Happy Planet is an animated short film about the beauty of life on earth. The film eliminates dialogue and speaks with its visuals and music. Much like life with its unexpected surprises, the flow of visuals in the film is organic. The interplay among the creatures or between the creatures and the environment in each shot creates the visual room and space for the next interplay. These visuals and the movement within them blend seamlessly alludes to the connected life that all we share. The film ends on a poignant note - a child’s hand appears on screen, requesting us humans to take responsibility for protecting and conserving our environment. Happy Planet was the outcome of an animation workshop conducted by Dhimant Vyas for our animators, for many of whom it was their first foray into claymation. The concept and storyboard was done by the entire team, under Dhimant’s guidance and direction. The setting and characters were created by the whole team working together, they are intentionally kept realistic or semi-realistic because the movement of the characters could not be made too exaggerated and cartoonish - considering they were made out of a rigid material. The characters are made out of clay - and are mostly relief work on glass. It was a challenge to give them a three-dimensional look on the screen. The team studied wild life videos for reference in character design, and to get a sense of timing for the character movement. Each sequence was animated by a different animator. It was a challenge to link different animators’ ideas effectively and make smooth transitions between the sequences. We hope you enjoy watching Happy Planet. Even more so, we hope the message in it impresses you enough to make you contribute your bit to make our planet happier. (Happy Planet is a claymation (stop motion) film directed by Dhimant Vyas, Deputy Head - Animation at Tata Interactive Systems.)

I have never written a story or an experience of this sort. I have visited Japan once in the past and worked with a lot of Japanese companies like NEC, Fujitsu, and Toshiba, to name a few. I had faint memories (none, to be honest) of my last visit. During this visit to Japan, what touched me was the hospitality and the kindness of the people. I have often heard about the Japanese being tough, difficult negotiators but what I saw of them during this visit was completely contrary. They are professionals in their field, they ask the right questions, and more so, are extremely hard working. I always thought that Indians work hard, stay late in office, speak to clients at odd hours, etc. And don’t we complain that we spend so much time in the office and hence have less time to spend with our family? The Japanese professionals are out to work when we were having a morning walk at 6 a.m. They were still in office when we were packing our bags to go back to our hotel. Most of the senior guys are in office until midnight and this is their daily routine. Wonder how they can work so hard, every day. During our consulting assignment we asked what is a normal day for a 4th grade kid is like. This was their response. Wake up at 7 a.m. Public/private school from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Extra-curricular activities like football, baseball, karate, etc up to 6 p.m. Special schools for another 3 hours (Now you know why I qualified the second point). While the public schools are in the same locality where they stay, the kid has to travel to go to a good special school. Sometimes this travel takes about an hour by train one way. By the time the kid gets home it is well past 11 p.m. Once they are back home, they would like to play games. So much pressure on kids from such an early age and we talk about how school education in India puts so much pressure on kids and how there is too much competition. Another interesting characteristic of the Japanese is the punctuality. Be it trains, be it for dinner, or be it for meetings. You would rarely see anyone walk. They are always running, to catch a train, to go for a meeting. An interesting statistic to note is the average delay of a Shinkansen (Bullet train) in a year is 0.4 minutes. This includes delays caused by typhoon, rains, earthquakes, snowfall, etc. Punctuality is not by accident but by design and it is taught and ingrained in children right from an early age. After having visited and stayed in Japan for 2 weeks I think there is a lot to learn from the Japanese. Arigatou Gozaimasu means "thank you very much" in Japanese. (Anand Subramanian is Head - Systems Design with Tata Interactive Systems)

