Hello everyone! I am proud to bringing you the 9th episode of Whats New in APE! It has been a tremendous journey so far and I am excited for it to continue. For the 10th episode we were honored to have on two adapted physical educators who are mother and daughter. The mother, Jean Young, is an adapted physical educator in Poway Unified School District in California. Jean's daughter, Amanda Young is an adapted physical educator at TCU in Texas. Amanda is also a colleague of mine at Texas Women's University and is working on her dissertation which focuses on communication with parents of children with Down Syndrome.Listening to both of these educators unique perspectives on the world of APE and working with kids with Down Syndrome was a blast. Please give it a listen and leave any comments for me on ideas for upcoming podcasts.

DocentEDU is an exciting new app (iOS, Android), and browser plugin (Chrome, Firefox) that essentially lets you turn any webpage or online document into an engaging, interactive, digital lesson.  With the tool, you can easily add questions, discussions, notes, and HTML widgets into an already existing webpage, and send it out to your students or classes. Read more on our reviews page.

What an amazing year! If you read on, you’re going to hear all about it… … because this post will look back at 2015 - what went well and what didn’t - and look forward to 2016. I do this to see what I have done over the past year and to set new goals for […] The post 2015 in Review - And What I’m Going to Do in 2016 appeared first on Teaching ESL Online.

