Given the revolt of many people (including me) against bottled water, carrying one's own water bottle is slowing becoming a social norm. The trend has been noticed by drinking fountain manufacturers, who now offer water fountains that fill bottles, easily, without having to juggle the valve of a drinking fountain.When I first encounter one of these bottle-filling fountains, I couldn't figure out how it worked. That's because I have years and years of conditioning that drinking fountains have buttons, and when you push a button, water is dispensed. So my bottle just sat on the platform while I searched for a button. Finally, someone took pity on me and showed me how it worked. You raise the bottle toward the fountain, and an electric eye detects the presence of the bottle and the water flows. Take the bottle away, and the water stops.Why this design? Why not button? The story is that to avoid germ fears, designers needed to make the fountain touchless. But like me, other users were baffled about how to fill their bottles. So the designers added graphics to illustrate what to do. I think there were graphics on the one I first used, but I was so into button-pushing mode that my mind completely ignored them.But what is really cool (once you learn how to use these things) is that some models have a digital readout showing how many bottles have been filled (nice feedback for social norming. See WSJ, March 25, B1 for more. 

Simplicity is a key foundation for customer performance, especially within the Access domains of tools, interfaces, and information. A recent WSJ review of the book Simplicity examines the need for enhancing the simplicity of pill bottles (and instructions), end-user license agreements, processes (such as a hospital experience) and even the number of choices a customer is offered at a grocery store. The key principles of simplicity are empathy, distillation, and clarification.

As reported in this blog, the past couple of years have seen a significant rise in devices, gadgets, and apps that fit the Vision component of the coproduction experience model, specifically around goals and feedback. Well, someone has coined a term for these solutions - Big Mother (WSJ 4/23/13, A1). If you are slouching, driving like a jerk, or haven't brushed your teeth, these solutions will remind you, nag you, nudge you, to change your behavior. Data about your various performances can be uploaded and tracked in the cloud, and if you so desired, beamed to your friends, even your mother, for that extra bit of social support that you need to achieve your goals.The Beam Brush, for example, tracks the brushing of your teeth and publishes reports to your smartphone. The smartphone app praises you when you've met your goals (it even offers prizes), and marks your calendar with "missed brushings" when you haven't been so diligent.

It seems that the word "smart" is appearing everywhere these days - and it is no stranger to many posts in this blog. The Economists' recent article in its The World in 2013 report (pg. 85) talk about how cities are mining urban data, and using that data to facilitate the performance of its citizens and visitors. For example, transportation information (buses, subways, and so on) is being analyzed and published to on-street digital displays and smartphones so citizens can plan trips, estimate arrival times, and so on to achieve their performance goals. The article suggests that Londoners are modifying their travel behaviors based upon the advice "big data" analytics offer them. The value of smart cities is clear: efficiency and productivity, which not only makes citizens feel good, but also enhances the economic opportunity in that city.

There has been a rise in news stories about new innovations in encouraging customers to stick to taking their prescriptions as directed. The motivation? It seems that Medicare is providing financial rewards to insurers and pharmacies for improving patient compliance. The latest story (WSJ, 5/21/13, p. B7) introduces a whole host of customer performance tactics, such as:Big data analytics (scan patient claims and clinical data to identify people with high non-compliance risk)Earn points and prizes for taking medicines as directedIncluding sensors in pills themselves that report to a mobile device when a pill was ingested (with reports delivered to doctors and family members)Including sensors in pill bottles to assess remaining medicineDesigning a pill bottle that develops "banana" spots to indicate expiration

I was intrigued by a story on NPR this morning titled A Surprising Barrier to Clean Water: Human Nature. The story was about Innovations for Poverty Actions' efforts in Kenya to encourage people to purify their water. Most water comes from springs or wells, and it is contaminated. The co-creation of value story here encouraging Kenyans to add a few drops of chlorine to their water containers. The first design was to sell chlorine cheap at stores ($0.30 per month) with a social marketing and communication campaign. Adoption was very limited. The next design was to place chlorine dispensers next to the well or spring. 61% of water in Kenyan's homes tested positive for chlorine treatment, compared to 8% for a treatment group. A good trend.From a customer performance perspective, the designers were primarily manipulating the Access component of the coproduction experience model by providing the tool (chlorine and its dispensers) and manipulating the interface (how and where it is dispensed). They also manipulated Incentive (making chlorine free). I assume that there is some customer education in the mix as well (it is not discussed in the project details I found), and the Vision, well, is self-evident: better health for kids and fewer deaths. You would think that would be enough for 99.9% adoption.

Check out my recent article in The Spark, the Nevada Institute for Renewable Energy Commercialization's resource for entrepreneurs - http://thesparknv.org/2013/06/19/how-to-listen-to-customers/.

A friend just sent me this. The interior of the RER train that takes one from Paris to Versailles has been transformed into a replica of the palace itself. It is a great example of how nuances (Access) like this can surprise customers and set their expectations (Vision) for what is to come. http://trendland.com/parisian-rer-train-transformed-to/#.

Yesterday my smartphone started cackling like and old witch. I had never heard anything like that before. It certainly caught my attention! I picked it up, looked at the screen, and it was the National Weather Service alerting me to the fact that there were dust storms in the area and for me to take precautions.In the other room my wife was listening to the radio. The radio cackled as well and communicated the same alert. I initially thought that what I received from the NWS was a text message, and I wanted to figure out how I could attach sounds to my text messages the same way. Alas, that is not possible, because this special feature is part of FEMA's Wireless Emergency Alert Network. The Notifications setting on the smartphone controls when it is activated. Not sure if it is based on my actual location or where I live. I hope it is the former. What a cool extension of an idea that's been around since I was a kid, the Emergency Broadcast System. It certainly initiated some customer performance around my house.

I came across this blog the other day written by George Van Antwerp (see http://georgevanantwerp.com/2014/01/23/listing-of-medication-adherence-solutions-2/). From a customer performance perspective, it provides a very comprehensive list of solutions related to medical adherence - that is, patients (customers) doing what doctors and nurses tell them to do to get better. As you can see from the list, the various solutions touch all the different parts of the Coproduction Experience Model (Vision, Access, Incentive, and Expertise), using a variety of different technologies/media (devices, mobile/web, and so on).

Why did you go into Human Resources?  What about HR attracted you?  For me, I wanted to make a difference.  That has always been the most rewarding part of my job.  Many of you will say that you want to have a "seat at the table."  What about having a seat at the table with the Department of Labor?  What about having a seat at the table in a Congressional hearing?  Sound like a way to make a difference and represent our profession?  Join the SHRM Advocacy Team. Why did I join...