We are living in exciting times.  We are smack-dab in the middle of a r/evolution of such magnitude that its impact will (likely) only be evident in retrospect. Three data points have converged recently to evoke this feeling of excitement, amazement, and minor vertigo about what the future holds. 1) Information Management Technologies In the video above (one of several fantastic presentations shared by TED), Blaise Aguera y Arcas demos some jaw-dropping technology (Photosynth) coming out of Microsoft Live Labs (based on Blaise's previous efforts with Seadragon, which was acquired by MS in '06).  This image/info manipulation and organization tool is tough to describe in words, but the wide array of potential applications/uses immediately become apparent via the demo shown in the video. Suddenly, we see the ability to enable the emergence of information that has never been explicitly defined by someone, but rather is dynamically created based on the novel analysis of large groupings of small pieces. (see the segment about Notre Dame modeled off of Flicker images) We begin to see novel ways to leverage technology to do truly unique things, rather than using them to recreate old things in new skins. (see the embedding of micro images/print into digital versions of 'traditional' media - it reminds me of the corporations who are inserting long, detailed product information and extended stories in a momentary burst at the tailend of TV ads, viewable only by 'stepping' through them frame-by-frame using a Tivo/DVR remote, as a means to (re)capture eyeballs in the age of 'ad skipping'.  For an example, view GE's One Second Theater.) I recall reading somewhere (can't remember now) that UI beauty is born from spare MIPs - that it was only when processing/computing speeds became sufficiently fast that any substantial attention was directed towards the look & feel of applications.  Thus, we had text-based OS's and app's (think DOS as a later example) well before any GUI's were an option.  It seems we are experiencing another step along this path, as the power of even average PCs today far outstrip the stress the average user places on them - they (effectively) sit idle, waiting for the next command from the user 95% of the time (I made that figure up, but it's probably an underestimation, if anything).  Thus, you see 'grid computing' efforts popping up to take advantage of these spare cycles (one of the older examples is the SETI@home initiative).  The power of 'gamer' video cards and video gaming systems (XBox, PSP, etc.) is extraordinary by measures set only a few years ago.  This fact enables people like Blaise to begin to imagine new capabilities (thanks to Moore's Law... although I think that he came up with some very innovative ideas about how graphics are handled that amplified the pure computing power curve!)2) Direct Manipulation Interfaces In video above (again, from TED), Jeff Han demonstrates an amazing and intuitive way of manipulating information directly, rather than the long-in-the-tooth mouse/keyboard method. Again, seeing the demo in video takes the place of pages of (inadequate) descriptive text. This is very similar (perhaps related deeply?) to the newest Microsoft announcement, Surface. Even if they aren't related efforts, it may be an example of simulateous convergence of an idea whose time has come (like Newton and Leibniz related to Calculus). This concept of direct manipulation, coupled with widely networked and 'aware' devices (see the three videos on the Surface home page) will open up an entirely new horizon of creating/storing/sharing digital information. 3) New Paradigms of Information Organization David Weinberger recently published a fascinating book, Everything is Miscellaneous. At its core, it's a book about classification/categorization and how things change when the items being cataloged are bits rather than atoms (digital rather than physical).  It's about the power of metadata, tagging, and in/formal taxonomies. This basic premise (that we are now afforded the option of describing a single thing in multiple ways, all of which are valid and useful, depending on your objectives) is the fuel behind what makes Blaise's work possible (in part).  The ability to search, sort, and shuffle large storehouses of otherwise miscellaneous/random data to reveal new patterns and meaning rests in the 'information about the information'. These three spikes in the blogosphere converged in my head today and (re)ignited my imagination of what awaits us (and our children) in the not-so-distant future.  How will these samples (along with the hundreds of other gadgets, gizmos, and tools that are popping up daily on the web) influence and impact the way we conceptualize and manage "information", "learning", and "knowledge" in the academic (K-12/16/20+) and corporate domains? Only time will tell, but it seems clear that the possibilities are limited much more severely by our own imaginations and mental models than by the enabling technologies. (Jon Revelos is Director - Story Based Learning at TATA Interactive Systems)

Michael Moore's latest movie, Sicko, is a powerful example of how Stories trump Facts when attempting to teach material that is intended to invoke change (mental and/or active). Although the film won't be in wide release in the US until later this month (June 29th), Moore has been on the promotional circuit non-stop since his latest work debuted at Cannes' annual film festival (where he won top prize of Best Picture three years ago for Fahrenheit 9/11').  This time around, Moore set his sites on the flawed American health care system. This blog isn't the proper place to comment upon the in/validity of the content within Sicko.  Nor is it the right forum for arguing the pros and/or cons of socialized medicine.  Besides, a quick search on the 'net will turn up more than enough 'discussion' on these topics. I'm mentioning this movie here not because of WHAT material is contained in the film, but rather because of HOW that material is presented.Here, in the US, the shortcomings of the healthcare system aren't something newly uncovered, freshly emerging, or previously unrecognized.  The issues associated with this topic have been discussed and analyzed in great depth, for several years, by both political parties and a myriad of independent agencies (see this, that, and the other for a short, random sampling) .  And yet, little has occurred in the way of substantive change on this hot topic. Why? While it would be wrong to simplistically distill this complex issue's solution into a blog entry, for the purposes of education, learning, and change (arguably the focus of this blog), there may be something interesting and illuminating that we can learn here. Consider the following statistics: "Rates of potentially preventable hospital admissions ranged from more than 10,000 per 100,000 Medicare enrollees in the worst performing states to 5,000 per 100,000 enrollees in the five best... The researchers estimated that if all states could reach low levels of preventable hospital admissions and readmissions for Medicare recipients, hospitalization rates for senior citizens alone could be reduced by 30% to 47% and save Medicare $2 to $5 billion a year." (source) "Between 2000 and 2005, 7.2 million Americans lost their health coverage according to the US Census Bureau....  At the end of 2005, the number of Americans without health insurance reached 47 million." (source) "...the U.S. is an outlier in terms of financial burdens placed on patients. One-half of adults with health problems in the U.S. said they did not see a doctor when sick, did not get recommended treatment, or did not fill a prescription because of cost... Despite these high rates of forgone care, one-third of U.S. patients spent more than $1,000 out-of-pocket in the past year. In contrast, just 13 percent of U.K. adults reported not getting needed care because of costs, and two-thirds had no out-of-pocket costs." (source) OK... Now consider these profiles from Sicko (as summarized by Robert Weissman): Dawnelle, whose 18-month-old daughter Michelle died because her health plan, Kaiser, insisted Michelle not be treated at the hospital to which an ambulance had taken her, but instead be transferred to a Kaiser hospital. Fifteen minutes after arriving at the next hospital, Michelle died, probably from a bacterial infection that could have been treated with antibiotics. Julie, who works at a hospital, explains how her insurance plan refused to authorize a bone marrow transplant recommended for her cancer-riven husband. He died quickly. Larry and Donna, a late-middle-age couple, find that co-payments and deductibles for treatment after Donna has cancer add up to such a burden that they have to sell their house and move into a small room in their adult daughter's house. The day they move into their daughter's house, her husband leaves to work as a contractor in Iraq. Which list better captured your attention?  Which list made the (claimed) crisis more real/tangible to you?  Which list created more outrage... sadness... anger... disappointment... amazement? From an Instructional Design perspective, which list (or approach: fact vs. stories) is more likely to improve your ability to understand the situation at hand, recall relevant examples of the claims, and invoke behavioral change with your local government representative? (Comprehension, Retention, and Application are three primary legs upon which the fundamental goals of Instructional Design rest). The questions are effectively rhetorical.  In matters of Change Management at nearly any level (personal, corporate, organizational, political), the analytical and quantitative approach of providing stacks of facts and figures in hopes to evoke a shift in behavior is inefficient (at best) and ineffective (at worst).  Most change doesn't occur based on evidence - it most often happens based on emotion. Al Gore's award-winning documentary on global warming, An Inconvenient Truth, was chucked full of statistics and report findings that had been around for years, but those numbers weren't what made the film a catalyst of attention and action - it was the stories and photos (in part) that caused audiences worldwide to speak up and take action. The dangers of Methamphetamine are well documented, but the factual presentation of definitions and known side effects were largely ineffective against the powerful lure of the drug.  Solution: move away from the dry figures and highlight the stories of real people (individuals, as well as their families, children, neighbors, and communities). The next time you are tempted to force a change in your organization (or at home) by overwhelming your audience with facts, figures, charts, graphs, reports, or (gasp) orders from authority figures ("Why should you do this?  Because I/your boss/the CEO said so, that's why!"), take a moment and resist the urge.  After all, you know in your heart that sort of an approach is rarely effective beyond the short-term.  Instead, come up with a tangible example (story) that illustrates why action is necessary, what sorts of positive (or negative) results may blossom from the change (or lack thereof), or how the success of the change is intimately tied to the actions of individuals.  The difference, not only reception, but in deep understanding and internally-motivated behavioral change/action will be amazing. In the end, it's easy for data to be questioned and argued to the point that your larger message is lost; to bury your call to action beneath an appeal to facts; to mistakenly assume that your audience is logically-driven rather than emotionally-driven.  When we tell (focus on the quantitative), we force our audience to accept a viewpoint that isn't theirs.  When we share (focus on the qualitative), we allow our audience to draw a conclusion for themselves - to decide, for their own reasons, that change is necessary.  All long-term, meaningful change is grounded in belief, and belief ultimately comes only from within.  Stories provide a uniquely effective path to the threshold of internally-motivated change. (Jon Revelos is the Director of Story-based Learning at Tata Interactive Systems)

