Assessing reading ability is a very difficult task. This is because reading is very complex. What exactly are readers doing when they read? How do they understand what they read? At this day in age, I think we are more aware that reading is one of the most important skills that we need. It is […]

"it pisses me off that business schools virtually ignore sales, while fawning over marketing" - Tom Peters Marketing is relatively easy to teach. Doing sales takes time, practice, and feedback. It’s fairly obvious why universities prefer to teach marketing. I don’t know of any programs where students do real sales calls. I guess that’s for after graduation. Using the perspective of the 70:20:10 model (Experience, Exposure, Education) we should focus our efforts on maximizing our workplace experiences for learning. If we learn ~70% from experience, we should at least develop some practices to learn as we work. For the most part, our learning and development departments don’t help us learn as we work. They provide interventions that take us away from work (courses) or negate the need to learn (performance support). Educational institutions let graduates walk out the door and then get to work, with co-op programs being the exception. How we make sense of our work and continue to learn at the edge of our expertise is mostly left to individuals. To learn as we work, first of all we have to do things. We learn from doing the new. If we are not doing anything new, we are not learning. In an age of increasing automation, doing new work is how we stay ahead of the machines and algorithms. Personal knowledge mastery is one framework for individuals to take control of their professional development. Combine this with groups of co-workers working out loud and it creates the foundation for experiential learning at work: the 70%. The 70:20:10 model is not based on formal education. It is a way to ensure that we do not overly focus on training and education. We learn from experience, but only if we have new experiences and pay attention to them. Experience is the execution of education and exposure. Image: The Works, by Tom Peters  

  This is my first experiment creating a vlog-style video for a blog post. If you have never watched a vlog or other informal-style videos, you may not like this format.  I can already see things that I would do differently next time, but I hope you enjoy this little experiment and learn something in the process. The first part of the video is just my day traveling from Phx to Litmos HQ in Dublin CA. Was it necessary? Maybe not. But hey, that's what experiments are for, right? In the second half of the video I respond to a couple comments about my recent post about mobile learning: The Future of Mobile Devices, Mobiles Software, and Mobile Learning. The comments were made on LinkedIn and can be found here. Are you experimenting with video for eLearning? Are you considering video as part of your mobile learning strategy? Don't be afraid to experiment. Let me know if you give it a go. @Litmos The post The eLearning Blog Vlog - Answering Comments on Mobile Learning appeared first on Litmos.