Key Points: Our content is constantly updating, so we need to keep control of it on our servers.  This doesn’t work well with SCORM. We provide the ability to personalize the content, mix and match assets as desired, quickly. For customers who do want SCORM tracking, we develop a way to send that data for each customer. Everyone always uses the latest version of the content. Recording informal learning — message boards, instant messages, is important for preserving knowledge. Looking into mobile, at least tablets. Providing "just in time" searchable access information, doesn’t have to be taken all at once as large courses. New API should make use of open source. You were saying you do technical training? Right, for techs, engineers, and communications companies. Our primary market is service providers: Verizon, AT&T, telephone companies. There are about 1100 telephone companies in the US. That’s our target market. The issues with SCORM are about accurate content. We looked into Scorm a couple of years ago, and we’ve run into clients every now and then and maybe even a potential partner now and then wit questions about SCORM support.  Their question was, are our courses SCORM-compliant? and the answer is, no, they’re not. The reason they are not SCORM-compliant is because SCORM doesn’t work too well with online training. The reason that we like online training is because we are constantly in there, making the course better, doing enhancements and improvements to the course. We tell our clients that the course we’re selling today is better than the course we sold two months ago, and the course we sell six months from now will be better than this one. And the reason is, we are constantly getting feedback from students, from people who interact with our students, and people who have gone over the syllabus with us. So we’re constantly in there improving the quality of our training. When you say "online training," do you mean hosted training, as opposed to training that’s delivered to the LMS? That’s right, we have a partner who hosts the website for us. It’s strictly online. And that’s real important, particularly in our industry, because things are changing so rapidly. Right now, there’s a big push within our industry to standardize Internet connectivity. It’s accomplished by the service provider and it is called Carrier Ethernet. In the SCORM world, when you develop a course and make it SCORM-compliant, you have to press a disc. Then you give it to your customer,  when that happens, you lose control over what the customer is looking at. For that reason, we shy away from SCORM. Now if we have customers who have SCORM systems, then we can adapt our system to do the reporting that SCORM system requires. But as far as the course material itself, we kind of stay away from SCORM, because we don’t want to be pressing discs. The theory is that as soon as you ship that disc out the door, it becomes obsolete. And then you kind of lose control over what version people are looking at when they’re taking your courses. In our particular industry, communications, accuracy is very important and the information has to be constantly updated. So that’s why we kind of shy away from SCORM. We’re intrigued that people are looking at something new or different. I’ve read the comments and I know there are a certain number of people who are saying that, well, you can’t always rely on having an internet connection. We’re saying, at least for our market, that’s a given. They have an internet connection, and a high speed one. We only need 200 Kb, but all of our customers have megabit connections. So that’s not really an issues with us. Now I can see that if you are doing courses on, for example, sales, or pole-climbing, or any kind of management training, HR training, etc., then that lends itself well to SCORM systems because you can press a disc, send it out, and it’s more or less "fire and forget it." So what we’re doing is we’re talking with the technical people inside these companies, and that’s where, as I say, accuracy and timeliness of the material is crucial. And we’re actually developing a relationship — certainly with the customer, and particularly with the students that the customer will send to us. We like to initiate conversations, and there’s feedback, and that helps us, again, enhance the quality of the course. Basically that’s the message I want to get across to you; I’m not sure whether this new learning platform is something that’s applicable to a company like us. We’d like to think it is. It sounds like your customers do sometimes have LMSs that they want results reported back into; have you been able to do that step via SCORM? How does that work? When we first started this out, we didn’t know anything about SCORM, so we’ve created our own LMS. We use software and databases to present our material. When you look at any of our screens on our courses, what you’re looking at is a template on the screen, and then we populate that template with various files. There’s an audio file, there’s image files, there’s text files; so we dynamically create all of our pages when the user requests them. It’s transparent to the user. We use this capability, this flexibility, because we do something that we haven’t seen anyone else do. We’ve developed 13 text-book courses, and that means we have probably about 100 different technology chapters. And those chapters are made up of about 350 technical modules. We enable the customer to go into what we call the library, and they can mix and match any of those technology puzzle-pieces together and create their own course on the fly, in real time. So you can create a course in less than a minute, by just selecting what you want the course to contain. That’s why we do it the way that we do; to have that flexibility so that the customer can mix and match pieces of the courses in real time. We think that’s important. And that certainly doesn’t lend itself to SCORM. But when we get to a customer who has SCORM, then they’ll say, well we need to know the reporting — did this person complete the course, etc. But we can make our system talk to their system with that information. Because we’re collecting the information and we send it, we would normally send it to them anyway. It wouldn’t be in a SCORM format, but as far as changing it, we can do that. So you just do that on the back-end, just figure out how their system wants it and negotiate a way to send it for each customer? Yes. Another thing that is very important to us, is the quality of what we put out there. We have looked at a couple of companies who are making SCORM courses, and when I look at their course, and look at what we put out, it’s night and day. I’ll give an example: we talked with a company over in Europe who does SCORM courses. And we looked at their course and in our mind, it was just no comparison. To give you an example, I asked them how long it took them to develop their course. Their course, they said, took about three weeks to develop a SCORM course. Now, to contrast that, we have a new course on carrier ethernet. Took us 856 hours to develop the technical part, which is basically an instructor-led course, the course work and all the graphics for the course. Then, in order to adapt that course to put it online, there was an additional 1,020 hours. That’s engineer hours. So our quality has to be there. If the person gets in front of the screen, it has to work. First time, every time, no hiccups, nothing. And if something happens, they just throw up their hands and walk away. So we have to make sure that everything is spot-on. We have one place for images, and when the image changed, the audio lecture describing the image changes with it. It’s timed and the quality has to be there for us. I haven’t seen that in a lot of the SCORM courses that I’ve looked at. Another example is that in the SCORM courses I’ve looked at, they’ll have the instructor or some other person doing the audio lecture for the course. What we do is we hire professional voice-over people to do the lectures. The difference in quality of the audio is important to us as well. That may not be anything that’s really a limitation of SCORM Also, you have the mix and match — it’s really the fact that you’re delivering your own content from your own system, is what enables you to do that. But I think it’s important for a company to be able to personalize. A company that was making SCORM courses wants to have this on the back-end.  If a customer comes to them and says, Hey, can you develop a course with just this, this, and this, then they can do it in like two minutes. We think that’s an important component of what we do, because a lot of our customers like the online stuff, but the fact that they can then tailor it to be exactly what they want. For years in our business, we were saying, What’s the killer app? And we think that’s personalization. Have it your way. So rather than have one size fits all, we like to give the customer the capability to design it how they see it. So that’s an important aspect as well. I guess what I’m saying is that any kind of program that has you press a disc, and publish a CD, well it’s hard to maintain accuracy of the content in a changing environment. I think that SCORM certainly applies to a lot of generic kinds of training, but I don’t think it applies that well to technology training, because things are just changing so rapidly. It’s hard to draw a line in the sand. As things are changing rapidly, what do you find are your versioning needs? Do you find there are some changes you make and people immediately see, or are there others you need to hold back if someone has already started a course? Any sort of split like that? What we do in addition to providing the course online, each has a student workbook associated with it. So the student workbook is a pdf document, and the inside of the document ranges from some 60 pages up to 360 pages, depending on the course. Whenever we make changes in the content of the course, then we have to make that corresponding change to the document itself. So you’re right; we do look at windows when there are people in the courses, and if we do make a change, we’ll notify those people at the time, that there has been a change and they may want to take another download of the student workbook. But it’s important for us to make sure that the student workbook agrees with what they’re seeing on the screen, online. Typically what people do is they download the book and then they take the course with the book sitting on their lap. The reason it’s a pdf document is because let’s say I sell you a course now, and you can’t take it until the fifteenth of May. When you actually go in to the course, that’s when you download the book. So we can be sure the book agrees with what’s online. It sounds like sometimes you notify people that there are changes, but it sounds like you never run into a situation where you’ve made a change, but you want to hold it back from the people who are taking it currently, just to avoid rocking the boat, and only propagate that change to the next group of people taking that course? Yes, and we have people coming and going all the time. Because one of the good things about this is they can stop the course anytime. We automatically bookmark the page. I was just talking to a CISCO engineer who was taking one of our courses. This person can access the course from your work location, from home, while you are on the road if you’re in a hotel. As long as you have Internet access, you can access the course material. Have you been looking at mobile at all? You can take the courses from a Netbook. We are thinking of putting up student work-binders on iPads. We’ve already done one of our student workbooks to be viewed on  an iPad. Not the course itself. But that’s easily done, because the big thing we have to work with is the screen size, and the iPad actually has a larger screen than the Netbook does, so that would be no big issue. We have an iPad to and we had to work around a couple of issues but it works great. But I think it would probably take us a few days to adapt the full course for the iPad. The hard part about selling it in the mobile environment is to get your price for the course. The prices of our courses range from $300 all the way up to $1300 a course. And people are used to 99 cent downloads in the app store? That’s right. So one of the things we are thinking about doing is selling it online but a chapter at a time. Here’s Chapter 1, here’s Chapter 2. Typically, the way we engage with a lot of clients is what we call a site license. A site license gives the company access to all of the material we’ve developed. A site license duration is a year, and in that year, that includes any new material we bring online during that time. Customers pay based on the number of users that are going to access the system, so a site license of 10, 20, 50, 100, 200, 300. Like that. That’s typically how they engage with us. When we engage on a site license we establish a point of contact for their company, someone in their company who is going to be the administrator. It takes us about five minutes to train the administrator: Here’s your log-in information, here’s the page where you can look at the reports. You can go in and look at each student, find out where they are, what course they’re working on, how well they’re doing, etc. Which courses have been completed, all. We collect that information already for our administrator, so it’s just a matter of them building a bridge to make it adaptable for the SCORM system. If you require any information about the people who are taking the courses, then the administrator feeds that in as well? And do you need to know their name, title, what department, etc? Sure. We use their e-mail address as the user name, and we come up with a password. Our system randomly develops generic passwords, or we can assign our own. That makes it easy for them, but at the conclusion of every course, in order to get credit for that course, you have to complete the course survey. And the course survey has places for name, address, etc. The other thing we do for our students is we build a profile page for every student. When the student logs in to the system, there’ll be a page where they can upload a picture of themselves, put their name, title, company, what their area of expertise is, and then we offer a bunch of web 2.0 services in conjunction with that profile page. There is a section we call the "switchboard," which is industry information that the user might want to read. There’s another section which is "conversations" and that’s an internal blog for techs and engineers to talk about technical issues, or ask questions of each other, etc. And you scope that down to the customer level, or is that just a blog where - Depends on the size of the customer. If we have a small customer, than the blog will be shared by a number of small companies, but if it’s a large customer, we’ll do it internally. Whatever they’re comfortable with. We do that so they have access to those two areas. We also have an internal message system, and here’s the cool thing about the message system. We tell our customers that, this is not like the old days where you get out of high school and you go to a company and you work there forever. The way that it is these days, a lot of people, especially in our business, are project-oriented. They’re engineers. They want to work on this, on that, etc. They want to build their resume. So if you’ve got something interesting that they want to work on, that’s a cinch — they’ll work there. When the project is up, then they’re going to take a hard look at what else you’ve got to do, or maybe they’ll go over and work on another project somewhere else. We’re telling our customers that — in the lifetime of your company, there’s going to be some really smart people transition through your company. They work for two, three, four years, and then they’re off to something else. We have created is an internal message system. We encourage the customer to have technology discussions using the message system, which is almost like an instant message system. With this message system, they can have those internal discussions, and we record the discussions and archive that information. Th archive is then searchable by other people inside the organization. An example would be, you have a company in New York, and they’re having a discussion on how they’re going to support voice-over IP. They may have that discussion between people at the same location or a different locations. And then maybe, let’s say, six weeks later, other people in San Francisco want to have a discussion about voice-over IP, they can go in to this message system, go into the archives and do a search on voice-over IP.  They can recall this conversation that happened six weeks earlier in New York, and see what was the result of those conversations. We’re trying not to just deliver training courses, but to implement learning environments. The courses raise the level of discussion between the people who take them, and then we want to be involved in recording those discussions, or facilitating those discussions that helps people learn from one another. If you go to any classroom, there’s a lot of learning that takes place outside the particular instruction — on a break, at lunch, etc. You might learn something that’s real important. So we want to tap into that, and facilitate these discussions as well. I don’t know how that would fit into an advanced learning system, but my encouragement is to develop something that not only deals with the actual instruction itself, but recreate that whole learning environment. Sort of like that unstructured learning. We think that’s important. A lot of what I’ve been looking at is how to integrate various systems that provide learning experiences with systems that track it, or other systems that might offer an environment for collaboration, but it seems like you have the whole system. Whereas, sometimes, people think of the LMS - And that’s part of our history. What we have right now, we were actually doing, probably 80% of this back in 1998, but it didn’t work because the access technology wasn’t there. You could download a page, but while the page was downloading, you had  go get a cup of coffee. And a lot of the functions that we have now, we had to develop back in those days.  We had to develop the capabilities ourselves. There were no software packages that did it. Now, there are software packages with all kinds of things to help you publish this stuff online, but we’re sort of taking the other route, where we’ve developed a lot of this stuff. Do you have — it sounds like — would you say most customers use your system as it is and get reports out of that, or do more of them have other systems they want to — that you wind up integrating with? No. I can count on one hand the number of customers we’ve had who wanted us to adapt our system to report to their SCORM system. Most of our customers are interested in the actual learning itself, and what they’re looking for is accurate and timely data. That’s what they want. And so, if this is an easy solution for them.  The only thing they have to do is maintain a website or a browser. It’s very easy for them, it’s a turn-key solution for them. A lot of our customers don’t have big training organizations. Even so, I’ll still work with large companies that probably have these internal systems, but we get engineers and people calling us because they want access to the content that we have. And it’s easy for the companies to say, Yeah, go ahead, do it. Because all they have to do is get on the internet and they get access to the course. So we do the credit card process — they call us with a credit card, we take the card, we give them access: Bang! It’s done. They go in, get access, take the course — they get a certificate when they finish, if the boss calls up and wants to know how they did, we’ll that out for them. So, it’s — we’re trying to make it as easy as we can for the companies we work with, and the customer. So we do all the heavy lifting on our end. A lot of them don’t have a big learning, tracking system they want to keep track of all this in, necessarily. Sure, and typically what we do for those customers is we just generate a monthly report. It’s automatically generated. They go in in the first day of the following month, and they can just print out the report that’s sitting, waiting there. And it just shows who did what during the month. Another thing we do is interactive exercises in our courses. So our courses are broken down into chapters, and there are several modules that make up a chapter. Every chapter has objectives, the course content, and then at the end of the chapter we have a summary that summarizes everything. And then we have interactive exercises, or multiple choice exercise questions. So the questions range from 16 up to 36 or 40 questions, depending on the content of the chapter. The student can go in and they’ll answer all of the questions in the exercise, and we make them answer all those questions. There’s a button where students can correct the exercise question. Let’s assume someone takes the test and they get 5 or 6 questions wrong, They may be 75% first time they take the exercise. We’re not interested in giving anyone an A or B or C; we want to make sure they understand the content. We allow the student to reset the exercise, go back into the material, look up the answers they got wrong, find out what the right answers are, come back to the exercise, answer those questions with the right answer. So the first time they take the test, they get a 75%; second time they answer the other questions, they get 100%. As far as we’re concerned, that’s 100%. We haven’t run across anyone who is really hung up on whether someone gets an 80 or 90 on a course, or whatever. The only thing is, if you have people who aren’t motivated, who you have to maybe coerce to take the course it doesn’t work.  We have had several instances where they were made someone take the course, they went in and took the test one time and said, forget it, and moved on from there. We had a couple actually failed a course. That’s really hard to do. But that happened. Another thing we run across is we had a couple of companies where we look at the logs of people going in and taking the course and the exercises. We saw some people go in and take the exercises and complete it in a minute. And that told us that someone had gone in and taken the exercise, and written down the answers. Now, in every exercise, we randomize the questions. The questions you have in one person’s test will be arranged in a different way for someone else. And even in some courses, we have multiple pools of questions. In one of our courses we have 400 questions, and what we do is randomly select a number of questions from that. It’s just making the system deal with real life.  There people who are going to cheat. And that’s important. I tell all of my clients, "If you have to coerce people, if you have to bring them over and sit them down in front of us, save your time. There’s a lot of people out there looking for a job. Get somebody in there who is interested and wants to do this. It’s somebody who understands the gravity of the moment. If you aren’t trained, if you don’t know what you want, then you’re going to be out of a job. Your standard of living is going to drop like a rock. And so it’s no good to force people to do that." These features you’re mentioning — the question pools, the randomization, etc. — that’s all things you are perfectly happy with how they are working the way you’ve done it, so you aren’t looking for standards to help support that in the future? Are there things that if there were a standard that incorporated features around this that you might want to switch to? There are capabilities in things that we have right now, that we thought were important to the development of our products. A lot of other people might not want to do that, but I want to mention that these are things that we’ve developed to separate us from a lot of other companies. I’ve had some companies say to me, they are afraid to do training, because if they train their employees they will be more appealing to other companies, and they’ll go off and get another job. And my comeback to them is that there’s nothing you can do about that. You’re going to train people and there are some people who are going to leave. But the thing you should be thinking about is all of those people who aren’t trained but you’re still paying them. So what are you getting from them? Right now, another thing we are building in that we’re about two weeks away from having online chat. So that the persons taking a course can do an instant messaging with the person who wrote the course. Right now we do e-mail, but I think IM would be better. This is what you’re doing now, but in the next 5 - 10 years, how do you think e-learning will change, or how will you need to change what you’re doing with your training? Well, obviously — I’m an old guy. I can’t imagine taking this on an iPhone. But that’s something we’ll develop this year, to be able to offer this on a mobile device, certainly on an iPad. This will probably be done before the summer. As far as doing this on a mobile device, that’s another thing I think we’ll do. What we’re trying to do is create a technical partnership with our clients, so if they have any technology issues, they can talk to us, and we’ll give it to them in plain English. What are you looking for? For example we already have a search engine, where they can type in a keyword, and we’ll tell them every place in the Watershed library that the term appears. In real time we want the person to get the information right when they need it, from wherever they happen to be. If someone is working on an issue and they have a problem with Internet Group Message protocol, they can go on the system, type in IGMP, and in five minutes, we’ll give them — not just — a rundown on what it is, but not just text but graphics, animations, to explain it to them much quicker and in a format that’s easy to listen to. Rather than try to reach something that’s five to ten pages long, now you can just open this up and it’ll talk to you. It’s kind of like audio-books for engineers, with animations and texts and graphics. I think that’s going to be, that’s important. To have that information right at your fingertips. Whenever you need it. So just "in-time" information, being more of a reference than just going and taking a big course and delving into that for information? That’s part of our marketing. When we market the course, we’re saying, "If you’re going to put in voice-over IP in June, no sense in taking the course now. Wait until maybe the second or third week in May, take the course then. When you start to implement, start putting this new network in, and the information is in short term memory and you can apply it and that’ll really make it stick. It’s all just-in-time training. A couple of other good things about the way we do it, is, if you’re a company and you need to train lots of people quickly, we can do that in a week. And, those 150 people don’t need to be in the same location. They can all be in different locations, doesn’t matter to us. Any other changes you can foresee coming up? We feel like we’re hamsters on a wheel. We’re trying to keep up with what’s going on technology-wise, so that’s difficult by itself. What we’re doing is implementing a program where we’re going out to the industry and looking for industry experts who will write courses for us, we’ll put it on our system, and we’ll give them a share of the revenue. Is there anything you didn’t get a chance to say that you wanted to? No, I think that’s probably it. That’s a rundown on what we do, and that’s what I wanted to do was give you some input as to how we look at this and how it works with us. Like I say, the big problem we had with SCORM is the need to keep up to date with what’s going on in the industry. And I would say that not only applies to my industry, which is communication, but it probably applies to a lot of the sciences as well. Supporting distributed content is one of the goals of this project. I’m a strong proponent of using open source. We use PHP, AJAX, Linux, all open source software packages in our products. I think if you buy something that’s open source, that lets other people in the industry get in there and take a look — as long as you have several people that know what they’re doing to be the editors of changes you can make, just open it up and let people who are in the business go in there and look at it, maybe make adjustments to it, and changes. I think that’s the direction that everything is going.  It’s probably a good idea to open it up and let other people get in there and collaborate and you’ll find out how much stuff you can get done for free by doing that. Whereas, the other point of view is to then hire some software company to develop this. I’m a proponent of opening it up and let other people — take all these people who have SCORM courses, SCORM systems, open them up and let’s see how you can adjust them, make changes and enhance them. It doesn’t seem like it’s at cross-purposes to try to define an open standard, whether they’re open source or not, but that seems like it would be helpful both to open and closed source systems. The thing is that I’ve been involved in standards for a number of years, ANSI standards, ITI, IETF,  and IEEE standards, etc. It’s been my experience that the bulk of the implementation of these standards is complete before the final drafts are written. When the standards are finally complete all the leading-edge companies are off on something else. For product development, once you get a framework designed and people have an idea, okay this is pretty much how it’s supposed to work, then you have a number of companies who will develop their solutions, what they think is the right solution, and the market will decide which one is spot on.

