Another resurrected post from my old blog ‘A Compound of Alchymie’. This time on e-Learning 2.0. Have we come that far in seven years. Sadly I don’t think so. Originally posted on 5 November 2005. Came across this interesting article entitled E-Learning 2.0 by Stephen Downes from the National Research Council of Canada today while researching some stuff on e-learning. It takes a whirlwind tour through the landscape of e-learning and touches on a wide range of related ideas (and especially those in the social computing space) before looking at how e-learning will look in the context of Web 2.0.  E-learning is definitely evolving and with the massed array of social computing tools is likley to become much more collaborative, flexible, adaptable and even chaotic. The question is can we as learners accept this new learner centric approach? It certainly feels different but also really empowering - roll on Learners 2.0.

Write astounding multiple-choice questions. See examples here.Post from: The eLearning CoachWriting Multiple Choice Questions For Higher Order Thinking

Adobe has just launched Presenter 8 the latest version of it’s PowerPoint to Flash development tool. Presenter is Adobe’s answer to Articulate Presenter (the core element of Articulate Studio). Both tools started out life as presentation tools (hence the names) but it quickly became apparent that they were pretty useful for producing simple e-learning courses. Re-badged as ‘Rapid e-Learning’ authoring tools they both became popular components in the e-learning developer’s toolkit. However Adobe Presenter has always been eclipsed by Adobe Captivate while Articulate has captured the lion’s share of the Rapid e-Learning market. So where does the new Presenter 8 fit in the grand scheme of things? I haven’t downloaded and reviewed the product yet but intitial investigations reveal a return to it’s roots as a presenter’s tool because of its focus on integrating presenter video. The integration looks pretty impressive, enabling a good presenter to create a presentation that mixes slides and presenter either interleaved or side by side. You can also add nice pre-built intro sequences and use professional looking overlays (to show the presenter name for example). It also includes e-learning type functionality but I can’t help feeling that it’s aimed more at producing video based content that is mobile friendly. One thing that appears to be missing is any HTML5 support. There is an iPad app but what about other tablets and mobile OSs? Full review to follow. For the time being here is Adobe’s e-Learning Evangelist Dr Allen Partridge taking you through the new features. List of features: http://www.adobe.com/uk/products/presenter/features.html

HTML5 is causing all sorts of headaches for us learning technologists at the moment. Suddenly everyone wants their e-learning to be developed in HTML5 without having a clue what it actually is. Of course much of this behaviour is down to Apple and its fashionable iPad but even Google have now dropped support for Flash on mobile devices from Android 4.0 onwards. Here’s a video that explains what HTML5 is in 1m 32s. Note the use of the word ‘hope‘, the phrase ‘working hard‘, and the phrase ‘some day in the future‘. Enjoy.

Find out how to promote transfer of learning with a supportive workplace.Post from: The eLearning CoachHow Your Workplace Can Support Learning Transfer

A consistent process to transform poorly designed slides into ones that are instructionally effective.Post from: The eLearning Coach5 Steps To A PowerPoint Redesign

This is a nice simple introduction to SCORM. Anyone seen one for Project Tin Can?

How long does it take to develop online learning? These resources will help.Post from: The eLearning CoachFive Resources for Estimating Development Time

It’s a bit out of date but this ‘learnographic’ highlights some of the strengths and weaknesses of HTML5. Click to enlarge.  

Reviews of stock music sites for people who produce online learning, presentations and videos. Post from: The eLearning CoachBest Stock Music For Multimedia Projects

