Interested in a portable and sustainable career? For many, that concept translates into seeking out work-from-home opportunities. But there is one in-demand field that is often overlooked; one that holds the interest of everyone, regardless of location (in the US and abroad). Fitness. I speak from experience when I tell you that fitness is a fad that will NEVER go away. I have a closet full of neon workout outfits that prove it's easy to get caught up in the excitement and promise of results! The best part: You can get PAID to exercise! Yes! I said... PAID! Now, do I have you attention? Becoming a fitness instructor can be very rewarding. Here are a few benefits: REWARD #1: Your fitness career is PORTABLE. That the magic word! Whether you are interested in cycling, lifting, swimming, or even dancing, this career allows you to bring your knowledge and certification to any location, anywhere. REWARD #2: Fitness is popular EVERYWHERE and always in-demand! REWARD #3: Your job keeps you healthy and fit. A career in fitness allows you to emulate a mindset for yourself and your family that being healthy isn't just a hobby... it's a lifestyle. REWARD #4: Working in a fitness facility is a great way to meet new people and make friends in a new place. You're never alone in this career and it's a lot of fun! Working in that type of atmosphere can be motivating and good for your social health, as well as physical. Ready to dive into this fun and exciting career? Take advantage of the digital age and become certified as a Fitness Instructor online! With the right online program you can complete your certification at your own pace and be on your way to helping other achieve their health and fitness goals! So what are you waiting for? Modified from: http://www.milcareered.com/blog/career-spotlight-fitness-instructor#stha...          

The potential of webhooks to create more efficient eLearning processes has yet to be fully realized. For some users, that’s fine. Standard features are all they need from an LMS. But for others, tools like SSO, API and webhooks could be used to customize and automate a more effective system. Yet webhooks, in particular, are little understood. While they’re underused in eLearning, they’re also often suggested as a solution for problems they’re not really relevant to. If you’d like to access real-time information about learners and courses, here’s why webhooks should matter to you. What are webhooks? In a previous post, I compared SSO and API to a knife and fork. While the tools work well together, they also serve different purposes. To extend that analogy further, webhooks are like a dessert spoon. While a webhook can act as an effective supplement to SSO and API, it can also be used on its own. You should consider implementing webhooks if you’d like to be notified about an event as soon as it happens in your LMS. Your developer will create a "module" (that module can be a simple script or piece of code on your own website) that allows you to "listen" for the event: when a course is completed, or a learner fails an exam, for example. When the event occurs, the LMS will use the webhook to notify you in real time. You can then use information forwarded with the webhook to update or create further actions in a separate website or application.   How you already use webhooks Most of us already use the concept of webhooks on a daily basis, even if we aren’t aware of it. Every time you receive a text message on your mobile phone, you receive a kind of webhook. That’s because your phone is an application that receives a piece of information from a given source. While the word "webhook" might seem to suggest a method or action, mostly it’s used to describe the "information" that’s transferred between sending and receiving parties. In this example: The person who sent the message is the sending party You are the receiving party The text message is the webhook. Once you receive the message, you’re free to use it as you please - respond to or delete the message if it doesn’t interest you! That also applies to eLearning. You can receive a webhook, use the information you need about learners and courses, and simply discard the rest.   Using webhooks in eLearning There are as many ways to use webhooks as there are pieces of information you would like to pull from your LMS. If you’re using an LMS to deliver courses, you could benefit from receiving information like completion data as it happens in real time, for example. There are, of course, alternative ways to do so. You could use a tool or LMS feature to generate or schedule a report. Or you could ask your developer to use our API to extract the information you need from your LMS. But webhooks have the potential to be more efficient than all of these alternatives. All of these other options involve what I call "intent". You must do something to get the information you need from your LMS. Can you imagine if you had to constantly call your loved ones to ask if they had a new text message for you? It wouldn’t be very efficient, or much fun! The webhook movement solves these problems. If you want to know when a user completes a course, LearnUpon can use a webhook to tell you as soon as it happens. All you need to do is listen out for the webhook, just as your phone listens out for new text messages. While your phone has been programmed to listen, implementing a webhook involves one extra step. You need to code a small site or service. We’ll then deliver the data in a neat webhook package, saving you from the need to look for it. The information will be available to you in real time whenever you need it and however you’d like to use it.   Examples of webhooks in eLearning Like a text message, the webhook contains chunks of information that pass on important details to your application. Examples of such data include: Who completed a course Which course was completed When the course was completed What score they achieved.  And like a text message, you can choose to ignore some messages and to read and act on others. You can choose to take the information received and store it in other applications. Or you can use information from the webhook to: Build reports, dashboards or leaderboards  Update a learner’s status in your database Email a customer Log an accounting entry. Once you’ve defined the kinds of information that are most important to you, your developer can build a corresponding "listener", waiting patiently for the next webhook to arrive from your LMS! And you’ll never need to look for the data again. The webhook will deliver it to you.   For more information on how LearnUpon uses webhooks, contact our support team for access to our detailed documentation The post How to use webhooks in eLearning appeared first on LearnUpon.

