This is my presentation at the Online Learning Summit in London on 16 June 2015. I asked participants to choose between a set of four questions: Question #1: Why are learning, education and training so impervious to change? Number two is the Extinction Event question: It’s 2025. Your organization ceased to exist in 2020.  What happened? What was your role, i.e. the role of the learning leader in what happened?  What are you doing now? Question #3 is about LSi’s capabilities: What problems can we help you solve? And, last but not least, Question #4: why does e-learning suck? I will let you guess which question(s) were chosen for the discussion and workshop… Credit where credit is due: the Then-And-Now photo series is from a brilliant presentation by Michael T. Moe at the Global Leadership Congress held in Philadelphia a long time ago where I was a featured speaker. The Ferrari pit stop crew as a model for mission performance was first shown to me by Karen E. Watkins (University of Georgia) and Maya Drobnjak (Australian Army). Kermit Washington’s story (completely unknown to the London participants) is told by James Surowiecki in his New Yorker article Better All The Time.

This should be fun (and interesting). I’ll be heading to Amsterdam on July 21st for Google EDU’s Moonshot Summit. This event aims to bring "together top innovators from around the globe to design moonshot projects that will be launched in the Fall". Attendees were selected, we are told, because of our "experience and belief that education can be improved for innovation". The moonshot co-exists with skunk works, DARPA, braintrust and many other terms that describe the conditions, process, or outcomes that foster and drive innovation. Google’s concept of a moonshot intersects innovation and scale, and posits that, in specific circumstances, scaling up can define innovation. "Instead of a mere 10% gain" Google’s Project X team explains, "a moonshot aims for a 10x improvement over what currently exists": The combination of a huge problem, a radical solution to that problem, and the breakthrough technology that just might make that solution possible, is the essence of a moonshot. This event in Amsterdam is led by Esther Wojcicki, whose work  around moonshots in education (and specifically blended learning in the classroom) I’ve just discovered. Photo: The last Saturn V launch carried the Skylab space station to low Earth orbit in place of the third stage (Wikipedia/public domain). #moonshotsummit Tweets

In February, Daniel Seaton and his colleagues shared data about the very high level of teacher participation (28% identified as past or present teachers) and engagement (over four times more active in discussion forums than non-teachers) in a series of MITx MOOCs.  Very interesting article when thinking of teachers as multipliers, mediators and facilitators of learning (and not just transmitters). Unlike earlier MOOC research that has been criticized for being ahistorical, Seaton shares the following example of pre-MOOC massive, open online education: One of the earliest precursors to modern MOOCs targeted high school teachers in the United States. In 1958, a post-war interpretation of introductory physics called "Atomic-Age Physics" debuted at 6:30 a.m. on the National Broadcasting Company’s (NBC) Continental Classroom. Daily viewership was estimated at roughly 250,000 people, and over 300 institutions partnered to offer varying levels of accreditation for the course. Roughly 5,000 participants were certified in the first year. Teachers were estimated to be 1 in 8 of all certificate earners,  indicating reach beyond the target demographic of high school teachers. Through its expansion of courses between 1958 and 1963, the Continental Classroom represented a bold approach in using technology to address national needs in education reform. In contrast, the current MOOC era has largely focused on student-centric issues like democratizing access. Source: Seaton, D.T., Coleman, C., Daries, J., Chuang, I., 2015. Enrollment in MITx MOOCs: Are We Educating Educators? EduCause Review. Ho, A.D., Chuang, I., Reich, J., Coleman, C.A., Whitehill, J., Northcutt, C.G., Williams, J.J., Hansen, J.D., Lopez, G., Petersen, R., 2015. HarvardX and MITx: Two Years of Open Online Courses Fall 2012-Summer 2014. Social Science Research Network Working Paper Series. Photo: Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Lab (1950-1951) (ORAU.com)