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Conventional e-learning relies on the SCORM module (sometimes called the SCO - ‘shareable content object’ by those in the business). The SCORM module is a good concept - effectively an online learning activity that includes interactions and assessment that can be delivered via any SCORM compatible LMS (effectively all LMS’). But there are some serious limitations to SCORM so are there other ways to develop e-learning or online learning that don’t require the use of SCORM? Yes there are, and they are becoming increasingly popular for a number of reasons. I’m currently working with WillowDNA where we are busy ‘unpacking’ e-learning and creating what we call ‘learning pathways’. This isn’t a new term but there are some nuances to the way we are designing and building learning pathways online. Why unpack SCORM? Well there are some key things that SCORM doesn’t support and the most important of these in my view is interaction with other learners or with a facilitator or trainer. By packing everything into a single object (the SCO) SCORM also creates barriers to access. You really enjoyed a video you saw or liked the scenario at the end - you can’t access these unless you are within the SCORM module. Online learning pathways allow for a wider range of learning activities organised in a more flexible format. They can still include SCORM objects of course but the SCORMs are generally much shorter. Learning pathways can also incorporate existing assets such as documents, videos or web based resources. So what does an online learning pathway look like and what learning activities are possible? Here’s a graphic that illustrates the pathway approach.   Creating learning pathways isn’t exactly rocket science but they do need some insightful learning design if they are to be truly successful. Designing online learning pathways requires the skills of an instructional designer combined with the skills of a good face-to-face trainer or facilitator. Learning pathways come in a variety of types depending upon the level of learner to learner and learner to trainer interaction. There are four basic types: Autonomous This has no social elements at all. It performs the same type of tasks as conventional e-learning. The advantage is that it can be completed independently by the learner so it’s good for compliance or other types of basic knowledge acquisition. Social This adds learner to learner interaction into the mix. To be successful this type of pathway needs to have a number of learners working through the material at the same time. We call a learner group in this context a ‘cohort’. The cohort can be loosely connected - for example they don’t all need to start and finish on a specific date/time. Adding a social element really helps transform e-learning from something that you do on your own to something where you can genuinely interact with others and hopefully learn from them as well as from the course materials. Supported This adds both learner to learner interaction and also facilitator or trainer support. The facilitation can be light touch but adding it enables social activities to be included in the learning mix (for example a workplace assignment). Supported learning paths can also include synchronous (live) events such as webinars. Blended This mixes online elements and face-to-face elements. This is ideal where you have a course where some elements are best done face-to-face whilst others are ideally suited to being delivered online. This type of learning path can also adopt a ‘flipped classroom’ approach with knowledge building activities done online prior to a face-to-face workshop where skills or techniques are practised.   I’ll look at the various types of pathway in more depth in a future post. The only downside is that pathways generally need to be designed with a specific learning platform (LMS or VLE) in mind. Willow have their own platform - called unsurprisingly Pathway - but learning pathways can also be created on other platforms. Moodle is good at supporting the pathway approach. But of course a pathway is less simple to move between platforms so it’s less flexible than a SCORM module if you want to distribute it across the planet. But in practice most online learning is bespoke for the organisation and the audience - it is rarely shipped and distributed (unless you are attempting to compete with an off-the-shelf provider such as SkillSoft). On the positive side many of the ‘activities’ in a learning pathway are even more transferable - PDF files, video files, audio, and SCORM lessons can all be moved and re-used simply and easily. It’s just the ‘conversations’ that will need re-creating but then they are unique to each learner cohort anyway.