For the past year, I have been working at TIS as its first American employee based in India.  It has been a thrilling experience; living in India has not always been easy, but it’s always been interesting. I’ve learned so much at TIS that it’s hard to know where to start, so I thought I’d start with my first day. On my first day, still jet-lagged and overwhelmed, I was pleased to find that I at least had no problem understanding people’s accents…until lunchtime. At lunch, my new friends took me into the cafeteria, where their work accents, good for conference calls and in-laws, gave way to a fast talking, and, to my ears, nearly incomprehensible banter.  It turns out this is a common phenomenon; people unconsciously talk and write one way for business and another way in their personal lives.  But at that point I could hardly keep track.  People kept weaving in and out of Hindi and using English words in ways I just couldn’t understand. Indian English is a great language; brash and breezy.  It varies enormously from one person to the next, depending on their education and where their parents are from.  Some people switch v and w, others pronounce both like Americans pronounce w. Some people pronounce th like Americans do, others just stress the t a little more (give it a little spit at the end…you can do it.)  Less educated people speak a functional, pidgin English that lets them communicate across India’s innumerable local languages. Indian English incorporates innumerable Hindi words, such as "wallah," which basically means a guy. A rickshaw driver is therefore a rickshaw-wallah, a vegetable seller is a subzi-wallah, a newspaper delivery guy is a paper-wallah, and so forth. Hindi speakers also unconsciously use plenty of English. People who don’t speak a word of English talk about "pest-control-wallahs," known in the US as exterminators. Similarly, I asked several friends whether they knew how to say "left" and "right" in Hindi; all did, but none remembered which was which. Some people despair of the quality of English the kids these days are speaking, but I think it’s great. I’m sure that 12th century Norman aristocrats were horrified by the Saxon inflected French their kids were speaking. After all, what’s English if not German + French + time? I think that this new English reflects Indians’ comfort with both Indian traditions and Western culture; Indians now engage with and contribute to English and the West, rather than simply observe them. Over the last year, my comprehension problems have dissipated and my language has met Bombay half way.  I luckily found that I really like the people I had lunch with my first day, even after I started understanding what they were saying; they were less lucky to discover that once I know what’s going on, I’m not actually so quiet or pleasant.  While I’ll be happy to return to my friends and family back home, I will also miss TIS, Bombay, and Indian English enormously. (Daniel Goff spent a year in India, working with Tata Interactive Systems as lead content developer.)