Key Points 90% of content loaded into our system is SCORM 1.2 — because it’s perceived as simple by our clients. Demand for SCORM 2004 support seems to be mainly as a "check-box", something you’re supposed to have. Mining industry: simulating big trucks. Have objectives & interactions to track but don’t have a way to track them. Support for distributed content is our biggest issue. "Content as a Service", need to manage IP, licensing, discovery of distributed content. API needs to keep track of what version of content is used. And report on it. Would be great to have an instructor API to allow an observer to indicate an objective has been met. Reporting API may make sense, but our clients aren’t asking for it. System integrations generally consist of passing certification status (yes or no). Discovery, license, and use of content needs to become more like buying an iPhone app for your organization. Cross-platform will be big SCORM should have a mission statement, and a roadmap, that should allow people to feel more comfortable putting effort into it. Can you describe your role within your organization and how you have made use of SCORM and other similar standards, or where you’ve avoided it too? I’m founder of Ecampus and I’m looking at this from a commercial/usability point of view. Our technical guys can’t agree on how things should be done. So I don’t think I’ll bring that discussion to the table. All of our clients use SCORM and a LMS to deploy their learning content. So it’s something we work with every day. It’s a big part of our business. What versions of SCORM are you currently supporting and why? 1.2 and 2004. 90% is still 1.2, though. Perceived simplicity is the reason. People just want to be grab the raw score. The other things that SCORM 2004 offers are often surplus to requirements. Since you do support 2004, is that just a request of the other 10% or do you think it’s more of a check-box for people? What pushed you to do 2004? I think it’s a check-box for most people. Only a few of our clients use sequencing or anything like that. Even when they do demand 2004, their authoring tools often won’t support it. You mentioned raw scores, but are there any other sorts of data your customers typically want to track? We’ve got clients in the mining industry who want to use mining simulators. They’re simulating big trucks. They want to push that data back into their LMS. How do you measure whether someone’s driven a truck correctly? Scoring doesn’t really work. So objectives are the kind are useful there. But not entirely adequate. It’s not just that they don’t know about objectives, it’s that they don’t have a way to hook it up to track them? So the JavaScript API is not sufficient and we need new services? Yes. Another thing that’s top of our list is distributed content. That’s our number one thing we’re passionate about. That’s where SCORM needs to go. That’s probably one I don’t necessarily even want to spend a lot of time on, because it’s such a slam-dunk, we don’t need any more justification for it. Sure. I would emphasise, though, that when deciding on using SCORM with apps and virtual world simulators, ways to manage IP, licensing, etc, in a standard way is vital. During both the discovery and use of courseware. I think that will take SCORM a long way forward - making it really easy to grab and utilize content. I don’t want to gloss over the API too much, because it’s still useful to know all the use-cases in case there is more to it than we just need to get rid of the JavaScript API. That’s something the other folks have brought up too, is the content as a service model. For example, in Australia, a lot of content is driven by compliance, changes to legislation, and so on. So managing versions is really important. Administrators need to know which version of the course has been completed by a given student. I guess this will mean the API needs to pass something along that says, "Okay, John Smith actually is doing version 2.2, not 2.1 now." Something like that. If the mining companies were to track objectives to see how well people could drive; do you have any specifics on objectives there might be and where the data is coming from? Flipping a particular switch, etc.? I’m by no means an expert in this area. If you can successfully execute a 3-point turn in a mining truck might be an objective, though. I think it’s kind of binary, yes or no in most cases. But not always. So they don’t want, driver started their 3-point turn at an angle of 40 degrees, then took five seconds, then reversed, nothing like that? I don’t think so. I can see the military guys would probably love that, though. We need SCORM to handle more sophisticated data models that capture information like that. Any other examples that spring to mind with customers with something they want to track, whether due to the API or something missing in the data model, there doesn’t seem to be a clear, good way to do it? Clarity around the API can sometimes be the issue. But sometimes it’s the structure of it. In the mining scenario, we’ve got people out in the field. It’s competency-based training, so instructors observe learners doing it. The instructor needs to tick a box that X and Y have been done, on an iPad. It would be fantastic if that guy could — either in real-time or it could sync up later, tick that off via the API without logging in as the learner. That’s something that if that were available, you would want to implement that in your LMS, and you think your customers would prefer to handle it through the API than through the features your LMS provides? Yes. It needs to be standard. Then for example, the manufacture of a piece of equipment could have an app to do the training and interact with the API. The app steps the trainer through things, which can be tediously complex. So that’s what we’re thinking; it might be a pie-in-the-sky, but it sounds like a nice idea, conceptually, from where I’m sitting. Once it’s captured, how do your customers want to access that data? Just by LMS reports, typically. I think some people are talking about a report API, it may make sense, but in many respects, our clients aren’t asking for it. What other sorts of vendors or systems are you integrating with now? We integrate with lots of systems. For example, we do a lot of contractor induction. Which uses SCORM content. And ultimately that data gets pumped into a compliance / risk management system because they need to ensure that people working in mines know not to drink whilst driving that big truck. And there are business systems, too. We don’t really integrate into other learning systems, except simulators, which we talked about before. When you integrate with compliance systems, you’re pushing that out to say, these people have been certified, they’ve taken the training they need to? And that is purely completion certifications, or is there the score, that sort of thing going over there too? Purely completion at that point. If people need to dig down deeper, they go to the LMS, but this is purely tick the box, if you’ve met the requirement‚ and off they go. I think that it’s completed is all that gets sent through. Do you think there’s any need for standardization of that sort of communication, to say — I guess this is another aspect of, is it a reporting API, or just, shouldn’t it be possible to just check with the LMS that they’ve met this certification? We are creating more and more systems where this is occurring. So this is a reporting API of a kind. And you look at any sort of development community out there. Provide an API and they do all sorts of crazy stuff you’d never think of. Are there any things that you’ve noticed or aware that your customers are doing in the learning experiences they are creating you would describe as new and innovative and do you think those would have any impact on what sort of communication might be needed in the future? An example. We have people trying to add forums to SCORM courses. Making forum responses part of assessments. We’ve done it on behalf of clients, for quite a while now. It’s messy at the moment. But it would be great to have an assessor assessing items and then having the results slide back through the SCORM API. That gets back, I guess, to the instructor API? Very much so. Social may turn out to be an interesting domain that we could sell our clients on if we could present meaningful use cases for it. At the moment, the SCORM spec just doesn’t support it. Maybe that is an opening for the SCORM spec; you could try to make sense of all that’s out there. I’ve seen tweets about activity streams. If you guys can make sense of all that, I’m sure people will use it, they just need someone to make sense of it all first. What do you think will change or should about e-learning in the next 5 - 10 years? That’s a big question. I hate the generic answers I could give here: mobile devices, blah-blah virtual worlds, blah-blah … But more practically, there’s too much complexity, too much friction in elearning. It’s hard to go out and find a piece of learning content. It’s hard to deliver it to learners. So the point of discovery, licensing, and using elearning content has to become like buying an iPhone app for your organization. Bullet-proof. It just works. It all needs to operate cross platform. It would be awesome if you could just publish once for for the different target platforms and deploy new versions with ease. Is there anything you had on your list you haven’t been able to bring up yet? What’s going to happen to SCORM in the next ten years? The world’s moved on since the first spec was drafted. SCORM needs to be more than a set of tech specs. Realistically, with tech, we have no idea what’s going to happen in five years. In broad terms, sure. But in technical terms? No. So we need some kind of a framework allowed SCORM to evolve and adapt to new technology. So that if something really cool comes out, there’s a fair chance it will get picked up and integrated into the spec. That would give some degree of comfort for vendors. To do this you have to get people behind it. So many people show so little interest in SCORM. Content portability, open standards, and so on, are not at the top of most peoples priorities. Integrating SCORM with new technology is even lower. But if you can create demonstration projects that actually show the benefits of the new SCORM standards, the way Gmail did for web apps, a roadmap explaining where it’s going, and simple, comprehensive documentation, then you have a better chance to generating the excitement required to get people investing in SCORM.