[Post by Karla Willems, Account Manager at GeoMetrix Data Systems Inc.] How can technology take your talent development efforts to the next level? ATD TechKnowledge 2016 is the place to learn about the latest technology trends. Hear from thought leaders and practitioners who are on the leading edge of this new frontier. Keynote speakers and session presenters promise an engaging three days. Ditto Labs CEO David Rose’s keynote is titled, "The New Vanguard for Business: Connectivity, Design, and the Internet of Things." Kate Matsudaira, Principal of Urban Influence and founder and CEO of Popforms will discuss "The Conundrum of Technical Leadership." "Evolution Mobile" is the subject of a keynote by Brian Wong, Co-Founder and CEO of Kiip. Session tracks at this year’s event include: E-learning design/development Emerging technologies Management & implementation Mobile platforms & tools Serious games & simulations Social Virtual classroom GeoMetrix and GeoTalent are proud to be Silver Sponsors of this important industry event. So join us in Las Vegas and come prepared to stretch your imagination. Remember to drop by booth # 500 in the Expo Hall to find out the latest developments with GeoTalent and TrainingPartner. Remember to check your attendee bag for a key. Bring the key to booth # 500 for a chance to try it in the prize box. If it opens the lock, you’ll walk away with that’s inside. For a free expo pass to this event, please call 1-800-616-5409 or email us by clicking here or using the contact page. For more information visit: ATD TechKnowledge® 2016

I have learned a lot from Verna Allee over the years, and frequently referred to her work on this blog. Now that Verna has retired her websites, I have collected some of her insights together in one place. It was her work on value network analysis [PDF] that particularly influenced my thinking. "Only through the power of value networks can we address our complex issues - together - and create a more hopeful future." - Verna Allee "A value network is a web of relationships that generates economic value and other benefits through complex dynamic exchanges between two or more individuals, groups or organizations. Any organization or group of organizations engaged in both tangible and intangible exchanges can be viewed as a value network, whether private industry, government or public sector." - Verna Allee "The true shape and nature of collaboration is not the social network - it is the value network. Value networks are purposeful groups of people who come together to take action. Value network modeling and analytics reflect the true nature of collaboration with a systemic human-network approach to managing business operations. It shows how work really happens through human interactions, and provides powerful new practices and metrics for managing collaborative work. It provides a way to a) better support non-hierarchical organizations such as cross-boundary teams, and task forces, and b) quickly and effectively model emergent work and complex activities that have multiple variables and frequent exceptions." - Verna Allee   Image: Value Network Analysis by Patti Anklam Verna also discussed the difference between tangible and intangible assets and knowledge. "Intangible knowledge exchanges include strategic information, planning knowledge, process knowledge, technical know-how, collaborative design, policy development, etc., which flow around and support the core product and service value chain. "Intangible benefits are advantages or favors that can be offered from one person to another. Examples might be offering to provide political support to someone. Or a research organization might ask someone to volunteer their time and expertise to a project in exchange for an intangible benefit of prestige by affiliation. These are intangible products that can be exchanged, as indeed people can and do trade favors to build relationships." - Verna Allee Source: Ocean Tomo "You can’t plan networks or force fit them into any pattern. You can’t constrain a network to be purely within your own organization - at least not if you want to get any value from it. Networks involve customers/citizens and partners. In fact every participant in a network is a partner - not in some corny marketing sense but in the reality of the exchanges in the network. Networks support communication across channels you didn’t predict in advance. They cross any organizational unit you might have defined - even following the VSM [Viable Systems Model]. For all these reasons networks are great sources of innovation - and that innovation is emergent." - Verna Allee Image: Cynefin Framework by Verna Allee

Years ago, when I started working at Indiana Wesleyan University, a student asked an innocent question, "What is Eye-woo?" In this series, Jule Kind, Director of Off Campus Library Services (OCLS), and fellow librarians share...Continue Reading »

Training employees is essential for reaping corporate success. But, those companies that are forward thinkers invest in external training. By utilizing software like SharePoint, business profitability can go from average to amazing in a nanosecond. What exactly is the extended enterprise? Anybody outside of your company who has the ability to affect your organization’s bottom line. This can include channel distribution partners, dealers, franchisees, resellers, contractors and customers.

Times are changing and this certainly applies to how we learn and the effect it has on corporate training. A move away from the one-size-fits-all mentality of years past, personalized learning will continue to be a big trend as new technologies enable learning to be very customized and accessible. SharePoint allows a trainer to offer a catered program to learners and this blog will identify three ways to do this.