A couple of months ago, WIRED Magazine made a subtle offer to their subscribers (I've been a loyal subscriber since the first issue showed up in my mailbox for free back in the early 90's): The first 500(?) people to email a digital photo of themselves to their site would get a personalized cover (using that picture) on the July '07 issue, courtesy of Xerox and their "Custom Xerox" offering. Well... my personalized issue arrived the other day (see the image on left), and even though it is just a marketing stunt, I have to say that it was pretty neat to have my photo on the cover of my favorite magazine (my son got a kick out of it, too)! This fun experiment got me to thinking about the implications for learning.... Being primarily focused on technology-based learning, I usually see things through those sorts of glasses, but I am in full agreement with the claim that eLearning is no more a silver bullet solution to education/training woes than the television was when it was introduced.  Rarely are there full, single-source solutions to issues, and education is no exception - a careful analysis of goals and objectives, tied to a review of the available tools and techniques is always a critical first step in any learning effort. With that in mind, I was reflecting on how, even in this age of websites, blogs, and wikis, most people are still much more comfortable and happy with physical documents.  For anything over the length of a short email message, most people still prefer to have a hard copy for reading and 'personalizing' (marking up with notes and comments).  This is easy enough on a one-off basis for shorter length items using traditional PC printers and blank paper, but what about longer articles or collections of essays that are related? What would it be like to be able to self-assemble 'personalized learning packets' of related articles from the web that could be bound into a magazine-like format?  It's not a rocket science idea (in fact, I don't think there is anything that's been preventing it to date), but just how much more convenient, usable, and useful would such an animal be, compared to stacks of individual articles (usually stapled in a corner, printed with questionable quality on a single side of paper)?  Would YOU value the ability to have a "magazine" of the articles that you wanted/valued?  How much would you be willing to pay for it?  Would your organization see value in producing customized, high quality collections of articles for its employees (as an internal communication vehicle, performance support tool, or as a blended-learning artifact)?  What sorts of avenues of opportunity begin to emerge and open as the ability for greater personalization becomes feasible (both technologically and economically)? Hmmm..... (Heck... forget about personalized magazines!  What about personalized objects?  Where do these trend-lines begin to take us, as learning and performance improvement experts?) (Jon Revelos is the Director of Instructional Design and Story-based Learning at Tata Interactive Systems)

Alan Kay, a true pioneer/legend in the Computer Science world, once said: "People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware." Apple CEO Steve Jobs has referenced this quote several times when challenged with the idea of making Apple more profitable by taking a page from Microsoft's strategic play book and concentrating efforts primarily on software. Without speaking for Mr. Kay and what it was that he intended with this famous phrase, one potential interpretation is that living in operational silos makes for less than stellar results.  The more you have isolated groups who have little/no understanding or appreciation of what goes on in other operational divisions, the less likely you should expect anything groundbreaking or revolutionary to emerge.  The best one can expect in such a circumstance is a more finely polished version of what has been seen before, due to a lack of understanding of what is possible and reasonable. Relating this interpretation to the world of online learning and instructional design, I have gone back and forth over the years regarding if the best (eLearning) IDs also have a more-than-passing familiarity with the basics of computer science, programming, and some of the more popular/powerful authoring tools.  Reflect, for a moment, on the following: Are the IDs you admire/respect the most tech literate? In recruiting, do you explicitly look for tech abilities/understanding as one of the characteristics that are required? Are tech skills something your organization supports developing (in the form of ongoing training) in its ID team members? Why? Why not? I'm still not fully convinced one way or another, but I have a heavy leaning... In my 16+ years in the field, I've seen far too many examples of designs thrown over the wall to developers that detail either mind-numbingly simple interactions (for lack of knowledge that anything better was possible) or amazingly complex pipe-dreams that would require a form of A.I. to actually implement (for lack of understanding of what sorts of logic would necessary).  In such cases, I can't help but believe that having a moderate understanding of how development work is done would make for better designs (and ultimately, courseware). Just as a good architect can't simply design based on what 'looks good', but actually needs to have a basic understanding of the strength of various materials and how they may (not) interact with each other, perhaps the best IDs should know be conversant with Programming Concepts 101 (maybe 201? maybe more?).  Of course, there will always be the counter argument that such a background should be regarded as a 'nice to have', not a 'must have'. After all, didn't Frank Lloyd Wright design beautiful homes that had notoriously leaky flat roofs? (it is said that FLW once told a client to "Move the chair" in response to a complaint of rain leaking through the roof of their house onto the dining table.)  But should we build the rule based on the exception? How would the ID profession change (both positively and negatively) if we suddenly began to require more of a tech-bent?  Would we end up cutting our noses off to spite our face?  Or would we see a sudden surge in the quality, sophistication, and ingenuity of the instructional solutions that are thrust upon the world? I'd like to hear YOUR thoughts, regardless of what they are, or how fully fleshed out they might be! Weigh in! (Jon Revelos is the Director of Instructional Design and Story-based Learning at Tata Interactive Systems)

I've posted several entries related to Story and Narrative since TIS decided to open this blog (and I intend to continue), but sometimes the abbreviated format of a blog isn't the optimal way to communicate an idea (or to understand it, to take a learner-centric perspective). Just as a 'blend' is more often than not the best overall delivery strategy for instruction, I wanted to share an opportunity for those who want to see/hear the 'long version' of why I'm such a fan and advocate of Story as an instructional strategy. Late next week (Aug 16-17), I'll be presenting as part of a 'virtual conference' (read: you can attend from the comfort of your office/home) hosted by the eLearning Guild. I'll be taking the cyberwaves at 1:15p ET on Thursday 8/16.  If you are interested in 'attending', you can visit the event's website to learn more. I know the talk will be recorded, but I'm not sure if the archived versions will only be available to registered participants, eLG members, or if they will be made open to the general public, so why take a chance?  It's quite affordable and you'll have access (either live or archived) to several terrific presenters on a variety of "Advanced e-Learning Instructional Design" topics. I hope to 'see' you there! (Jon Revelos is the Director of Instructional Design and Story-based Learning at TATA Interactive Systems)