Key Points: Customer wants to allow learners to share and comment on notes: within a topic, or across courses. There is increasing demand for mobile delivery. We have extremely large libraries of content. Clients desire a simpler way to find, manage, and deploy content from within their LMS. Each LMS provides different properties to adjust course behavior. Some systems don’t provide bulk import. Cross-domain, JavaScript issue.  We would prefer to host the content, and just deploy meta-data. Discussion of marketing new API. Meta-data should be more extensible, content provider should be able to add meta-data that will be displayed, and acted upon if understood. Trend: tracking, reporting on more detailed assessment data. People want to have access to one and the same library of content from a range of different devices. Versioning: important to keep track of what version of a course was experienced, but also the fact that multiple versions are logically the same course. Multi-lingual content is an important use-case for versioning. We provide robust simulations, and have added gaming concepts. But we would like to share some information across users, e.g., add a competitive component. Monolithic courses will to some extent be replaced by smaller, or interactive experiences. Another trend is vLabs, our virtual labs product that provides live sessions to actual hardware. TinCan: If you want to go around and do introductions, that would be great. Tom: I’m Tom Stone. I used to be an instructional designer here at Element K, years ago, and now I’m in a learning evangelism role. Jim: Hello, my name is Jim Renner. I work in Element K’s platform services group as a technical consultant and I provide pre-sales support for our clients, focusing on our platform products, KnowledgeHub and ContentHub. Specifically, the areas of integration and customization, and you get quite a bit of exposure for clients looking to deploy all sorts of content, SCORM and otherwise, through our platform. Chris: This is Chris de Turk, I’m an analyst at Element K, and I work mostly with the Element K LMS. Jen: Jen Turney, I’m a systems architect, I’ve done a fair amount of work with the LMS side of SCORM communications, both SCORM and AICC, both with our LMS and with our ContentHub product through which we expose content to other people’s LMS. Paul: Paul Sleeman, integration consultant. I am a technical resource for our sales team and customers who are actually doing the integration of Element K content into other LMSs and integrating their content into the Element K LMS. So I do a lot of hands on work with SCORM content and customers who are using SCORM. TinCan: What would you say are the most new and innovative things you are working on, either in your training or what your customers are doing? Jen: We’ve got a customer where they want us to have the user able to take notes within a particular topic and have those notes shared across the topic or possibly even have that information shared across courses. And we were sort of fleshing out similar to, the way we had approached other, similar scenarios in the past, where we essentially introduced custom data model elements and behaviors associated with those and make those data model elements available for our own courses. Tom: Mobile delivery of content to smartphones and tablets is certainly something we’ve been pursuing in a couple of different ways. We have an app-based solution that primarily focuses on smartphones, and we’re also pursuing tablet-focused content for the iPad in particular that is sort of re-engineered so it’s not Flash content, but rather HTML 5. So that’s certainly a big trend we have been pursuing lately. Jim: From a business-perspective, I think one of Element K’s biggest challenges (and we’re somewhat unique in the industry because we’ve got both, content and an LMS), is content deployment. We’ve got extremely large libraries of content and the standards currently don’t support a good solution for asset management. Specifically, for a client to query a content delivery system, to say, "What assets do you have that meet this criteria?" So that I can go and get those assets and deploy them, that’s currently a relatively manual process. So anything in that area, around asset-management, and improving the overall deployment process as it relates to standards, would be helpful. The additional characteristics or attributes of a course, that are defined by each unique LMS, make the content loading and deployment process very burdensome. Every LMS seems to have a different approach to what are the additional required fields, how do you categorize and tag the content for search and cataloguing, and that’s very frustrating for our clients. The introduction of standards for asset-management and asset-deployment within the LMS could go a long way to improving client experience. From my perspective, that’s one of the biggest deficiencies in the standard right now. TinCan: You started out mentioning asset management, and then you were talking more at the course level. Are you talking also about, what I would think of as assets are pieces of the course — are you talking about managing at that level, or more the overall course packages? Jim: I think at the course package level, it’s the most important. In my experience, we just haven’t seen enough reusability so that the multi-SCO structure works. Element K is a big supporter of multi-SCO content; unfortunately, the vast majority of third-party content we deploy into our LMS is single-SCO. The industry in general has avoided multi-SCO structures for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is course completion requirements and how unstructured that is in the 1.2 specification. Paul: I do agree with you that we have never seen the real benefit of the granular sharing of assets that was a big part of the original specification. In practical experience, our customers are interested in deploying courses, and knowing about what courses are available to them, and by extension, getting those courses actually deployed in our LMS. They consider that one big project as far as the implementation of e-learning goes. So anything that is designed to make that easier to deal with — and from their point of view, across multiple vendors, would be a huge benefit. The cross-domain aspect, the JavaScript API was going to be my big issue to bring to the table. As far as just a general complaint, it seems like you guys already addressed that in the beginning. I think that, to me, would be the biggest single improvement to SCORM: making the API communication something that was cross-domain friendly, and could enable us to more easily pursue the deployment model we prefer: over the internet with us host the content. That is, the scenario where we just deploy meta-data to the customer. TinCan: The JavaScript API just doesn’t solve the problems we are setting out to solve. Paul: Having a simple way to use SCORM as the standard for the communication in the hosted model would be huge. We’re using AICC, because of the HACP implementation. It’s just that much easier to do this kind of thing. So, I can see that as being able to take the best of what SCORM offers and not have to be tied to an older standard to do the communication piece of it. It just makes a lot of sense, and it would make SCORM a better standard, from my point of view. TinCan: What are the key things you think you are missing out on by using HACP that you would be looking to get back? Paul: It’s more the meta-data when you get down to it. The AICC model doesn’t have some of the nicer things that SCORM supports. It’s kind of limited: you have your title, description, keywords, some information about the course that’s available in the aggregation model that you can leverage, but there’s more and other custom things that each LMS provider is doing and perhaps incorporating some of those things into the standard would make it easier for customers to use the content. Our content is reasonably simple when it comes to what we communicate. So from an actual data-model perspective, we’re not really missing anything. There are some limitations, just in trying to stuff everything into suspend data. So overall, I don’t think from a run-time point of view that we’re really missing much. I mean, to me, it’s more aggregation, and then it kind of explodes into the whole catalogue and asset-management component, which there’s nothing for now. Jim: I’d say, just to piggyback on what Paul said in terms of implementations, of what we’re missing — I think there’s a level of marketing and name recognition. Clients are always asking for SCORM. Is your content SCORM-compliant? Absolutely. And then we get to implementation, and we want to deploy 1,000 courses, and we want to use our ContentHub product, which is our over-the-internet solution, and we fall back on AICC. That can be challenging, occasionally, because of the various AICC implementations. I think, Paul, would you agree that some of the content-loading practices for AICC courses are a little more archaic than their SCORM counterparts, in certain LMS providers? Paul: I totally agree. I think that’s one of the great things about SCORM. The XML-based meta-data and communicating that meta-data through a standard, like XML, is far superior than what AICC ever really got to in their standard. TinCan: To go back to what you were talking about in terms of marketing, I’m curious, if this new API comes out, and it’s not called SCORM, do you think that it would be significantly more difficult from a marketing point of view to say, This isn’t SCORM, but it’s from the same folks who developed SCORM, and it’s their next thing, or does it matter if it’s called SCORM? Jim: I think it comes down to what vendors you’ve got supporting it. I think there’s name-recognition for sure. The client just wants the content and the LMS to interoperate. I think I mentioned the marketing because they want SCORM, we tell them we use SCORM, and then we ultimately implement with AICC. But they’re happy, because ultimately, they’ve gotten what they asked for. Jen: Look at what happened with SCORM 2004. The LMSs never really adopted it because it wasn’t being used by the content. Same kind of thing — maybe if there’s enough new features and enough new capabilities in whatever the next new thing is, then it’s not so much about marketing. Jim: I would say your biggest marketing challenges would be to your vendors. The general population, your end consumer, they’re going to live with it whether it’s called SCORM or something else. I think the starts and stops we’ve seen in SCORM, there are vendors that are a little gun-shy about yet another version of SCORM that will fix all the ills. And so a name change might not be a bad thing from that perspective. TinCan: So, going along the adoption lines, what would be a really compelling or series of features together that would be a really compelling, sort of must-have feature in a new standard that would make you folks want to adopt really quickly? Jim: I think Paul answered the big one, which is the new communications protocol. I think the asset-management piece and improved — I’ll call it generically "extensibility," the ability for us as a content provider to say, "This is everything we want to tell the LMS about our content, it may or may not be part of the standard." We can be confident that when the LMS gets that information, they are actually going to display it to the user, that we’re not just putting it in the meta-data for our own sake. We’ve seen a lot of LMSs that basically do the bare minimum as it relates to SCORM attributes, and some standards there in terms of support, in terms of extensibility, would be important. TinCan: It’s interesting — you say it would both be extensible and something the LMS is sure to display to the user so is that — really an extensible set of meta-data that the LMS knows that everything that’s within this area, it has to be displayed to the user somehow. Jim: Exactly. TinCan: Besides a description of the content, what other sorts of things would you be putting in there? Would you just wind up with named value pairs you want the LMS to display? How would you want that to look? Jim: Yeah, I think it could be as simple as that. It could be a way to say: This is information we’re providing about the content that we need the user to see. It could be mobile-platform compatibility; we just don’t know where our content is going to go and what types of attributes we want to communicate to the users. Not expecting, necessarily, the LMS to take action on it, but it could. It could make those now search terms, or integrated into catalogue tagging. Jen: We’re actually just putting that in portable content. It’s sort of a way of specifying an arbitrary number of attributes, and so it’s really set up so that if there are attributes there, we display them. We don’t put any restrictions on what attributes can be there. TinCan: What is it that your customers usually want to track as part of a learning experience or course? Jim: Completions are the core tracking element. Is it complete, and when did they complete it. That’s at the center, the most important to all of our customers. From there, it goes in all sorts of directions. We’ve seen a big trend recently in assessments. There are a lot of assessment authoring tools out there now, and clients want to see the minute details of what the user accessed, and how they responded to questions. And unfortunately, in 1.2, each of those vendors is providing different levels of information. Jen: Sort of related to that is the idea of context of having interaction with the course in a particular context. Like right now, we only have the ability to save one set of values for this person for this SCO, but they may actually be interacting with that SCO in a different context, whether that be within the context of some greater development plan, or is it a particular period of time we are trying to track their interaction. Tom: Or they accessed the same content object from multiple devices: One from a laptop, one from a smartphone or tablet. People want to have access to one and the same library of content from a range of different devices. TinCan: You would actually want to know at that point, at the interaction level, that okay — this interaction occurred from this device? Paul: Sure. Jim: I think versioning to some extent is a bit of a challenge too. Versioning the content and thereby keeping track of what user participated with what version of the course. Some clients would like to be able to run a report, to say: I don’t care what version of the course the user completed, did they complete this course? So some level of version management would be helpful. TinCan: So the difference between an identifier for the course and also being able to declare that this is a particular version so that you have to have something in your LMS to tie it together. Jim: Exactly, yes. Because our typical approach, when we advise clients, is if your instructional content is changing, or the structure of the course itself, in terms of SCOs, is changing, you probably want to deploy it as a new course. But again, that’s not a great answer when the client doesn’t have a mechanism in the LMS to tie those versions together. And the other big one, as it relates to various versions, is multi-lingual. There is not a good approach to managing multi-lingual content. Element K has taken the approach of doing separate courses in specific languages, but we’ve seen some vendors that have done one course with a selector at the beginning of the course where you choose the language. The downside to that approach is that you have one set of meta-data and it’s probably going to be one language. The positive side of that is that I can run a report in the LMS to see who has completed that course and it doesn’t matter what language they took it in. So that’s another issue that comes up on a fairly regular basis. TinCan: What do you think about e-learning will change in the next five to ten years, and what should? Tom: Some of the things we’ve been talking about are things like mobile delivery of content, social learning, and users generating their own content whether that’s tied back to formal training courses or it’s sort of independent content emphasizing more social and informal learning on LMSs. At this point, pretty much every LMS vendor has some sort of social learning or web 2.0 functionality. That wasn’t true a couple years ago. They don’t all have mobile learning support in a strong way, but as described earlier we have a couple different tracks we’re pursuing on mobile. From an industry perspective, I think those are sort of the two hottest trends. Some of the things we are proud of doing on the e-Learning content side are interactive business skill simulations that are multi-branching. Also, we have introduced gaming concepts into our e-learning courses. Jen: Or even, this is going a little farther towards competitive types of activities, where you would want to be able to expose information to other users - Tom: Right now, most of the things we’ve done in this regard are things a user does on their own. If standards could support more competitive gaming for learning purposes inside of a course experience, that would be appealing to us. Jim: More broadly, and not just in gaming, but in general, I think we will see a move to cloud-based e-learning. What I mean by that is, the emphasis on the monolithic start-at-the-beginning-go-to-the-end course is decreasing, and whether it’s mobile delivery saying you’ve got five minutes, I’m going to go in and refresh myself on how to create a pivot table, or because it needs to be a head-to-head competitive learning experience between two people online, there is server-side functionality that’s going to have to start to be introduced into this content. Anything we can do on the standards side to get ahead of that and support that is going to be very beneficial. So I would recommend the standard comprehend server-side content delivery and that not all content will be the traditional "bunch of files" loaded on an LMS. Tom: As Jim was just saying, the course isn’t going to be the be all and end all. I think it’s taken ten years for the industry to fully wake up to that, and wake up to the possibilities, but at this point, certainly the thought leaders, and now even some of the vendors are really diving into some of these other approaches. Jim: And just to put it in context to what we’ve done in that realm of extending traditional course content: We have a virtual lab product we call vLabs, which is integrated into our e-learning content, and when the user launches the lab, they are actually going out to Element K servers and participating in a live session via a virtual connection to actual hardware. It could be a Cisco router or a Microsoft server; but they are on the hardware, interacting with it virtually, and that’s the type of interactivity and server-side extended functionality that I think we’re going to see more prevalent from the primary producers, but I also think that you’re going to see a lot of interesting combinations of social interaction tools and e-learning coming together.