The Nonaka and Takeuchi Knowledge Spiral (click on the image to learn more) For about five years around the turn of the century most of my days were spent helping clients manage their knowledge. Back in 2000 knowledge management (KM) was really big. Every year I’d head off to Amsterdam for the obligatory industry conference, KM Europe. We even had our own home grown conference, KM UK, with pretty much the same people but with less impressive venues. Then suddenly things went quiet - KM Europe was suddenly cancelled in 2005, KM UK limped along (and is still going today). KM had lost its way. The promises hadn’t been fulfilled. Of course KM just didn’t disappear overnight - it just degraded gracefully. One client, a very large UK multinational, shed their KM teams and announced that KM was now ‘embedded in the business’. KM still goes on but it’s likely to be on the margins and not essential for peak organisational performance whereas in 2000 KM really was positioned as a game changer. So what happened? That’s a good question and one which this post is my first attempt at exploring why KM failed to deliver on its early promises. And why do this sort of navel gazing now? Because knowledge management appears to be making a comeback but this time it has a shiny new suit and it’s called social learning. The KM wave was initially driven by big tech - the idea that an organisation could somehow manage its knowledge was attractive in an economy where knowledge was as important as capital. But knowledge was elusive and the most valuable forms of knowledge refused to be stored in corporate databases. The response from most practitioners was a more people centric approach. The valuable knowledge resides in people’s heads so the best way to surface it is via conversations in communities - communities of practice and communities of interest. Before I go into why I think social learning and KM are very closely related let’s take a very quick tour of the fundamentals of KM.  What is Knowledge Management (KM)? "Knowledge management (KM) comprises a range of strategies and practices used in an organization to identify, create, represent, distribute, and enable adoption of insights and experiences. Such insights and experiences comprise knowledge, either embodied in individuals or embedded in organizations as processes or practices." Source: Wikipedia Just like we love to debate the actual meaning of the word ‘learning’ KM people loved to debate the meaning of the word ‘knowledge’ and in particular how knowledge is different to ‘information’ and ‘data’. The knowledge pyramid graphic (see below) was seen frequently in KM circles. Most KM people used to work in ‘information management’ so you can see why the definition was so important. I don’t want to go into this debate here but one really critical thing to understand if you have any hope of applying KM is the difference between explicit and tacit knowledge. Explicit and Tacit Knowledge Explicit knowledge is knowledge that can be codified in some way (written down, stored in a visual, or embedded in a process). Explicit knowledge is good because although it is created by people it can be stored in a system. In our case a KM system but more of that later. How does explicit knowledge differ from information? Good question (see the debate on information versus knowledge mentioned above). Tacit knowledge is knowledge, sometimes called know-how, that resides in people’s heads and is hard to codify (write down). Why is it hard to write down? Usually because it is either complex or contextual or simply because those who have it don’t actually recognise its value (unconscious competence). Systems Centric or People Centric? The rise of KM was largely driven by the desire of organisations to capture as much explicit knowledge as they could and store it in a system so that it could easily be shared with others. This systems centric KM became dominant in the early days because it was fuelled by considerable investment from big tech who were re-positioning their information products as KM systems (OpenText, Documentum, Autonomy etc.). The problem facing systems centric KM was the fact that it relied on people to make it work. How could organisations get their people, and in particular their ‘experts’ to share what they knew? To address the people issue we had people centric KM. This view of KM recognised that if people were to share knowledge it had to be both explicit and tacit and the best way to do this effectively was through direct communication in networks. Specifically networks that were created around a specific topic or area of interest or practice. These networks became known as communities of interest (COI) or communities of practice (COP). In fact the  term COP had been around before (see refs below) -  it was simply co-opted into the language of KM. The Perfect KM System The perfect KM system combined both the systems and people centric approaches and acted as a store for explicit knowledge and a connector for tacit knowledge. If you didn’t know something you logged into the KM system and did a search and that search would either tell you what you wanted to know or it identified someone who would have the answer. BP called it their ‘yellow pages’ and even spun a commercial product (called unsurprisingly ‘Connect‘) out of the ground breaking working they did in KM. KM had sorted knowledge sharing. In future, organisations would be less reliant on people who knew key stuff but didn’t share that stuff effectively. In practice there were lots of problems when it actually came to making  KM work in practice and unsurprisingly most of those problems revolved around people’s behaviours and attitudes to sharing what they know. In my next post, ‘Why Social Learning Won’t Work‘, I’ll look at what went wrong with the KM dream and why understanding why KM didn’t deliver on its initial promise has some useful lessons for those of us attempting to introduce social learning into organisations. In the third and final post, ‘Why Social Learning Will Work‘,  I’ll explore some ways we might be able to get social learning working for us by starting small and looking for quick wins. Learn More: KM at Wikipedia COPs at Wikipedia David Gurteen’s Knowledge Management Community  

Want to speed up the learning process? Here's one approach.Post from: The eLearning CoachMetalearning, The Four Hour Chef, and Instructional Design