So I’m reading John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University, which begins by asserting that the university "is a place of teaching universal knowledge". I’m fascinated by the historical context (Catholicism in Protestant England), by the strength and substance of the ideas, and by the narrative style of carefully-constructed arguments. I’m also struck, however, by the centrality of learning as transmission, the line of demarcation between invention and teaching, and the belief that it is possible to know by disconnecting from society (although I acknowledge that concentration and flow tend to require quiet, in a pragmatic sense): To discover and to teach are distinct functions; they are also distinct gifts, and are not commonly found united in the same person. […] He, too, who spends his day in dispensing his existing knowledge to all comers is unlikely to have either leisure or energy to acquire new. The common sense of mankind has associated the search after truth with seclusion and quiet. […] It must be allowed on the whole that, while teaching involves external engagements, the natural home for experiment and speculation is retirement. If all three of these characteristics of institutionalized knowledge creation and production no longer align with the demands of the world we live in, what needs to change and how likely is the change to occur within organizations founded on very different ideas and assumptions? Newman’s Idea is also crystal-clear with respect to the relationship between the university and the corporation (in his context, the Catholic Church): Just as a commander wishes to have tall and well-formed and vigorous soldiers, not from any abstract devotion to the military standard of height or age, but for the purposes of war, and no one thinks it any thing but natural and praiseworthy in him to be contemplating, not abstract qualities, but his own living and breathing men; so, in like manner, when the Church founds a University, she is not cherishing talent, genius, or knowledge, for their own sake, but for the sake of her children. Through the lens of organizational learning and the need for mission-driven organizations in a knowledge economy to invest in their people, this rationale stands, in my opinion. Photo: Aerial view of Finney Chapel, Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio, United States (oberlin.edu)

Previous weekend three current and one former LearningSpaces devs went to Berlin to attend BattleHack, a hackathon organised by BrainTree (PayPal). Because we love both writing code and Berlin. A hackathon is an event where you collaborate intensively on a project, usually involving technology. Hackathons are a lot of fun and every developer that hasn't yet attended one should do it at least once. It's a great playground to try out new technologies. And it's a good experience to have a clear goal and focus on that for a set period of time without distractions. Agile on steroids 24 hours to build a product is a good training in product thinking. Which features are essential to convey the concept during a demo? The limited amount of time forces you to build only that. Onions and beef This is not about the food during the event. Which was great by the way. We actually made an app to buy food directly from local farmers. Our mission was to help people: Reconnect to your food. Buy real ingredients from local farmers while it's still alive or in the ground and follow how it's grown. We're convinced that good ingredients are the key to taste, health and environment. Yet often we don't know where are food is coming from and how it was produced. Onion Square is a marketplace where farmers and urban gardeners can sell their produce directly to their customers. Cut out the middlemen! For the the BattleHack there were a couple of sponsors whose technologies we've incorporated in our app. We had to use BrainTree or Paypal, and we could obviously use that to process payments. Braintree launched a new marketplace feature that we used to send the payments directly to the farmers. When a product is sold we send a text message to the farmer with Twillio, and we use Pusher for live updates in our app. Sendgrid was used for sending confirmations an password resets. Finally the app was deployed on Heroku. It's a contest! Ready to be judgemental! #BattleHack @ Cafe Moskau Berlin https://instagram.com/p/4MH9K6j9DA/ - @theopani The 1st prize was won by a smart bike lock. Technology wise a very nice hack. My personal favorites where these: PayPowr, a PayPal controlled electric power outlet. Pot o' Gold, a GitHub bot to reward open source contributions with bounties PrivateCircle, a lone hacker trying to help us use PGP What's next for Onion Square? We didn't win anything nor got any feedback or questions. Yet we're still very excited about what we made. And so are most people we've talked to. So we will start talking to some farmers to see if they think the idea is feasible. And who know we'll all be eating fresh and local soon! Interested? Checkout onionsquare.com and subscribe to this list.