Key Points: Biggest issue is still interoperability, though we haven’t encountered many problems. Mobile learning is increasingly in demand. Offline use, and the JavaScript API are the main (API) problems to be solved. Currently have a portable LMS, runs off a flash drive. Our portable solution will work well without new standards. Customers are asking for social learning. When having trouble in a section of a course, identify people in your network who did well. LMS could provide access point and tracking for social networks. Learning will become much more individualized. TinCan: Would you mind briefly describing what each of your roles are, and how you’ve used standards and SCORM? Al: I’m a product manager for our LMS product and some peripheral products, so I’m managing the enhancements, the things we put into the product, the decisions that we make about where we’re driving the product, and some strategy along with working with engineering and people like Rob here as well. Rob: I’m on the engineering side of the product development. In our LMS we support SCORM 1.2 and 2004, as well as the AICC specifications, the communications specifications and packaging. Al: We’re also doing OLSA (SkillSoft) and we were actually the very first LMS to work with SkillSoft to make that connection, and do that integration. Al: From NetDimensions’ standpoint, I think we would like to stand closer now and be part of the next steps from ADL, as much as we can. That helps us as much as ADL. TinCan: I think everyone would agree with that. We’re happy to hear that. And quite frankly, it’s one of the things we’re trying to bring to the table as part of this research project. Which is to go out there and kind of re-engage the community. And we’ve developed a lot of relationships with a lot of people over the years, and we’ve been explicitly reaching out to a lot of people, like you guys, and trying to let them know there is something going on again, and let’s come together to put something together to be useful to everyone. Al: I think my biggest issue has always been that this is a reference model and it’s not truly a standard, you don’t plug this into a wall and everyone works the same way. It’s the one biggest issue I would love to see this whole thing really come together in terms of a definite standard. TinCan: To parse words a little bit there, and say is increased standardization the goal? And I would say no. Because when you’re using those words, they’re loaded words for us standards geeks, and standardization at a formal level means taking five years to go through processes that at the end of the day don’t necessarily produce better results. Increased interoperability is absolutely on the radar screen and is something we’ve been hearing a lot from people, is to try to sand off those rough edges and find ways to make things work together a whole lot better. Al: Yes, interoperability. We have quite a few content vendors that we’ve tested with over the years, and for the most part, I think things have worked pretty well.  But it is something that hasn’t really come back to us where we’ve had a lot of problems with SCORM. I don’t know — Rob, is there little to none? Rob: On the whole, it’s worked pretty well. There are obviously issues where we need to dig in to what’s important under the hood. But as often as not it turns out to be misunderstandings on our part as to what implementers are about, and how certain things should work. Obviously, the test suite is pretty comprehensive, and catches most issues. TinCan: What new or innovative things are you or your customers doing in your training or learning, and particularly, things that are really forward-looking and maybe pushing the boundaries of what you can accomplish with SCORM? Al: The whole mobile learning piece of it, in the industry, is pretty much in our face all the time, and it’s getting more and more so. TinCan: The issues there that relate to SCORM would be the offline, disconnected sort of support as well as the fact that you’ve got a JavaScript API that forces you to involve a browser, right? Al: Right, exactly. We also released a product last year, mid-year, called mEKP (our LMS is called EKP, Enterprise Knowledge Platform). It runs on a Flash drive, and it’s actually the entire LMS, as much of it or as little of it as you want it to be. That is really how we are promoting portable LMS. At the same time now, we also have the mobile strategy, the smartphone strategy for iOS and Android, so being able to push that out. We’re moving from just having this portable LMS into the smartphone side of it. TinCan: We’re looking at a web service API to resolve a lot of the issues we’ve identified. With such an API, content could detect whether there’s a connection and if it has some means of caching, hold on to this data for a while. Is that something that you would have interest in changing your offline methodology to use? Or it’s not as interesting because you’ve basically already solved it? Rob: I am not immediately sure how that would help, so to consider a couple cases: On phone platforms, we can use the offline capabilities of HTML 5, the local data storing capabilities, so content can communicate through a JavaScript API and we can cache that offline. So if we use that with our portable LMS product, we can cache that on a laptop PC, or tablet, etc., so I don’t immediately see why we would need a separate or different API to do that. But maybe you’re thinking of something that I’m not. TinCan: One thing I’m thinking is that you are stuck with a JavaScript API, with needing a web browser somehow, so that’s one thing you could get around. I’m also trying to get at — what problems could be solved that would get you or your customers very interested in the adoption of a new API? Are there things that are missing that if we found a way to standardize there would be a big business case for? Al: For the most part, I think we came up with a really great solution for the mobile learners. I mean, obviously you need a computer, and then we really covered both sides of the coin. Offline learners, the person who has connectivity anywhere they go. I guess I’m not sure the API could help us from here. TinCan: So getting off of mobile, is there something else that you do think you potentially need some help in terms of what can be provided by an API or standard that would solve a business problem for you? Al: One of our offerings is a portal tool kit. We can create a portal, and connect it to our system, to the main server. So there’s a bunch of APIs. That’s potentially our biggest challenge at the moment for the portal. However, it’s more of what we’re using our APIs for, and the availability of those APIs. So those typically aren’t connectivity or interoperability problems. TinCan: What other sorts of things are your customers asking for? Al: One of the items that we hear more and more about is the integration with social services.  EKP has some nice things already built in like our wiki which can be used for all kinds of dissemination of content including Forums, chats etc;.  In addition to that we also have integrated the wiki directly with courses.  So if a learner needs additional information it’s just one click away.  With the use of our Portal Toolkit which allows clients to create an external portal it can easily interface with the other social applications such as Buddypress or any other broad social applications that are likely to be adopted by enterprise wide clients. TinCan: What does social learning mean to you? Al: To me it’s informal learning. It’s connecting to communities or people that supposedly would have the knowledge or expertise that you’re trying to find, and having connections to that. TinCan: Does social learning lead to interoperability challenges? Al: None that I can think of. Other than, if you’re in our LMS, if there was some access to content, if there were any issues around access to that. Rob: I guess if you wanted to design content that, for whatever reason, was aware of your social connections and people you know who might also involve some kind of interactivity, I guess then it could be an interoperability issue. TinCan: What are the roles of the LMS? So one of those is keeping track or providing a way to access what your social connections are, are there any other roles you would envision?  People can be on Facebook or Twitter, and get information from each other from various forums, and I’m wondering what is the role the LMS actually plays there? Or do you just want to say: Okay, go out and do it? Al: The role is providing an access point or just a way for you to get into your Twitter or Facebook or Yammer, or whatever accounts you think you’re going to go to, I think. We’re just providing the mechanism for people to get there. It’s our clients who would have to determine, do they want to allow that kind of access, and do they need to track it, do they want to keep track of things? If I were a training administrator at one of those organizations, I would want to know where my people are going. If we are spending money on buying training and then not using it, then that’s not very effective. Rob: So it could be something offline too, right? You might be interested if someone in your network has taken the same course you are currently taking. If you’re having trouble with a particular part of a course, and someone you know did particularly well on that part, that might be something you’d want to know. Maybe you want to ask them some questions. TinCan: A way for the course to reach out and somehow identify who the people in the network are and then also see if they’ve taken the course or not. And I guess that could mean that the LMS has somehow loaded information on your network, or at least, those people in your network who also use that LMS. I guess this is where standardization comes into play, to have a way to even identify if people have taken the same course in another LMS, but they’re in your network somehow? Sure, yeah. There could be a whole host of privacy issues around that, so there’d have to be some control there. TinCan: Absolutely, that’s where it gets really complicated. Within a learning experience, what do you think would be useful, or what do you think customers and users want to know about the learner? You mentioned wanting to know their name, maybe what department they’re in, their preferred language, etc.? Al: We don’t seem to hear that. However that would be an interesting feature or functionality to either determine that, or the user themselves volunteers their preferences for how they want to learn and then be able to provide the various blended learning offerings or scenarios for them. TinCan: How do your customers want to access the data they want to track? Part of it is how do they want to see it and also where and in what systems do they want to get at it? Rob: It’s very hard to generalize. Reporting requirements vary from client to client. We’ve built a reporting tool that allows people to construct customized reports because no two clients are the same in what they want to see. I would say, generally, most of the raw data they want is probably there, provided by the SCORM API, but in terms of how they want to slice and dice it, it varies from pretty much every customer. TinCan: And do you think they want to see it right within the LMS or do they have other systems they are trying to connect that to, that they want to integrate with, and how does that work for them now? Rob: Most of them get it from the LMS. Some have feeds that go back to their HR systems. TinCan: Are there few enough HR systems that people integrate with that it’s just not that hard to do one-off integrations with them? Rob: I’d guess there are about half a dozen that come up regularly, but having said that, on every implementation, pretty much every one is different. So even if you’re dealing with the same product, in our experience, it’s hard to have a sort of out-of-the-box, one size fits all, kind of connections to systems with no tweaking involved. TinCan: How do you see e-learning changing in the next five to ten years, or what do you think should change? Al: Mobile, smartphones. I think it’s just going to continue to get completely blown out and blown away. I don’t think a lot of us will be carrying laptops in five years from now. It might be some other kind or type of device that may give you the things that you need. It’s more personal; I think a lot of things will become more personal. Learning, much more individualized and connected and customized for how learners want to access information and perform, performance support and all of that. Things are changing so quickly, the tablet, I think, is an extreme game changer. Smartphones crept in but the tablet became a pretty big game changer, I think people will just continue to innovate on those kinds of products.