Early November, in 2006, the eLearning team from ICICI Bank requested TATA Interactive Systems to recommend a training intervention program that would help make their people, involved in the Inward Clearing process, more efficient. One of their tasks involved spotting up to 18 potential discrepancies on each bearer cheque in less than 7 seconds to overcome the high volumes of transactions everyday. For the bank, an incorrect decision of passing or holding a cheque has severe regulatory, financial and legal implications. The need, as we saw it, was to entice their employees to demonstrate exceptional skills in the task. Our solution, ‘Cheque-Mate’, was a skill-enhancer game designed around our Game Based Learning (GamBLs™) model. It put the player in an imaginary world where he/she was challenged to tag a series of correct and incorrect cheques according to an identified discrepancy in a limited time. The player would customize the game to match his/her ability using time and complexity controls at the start of the game. The player was scored on speed and accuracy of their decisions and recognition for good performance corresponded to the degree of challenge. The game used a dynamic data model that generated different data sets for every session to ensure replay-ability, another key attribute of GamBLs™. The game was received with great enthusiasm by both the eLearning group and the employees of ICICI Bank. It also won the APEX Award this year. In focus group testing, one of the players said,  "When I started, I could hardly find errors in a cheque, but after practice, I could track errors quite easily. So definitely playing over again I would look forward to improving my scores and reducing the errors." Another said, "It made me sit back and concentrate to ensure good scores."Since November, 2006, TATA Interactive Systems have created four highly engaging GamBLs™ for ICICI Bank and are in the process of developing four more around the roles of cashiers, back-end operations, Branch managers, customer sales representatives and sales representatives. Mr. K. Ramkumar, Group Head - HR, ICICI Bank expressed his excitement about the role of gaming in his department vision for the future in an article that appeared in The Mint recently. (Chandra Shekhar Ghildiyal is Deputy Head - Game-Based Learning at TATA Interactive Systems)

The TLDF 2007 received an overwhelming response with over 200 attendees making it to The Grand Hyatt, Mumbai that played host to the day-long event. The TLDF 2007 brought together national and international speakers, deans, principals, teachers, and even families of students with learning disabilities. This year, the TLDF 2007 not only discussed working together for the benefit of LD students, but also welcomed on stage, the students and parents of students who have overcome learning difficulties. While the TLDF 2006 successfully spread awareness on LD, the TLDF 2007 went a step ahead and brought together speakers and participants from across the globe to gather support for LD students in India. For the last two years the TLDF has proudly provided a platform for this cause, and with the support and encouragement of positive results, we will continue to encourage, enable, and empower LD students for a better future!    Some of the topics discussed in the sessions were: the steps beyond LD certification, multidisciplinary approaches, medical aspects, the role of a Special Educator, how to identify LD in the classroom, the social and emotional aspects of LD and most importantly, the role of the Government. To enable a greater sharing of knowledge and extend our support to this cause, we have made the TLDF presentations available on http://tldf.tatainteractive.com.

I am eating my words. I am selling myself down the river. I am completely contradicting what I wrote in my blog post circa 2006, titled "Give me Back My Fun Learning!" in which I thundered against rapidly developed, plain vanilla e-learning and lamented for fun-filled, engaging e-learning. Call it fickle mindedness or call it evolution, but ladies and gentlemen, I have seen light. I have realized that e-learning in the corporate sense is not about the "greater artistic question" but about the "greater business question". In a sense, the distinction is similar to mainstream blockbusters and art-house cinema. True, e-learning as it is "ought to be" needs to be fun/funny, out-of-the-box, and challenging; it needs to surprise; and it needs to push the envelope of the medium. But e-learning that works with the masses ought to be plain functional. This wisdom comes from working with a leading multinational manufacturing company in the past year. The e-learning we were engaged to develop for them was part of a company-wide strategic realignment journey. E-learning was to be an enabler and a change agent that would help its close to 100,000 employees across the globe change the way they have been working and adopt a new way. Because of the business imperative, e-learning development was time-bound and mission-critical. So naturally, we chose the blockbuster route. If the word "formula" has already suggested itself to you, give yourself a cigar! Our formula was governed by some "Thou Shalt" rules, as one of our SME puts it. It included the following: Thou shalt keep it simple: You will not make the learners jump through the hoops of frustrating interactions, bewildering exploratory activities, and tricky questions. Make the learning to-the-point and get to it quickly. Thou shalt keep it short: Remember that the learners have tons of other stuff to learn/unlearn, in addition to their daily job-related activities. Don’t stretch them. Thou shalt keep it consistent: Far too much is changing in the learners’ lives even without playing a game every time they open an e-learning program. Use a template that is easy to understand and rely on. Thou shalt keep it literal: Metaphors, puns, flourishes of style, and "clever" or "cute" animations/images only irritate the learners. They are also difficult to translate. Thou shalt keep it in context: Let the learners know why they are doing it before launching them into games, case studies, or "try it" activities. If you are telling them a fictitious story, let them know upfront. Thou shalt not be a perfectionist: While guarding against blatant errors and inaccuracies, don’t treat e-learning as a magnum opus. In the real world, continuous improvement makes far more sense. E-learning development and implementation is an iterative cycle in which every new version is better than the one before. Get it out so that this cycle can start. Has it worked? Well, early results seem to indicate that it has. Close to 10,000 learners have taken around 40 hours of learning and they’ve scored us (on an average) 5 on a scale of 0 - 6. Moreover, all e-learning modules are out on time for senior management to implement downstream strategic activities. And what about me? Much as I dream to be the "independent" e-learning maker, I am currently enjoying my role as the wily studio executive! (Priya is Deputy Practice Head - Instructional Design, Products & Skills Training Practice at TIS.)