It’s a very exciting time to be a front-end developer. It is the Renaissance age for JavaScript, and every day brings a new round of shiny new toys for developers to play with, each with a new set of paradigms that are good for stretching the mind in exciting new ways. As big fans of the old axiom, "the right tool for the right job," we are constantly evaluating the newest libraries and tools. There are some very shiny new players on the block that have the JavaScript world super excited, e.g., Angular and React, to name a couple. So why are we not moving to a more modern front-end framework? Part of the answer to that question is who we are and what we do. Enspire is a custom e-learning development shop focused on cutting-edge instructional design, high-end media development, and immersive simulation development. So right off the bat, we are approaching development differently than a lot of shops. We have no monolithic product that we work on day in and day out forever on end. Instead, we have to use a rip-and-burn style of development. In this day and age where a single person can build a SCORM-compliant e-learning course using only a stand-alone piece of software like Articulate, the pressures on a high-end vendor have multiplied. More for less has always been the soup-du-jour in our industry, and it is challenging to be committed to such a high level of excellence when everyone at the table is clamoring for discount rack prices. So efficacy, speed, and flexibility are really the only ways we get to bring our best ideas to life. Back in the early days, Enspire was, like most e-learning developers, heavily invested in Flash. It is now the popular opinion that Flash is the scourge of the internet and should only be approached with a large dollop of scorn and mockery. In the early days of the browser wars, before everyone had access to a computer, much less a computer that could be carried in your pocket and more powerful than the moon lander, Flash was a godsend. In the days when JavaScript was but an infant, you couldn’t trust that any user would even have it enabled. Doing something that required what we now call a single-page application was unreliable at best and downright impossible in some cases. With Flash, you could easily add state into the stateless web, as well as soothe over some of the pain of supporting the vast differences in browser implementations of the time. It also empowered designers with no coding knowledge to take on complex layout and animation. I remember reading that one developer from Macromedia (the company that owned Flash before Adobe gobbled it up) said that users were regularly showing the Flash team that it could do way more than was even dreamed of by the developers themselves. We were constantly pushing the bounds of what we could squeeze out of Flash to make new and immersive experiences. Those were the good ol’ days, when we were so ahead of the curve that we had problems like, "We need more shelves for our awards, should we go ahead and buy two"?  Around this time, we were starting to see the buzz about HTML5 and were talking about a refresh on a multiplayer simulation game that we had been running for years. It seemed like a pretty good HTML5 candidate, so we started researching which libraries and frameworks were available. There were the giants of the day: YUI, Prototype, and MooTools. We had used YUI and Prototype before, but we weren’t sold on them. A new thing, jQuery, was starting to make some waves, so we wanted to take a look at that. About that same time, I stumbled upon an article about a brand new library call Backbone.js. It was currently at version 0.3.0. It mirrored some of the design patterns of our current AS2 Flash framework around generics for models and separation of MVC concerns. After looking at some code examples and reading about Backbone’s philosophy, we knew this framework was what we had been looking for to redevelop our multiplayer simulation. So, we rolled the dice. We’re happy to say that the decision paid off, and the application is still being used in production today, although we did update it to Backbone 0.5 at some point. As time went on, it became clear to us that Flash was going to be on the ropes sooner than later. Luckily for us, we’re a shop full of developers who are hungry for new things, so we were mostly ready for the rug to pulled out from under us. I say this mostly because the accelerated death of Flash and the rise of HTML5 did not happen organically. Apple, still mad about Adobe’s decision to focus more on PC performance a decade earlier, announced the birth of the iPhone, which also served to knock a few more props out from under the old-school e-learning development toolkit. To make matters worse, even though we were looking at incredible "experiments" in HTML5 every day, they were a long way from the large-scale single-page media-heavy tour de force that we were used to producing. We took a look around, and so many of the problems that we had solved in Flash over the years were now back on the drawing board. Things like how to keep audio and animation in sync with pause/play and rewind/fast forward functionality - a problem that there is still not a good answer for in some situations. At least we weren’t caught as flat-footed as a lot of shops in the e-learning industry when our old, tattered security blanket was ripped away. We already had a good toe-hold on the cliffs of HTML5 development. It was then time to retool and get back to the business of blowing minds and pushing the bounds of the way people learn. Something I read about Backbone in the early days was that it was not a framework, but instead, it was a library for building frameworks around. This is really what a shop that works on short timelines and often says, "If we can dream it, we can build it," was needing - a way to respond to the never-ending stream of projects that could be radically different than everything that came before it. So we chose to build our framework Blaze around the core of Backbone. We looked at a couple of the other frameworks now popping up in the Backbone ecosystem, like Marionette and Layout Manager, but most of them did not really do much for our needs, and instead focused on handling complex nested views and aimed mainly at building traditional websites. What we needed was solutions around assessment, interactivity, simulation, complex branching narratives, internal legacy data formats, gamification, user tracking, and analytics. Another serious requirement was a lot of e-learning packages must run serverless and are not only expected to integrate seamlessly into a myriad different environments, but must also communicate through specifications that date back to the 1980s. So we set about the porting of our Flash framework to JavaScript. We added Mustache for templating with a thin layer wrapping it, providing template loading and global helper functionality. We used Cocktail.js for mixins since we favor composition over inheritance. Of course we get Underscore.js since it is Backbone’s one hard dependency. It’s like a Bat Belt of functionality that I would be sad to have to give up. We made heavy use of Promises through Q.js to handle async operation and sequencing. Then we built the stuff needed for our business domain, like adaptors for LMS communication, Interactive and Assessment controllers and trackers, and our Conversation Engine, which is used for extremely complex soft skill simulations. In some places, like animation, we made the framework agnostic. This allows us to choose the best animation engine for the project’s requirements. Need one that supports IE7 or one that will be screaming fast in Chrome on a Windows 8 kiosk mode set-up for a game in your mobile learning trailer? No problem. We would not advocate everyone should drop [insert fad of the week framework here] and build their own (although building a framework is great learning experience). Nor has our search for new technologies stopped (for instance, we have a couple of Meteor.js/react apps under way right now). However, if you develop in a niche like e-learning and look in your toolbox only to notice that your hammer is suspiciously shaped like a burrito that spews beans everywhere anytime you hit a nail with it, you might consider using Backbone as a tried and true place to start a framework that is more suited to your needs. The post Why We Still Use Backbone.js appeared first on Enspire.

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How prepared is your organization to deal with the mega trends of Manufacturing 4.0 and the widening variance in leadership quality?

Leadership is a profoundly human endeavor: Helping yourself and others grow. How will you use your leadership skills to make change in 2016?