ROI Institute, Inc. has announced the publication of a new book, "High-Impact Human Capital Strategy: Addressing the 12 Major Challenges Today’s Organizations Face," by Jack J. Phillips and Patricia Pulliam Phillips, published by AMACOM, a division of American Management Association, New York, 2015. This new book focuses directly on how to set the human capital (HC) strategy in today’s turbulent and changing environment. Too often, the strategy encompasses only a classic and traditional approach to human resources: recruiting the best people, preparing them for assignments, motivating them for high performance, and retaining them for several years. While this is necessary, it is more helpful to have a high-impact human capital strategy that fits into the current environment and context. That strategy must effectively address the change in demographics of the workforce, current skill shortages and mismatches in labor markets, societal and structural shifts in organizations, the persistent energy crisis, globalization, important environmental challenges, and the use of technology to name just a few. At the same time, the strategy must be feasible, actionable, measurable, and implemented with remarkable success. This new book addresses twelve forces that are shaping HC strategy with the premise that each of these major forces must be addressed efficiently and effectively in the HR strategy. "It has become clear to many that in the most successful organizations—listed as the most admired, most profitable, most innovative, and those that represent the best places to work—have the best human capital," explains Patti Phillips, president and CEO of ROI Institute. "Every company has the same access to financial resources, natural resources, and technology, but what really makes the difference is human capital. How the organization acquires, manages, and retains human capital is driven by the human capital strategy in the organization."  "Several forces are having a tremendous impact on today’s organizations, ranging from technology, globalization, approaches to innovation, diversity, and the health status of the workforce. If these changes are not addressed and integrated properly in the organization, the results can be disastrous. Successful integration of these forces is accomplished through an innovative, high-impact human capital strategy. Unfortunately, most human capital strategies do not address all of these issues. This book is our attempt to share what must be done and is being done to address these twelve important changes that can make or break an organization," adds Jack Phillips, chairman of the ROI Institute. "The leader for this strategy is the human resources executive, often with a title of Chief Human Resources Officer (CHRO) who has been charged with preparing the human capital strategy, securing approval from top executives and the board of directors, and ensuring that it is executed efficiently and effectively. This new book is a ‘must’ guide for the human resources team and for the executives, detailing what they expect, and sometimes even demand, from this important function." Examples and step-by-step guidelines are included in the High-Impact Human Capital Strategy book to addressing the 12 major challenges today’s organizations face. It is designed to help HR move beyond hiring-training-benefits functions to developing human capital strategies that deliver measurable value in the face of ongoing challenges.  Copies of the book may be purchased directly from the publisher, ­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­amacombooks.org, amazon.com, or wherever quality books are sold. Copies are also available at ROI Institute. For more information, contact ROI Institute at www.roiinstitute.net. About ROI Institute ROI Institute, founded in 1992 as a service-driven organization, assists professionals in improving programs and processes using the ROI Methodology developed by Dr. Jack J. Phillips and Dr. Patti P. Phillips. The ROI Institute is the global leader in measurement, evaluation, and analytics, including the use of return on investment (ROI) in non-traditional applications. ROI Institute regularly offers workshops, provides consulting services, publishes books and case studies, and conducts research on the use of measurement and ROI, making it the leading source of content, tools, and services in measurement, evaluation, and analytics. Working with more than 100 ROI consultants, ROI Institute applies the ROI Methodology in 20 fields in over 60 countries. ROI Institute authors have written or edited over 100 books, translated into 38 languages. Organizations build internal capability with the help of ROI Institute and its ROI Certification process. By successfully completing this process, individuals are awarded the Certified ROI Professional (CRP) designation, which is respected by executives in organizations worldwide. For more information on ROI Institute, please contact info@roiinstitute.net or visit www.roiinstitute.net. The post High-Impact Human Capital Strategy Book Published appeared first on ROI Institute.