Gifts in the festive season are normal and welcome, but awards are even better. And when we landed two awards this month, we couldn’t stop smiling. So allow us to preen a bit. First up was the ASTD Atlanta T-BL SIG (in simple English, that is Technology-based Learning Special Interest Group) E-Learning Award in the Custom Content category for the story-based learning (StoBL) solution we developed on the subject of Fire Safety for the NewYork Presbyterian Hospitals. We hope this laurel will give more muscle and credence to our conviction that stories are strong vehicles for instruction, especially for subjects like safety, compliance, ethics, and leadership. The second award is even more special to us. Focusing on the learning disabled has been a serious CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) initiative for us for the last few years. One of the landmark events for us in this direction has been the TLDF (Tata Learning Disabilities Forum). We held it for the first time in 2006, with a fair degree of success (read our post on that event here). The 2007 one, we thought, turned out to be even better (post here). Which thought was confirmed when we won the Reader’s Digest Pegasus CSR Gold Award in the category "Contribution to Society - Imparting Education". Positive portents as we step into the New Year. Wishes for the season.

After eight years of scripting lessons that start with objectives and end with a summary, it is a welcome change to script stories for TATA Sky, India’s premier direct-to-home television service. There are no modules or lessons, no tools or tips, no knowledge checks or learning aids, no graphic organizers or assessments; just seven screens of fun, color, and magic! Scripting for TATA Sky Actve Stories is a writer’s dream. It is about writing stories for children in the age group of 3 years to 10 years. Some of the stories are original; some are adaptations from folklore, grandmother tales, mythology, and history; and some others are anecdotes from the lives of great national and international personalities. All stories are moral based or deal with a problem that children of the target age group commonly face like, getting lost, sharing, being clean, being lazy, etc. Each story is of the same small size—just seven screens! The first screen is the title screen and the remaining six house the story with full screen graphics and 2-3 lines of text each. For me, the greatest satisfaction of being part of this project is being able to see the stories on television and seeing user reactions first hand. Almost every day (since I do not have a TATA Sky connection as yet), I head to the nearest Croma (an electronics retail chain in India, also owned by the TATA Group) to check out the story being aired that day. And while the salesman rattles out the benefits of taking a connection for the umpteenth time, I skip through the seven screens, drool over the awesome graphics, and try to ignore my son shouting, "Mummy you wrote that?" On some days when we have friends and family visiting, the enquiries for TATA Sky connections in Croma are a little more. But the real satisfaction is when I stand behind and watch the little children in the store leave their parents and rush to stare at the screen. TATA Sky Actve Stories do not have the fast paced animations or the action packed sequences children of today are used to. But it yet succeeds (as initial feedback suggests) in its own charming way, in doing what it is meant to do—introduce children to a magical world of characters who live and learn from experience just like they do, and teach them some morals without actually doing so. (Susan John is Senior Specialist - Instructional Design at TATA Interactive Systems)

On January 20, 2008, TATA Interactive Systems (TIS) celebrated team spirit by participating in the fifth annual Mumbai Marathon. TIS has been running the marathon for three consecutive years in support of students with learning disabilities—extending its initiatives beyond schools and the teaching community. This year the participating TISians were sporting T-shirts promoting the message of the TLDF 2007—Together Let’s Define the Future, and even carried a banner spreading awareness of the cause. Click here for more pics.

Regulatory and compliance training has always been a thorn in the flesh of training managers. There are the regulatory authorities to satisfy as they want records of training completion; there are the reporting managers to reckon with because they don’t want their wards to be off their workplace for too long; there are the learners to manage, because they don’t particularly find the content interesting. Then there is the business end of it - how do you ensure that compliance training leads to compliance, and how does that lead to an improvement in organizational performance? Answers have been sought, with limited success. Little wonder then that compliance training has been long on rhetoric and short on transformational approaches. Here are five key challenges in developing e-learning courses in compliance training.Compliance training is a grudge purchase. Implementing compliance training is as exciting as replacing car tires - you get no particular joy doing it, but not doing so is not an option. The same applies to the people getting trained and their reporting managers. The challenge is deceptively simple: How do we drive learners into adopting compliance as matter of habit? How do we integrate it with the way they work and think? Compliance training is more than just training. Compliance training is as much about communication and sensitization as it is about training, perhaps more of the former. It’s about making the learner aware of changes in regulations; it’s about getting the learner to understand the not-so-pleasant consequences of not adhering to certain norms and practices of behavior; it’s about ensuring the learner remembers certain key principles when s/he is in the middle of a professional transaction. Consequently, approaches to compliance training need to vary depending on the different requirements and application scenarios.Much of what compliance training covers is not new to the learner. This is because a large part of compliance training is perhaps intuitive (not unlike the statutory warning on cigarette packs) and/or known to a large part of the learner audience, especially the more experienced ones. Consequently, the content of a compliance training course comes across as a blinding flash of the obvious to many a learner, and hence gets ignored. The challenge is to consider layered approaches to the instructional design of compliance training courses, so experienced users and novices alike get the most out of the course.Ignorance is not bliss. Not knowing the law is not an excuse for breaking it. Hence, the speed with which new compliance guidelines are communicated to the learner audience is an integral requirement of compliance training. This includes a design that accommodates changes seamlessly, and development tools that enable quick changes to be made by subject matter experts or program managers or training managers.Prioritization is possible. Quite often, compliance courses tend to be long and cognitively heavy because there is an imperative to expose all the content to the learner. Sure legislation mandates that, but if the content can be prioritized and exposed to the learner in smaller chunks and on an as-needed basis, effectiveness can perhaps be enhanced.(Geetha Krishnan is Head - Consulting with Tata Interactive Systems.)