There are two main purposes of the literature review of research, firstly to provide a background introduction to the chosen research area, and secondly to provide a justification for the research about to be undertaken by documenting how the topic under investigation relates to previous research. To do this, the researcher will need to cast a net widely and be open to a wide range of prior research which is directly, or indirectly, relevant to their specific research topic. This is where the first problem might arise. How does a new researcher know if something is relevant or simply something of tangential interest? There is the "need to know" information and the "good to know" information, and both are required. The literature review can come in different styles, normally as the opening chapter to a dissertation, but the review could be spread throughout several chapters, especially in a multi-disciplinary study. It is a bit like a detective story - the text has to let the reader know what the key issues are, how the research area has developed, and what has been tried before? In setting out the highlights of the history of the specific research topic, the reader needs to know the details of what is already known about the research topic, and consequently, what aspects are less well-known and might be the subject of the subsequent research by the student. I like to think of this as the "landscape" of the proposed research - the high-points and the low-points, the obviously recognisable landmarks and perhaps some of the hidden depths. By the end of the literature review, the reader should have a good understanding of the main features of the topic, why it is important, and what the academically contested areas are. Then there is the "good to know" information, and this can be more problematic. In the body of previous research, there will have been many false-starts and blind alleys. There will be respected academic literature which has investigated the topic, set out their results, and given an interpretation of the known facts, only to have been overtaken by subsequent research and shown to be wrong, or at best only partially informed. This is good information to know because it might save time by indicating a line of enquiry which has been tried and found to be fruitless, or a method of gathering data which has been improved upon and might therefore be worth looking at again. The longevity and the depth required for PhD research means that the student has opportunities to explore the realms of the possible, the unusual or off-chance lines of investigation which just might lead to a breakthrough, or a new way of thinking about the research problem. As long as this "off-piste" work is kept within reason, and not allowed to detrimentally influence the main flow of the research thinking, it is to be encouraged, because there are many great discoveries which have started when someone thought, "What if I do this instead…?" The evidential basis for many of these directional changes in thinking originates in the review of the known academic literature. That is why it is good to read widely, read deeply, and read often.

It is common this time of year to have less employees (and focus) in the office. With holiday trips, family visits, and general festivities, people have their time and priorities stretched very thin. So now is the time to get creative about who and how projects get completed.Consider this: We are rounding out a new year, and when we interview leaders, people often want to take on new things at this time of year. That perfectly aligns with the opportunity to take on new tasks when people are away.This week’s tip is to use delegation as a way to get more things accomplished during the holiday season. Well in advance of your departure, identify team members or colleagues who either have experience with similar opportunities or who have shown aptitude in other areas and an interest in yours. Clearly outline the level of decisions they can make around each item and how you would like those decisions communicated.Then it is time to let go and trust the process. If you are a Type-A control freak, know that you have set-up the decision-making strategy. Have confidence. And if anything goes differently than expected or needs course correction, you can discuss it post-holiday.Instead of being stressed this time of year, engage your team members to help get things done. Bonus gift? You will definitely learn more about yourself and each other.The post Fierce Tip of the Week: ‘Tis the Season to Delegate appeared first on Fierce, Inc..

It is a wonderful time of year to connect with yourself and each other. It can also be a time of year that is challenging. Stress can start to pile up from end of year pressure, family trips, commitments, large to-do lists, and a growing need to prepare for the upcoming year.Don’t be hard on yourself. When you commit to going to a holiday event, be conscious of the choices you are making. Choose to enjoy how you are spending your time and get out of your comfort zone.When all else fails, lean on these three tips to get more out of your holiday events:Be present. With the holiday frenzy, it can be hard to enjoy the celebrations when you are trying to wrap up last minute projects and get approvals from others. Use this time to learn something new about the people you work with. When you ask someone a question, really listen for the answer. Don’t thumb through what you want to share or say next. Look people into their eyes and really hear what they are saying. They will remember how present you were with them - that’s a gift in itself.Step away from your usual suspects. It can be very tempting to spend time with the same people you are usually with at other company or social events. It is great to connect with them, and this is an opportunity to really spread your wings and expand your circle. Meet new people, and ask them interesting questions. Try: What motivates you? What gets you out of bed in the morning? What do you consider your biggest success this year?Don’t get too tipsy. Letting loose by having a few drinks can be a fun retreat, and yet, it can also take away from the experience. If you enjoy imbibing, make sure that you are pacing yourself. You want to remember the conversations and moments that occur during the parties. Do not do something you will regret. We have all witnessed these moments, and it is not fair for anyone on your team to be forced to. What tips do you have for making the most of celebrations? The post 3 Tips to Get the Most Out of Your Holiday Festivities appeared first on Fierce, Inc..