Unity is power, when there is teamwork and collaboration, wonderful things can happen. But let's admit it is becoming rather difficult to enhance teamwork between different generations, because every generation has a different perception of communication, and communication is vital for teamwork. Recently we had a chat with a teamwork guru Anne Loehr and she helped us to answer the question whether teamwork is being redefined by every generation. Milda: Hey Anne, I know quite a lot about you, but could you tell our readers a bit about yourself? Anne:I grew up in Ithaca, New York as the youngest of eight children. After I graduated from Cornell University’s School of Hotel Management (with an intermission to go to culinary school), I moved to Kenya where I owned and managed eco-friendly hotels and safari companies for more than 15 years. My work in Kenya left me with a deep understanding of the fact that authentic relationships are shaped by courage and respect. (You can read a little more about how I came to that understanding in the next question!) After selling my hospitality business and returning to the U.S.A., I became a certified executive coach, facilitator and management consultant. I’ve been lucky enough to work with a lot of diverse organizations such as Facebook, US Air Force, Morgan Stanley Smith Barney, American Red Cross, Booz Allen Hamilton, John Hancock, Coca-Cola and Instagram to help their teams improve communication and deepen their working relationships. I am also a speaker and author of two books: A Manager’s Guide to Coaching: Simple and Effective Ways to Get the Best Out of Your Employees and Managing the Unmanageable: How to Motivate Even the Most Unruly Employee. Fun fact: The Washington Post named me the "Generational Guru". M: How did you get into training? Why? A: I actually never planned to get into talent development! I learned about it out of complete necessity. When I was in Africa turning around the Kenyan hotel, I become fluent in crisis management, literally facing down lions, tsunamis, rivers that carried away camp generators, and plenty of interpersonal and community conflict. I had 500 employees from different tribes. Let me tell you, tribes don’t just come together and succeed on their own. I tried to find top-quality leadership, coaching, and team effectiveness facilitators for my Kenyan employees, knowing that this would help break through tribal lines and set everyone up for success—but I couldn’t find one single program. I ended up having to educate myself in leadership and talent development. I wanted my team to succeed and there was nowhere else to turn. By the time I came back to the U.S.A, I had developed a passion for leadership development and coaching. When deciding what to do next, talent development became the obvious choice. M: Could you define what is teamwork for you? And why would you choose this definition? A: The official definition of "teamwork" is the combined action of a group of people to achieve a goal. But teamwork is so much more than this! It’s about listening to people, understanding their values and purpose, creating space for them to work together well, defining clear goals, roles, process and measuring for results… then celebrating success! M: Do you think that teamwork is being redefined (is the concept being innovated often)? Or is it lacking behind? A: The definition of teamwork remains the same. However, people of each generation has their own lens on how they see the world, which impacts how they interact within the team. So as 40% of Baby Boomers retire within the next 10 years, team dynamics will bend more toward the communication and relationship building style of Gen X and Gen Y. M: Does teamwork differ from generation to generation? A: There are differences in the way each generation prefers to interact and differences in the way each generation prefers to be delegated to. Interaction and delegation are core elements of teamwork so yes, teamwork differs from generation to generation. However, there are three generations in the workforce now so teams will likely be made up of more than one generation. They can potentially really annoy each other if they don’t take the time to understand generational differences! M: What would be the main differences in the way teamwork ‘works’ in different generations (Baby boomers, generation X and generation Y)? A: Here’s a quick breakdown: Baby Boomers love face-to-face interactions. They thrive in mass protests, mass rock concerts, and larger families. It is totally foreign to them to text, email or IM if you could be speaking face-to-face. This generation saw the power of using their voice as a group to make a difference, both at the high level and the detailed level. Not only were they able to successfully protest the lack of women’s rights at a high level, they were also able to finesse the details of policy and legislation to pass the laws needed to create their vision. This is the beauty of a Boomer. They can see both the vision and the details, and then prioritise to eventually win the battle. Some ways their teams will reflect these qualities is by having a lot of in-person meetings, setting clear high-level and low-level priorities, and being very focused on time management. Being group oriented, Baby Boomers also work well in larger teams. Generation X can be perceived as too independent, too self focused, and too individualistic. However, I prefer to say that they are realistic and solution focused. Gen X often prefers to work alone, on their own timetable, with quick decisions and fast-results. They like to work in their own style and when they are able to, they can get a lot done. Gen X teams are most productive when small in numbers, or when they are given the opportunity to work either independently or with one other person. Between stagflation, high divorce rates, and the humiliation of both the Iran Contra crisis and the Challenger explosion, they learned early on to be resourceful and pragmatic when moving forward. Because of this, they have laser-focused delegation skills, which comes in handy for high producing teams. Generation Y was born with a mouse in their hand so it’s no surprise that they prefer to interact virtually. To them, an IM chat or a text is the same as a face-to-face meeting. An added benefit of working together virtually is that it allows them to have more of a work/life balance, which is one of their core values. You can expect few face-to-face meetings with a Gen Y team, and instead you can expect group chats, video meetings, workflow apps and other teamwork technology. They are also used to having a voice during family meetings so their teams must be really collaborative in order to include everyone’s research (they love having all the details on the subject possible!) and opinions. M: Is it difficult to make different generations work in same teams? Why? A: Each person, regardless of his or her generation, is an individual so not all mixed generation teams will be difficult. There are some common communication issues I see though that can be corrected with a little training. For example, Baby Boomers can be challenged by Gen Y’s insistence on virtual communication and vice-versa. Gen X can have a hard time with both the Baby Boomers love of groups and the Gen Y’s love of being part of a community when they just want to be left alone to do their work. It’s important for everyone on the team to remember that each generation has unique contributions to offer and more diverse teams are more innovative. Their differences are an asset. M: How do you enhance teamwork in different generations? Are there any special exercises or tools to help people to work within teams? A: The best tool for enhancing teamwork in different generations is education. Educating employees about generational differences makes a significant impact. Once team members are aware of the different ways each generation prefers to interact, they won’t see the other’s behaviour as annoying or prohibitive. They will instead find a better way to communicate with each other to reach their goals. M: Could you tell us a secret (tip) on how to enhance collaboration between people in teams? A: My secret tip may seem simple but it is more challenging than you might think: Listen and ask questions. We want to thank Anne for brilliant thoughts, and explaining how communication differs between Baby Boomers, Generation X and Y representatives. Let's not forget that all of us a different but with a bit of understanding and some listening everyone can achieve great results as a team. Teamwork always means the same thing, although different generations enhances it through divergent means.