50 Cent filed 56 pages of financial information that’s required as part of his bankruptcy case. Find out whether the 40-year-old entertainer, whose real name is Curtis James Jackson III, is really as rich as he claims to be.

Leadership is often described as a journey. Is it an exhilarating adventure or a long, solitary drive through rugged terrain and past precipitous cliffs?

What’s in a name? We can’t address development needs at the mid-level because role responsibilities vary so greatly.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Aliquam a porta nulla. Etiam lectus enim, gravida at erat ut, blandit dignissim leo. Vestibulum vel odio a purus.The post Quote Post Format appeared first on ROI Institute.

ROI Institute Has Another Record Year Birmingham, Alabama, January 1, 2014 - The ROI Institute has recorded another record year in its operations, revenue, market share, publications, and product development. ROI Certification The 5-day ROI Certification Workshops, the principle way to transfer capability to conduct ROI studies, enjoyed another record year.  In total, 42 live sessions were conducted globally with a mixture of internal and external offerings. The majority of them were conducted outside of the USA.  In total, over 700 people participated in certifications; bring the total to over 8,000 participants since certification workshops were first offered in December 1995. The year ended with three certifications conducted simultaneously during the week of December 9-13, two in Dubai and one in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.  The online version of the certification attracted over 200 participants, a first for the company.  The certification was introduced to three new countries this year as Patti conducted certification workshops in Zambia, Trinidad, and the United Arab Emirates.  At this point, over 3,500 individuals have received the distinguished designation of Certified ROI Professional (CRP). Partners Our partners continue to grow in numbers and success.  New partners were added in Malaysia, Brazil, the Caribbean, Zimbabwe and Saudi Arabia.  Six new partners are in negotiation phases now. Our partner in Greece has survived the financial crisis in Greece and re-emerged with a new name. Publications Seven new books were published during the year with a certificate publication from McGraw Hill on Measuring ROI in Healthcare.  This new book has generated very much interest and has precipitated tremendous amount of work in that important field.  Three books were published with ASTD, our largest publisher.  For the first time, we have published instructional materials for those interested in teaching ROI. These materials, a participants workbook and a facilitators guide, were published by HRDQ. During the year, five case study books were completed for SHRM and delivered for publication next year.  Publication backlog is the largest that we’ve experienced in our history, with over 20 books in various stages of development involving various publications such as McGraw Hill, John Culley, Amazon, ASTD Press, SHRM Press, and more.  Next year we will see at least a dozen books released by ROI Institute authors. Consulting Consulting continues to grow with impact studies conducted in all types of fields and organizations. The number of active projects has reached a record level. Human Capital Analytic Certification After two years of development and testing, the Human Capital Analytic Certification will be launched in early 2014.  We anticipate at least a dozen certifications will be conducted with most of them offered publically.  This five-day certification is an extension of the current ROI Certification and is aimed to attract individuals in the human resources area working in an analytics capacity. Customization We continue to meet the customer needs by offering very tailored workshops and targeted materials.  Special ROI Certifications, for example, have been developed and offered for healthcare, universities, new projects, coaching, safety and health, technology based learning, leadership development, and organizational development.  We will continue to expand the use of ROI across many functional areas and special industry segments. Online Opportunities In 2013, more than 200 individuals participated in online learning opportunities regarding the ROI Methodology and evaluation best practices.  In additional to hosting online learning events such as the ROI Certification Forum and coaching webinar sessions, the ROI Institute partnered with organizations such as ASTD, universities, and the UN to provide individuals opportunities to increase their evaluation knowledge and skills.  Looking forward into 2014, the ROI Institute will be increasing the online courses offerings, including an online version of the ROI Certification Workshop, an ROI Fundamentals course, and a Survey Design course.  Stay tuned for more information on these offerings and how to sign up for them. Strategic Partnerships Strategic Partnerships are developed for a variety of organizations in an effort to collaborate with the best to meet market needs.  One such collaboration is the work with The Conference Board, a leading provider of conferences, workshops, research and applications.  Patti Phillips serves as Principal Research Fellow in Human Capital for The Conference Board. They are planning a variety of projects and programs to be offered at The Conference Board, including Human Capital Analytics Academy and a ROI Academy as well as the Human Capital Analytics Council and a Human Capital Analytics Conference. Staff The staff continues to grow to serve the needs of our growing business. New consultants and directors were added in different areas and a new marketing manager and publishing manger were added.  Jackie Healey now serves as Client Relationship Manager and manages the headquarters support team. Hailing from New York, Jackie provides a vital resource by managing our busy office and working with our partners. Belinda Keith has taken the role of Communications Manager. She joins us from a long career in state government. Crystal Langford, who has been a dedicated member of the staff for almost ten years, has assumed the role of Support Manager. She will continue to provide a variety of support services for the entire team. Robyn Holm joined us in December as Marketing Manager to provide networking and marketing support for our workshops and initiatives. Robyn joins us with a background in communications and advertising, with past media experiences in both television (Fox and Charter) and print (newspaper and magazine). Kirk Smith, our Director of ROI Implementation, was stricken with acute leukemia in May. He battled the dreadful disease for a good part of the year. The good news is that after a tumultuous battle and a lot of prayers from his many friends and family, Kirk is recovering rapidly and should be back at work full-time in February. We are so pleased about his progress and are touched by his enthusiasm for life and his tremendous fight against all odds. Also we are amazed by the wonderful support and never-ending care of his loving wife, Cathy. She is an amazing person and a role model for many. We are also pleased to have Boyce Byerly join us during the year. Boyce is a leading expert in Human Capital Analytics. He will lead our efforts to develop practitioners in the Human Capital Analytics area. He comes to us with a professional resume in both the academics and business arenas. Jack and Patti’s visit to Tunica has shifted our schedule to assist one of our best clients, Verizon, in a full-time capacity. Verizon has a goal to complete dozens of case studies and use them internally. We continue to build capability with the company. On a personal note, Auburn University, Patti’s Alma Mater, made it to the National Championship game.  Jimmy Johnson won his 5th Nascar Sprint Cup Championship (Caroline’s favorite sports figure) and a new wine labeled Level 5 was released.  This is a California SP produced by JPLT wine group (Jack, Patti, Larry, Tamar). Outlook In 2014, we will see another record year with increasing revenues in the 30% to 50% range. We will publish a record number of books and new customized certifications. A third certification will be finalized and ready for rollout at the end of the year.  A partnership with a major association will be announced at a later date. The post ROI Institute Has Another Record Year appeared first on ROI Institute.