Craig Weiss tops the 2015 Movers & Shakers list for the corporate elearning industry. He’s an LMS analyst and his influential blog, Elearning 24/7 is read by people in more than 150 countries.Weiss is a regular speaker at key elearning events around the world and we caught up with him at the OEB conference. In this frank interview, he shares his peeves about the elearning industry as well as his view on LMS trends and 70:20:10.What do you love most about elearning?I’m very passionate about it and what I love most about elearning is that it can change your life. Any topic that you think of can be done with online learning, anything. You don’t need technical skills, you can learn in your own time, you’re not waiting for an instructor and you can utilise your own learning style. I believe online learning gives people the power to increase comprehension, boost retention and enables them to synthesise knowledge and build from that skill set.But at the end of the day, if we strip everything away, it comes down to how the course was built. An engaging interactive course is going to be significantly more successful than what we call static elearning, which is where the course just has pictures and lots of text.What do you think is the most exciting emerging trend in the LMS space? "There are enormous metric and big data possibilities and it could lead to something really visionary - a personalised learning experience for each learner."There are so many trends but I would say the most exciting is what I call deep learning. This is where the LMS utilises a series of variables and uses an early stage of artificial intelligence to recommend courses based on what the learner is currently taking or recently completed. So it’s an automated experience and it’s eventually going to not only tell you the courses it recommends, but also the videos, the documents and all the curation. Then there is a third stage - which no-one’s at yet - where the LMS has the ability to identify a curriculum plan or a learning path and it’s all specifically tailored for you. To me this is the most exciting piece, it could be revolutionary. There are enormous metric and big data possibilities and it could lead to something really visionary - a personalised learning experience for each learner. This is almost like an LMS within an LMS, where everything is specifically tailored to that person and each person becomes their own learning community.What frustrates you most with the LMS and elearning industry?I have three big pet peeves. One is that from the vendor standpoint the people showing you how to use the products are typically salespeople or technical people, they don’t have a training or L&D background.The second peeve I have with the industry is we use too much jargon. We use too many words that we think everybody will know what we means, and also too many words that don’t necessarily mean what they should. For example, mobile learning, which only means that you can view something in a mobile web browser - that’s it. But consumers tend to think it means they can do everything in that device.The other big peeve I have, a huge one, is that generally consumers are no longer doing due diligence ahead of time before buying an LMS. You know, when I was looking for an LMS on the corporate training side, I would do the research, get estimates and book a demo. But what often happens today is people go to the vendor’s website and just blast out a request for proposal (RFP) that’s been created and that’s how they make their decision - they think that’s going to solve all their problems. But what I tend to find after speaking to people, is that they end up hating the LMS. Why? They didn’t do due diligence, even though it’s taken them a year to find an LMS. It makes no sense when you’ve got more information than ever before, you could hire an expert to help and focus instead on all the other things you need to be doing.You’ve written on your blog recently about why you think the 70-20-10 framework isn’t applicable for elearning. Can you explain your thinking? "Things change and technology has changed the way people learn."It was devised for classroom-based learning first and foremost. The terms formal and informal were defined for classroom-based learning. You don’t have to apply those today for online learning. I think they’re outdated terms so you’ve got part of that as a factor. And the other factor is that with 70-20-10 you have to break it down into separate pieces but online learning crosses between them. 70-20-10 is ‘siloing’ and elearning is doing it as a collective the whole, but if you only see elearning as a delivery mechanism than I can see why you would think 70:20:10 is the complete answer. But if you see elearning as the evolution of learning, which is what it is, then and the 70-20-10 is no longer applicable because it relies too much on the one variable being the model rather than the person. Things change and technology has changed the way people learn.For more about Craig Weiss visit www. elearninfo247.comThe post Craig Weiss on elearning peeves, trends and 70:20:10 appeared first on Sponge UK.

Top 7 Internet Tools to Brainstorm Ideas for Your MOOC https://t.co/VD59fXTg46 #elearning

Earlier this year, I was  invited to speak to a group of mumpreneurs, hosted by the fabulous company, Mums in Technology, to share my thoughts on ‘how to run a successful business’. In the workshop, we explored some questions like: What is success? What is a successful business? Can you ‘achieve’ success? How can you create success? It was a small room, with a creche in one corner for the mums’ babies (so apologies for the video angle), but I hope that by watching this video of the first 16 minutes of the 90-minute workshop I ran, you’ll be able to reflect on what ‘success’ means to you, and what you can do differently to help you achieve it.   Like this? You’ll love this free webinar on the 14th Dec 2015 at 16:30 GMT on: ‘How to create a winning start-up strategy’. Click here to find out more… Did you find the video interesting? Would you like to see the rest of the workshop? Let me know what you thought in the comments below…

This challenge is to make in interactive graphic about what people love & hate about e-learning, but I only saw love. Read more...

So at School we use a lot of cloud based systems, Frog, Sleuth, Google, Go4Schools, SISRA, ClickView, RMBooks, The Suite, VMWare to name a few, so despite owning a dictionary I was slowly running out of passwords. It was the same for all staff and students, so we rolled out RM Unify to help.. There are basically three types of tiles (basically the links) in RM Unify: Fully Integrated (ClickView, RMBooks, Google Apps for Edu, Frog) - here Unify communicates user credentials with the the service, so once into Unify you don’t need a separate password or username at all. Saved Password (Sleuth, Prezi, Room Booking System, Kerboodle, TES)- Where you enter your username and password on your first use, then it remembers it and logs you in from then on. Unsupported - basically just Go4Schools who sadly don’t integrate with anything, so its a link to the log in page. In the latest update, on a  Chromebook, RMUnify can pick up the user credentials - so users get straight in without the need for a password (provided they are logged into the Chroembook on their school account). In turn RM Unify is providing easy access to all our systems, the use of the systems is going up (presumably because people don’t get locked out) and the requests for password reseting is down.

