the cards into separate piles" Mike Paul Heather Only Paul gets it right. 3. Word Emphasis (Prosody) Another type of ambiguity is word emphasis in a sentence: The intended meaning of a spoken sentence often depends on the word that is emphasized, as: "He reads well", "He reads well", He reads well". This is called prosody and is impossible to determine from plain text only. The voices try to achieve a "neutral" prosody that tries to cover all possible meanings. A better way is to use modulation tags to directly emphasize a word. We’ll discuss that in a later post. 4. Abbreviations Most voices are equipped to translate common abbreviations. The temperature was 30F, which is -1C. It weighed 2 kg, which is about 4.5 lb. Let's meet at 12:00 Mike Paul Heather Heather does the best job. 5. Technical Words Unless they are equipped with specialized dictionaries, TTS voices will occasionally fail to read technical words correctly. However they can be always be taught to say them correctly by using a phonetic language. Here are some examples. Each voice says the word twice: first by itself (incorrectly) and second after being taught (correctly). Deoxyribonuclease (dee-ok-si-rahy-boh-noo-klee-ace) Mike Paul Chymotrypsinogen (kahy-moh-trip-sin-uh-juh Mike Paul More Information http://tcts.fpms.ac.be/synthesis/introtts_old.html http://tcts.fpms.ac.be/synthesis/ eLearning Technology Subscribe to the Best of eLearning Learning for updates from this blog and other eLearning blogs.

As you probably know, eLearning Learning has been steadily growing and is now one of the top eLearning sites on the web.  I wanted to let you know about an exciting development for eLearning Learning that’s being announced this morning in the eLearning DevCon Keynote. Garin Hess and the team from Rapid Intake has stepped in to help me keep the site going both from an effort and financial standpoint.  I'm very happy to have Garin involved because I've known him for years and he's always done a good job of helping to build the larger eLearning community through conferences that you probably already know about: eLearning DevCon Bring Your Own Laptop Garin was really excited to support this broad community of bloggers.  We both believe that while this is a loose network, it provides an important and really valuable voice.  It's somewhat the whole reason I started eLearning Learning - many people in the world of eLearning miss the great stuff that is going on in blogs.  Of course, if you are reading this, that’s probably not you.  That said - I still believe that everyone should be Subscribed to Best of eLearning Learning. Otherwise you’ve been missing things like: Top 75 eLearning Posts - May 2010 Top 68 eLearning Posts from April - Hot Topics iPad Google Buzz Top 125 Workplace eLearning Posts of 2009 Hot Topics in eLearning for 2009 And even though I subscribe to most of the blogs that are part of eLearning Learning, I still use the Best Of to make sure I’ve not been missing really good content. By the way, if you want to know more about the site and/or see ways you could be involved, take a look at: Curator Editor Research Opportunities on eLearning Learning. Garin - thanks for stepping up to help! eLearning Technology Subscribe to the Best of eLearning Learning for updates from this blog and other eLearning blogs.

If you’re a teacher and a fan of Twitter chats like us, you probably participate in some of the more popular weekly chats, like #edchat and #edtechchat (and many others!). One of our favorites is #TTOG (Teachers Throwing Out Grades), hosted by teacher and education author Mark Barnes. Earlier this week, Mark asked everyone to comment on mastery learning, and we wanted to chime in. Many teachers use Versal to facilitate flipped classrooms, and we’re definitely intrigued by the "Flipped-Mastery" model (according to Wikipedia, a term coined in 2008 by Jon Bergmann and Aaron Sams that refers to mastery learning that uses technology to time-shift the individual instruction). Self-paced online learning is one of the most obvious ways to time-shift instruction. There are so many options available to teachers, from Khan Academy courses to YouTube videos and even blogs. All can conveniently serve as valuable supplemental content. And while not all students have internet access outside of the classroom, the gaps are closing and online learning is often a viable option. Still, flipping a classroom isn’t just about sharing links with students. Teachers are rarely just experts at instruction. They’re (almost always) subject-masters. This is why we get excited about the Flipped-Mastery model. We believe that combining the wisdom of the Web with a teacher’s own expertise, blending online and classroom experiences, and focusing on helping all students master the material is the future of education. We think the future is already underway. Next gen SaaS VLE (virtual learning environment) platforms like Versal are making it easy for teachers to create interactive online lessons to compliment the classroom experience. We see more and more teachers every day looking to experiment and implement online learning. What do you think? Are we nearing the tipping point for mastery learning, and will tech be the last small piece to push it over? Will the Flipped-Mastery model become more the norm? If you’re flipping or blending your class (or have tried it before), what worked, and what do you need to make it work better? Share your thoughts on Twitter (#TTOG) or in the comments below!  