Get inspired! Create some time for reading.Post from: The eLearning Coach10 Books For Learning Professionals To Read In 2013

In January there are two big learning technology shows in the UK. One, Learning Technologies, is aimed at the commercial and public sector market while the other, BETT,  is aimed at the education market. I go along to both but Learning Technologies is the real e-learning show. BETT has always been about classroom technologies, not about online learning, but things might be changing. I was invited to attend some sessions aimed at corporate customers and I see that this year  there is a new zone dedicated to ‘Workplace Learning’. I’ve had a quick scan of the exhibitors and apart from a couple of Moodle implementors there doesn’t appear to be much in the way of online learning. I thought that with the rise of the MOOC and sites like Coursera and Udemy there might have been some new stuff happening at  BETT which challenged the belief that the classroom is ALWAYS best. Apparently not and that’s an opportunity missed in my e-book. Learn More: Blog post on BETT 2012 BETT 2013 Learning Technologies 2013

A radically new approach to learning but would it work outside of education? …new visions of learning better suited to the increasing complexity, connectivity, and velocity of our new knowledge society. We now have the capability to reimagine where, when, and how learning takes place. http://connectedlearning.tv/   The post New Model Learning appeared first on Designed For Learning.

Our community found these articles most valuable for sharing.Post from: The eLearning CoachMost Shared Articles on The eLearning Coach in 2012

Social Learning has been big in 2012 but like any new fad it’s not clear to everyone exactly what it is. For me it looks very like knowledge management revived (see Social Learning and Knowledge Management) and it’s important not to confuse social learning with learning with the help of  social media (see What is social learning?). This infographic provides a vision of social learning the Skillsoft way. One problematic aspect of the social learning utopia is the Nielsen 1-9-90 rule: Jacob Nielsen coined a theory called the 1-9-90 theory that says out of every hundred people who join a community or network - 1% actively contribute - 9% contribute from time to time - and 90% are lurkers. Nielsen was describing behaviour on the internet and one would imagine that the figures would be better for an internal community but from my experience in KM it’s often a dedicated few that make the greatest contribution and after a while they just stop giving when everyone else appears to be taking. See this post from Paul Dunay for an interesting discussion on the 1-9-90 rule for internal communities like Yammer. Click on the link below the image to open the PDF and you can then click on elements in the PDF to learn more. Link: Skillsoft Social Learning Infographic The post Social Learning the Skillsoft Way appeared first on Designed For Learning.

Expand your learning options with this list of 13 ways to learn.Post from: The eLearning Coach13 Ways to Learn in 2013