Google Chrome is awesome. Surely, the vast majority of the world knows this fact. It’s user-friendly and super fast. It travels well…meaning of course that your extensions, favorites, etc travel with you, even if you’re not working at your computer!! Many websites that teachers frequently use run best using Google Chrome. It’s just wonderful. I recently conducted a professional […] The post A "Techy" Teacher’s Toolbox: Chrome Extensions appeared first on Teaching with Technology.

Hearing T is for Training host Maurice Coleman unexpectedly and creatively expand the definition of augmented reality during a discussion on the show earlier today made me realize, once again, how inadequately our language and nomenclature represents our quickly- and ever-evolving training-teaching-learning world. As Maurice, Jill Hurst-Wahl, and I were talking about the intersection of lifelong learning and individual learning events, I was describing the wonderful experiences I had as a trainer-teacher-learner attending the LearniT! Technology Adoption Summit here in San Francisco earlier this week. What I was describing to Maurice and Jill was how LearniT! Vice President of Professional Development Jennifer Albrecht had, in her sessions, very creatively used every inch of the learning space and had, in providing a steady stream of additional resources, inspired me to pull out my tablet a couple of times, log into our local library’s online catalog, and place reserves on those books so I could continue my learning after leaving the classroom. And that’s when Maurice made the connection: by expanding the classroom, in the moment, by connecting it virtually to the library, I was augmenting the experience in a significant way that further extended the learning as well as the learning space. Augmented_Reality_at_NMC_2015_Conference[1]-2015-06-08Most of us familiar and intrigued with current definitions of augmented reality would, up to that moment, have envisioned the term as referring to overlays on a computer, or mobile-device, or wearable technology screen that provide additional information about an environment we’re visiting or studying. But I think Maurice was spot on with his observation: using my tablet to augment Jennifer’s list of resources by accessing them through a library catalog is no less significant than what we have, up to this moment, pictured when discussing and exploring the concept. And I could just as easily have augmented that particular learning reality by using the same tablet to find ebook versions of those works and downloading them immediately. Engaging in this augmentation of a definition of augmented reality made me realize how inadequately the term itself reflects the levels of augmentation we already are taking for granted. It also made me return to other situations where commonly-used terms no longer adequately suggest the nuances of what those terms suggest. Augmented reality via Google Cardboard The term mobile learning, for example, suggests the (often-wretched) formal-learning modules that allow us to continue our learning asynchronously on mobile devices rather than having to be in a physical classroom or other learning space. But many of us have come to acknowledge that those formal-learning modules are only a small part of a much larger mobile-learning landscape that includes a wide range of possibilities. Mobile learning can include just-in-time learning that is no more challenging than using a mobile device to find an online article, video (e.g., a TED talk), or other resource that quickly fills the learning gap. It can include participation in a Google Hangout via mobile devices. It can include exchanges between onsite and online colleagues reacting to learning opportunities in conference settings. It can include an informal exchange of information between us as learners and a colleague, mentor, or other learning facilitator who teaches us something via a mobile phone or tablet at the moment when we need that level of "mobile learning"; and given that informal learning provides a huge part of workplace learning, we clearly are underestimating the reach and significance of mobile learning if all the term conjures up for us is the image of formal learning modules viewed on a mobile device. In the same way, the words "libraries" and "classrooms" are beginning to overlap and expand in interesting ways as libraries feature stimulating state-of-the-art learning spaces that are at times indistinguishable from other state-of-the-art learning spaces. The words "librarian" and "teacher" and "learning facilitator" are also beginning to represent interesting and nuanced variations on professions with increasingly overlapping functions and goals. This is not meant to suggest that our training-teaching-learning nomenclature is completely obsolete. Quite to the contrary, it connects us to very deep roots from which incredibly dynamic branches are developing. And one of our many challenges is to not only observe and acknowledge the growth of those branches, but to help shape them in small and large ways—just as Maurice did, in the moment, during our latest T is for Training conversation. N.B.: An archived recording of today’s episode of T is for Training remains available online through the T is for Training site.