(Priya Thiyagarajan, Deputy Head - Instructional Design with TATA Interactive Systems takes a pot at the Learning Circuits Blog’s Big Question for March 2008.) My peer group is an organic encyclopedia. I sometimes fancy that among us, we’ll have the answers to most of the questions in the world—from the meaning of "hemi demisemiquaver" to the benefits of proportional representation in a democracy to the nuances of RFID implementation. That’s because we are the Facebook-ing, Youtube-ing, Wiki-ing, blog-ing knowledge-age kids on the block. We are in the driver seats of those earthmovers that are busy flattening the world. Information is our faith and fodder. Our intellectual biceps may be well developed, but it is debatable whether that makes us faster or more competent workers. Most of our knowledge is context-less, so many bits of data, pushed to us by a ubiquitous and aggressive web of new-age technology. This is just the tip of the crisis iceberg. IDC reports that the amount of information created, captured, and replicated in the digital universe in 2007 was 281 exabytes (or 281 billion gigabytes), outstripping the knowledge created by all the books ever written by a few million times, its gargantuan appetite swallowing all the existing storage options. And it is only going to get worse. In 2011, there will be nearly 1,800 exabytes of information created. Whither this information? What is the sane way of cataloguing, prioritizing, and processing this? How can this stupendous amount of data be distilled into something that can be useful and beneficial to us? More importantly, are we left to fend for ourselves in this binary jungle? IT service providers are definitely part of the rescue team, with their powerful, context-sensitive, and intuitive decision support tools that makes sense of this data. But what about enterprise support functions such as Learning & Development and Knowledge Management? Where do they stand?Which brings me to the Big Question of the month from the Learning Circuits Blog: "What is the Scope of our Responsibility as Learning Professionals (for supporting Long Tail learning)?" The primary responsibility, I believe, is to populate the Long Tail with "chicken soup" content. "Chicken soup" courses are wholesome, healthy, without frills, and easy to digest. In a sea of bewildering information, they are the safe haven, dependable guys, curtain raisers, and anchors. The key features of such courses are as follows: They are short. They are simple. They give a succinct overview of the facts/concepts/processes/principles. They have a sound instructional design foundation. The quality of content is high. They form the conduit for "deep dive" learning, if the learners so desire. They are easy and relatively economical to develop and maintain. As I see it, the edifice of learning content in an enterprise needs to be modeled as follows: Why should learning professionals be responsible for this, you might ask. What about Subject Matter Experts? What about the learners themselves? The answer is simple: learning professionals have the necessary ID competencies to analyze, deconstruct, mould, and re-construct raw content into learning gold. They may not know how recidivists are dealt by Collections, but they sure know what standard to peg the course at, how much content is the right amount, where the interactivities could go, and what the learner should be tested on. In addition to developing and owning the "chicken soup" content, I see learning professionals responsible for moderating, maintaining, and measuring the learning content of an enterprise. Moderation I am not suggesting a police nation here. I see the learning professionals moderating the learning system for quality and relevance of content. I also see them facilitating participation in social learning. Maintenance As continuous improvement becomes a culture, learning professionals, in collaboration with SMEs, need to update learning content to make it current and useful. Measurement Learning professionals should be responsible for measuring the effectiveness of learning out there, using parameters that are developed in collaboration with HR. This measurement will feed into the continuous improvement cycle. To conclude, I view the role of a learning professional as that of a guide, who helps learners navigate through the tricky maze of information overload.

(Preeti Jasnani, Deputy Head - Instructional Design with TATA Interactive Systems reflects on the Learning Circuits Blog’s Big Question for April.) I could start making a genuine attempt to adopt a simple and what experts call a ‘no-nonsense’ approach to learning, and thereby design. As an e-learning professional, most of my work caters to adult learners. And we adults don’t like to waste time; at least we’d like to believe so! Each time I get down to designing a new course, I focus on ensuring sound instructional design that would work for the said target audience and the said subject matter. I think in terms of scenarios, stories, simulations, and games and make every attempt to come up with a new, ‘out-of-the box’ strategy to create a learning environment that is fairly interactive and engaging for my learner. Holy intentions indeed! Then, why does each course I build almost always leave behind the lingering question: Do the learners really need all the information and interactivity that has been plugged in or is the learner being held hostage by the course? I must confess I’m afraid to hear the answer. That brings me back to the big question: What could I do better as a learning professional? I sure could start building courses that don’t waste my learner’s time. And how can I do this?  It’s all about focus, I reckon. About understanding the real purpose of the course and defining definite objectives, thus avoiding information overload. About adopting a ‘no-nonsense’ approach with which I can decide which course needs to be interactive and engaging and which other could be a simple ‘click and read.’ About realizing that each course need not really be a course!

Happy Planet, a clay animation - or ‘claymation’ - film developed by TATA Interactive Systems (TIS) has won its second award. This time it has been chosen for the Best Animated Frames (BAF) 2008 Award organized by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI). The BAF Awards, which are part of Frames, Asia's largest convention on the entertainment industry, comprise three categories: Animation, Gaming and Video Effects. Happy Planet, sent in the Animation category, was adjudged the Best Animated Social Welfare film. It had recently won the DigiCon6+3 Territorial Award in India and Japan.