  One of the current hot topics in e-learning is curation. But what exactly is curation? And what relevance does it have to e-learning? Interestingly the word derives from the Latin cura - meaning literally someone ‘who cares’. Curators have existed for thousands of years and their role is defined as follows: Traditionally, a curator or keeper of a gallery, museum, library or archive oversees an institution’s collections and is responsible for the safe keeping, display, documentation and interpretation of the objects and artefacts in the collection. Interpretation is the key word here. These institutions have substantial collections of objects and artefacts - way too much usually to put on display - so the role of the curator is to create an exhibit that combines a variety of artefacts in order that they may be interpreted in some way by the visitors. Interpretation is largely about telling stories. And not surprisingly it’s about learning so in that respect a curator is a sort of teacher. So in the simplest terms curation is about organising, displaying and interpreting stuff. More tellingly it’s about organising, displaying and interpreting other people’s stuff. Curation on the Web In this post I really want to focus on curation as it applies to learning (and specifically online learning) but before we do that it’s worth exploring the current trend for digital curation on the web. Curation is big on the web driven largely by a raft of new platforms such as Storify, Scoop.it and Pinterest that make it easy to collect, organise and display the articles, photos, and videos we come across while trawling the Internet. Curation with these tools appears to be primarily about aggregation and many curators place freshness above anything else so many curated collections end up looking like the front page of newspapers. Indeed many of the platforms are purposely designed to look like magazine pages. A scoop beats old ideas hands down in the attention economy. Learning is different to news. The important stuff is persistent. It has a long shelf-life. If you are new to e-learning then reading an article on ‘Social Learning’ isn’t going to be the best place to start your learning journey even if it is the hottest new topic. Curation applied to learning is going to be much more dependent on interpretation rather than organisation. Before our new e-learner reads about ‘Social Learning’ they should understand what an instructional designer does and why we need LMS’. But we are all creators not curators? When a client calls and wants a programme on equality and diversity we hardly ever say ‘That’s been done already - you can buy it off-the-shelf’. Our first instinct as learning designers (and business people) is to create shiny new learning experiences - designed precisely for the audience and content we have been given by the (paying) client. Why re-cycle old stuff when we can start afresh on a blank sheet? Well there are a number of possible reasons but four of the most compelling are: There’s already some really good stuff out there Content that already exists can be made available immediately It’s more interesting to mix and match than to build something homogenous It’s much more cost effective to recycle than to create something new Suddenly curation is sounding quite attractive if I’m trying to get as much learning done as I can on a limited budget and/or timescale. However curation is actually harder than it looks because the skill of the curator is in interpretation and in our case as learning designers in creating a coherent learning journey. To illustrate this let’s look at the place where we are most likely to have come across curator’s prior to 2012. Museum’s 20 years ago were a place you went to see things in glass cases with labels. Museum’s today take a very different approach. They create learning journey’s through the collection of artefacts on display. Modern museum curator’s are effectively learning designers working in a different medium - the medium of objects and artefacts. Effective curation involves a number of key skills: Finding With digital assets we have the advantage of powerful search and stacks of content feeds. Filtering We often need to look beyond the most popular stuff to filter out the older but more persistent stuff that we really need. Some things change slowly and often they are conceptually key. Facts not fads. Grading Not all content is appropriate for all audiences. If you are curating a collection on Roman technology for primary school kids it will feel quite different than if you were to curate the same collection for a graduate archaeology class. Synthesising Not all collections will speak for themselves. A curator’s role is to join the dots and to paint the bigger picture. Summarising Sometimes people need the condensed version. Sometimes they need the advanced guide. Signposting Sometimes people simply need to fills gaps in their knowledge. Signposting them to the bits they need or are interested in is a key curation skill. Balancing creation with curation In practice a successful online learning experience is likely to result in a mix of creation and curation. The relative amounts of each will depend on the subject matter and what is already available but I imagine an analysis and design loop along the following lines: Establish the learning objectives and intended audience Create a broad content outline and scope Find and filter existing digital assets Create a learning path design based on the curated assets Create additional content to fill the gaps Create the final learning journey Clearly there are challenges when developing learning using a mix of creation and curation. Do you have permission to use third party materials? Will they be there over the long term? What if they are updated or moved? In a future post I’ll look at some of the practical problems associated with curation and also explore some of the curation friendly learning platforms and technologies (such as the quirky Curatr from @benbetts). Tomorrow I’m at the Weelearning event in Bath -  ’Curate? Create? Debate?’. Some interesting contributions have been made to the pre-session Google Doc. Hopefully I can share those after the event. I’ve added this endpiece from Julian Stodd which was posted on the Weelearning Google Doc - it echoes some of my points quite nicely I think. My first job was in a museum, a local, dusty affair concerned primarily with telling the story of how the town had grown from it’s early marketplace origins through to it’s current shape and size. The story involved buildings, artefacts, documents and people. Indeed, one of my personal jobs was to go and record oral histories from elderly local residents: recordings that gave depth and flavour to exhibitions. From time to time, we would pull together an exhibition, and that’s when we would curate. It would start with us defining a central story: ‘The wool trade in Chichester’, or ‘The market traders’. Once we had the story, we would decide what, from the extensive collections, we would use to help us to tell it. The decisions were laden with subjectivity. For example, we had a coffin. It had been used to commemorate the last cattle market run in a continuous eight hundred year history. If you just saw it, it’s just a coffin. If you know the story, it represents (or signifies) something else entirely. The curator needs to understand the thing, but also the meaning of the thing. They are a historian and a storyteller. Julian Stodd   The post Create or Curate? appeared first on Designed For Learning.