Since about a week I'm sleeping with the Sense: I've waited more than a year for this Kickstarter project to arrive on my doorstep, and for the first time in my life I'm stoked to go to bed! Sense is beautiful. This little gadget tells the air quality, light, temperature and humidity of my room. Green means I'm good to go, orange means the sleep conditions could be better, and you can probably guess what the red light means. Cool right? Sense collects data about your nights with the Pill, a coin-shaped object that, once clipped to your pillow, communicates with Sense and tells it when you were in deep sleep, or moving around a lot, etc. Trust issues But truth be told, I don't trust it. Sense wakes me up whenever it 'thinks' that I am sleeping lightly. It doesn't let me know if the device really knows when to wake me up. Leaving me in uncertainty about my alarm, before that important meeting with procurement from that new client tomorrow morning. A meeting i'd like to be on time for. Sense doesn't get my weekends Friday and Saturday nights are the nights when I'm hanging out with friends. I was a little bit disappointed when on Saturday morning I saw Sense data which told me that I've been sleeping from 23.00 till 10.00 in the morning, with deep sleep from 23.00-03.30, which I know couldn't be right, since i was sure this was the time I was still in my garden with my friends. Unfortunately I cannot delete or adjust this data after one day. Leaving Sense thinking i had a long night with high quality sleep. This weekend I was DJ'ing at a friends birthday. After work I got home and got changed. I got at the venue at 9 and got home somewhere during the night. Somehow it picked up I was in the room around 8 and decided I was going to bed then. Again. First 7 hours of deep sleep... Saturday same thing happened. Concluding i'd say, in my opinion somehow Sense at this moment doesn't make.. well, much sense. Also, this could be solved with one little update ofcourse. I was really excited at the beginning, I'm not that excited anymore. I hope Hello will improve it because I really like the idea. For now, im glad I can tell Siri what time I want to wake up when it really matters.