We’re delighted to present you our latest white paper ‘Managing Top Talent - A Call for Better Communications’, which you can download now for free. Effective communication skills are key to finding, managing and retaining top talent across any multinational organisation. To develop a global talent pool of future leaders, HR needs a solid communications strategy. Businesses are becoming increasingly aware of how essential communication skills are for overall profitability. The Speexx Exchange 2014-15 Survey, carried out among more than 200 global corporations, revealed the clear competitive advantage of strong communication skills. 92% of the respondents rated business communication skills as important or very important, with a direct impact on business success. Managing Top Talent - A Call for Better Communications   This paper showcases they key drivers for successfully aligning communications with top talent management and leadership development and offers practical approaches for getting started. You will learn: Why talent management always goes hand in hand with communications How to empower HR with technology and the benefits of Big Data 5 steps to buidling leadership communication skills en Download Now  

Today my mojo returned. I’m not sure where it has been for the past 6 months - possibly running a pop-up beard trimming shop in Papua New Guinea - but I won’t question it. I’ll just accept the fact that, for now anyway, it has returned. I’m not sure why it left me in the first place, but I have a theory it’s something to do with camembert. Let me explain: A few years ago, I discovered camembert. As a lifelong lover of cheese this, admittedly, was a rather late discovery to make, but there you go. What’s life for if not for discovering new things? For a while, I devoured it at every opportunity, and the zenith of my camembert - love came when my partner encased a wheel of it in pastry and baked it. The resulting cheese pie was so unbelievably tasty, I all but inhaled it in 5 minutes flat. Then something odd happened. The thought of eating camembert suddenly made me feel queasy. I had overdone it, and made myself sick of it. So much so, that I still can’t go near this particular breed of cheese without my stomach roiling in protest. The same thing happened with my love of learning technology. After almost a decade of addiction to all things TEL-based, I lost interest. I think I may well have burnt myself out a little too - I found myself getting snappy with people who wanted me to help them and just felt so completely and utterly bored with anything to do with technology and education. I lost patience with people who couldn’t insert videos into their PowerPoint presentations, and remember getting quite snippy with one person who said that they didn’t like using technology. "Well, ten years ago you could have got away with saying that!" I remember ranting. "But nowadays, saying that you don’t use technology is the same as saying you don’t like using the number 2." What a smug idiot I was. And yet, at odds with this, I was longing to run away to a wooden cabin in the Highlands with a suitcase full of books and no internet connection. I abandoned this very blog because I couldn’t think of anything to write about, stopped Tweeting because I couldn’t be bothered with it, and Facebook updates became (and are still) infrequent to the point of being non-existent. The only technology I had any interest in was Fallout 4 on my PS4. I successfully managed to cock up my Masters dissertation too. This was something I had worked diligently towards accomplishing for almost 5 years, yet when it got to the dissertation stage, I just churned out 20, 000 words with as much interest as if I were writing a shopping list. I knew it was rubbish as I wrote it, and was aware of exactly where it had all gone wrong as soon as I’d finished, yet rather than proofreading and tweaking it in order to bring it up to standard, I just wanted the whole thing out of the way, so published it and sent it off knowing without a doubt that it was a fail. And when I got official notification that it HAD failed, I shrugged my shoulders and realised that I didn’t even care. Had this happened in the middle of the year, when there is usually no let up in sight, I may well have done something daft like quit my job. Thankfully, Christmas intervened, and I enjoyed a couple of technology-free weeks at home. And this week, after switching on my office machine and logging into the university network,  I felt the first stirrings of renewed interest. So this is why I’m writing my first blog post in five months. FIVE MONTHS!!! Later on today I’ll be delivering a seminar to academic staff about the benefits of Open Educational Resources, and I’m actually looking forward to it. Take a look at it here: Later on this week, I’m going to have a play with Sway and Office Mix to see what they have to offer. These are just two applications I’ve been aware of for several months but have had no interest in playing with, until now. Oh, and I’m also going to resubmit my dissertation, after giving it the attention it deserves. And this time, I swear to God…it’s going to be a pass!