Birmingham, Alabama, July 30, 2014- ROI Institute, Inc. has announced the publication of a new book "Measuring the Success of Learning Through Technology: A Step-by-Step Guide for Measuring Impact and ROI on E-Learning, Blended Learning, and Mobile Learning," by Tamar Elkeles, Patricia Pulliam Phillips, and Jack J. Phillips. This new publication is a part of the "Measuring the Success" series of books produced and published by ASTD Press and edited by Patti Phillips and Jack Phillips. Other publications include "Measuring the Success of Sales Training," "Measuring the Success of Organizational Development," and "Measuring the Success of Coaching." Readers of the new publication will appreciate that the authors have provided two books in one. The first part of the book details how technology-based programs are evaluated at the business impact and the return on investment (ROI) levels. The second part of the book provides case studies as examples to how this has been accomplished. This new publication comes at a critical time in the learning and development industry, where executives are more likely to turn to technology-based solutions in the face of ever-growing costs to conduct company-wide training initiatives. Technology-based solutions such as online learning, e-learning, blended learning, mobile learning, and game-based learning offer ease of use, low costs, and allow large numbers of people to participate in training without leaving their desks. The Association for Talent Development (ATD) estimates that 40% of all learning delivery in organizations is technology-based learning. This amount represents about $50 billion per year. CLO Magazine reports that for the first time, chief learning officers will deliver more training with e-learning than traditional classroom-based instruction, while mobile and social learning will also be a large and growing part of the learning delivery mix. "Technology-based learning is an exciting trend for our industry," explains Patti Phillips, president and CEO of ROI Institute, Inc. "We realize the importance of these initiatives in this ever-changing industry. At the same time, it’s important to see what’s working. When it comes to accountability, technology-based learning is no different than any other type of learning. In a study with ATD, 96% of top executives want to see this learning investment connected to the business, while 74% want to see the financial ROI of the learning, at least for major projects." This new book recognizes that results aren’t always clear for technology-based initiatives. While many professionals marvel at the fact that e-learning programs are cost-effective, there is a larger-scale attempt to pinpoint the exact business impact. ROI Institute studies have shown that technology-based learning has fewer positive results at the application and impact levels when compared to facilitator-led learning. It does not have to be this way. The book shows the need to measure technology-based learning at these levels and provides details for designers and developers to drive application and impact. The ROI Methodology is a step-by-step process that captures six types of data, including financial ROI. The data is captured using logical, sequential processes. "While executives see the convenience of technology-based solutions, they still demand to know the impact and that’s where the ROI Methodology can really help," said Jack Phillips, chairman of ROI Institute. "Now is a critical time in the industry to be showing the value of new technology. The good news is that progressive learning departments know this need, and are accomplishing it already. We hope that this book will assist more learning professionals to show the value as well." Copies of the book may by purchased directly from the publisher, ASTD Press, amazon.com, or wherever quality books are sold. Copies are also available at ROI Institute. For more information, contact ROI Institute at www.roiinstitute.net.   About ROI Institute ROI Institute, Inc., founded in 1992 as a service-driven organization, assists professionals in improving programs and processes using the ROI Methodology developed by Dr. Jack J. Phillips and Dr. Patti P. Phillips. It is the global leader in measurement and evaluation including the use of return on investment (ROI) in non-traditional applications. ROI Institute regularly offers workshops, provides consulting services, publishes books and case studies, and conducts research on the use of measurement and ROI, making it the leading source of content, tools, and services in measurement, evaluation, and analytics. Working with more than 100 ROI consultants, ROI Institute applies the ROI Methodology in 20 fields in over 60 countries. ROI Institute authors have written or edited over 100 books, translated into 38 languages. Organizations build internal capability with the help of ROI Institute and its ROI Certification process. By successfully completing this process, individuals are awarded the Certified ROI Professional (CRP) designation, which is respected by executives in organizations worldwide. For more information on ROI Institute, please contact info@roiinstitute.net or visit www.roiinstitute.net. The post Learning Through Technology Book Published appeared first on ROI Institute.

ROI Institute Opens New Office in Blairsville Blairsville, Georgia, March 12, 2014 — ROI Institute, Inc. is pleased to announce the opening of its research and development center in Blairsville, Georgia. ROI Institute’s research and development office will serve as a central hub of the research needs for the company and the ongoing efforts to publish relevant material on the topics of measurement, evaluation, ROI and the broader topic of analytics. New products will be created and tested at the new office. "We have been working on the opening of our research and development center for a long time," said Patti Phillips, President and CEO of ROI Institute. "It began in 2005 with the Pass Christian, Mississippi opening; however, Hurricane Katrina had other plans for us. So we are delighted to finally get it up and running on higher ground in the beautiful Appalachian Mountains." "This new center brings the company to make further progress with our contribution to research and the literature on topics that matter to our clients. Our company continues to grow and research and development have always been the foundation for that growth. Our new office and the team supporting it will serve as the catalyst for even further growth." Patti Phillips adds, "My husband, Jack, and I have made Blairsville our second home and find it is the perfect place to focus on research and develop new products and services for which our clients have been asking for a long time." Jack Phillips, Ph.D., chairman for ROI Institute, says he and Patti continue to be excited about the ongoing growth the company is seeing, as well as the additional resources provided for their clients. "We are excited about this opportunity and hope to introduce the new facility and team to our many clients and colleagues in the near future," Jack Phillips said. "Blairsville is in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains and is ideal for anyone interested in hiking, fly fishing, whitewater rafting or other outdoor activities. More importantly, it is an ideal location for clients and colleagues to focus on their own research and develop their capability in ROI and analytics." Two new team members have joined ROI Institute to run the research and development practice. Hope Nicholas, from Akron, Ohio, will serve as Administrative and Research Manager. Leslie Hoyer, from Blairsville, Georgia, will serve as Research Assistant. "I am very excited that a new business with a hometown feel and global outreach has come to Blairsville, and I am even more excited that I have the opportunity to work with ROI Institute and its team members," Hoyer said. Together, Nicholas and Hoyer will drive the research practice and assist ROI Institute with support of new projects and new product development. "We are looking forward to making positive contributions to the Blairsville community, ROI Institute’s team, colleagues and clients," Nicholas said. "It is an exciting time to work for this company." Additionally, this team will help support ROI Institute’s partnership with The Conference Board as they develop their human capital analytics practice. The Conference Board is a global, independent business and research association based out of New York City. Patti Phillips serves as a Distinguished Principal Research Fellow for the organization. The post ROI Institute Opens New Office in Blairsville appeared first on ROI Institute.

ROI Versus ROE Birmingham, Alabama, April 25, 2014- Occasionally, a new term will enter the measurement process that appears at first glance, to be the silver bullet for measurement and evaluation. ROE is one of these terms. On Monday, May 5, 2014 Jack Phillips will be debating the issue of ROI versus ROE at a major conference, the 2014 ASTD International Conference and Exposition. The session, titled "ROI vs. ROE: Which is Right for You?", will be held from 3 p.m. to 4:15 p.m. This session will examine the most effective ways to evaluate learning and development. At the ROI Institute, the clear winner of the debate is the ROI Methodology, which is based on sound-marketable concepts that are consistent with accounting and streamlined financial framework used by all companies. ROE, on the other hand, is defined as "Return on Expectation," which has no meaning with executives or sponsors. While ROI is based on financial data, ROE is based on perception data from the part of the client and is usually reaction data. ROE has little value to an executive, and certainly no value to financial officers looking at the bottom line. "From time to time, we have run across a variety of terms that are misused in the evaluation processes," said Jack Phillips, chairman of ROI Institute. "One of our own consultants, 20 years ago, started using the term ‘Return on Expectation’ and we suggested that there was no need to do it and she stopped." Phillips goes on to say, "We set objectives in our processes at different levels and our objectives become the expectations on the part of the client. Essentially we meet their expectations by doing that." The use of ROE can provide data that appears to be more than meets the eye. Most people think ROE is an impact measure, something that is easier to achieve than calculating the financial ROI. In reality, ROE is usually reaction data, however it can also be learning data, application data, impact data, or ROI data, depending on the expectations. "For accountants, ROE means Return on Equity. Return on Expectations means nothing. Learning and development is all too often known for following fads and creating its own jargon. ROE is an example of that," said Patti Phillips, CEO and President ROI Institute. "We have seen executives, particularly financial teams, react unfavorably toward this concept because it is a play on an acronym that actually has meaning and is developed using an actual calculation." For more detail on this topic, two articles have been published that are good resources for professionals unaware of the difference between the terms. The first article, "The Myths of Return on Expectation: Beware This Vague and Nebulous Term," by Jack J. Phillips and Patti Phillips, was published in a government publication. It can be read here. The second, "Beware Vague or Learning Jargon," by Jack J. Phillips and Patti Phillips was featured in Chief Learning Officer Magazine. It can be read here. The post ROI Versus ROE appeared first on ROI Institute.