Within LearningSpaces we think it's really important for people to contact us. For a long time we've only used Helpful for this and we gave it a good place in our UI. Since we've released Helpful in our app there were a lot of messages from our customers with feature request, questions on how to use the product, and bug reports. It helped us to understand what issues were helpful for our audience and what not. After that we continued to look at how we can improve our customer support and we found Intercom. Intercom offers to help with observing costumers, acquiring, engaging, learning, and with support. Of this list we use engaging with the basic plan, support with the pro plan and observe which is still free because it arrived in beta. We only let the admins and team owners in Intercom because of the pricing (for the support with the pro plan) all other users are still served by Helpful. Why intercom next to helpful? We already had a product that helped us supporting customers, why a new one that costs money? Helpful works mostly email based, customers send us a message through the app and we respond by email. With Intercom a user sends us a message and we reply in chat with that customer, this helps to respond faster, even with just a hello and the customer knows that we are on our way to help them. Our median response time is below 4 minutes and our customers praise us for that. Intercom gives us the possibility to make announcements about what we think is important or good to know in our app. It doesn't have to be all over the screen but there will be a little notification with our message to which the customer can respond directly. There are stats in the Intercom app that gives us a good idea of how active the customers are. Based on these stats we send mails to them for coming back to the app, to add more spaces, chapters or paths. We use it also to send mails to notify users how far they are in there trial. Auto in app messages and mails We're really happy with Intercom but when we started we had a hard time to get going. For us the interface of the app was hard to understand in the beginning. We didn't know how to get to our settings or to the documentation we read minutes ago. The other thing we're not really happy about is that not all of our users are in the app because of the extra costs, and thats left for consideration for now. All in all we're really happy with it and feel that we should have implemented it a lot sooner. It was always in the backlog to do it sometime in the future, but using it made us understand that we couldn't have begon too early with it.

I'm a working mom with a high energy toddler, a needy cat and a busy partner. Balancing your life as a business woman, a loving mom and partner while maintaining an active social life can be pretty difficult. Sometimes it might feel like everybody is pulling you in a different direction, while you are trying to keep calm and focus. On other days you find yourself having too much time and not knowing what to do. Just joking. That never happens. But here are some tricks and apps that help me deal: Work hard play hard I never said it gonna be easy, but if you want to be a power mom/ worker/ human being, you need indeed energy and lots of it. So don't give in to tiredness and laziness. Your little one is in bed and your partner doesn't mind to stay at home, go for it. You can get a babysitter, go for it. You have awesome parents/parents-in-law, go for it. An hour of free time a day keeps insanity away! Its for the greater good of everybody around you ;) But of course all of this means great organizational skills. Knowing what needs to be done and when. To organize my different lives I like to use Trello. The cool thing is its super easy to use and you can have different projects with a bunch of boards to get a perfect overview of your busy life (well sort of... haha). I have a project for each aspect of my life (whether its business, social or home stuff). So one project is e.g. 'LearningSpaces' with a bunch of boards on e.g. development, sales and marketing. Each board has cards with a bunch of ToDos or stuff you are busy with (or whatever you want to organize). So you can keep everything perfectly organized in one place! Just do it Everybody always talks about planning and making time. I say 'just do it'. Organize your To Dos, make a list (if you don't already have one), and then DO them. Don't think 'I'll finish that tomorrow'. Finish it today. Don't set certain things aside. DO them now. Be your own drill master. And at the end of the day you can look at your list and think 'Yes! I did it' (even if it was just one thing). For a quick and simple ToDo list, I recommend Wunderlist. Just write down what you have to do for the day or the week, set a deadline, and DO it. And in the end when you tick it off the ever so rewarding 'ping' is already enough for a good start in the evening. Done for the day 'ping' 'Ping' 'PING'!! Don't worry be happy Of course we all want to be perfect... It stinks if something goes wrong, but sometimes you just have to let go. The more you stress about things, the harder it gets to shut off and be in the moment you are suppose to be in. You didn't finish writing a proposition at work, your little one was sick, your cat is not potty trained yet? There is nothing you can do about it with pure willpower. Try to leave work at work and personal stuff at home (not including chitchat with co-workers about how great your kid is doing and that she must be a genius ;) My app recommendation: don't use them. Don't check your social apps at work and especially don't use your work apps at home, including your work email! And yes, that is a hard one and I'm not particularly good at it myself, but at least try to reduce it to a bare minimum and be in the moment! Location location location This one is for all the dreamers among us. If you work in a sunny country at the beach while sipping gin tonics, great, but for those of us that work at an office day in day out staring at the rain outside: Break monotony! Take the bike to work, work standing up, take a walk during lunch, change office... anything to switch it up! Ideally you have an employer that encourages that with flexible work time or special lunches. If everything else fails, at least get a new beautiful desktop wallpaper every day with Kuvva. Specially curated from some of the world’s leading photographers, designers & illustrators. If you need any help with balancing the way you learn, don't hesitate to contact us on Twitter or just head to LearningSpaces and get a free trial!

Looping animations in Storyline, by default there is no such thing (wouldn’t that be nice). However during a recent Articulate e-learning challenge [...]