Nandini Bandopadhyay and Sarbani Mukherjee, Senior Specialists - Instructional Design at Tata Interactive Systems write in their response to the Learning Circuits Blog’s Big Question for April: What would you like to do better as a Learning Professional?  Write. Seems an odd answer, considering this is what we do for a living! Yet writing interesting instructional content still seems to be a challenging task. So we wish we could write better. It’s a big responsibility us learning professionals have — to use words to teach the most complex of content to someone sitting thousands of miles away. The big questions, thus, never seem to go away — Is my writing good enough? Will my writing improve the learner’s online experience? But there’s technology and there are graphics, some of you may say. Text is not the only medium of instruction. While that’s a fair argument, what one can’t deny is the power of effective writing. Not dumbing down the content to suit the audience, but redefining style for a greater good. So what do we mean by ‘better writing?’ Using words effectively, learning the art of presentation, striking a balance between substance and style, and saying more in fewer words. But hang on! That’s not all. There’s the all-important task of making the learner ask for more. Of making him (or her) curious about all things mundane. Think this can’t be done? Read on… Think about school days. (OK! We accept that’s a whole lot of years ago…) Those history lessons, lines from King Lear, or inventions that changed our lives forever… We remember these because some of our teachers were great storytellers. Their anecdotes brought to life the dark ant-like letters in the textbooks. They unleashed the power of imagination. To reach across to the other side, we need to do just that. Look for a twist in the tale to keep the interest alive. And we need to mind the gap. Which brings us back to where we started. Our desire to write better. To tell good tales where the content allows, to create good scenarios to make drab content come to life, to use words to do what we set out to do… teach. At the end of the day, isn’t that what this is all about?

Taking the view that learning that delivers business impact can help organizations tide over the uncertainties posed by the global economy, the TATA Interactive Learning Forum (TLF) 2008 will focus on critical business issues such as boosting revenues by better customer interaction management, reducing time-to-competence, ensuring that staff are aligned to business goals, and increasing productivity and performance. Now in its fifth edition, the highly successful annual TLF provides an interactive platform for thought leaders across domains to get together, interact - and inspire - each other.  The event, being held in partnership with Training Magazine (Nielsen Media), aims to help organizations work together to overcome current challenges by sharing insights, innovations, and successes. It comprises discussions of the experiences of various organizations, and the different tools they use to make learning effective. As a unique knowledge-sharing platform, the TLF 2008 seeks to encourage ideas and innovations with a special focus on the effectiveness of interventions, specifically in an uncertain economy. This year, the event will be held on October 17 at the University of Chicago Gleacher Center in downtown Chicago. Participants in the TLF not only stand to gain from the successful experience of their peers in the industry, but also network and exchange ideas with the leaders in the learning. For more information and to sign-up for this event, please click here.

The Tata Interactive Learning Disability Forum (TLDF) 2008 held in Mumbai on the 29th November and in Kolkata on the 2nd December focuses on urgent need to address Learning Disability (LD) issues.The third annual TLDF - a unique global forum on LD in India - was successfully conducted at Mumbai and Kolkata. This is the first time the event, earlier only held in Mumbai, has been extended to include the eastern metro city of Kolkata as well.  Focusing on the theme of "Special Deeds for Special Needs", the TLDF 2008 underlined the importance of early remedial action to help learners with special needs. When asked about the TLDF, Sanjaya Sharma, CEO of Tata Interactive Systems (TIS) said, "Around 3-7% of the world population suffers from LD, but it can be overcome if detected at an appropriate time. We have invited international LD experts to interact with city doctors, parents and teachers to make them more aware. Right now we are focusing on Mumbai and Kolkata, to spread awareness." Tata Interactive Systems has been championing the cause of LD for several years, and its efforts recently bore fruit when LD was included in the MBBS syllabus last year in the state of Maharashtra. The educational authorities are now taking the initiative to enhance the B.Ed. syllabus as well, and similar efforts are on in Kolkata too. Such grassroots-level awareness is critical as the lack of awareness about LD has meant that even prestigious schools tend to classify LD-affected students as slow learners.Sanjaya added, "In the past couple of years, volunteers from our Mumbai staff have made presentations on LD in about 26 schools. In Kolkata too, we will carry out a similar programme."The TLDF emphasized that LD need not be an impediment to real-life achievements. Among the speakers was Swaroop Sampat Rawal, former Miss India and a special educator and consultant who said, "I am dyslexic, but I have completed my Ph.D. on this subject." The event saw a series of highly informative and engaging sessions by noted LD experts from Lokmanya Tilak Municipal General (LTMG) Hospital’s LD Clinic, one of the few clinics that offer LD certification in India; nasen, UK; Haskins Laboratories, US; Bombay Teachers Training College, Mumbai; SNDT University, Mumbai; and Manovikas Kendra Research & Rehabilitation Institute, Kolkata.

Please click here for more pictures.

Customer Interaction Management (CIM) Solutions offer the double advantage of increasing workers' productivity while reducing training costs. It frees up precious time and resources for innovation, process improvements and employee development. In contact centers and customer facing scenarios the CIM solutions can help reduce average handling time (aht) and improve the customer experience. This benefits both on the call center agent level, in terms of maximizing individual agent performance, as well as improving efficiency and standardizing the entire contact center operations.But more than anything else, the biggest benefit is in terms of customer satisfaction as a result of faster and effective resolution of queries, requests or complaints.The uniqueness of our solution lies in its ability to proactively present the most pertinent agent response to the customer, whether complaint handling or cross sell/up sell and connect to existing applications without "heavy", intrusive, time-consuming IT integration. I see businesses, especially in financial services, insurance and contact centers gaining significant benefits from these solutions. The front-end customer service executives in these industries usually need to internalize a great deal of information about multiple products and their myriad features, regulations and conditions and draw upon their knowledge in real time, on the job, while transacting processes with customers. I believe that CIM solutions can transform a customer service organization from being slaves of data to being masters of customer relationship management. If you would like to learn more please click here. Look forward to hearing from you! (Saurabh Mittal is Head - Electronic Performance Support Systems at TATA Interactive Systems)