If there’s one thing that’s certain about the future of learning, it’s that it will continue to play a large role in organizational success. But the shape of learning is changing. Based on conversations with top learning analysts, leading organizations and industry experts, here’s what we believe are the most credible and crucial learning trends for organizations in 2016. Trend #1:  Big Data and Learner Analytics With respect to eLearning, big data is everything that’s gathered when a learner takes an eLearning course or training module.  This not only includes large volumes of data for organization-level analysis, but also discrete pieces of data that offer insight into how each individual learner is acquiring and digesting knowledge.  We expect big data to allow both learners and learning professionals to take a more personalized, targeted approach that is more impactful for the organization.  It will also open up the discussion around predictive analytics , allowing organizations to identify which behaviors employees need to exhibit to achieve desired business outcomes. Trend #2: Gamification Gamification will remain a top learning trend in 2016. Two years ago, the industry was just getting their heads around what gamification meant. In 2015,  organizations became interested in how it could be incorporated into their learning environments. And in 2016, we forecast that organizations will take more definitive action.  While gamification in learning hasn’t met analyst projections yet, we think proof that it’s not just hype will lead to even greater adoption. Trend #3: Personalized Learning We expect to see a stronger shift towards adaptive learning and personalized learning paths this year.  This is largely driven by the availability of comprehensive data to help personalize learning to each learner’s needs and the availability and adoption of mobile learning, which will help deliver knowledge to employees when and where it’s most appropriate. The industry has long been aware of the fact that learning adjusted to the individual is far more effective and valuable. However, traditional methods haven’t been able to support this requirement. But technologies, like the Axonify Employee Knowledge Platform, now allow granular learning personalization based on a range of criteria, allowing learning content to be modified literally on the fly: based on how employees interact with learning content or how their needs change. Trend #4:  Mobile Learning We anticipate that mobile learning via a native app will more popular than learning through a standard mobile web browser. This comes as no surprise, since apps dominate everywhere else. Instead of being required to access learning from a corporate computer, mobile learning will allow employees to obtain learning content anytime and anywhere they have access to their mobile device. This provides an even bigger benefit to employees, such as retail associates and warehouse workers, who may not have access to a corporate computer or company email system, but can use an app to get the learning they need to perform at their best. Trend #5: Performance Support Although the term Performance Support has been used for a number of years now, the majority of organizations are yet to introduce a "learning at the point-of-need" strategy. We expect more businesses will start to move away from the traditional firehose method of delivering learning and, instead, separate training content into two groups: Information that employees need to know in their heads versus information they simply need at their fingertips to do their jobs better. This will change the way businesses deliver learning and pave the way for performance support methods to become mainstream. Trend #6: Microlearning We’ve seen the microlearning trend absolutely take off in the latter half of 2015 and it’s expected to continue to gain momentum throughout 2016. Organizations are looking to get a better sense for what microlearning is, whether it makes sense for them and if so, how they can to incorporate it into their business. However, we believe organizations will turn away from the narrow definition of microlearning as simply a short video or piece of learning content, and adopt a more holistic view that incorporates short learning bursts with gamification, retention techniques, personalization and ongoing measurement and analytics. Trend #7: Video Video is starting to emerge as a dominant approach to delivering learning. More profound than just watching a video, we expect businesses to use videos for all kinds of instructional uses:  onboarding new hires, supporting product launches, improving customer support and more. Video is being seen by many as driving a learning revolution. And it’s easy:  anyone with a mobile device can create and share a short instruction video. What are your big areas of focus for 2016? Share your ideas with us on our upcoming webinar with Donald Taylor and Carol Leaman, which is taking place on January 20th. You have the unique opportunity to contribute to the content of the webinar by participating in this survey on Don Taylor’s blog. We look forward to hearing what your big areas of focus for this year will be. Written by Laura Martin The post 7 Top Learning Trends for 2016 appeared first on Axonify.