Surprising insights from a hiring decision-maker.Post from: The eLearning CoachELC 001: Finding a Job in Instructional Design

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Redware App Store in the Technology Zone I went along last week to a pretty uninspiring World of Learning show. I wasn’t at the conference but I did catch some of the seminars in the various show ‘theatres’. World of Learning is normally heavily biased in favour of face-to-face training - but this year there was reasonable variety of learning technology solutions on offer. Not all of these are e-learning solutions, in fact the term e-learning wasn’t massively in evidence, but they do utilise technology in some way to support learning. Not surprisingly quite a few vendors are pushing mobile learning (m-learning). I had a play with a few of these m-learning solutions in the technology zone a special area where you could play with the devices and software without the vendor trying to sell to you. It’s a cool idea actually - something that would work well at Learning Technologies. In the technology zone I played with: Seminar Learning AuthorThis is a template driven rapid authoring environment that publishes iPad friendly content. It’s pretty easy to use and is a good alternative to Articulate Studio if you feel more comfortable with a template driven approach. It’s not cheap though at £995. Seminar Knowledge CentreI really like this simple no frills LMS from Seminar Learning (an offshoot of Information Transfer - now Aceton). I’ve played with a demo before and it’s easy to set-up and use. It also works really well on a tablet device. I’m going to do a full review in a forthcoming blog. Redware Learning App Store Redware appear to be the new kids on the m-learning block. I played with their mobile learning delivery platform which looked and worked just like Apple’s App store. It looked pretty cool but it was hard in the limited time I had to establish the full extent of their service/product offer. The web site isn’t much better I’m afraid and I couldn’t find a single screenshot of the tablet product. Nor any explainer videos which would really help. I did get a free bottle of tomato sauce however - now all I need is a bag of chips! Absorb LMSThis is a Flash based LMS which I have demoed in the past. It looks good but Flash powering your LMS? I don’t think so. Exscien Food Hygiene GameThis game is based on a 3D cartoon environment. It was fun to play for about 5 minutes but I would question the amount of learning that likely to take place. You can download the demo from Apple’s App Store - search for ‘KitchenMaster’. Exscien KitchenMaster It was good to see Moodle featured on at least three stands. Mind Click, CPD Online and Remote Learner. Franklin Covey were giving away free Nexus 7s but only of you had a lucky barcode on one of their flyers (sadly I didn’t so I’m going to have to actually buy one at some point). It’s amazing how much mileage a company can get out of one piece of IP ( Covey’s original Seven Habits book) but more of that in a forthcoming blog. I talked to quite a few of the conventional training companies - mainly to see what their position was on e-learning. Generally they still see it as poor solution that will hopefully go away. They are of course wrong. The problem many of them have is that their understanding of e-learning is poor. Typically they have seen a poorly designed page turner with a test at the end but they have little understanding of online learning beyond the 30 minute compliance driven e-learning module. Some see virtual classrooms and webinars as their route to online learning but their understanding of approaches beyond that is generally poor. I’m currently trying to work with the more enlightened ones - helping them to explore how online learning really can transform their learning offer, and more significantly, their business model too. On the subject of new business models Martin Belton and Kate Graham from Ascot Communications ran a seminar on learning marketplaces (Udemy, Course Park, Udacity, etc.) and launched their own platform called  MyLearningWorx. I’m a big fan of these marketplaces - they enable course designers to create complete courses (mainly using video) and sell them online. Some of the underlying LMS technologies are really impressive with the emphasis firmly on ease of use both for the course designer and the learner. MyLearningWorx is currently in beta but I’m hoping to get onboard and give it a test drive. See you at Learning Technologies in January! The post World of Learning 2012 appeared first on Designed For Learning.