Inc. Magazine published an article The Best Industries for Starting a Business In 2010.  Not sure what to make of most of the article, but they did include Exam Preparation and Tutoring as one of the top ten. Parents always want their kids to do better on tests. A large number of adults returning to school are also looking for an edge. Given the low barrier to entry, this field is competitive. But if you carve out the right niche, it could be lucrative. The industry, which includes tutoring in such fields such as special education, language, and music, grew about 7 percent last year. And it seems like there are lots of eLearning Startups that are taking aim at different aspects of the Business of Learning.  My 12 eLearning Predictions for 2009 included Increase in Consumer/Education Social Learning Solutions 2008 was an interesting year that saw a myriad of new start-ups offering content through interesting new avenues. Social learning solutions like social homework help provided by Cramster; CampusBug, Grockit, TutorVista, EduFire, English Cafe, and the list goes on and on. And it seems like Inc. is maybe just a little bit late as there are a bunch of startups going after online exam preparation and online tutoring.  Some eLearning startups rouhgly in this space: Knewton focuses on test preparation online using test experts to help students study. TutorJam offers online tutoring programs for students in K-12, AP classes, and college. Brightstorm focuses on helping students prepare for AP tests, as well as standardized tests. Sums Online provides a wide range of math activities to help at home learners. DreamBox Learning is an education start-up that provides math games for kids. This was recently acquired by Netflix founder Reed Hastings. ProProfs - SAT and certification quizzes. PrepMe - personalized prep for SAT, ACT, PSAT. Tutor.com - online tutoring. And there are a bunch more out there.  As Inc. tells us - low barrier to entry.  So we should expect lots more. eLearning Technology Subscribe to the Best of eLearning Learning for updates from this blog and other eLearning blogs.

It’s now significantly more convenient to add contributors to your course. So if you are interested in collaborating with colleagues or creating student-led projects, simply invite people. You may also now remove contributors from a course. While the core course creator hasn’t changed (don’t worry, your work is still beautiful), the interface where you manage everything is so much easier to use. As a bonus, there’s a few new features. NOTE: you may need to clear your browser cache to enter the new dashboard. If you don’t know how to do it, read this. It’s now significantly more convenient to add contributors to your course. So if you are interested in collaborating with colleagues or creating student-led projects, simply invite people. You may also now remove contributors from a course. We’ve also added robust new course list management features, including the ability to bulk-delete courses. If your dashboard is cluttered with some of your more experimental projects, it’s now easy to clean it up. The individual course manager now includes basic access statistics. This will give you insight into how many people have started your course in the past 7 days or month (we have much bigger plans for this in the future, stay tuned!). Let us know what you think in the comments, or send our team a note at support@versal.com. If you need help finding your way around, please visit our support center for more detailed instructions. Or, watch this short tutorial video: Special thanks to everyone who opted in to testing the new dashboard for the past few months. Your insights have been invaluable, and our team appreciates your support.  

My posts around the Beginning of Long Slow Death of Flash and my post from a CTO perspective that I Cannot Bet on Flash for new development stirred up quite a bit of response.  A lot of it said quite correctly that HTML5 is not there yet.  And that Flash provides things that you can’t do in HTML/JavaScript.  However, there are some pretty amazing things you can do without Flash. The bottom line is that none of the feedback I’ve received has convinced me that choosing Flash as a delivery option for a new product or project would be a good idea today, especially if I want it to play on mobile and live for 5 years. But then I received a great question via a comment: I am a Masters student enrolled in an Instructional Design course with Walden University. I am somewhat new to the field and this article intrigues me. Should I hold off on learning Flash... and focus more on learning HTML5? Or would it be best to learn both? I know a very little about Flash and made it a goal to learn more, but now I wonder. You input is greatly appreciated. What a great question and kudos to this student for being so on top of things to ask it! And it was somewhat the inspiration for this month’s Big Question - Tools to Learn.  If you’ve not done so already, you should go read each of the posts there.  They have different perspectives and taken together they provide a pretty good roadmap of how to think about what tools you should learn. Jeff Goldman in Development Tools I Would Learn If I Were You - Jeff's response to June’s Big Question tells us: Flash: Yes, Flash is still very much alive and well in e-learning and because it is so embedded in our industry and there is nothing at this time that can provide the rich interactive elements that it provides, I do not see it being "dead" in our field anytime soon. The fact is HTML5 is not there yet and if it ever does get there it will probably be more than 5 years before it is at the level of quality and ease of development that Flash currently provides. However, see my comments under HTML/HTML5. To me the question is more about where you choose to spend your time.  The list of tools that Harold and Holly provide are pretty lengthy.  And Jeff suggests both Flash and HTML 5.  If you have so much time that you can afford to learn all of these tools, then go ahead. However, if you have to prioritize Flash vs. HTML 5 vs. ??? … then I would put learning Flash (especially scripting in Flash) way down on priority list at this point.  Remember End of an Era - Authorware - another Macromedia/Adobe product.  These things do eventually die out.  How valuable are your Authorware scripting skills at this point? Learning Flash today is like learning Authorware in 1997. So, yes, hold off on learning Flash and focus more on learning HTML 5. eLearning Technology Subscribe to the Best of eLearning Learning for updates from this blog and other eLearning blogs.