Mike Enders shared a post called Create E-Learning Courses With Custom Learner Feedback in which he shared how we can change the [...]

I’ll be frank, I love the idea of webinars for learning. An expert sharing his experience with an interested audience, what’s better [...]

Content from the nowcomms.com: the B2B marketing company for tech busineses in education, sports, security & ID. See the full story here How to support L&D output with marketing that doesn’t stink The L&D industry’s best eLearning courses and resources are supported by some of the lamest marketing strategies we’ve ever seen. OK, so we’re a B2B marketing agency and our work is focused on marketing deliverables that bring new sales opportunities into the pipeline. We don’t usually get involved in the marketing activities that help L&D departments "sell" courses into the workforce.  But when it comes to creating campaigns that communicate course materials to employees, you don’t need to be the world’s most insightful marketer to notice that some L&D professionals just don’t have their heart in it. When you ask L&D people to think like marketers they panic. They start acting like the cast of Mad Men and come up with ideas that haven’t really worked since the late 60s: "What about a nice poster in the staff room to promote the new sales course?" "How about a fun to enter competition?" or "Maybe we need a regular newsletter to remind staff that L&D is alive and kicking". Frankly, if we ever proposed any of these classics without real rigour and substance we’d be shown the door. Sure, we’re lucky enough to be allocated reasonably good budgets for the work we do because most companies think that good B2B marketing is a critical contributor to success. That’s not usually the case when L&D professionals are asked for a marketing plan to launch a new course or boost take-up in a course that’s floundering. In these circumstances, budgets are tight or even non-existent. Usually, this is because marketing requirements have been factored into the course roll-out programme too late. Quick fix marketing never works L&D people usually resort to inadequate, lacklustre marketing when high expectations for a course’s take up are not realised. With a hefty chunk of change already invested in a course that’s failing to gain traction, L&D parks the problem with marketing and crosses its fingers. This bolt-on approach never works.  It’s too little too late. It’s much easier (and ultimately more cost efficient) to weave agile marketing into the course development from the beginning. Toward’s Maturity’s 33 reasons why e-learning projects fail download suggests this when it stresses the role that pilot programmes can play in powering early stage marketing success. Turning early adopters into heroes and publicising departments that have benefited during a course’s pilot phase is agile marketing at work. Messages may not be clear and concise at this stage, but they’re evolving. The Eureka marketing moment that delivers the big idea may be some distance down the line, but the fact that it can be seen on the horizon provides early direction. A plan is no substitute for an idea L&D professionals who want to market their courses and resources better aren’t really short of good advice: Shift’s 9 Steps to Marketing and Promoting eLearning Projects details a rigorous enough process and Aurion’s Top Tips for Marketing Your eLearning offers up some great getting started help. But these guides, and others like them, explain the marketing process without stressing the importance of the idea. Just as great course designers have a clear learning point in mind for every course they create, great marketers know that all communications need to lead to one simple, straightforward idea. L&D professionals who don’t have marketing in their DNA simply gloss over this detail, usually because they feel the big idea is something they need to come up with all on their own. They don’t. Great ideas are never hatched by one person, the agile marketing process allows them to evolve, in the wild, over time. Big ideas don’t need big budgets The key point here is that the idea isn’t the pricey part of any marketing programme. In the B2B world communicating an idea saps budget because external channels are usually required to push the message out to the target market, but within the company, these channels exist already and are free to access. When L&D professionals are asked to "market" courses to the communities they serve, they usually have unfettered access to the channels they need to deliver high definition messages to incredibly well-segmented audiences. It’s a degree of granularity that most B2B marketers can only dream of. So how do you support L&D output with marketing that doesn’t stink? 1. Make marketing matter from the start We think that marketing needs to be in the DNA of any course roll-out programme right from day one.  Communicate the idea for a new course before even thinking about how it might be created or how it might look. Ask the workforce you serve what they think about the training need you’re trying to address and press for feedback: what are their pain points and how do they think the L&D department might help address them. Never assume that your learning priorities (as the L&D professional) are the same as the learning priorities across the workforce. 2. Learn from feedback Many marketing plans for course materials fail because they sell the benefits as the L&D department perceives them. They promote what you will learn rather than the advantages that the new learning will actually deliver to the worker. Pure-play L&D professionals think that base benefits like "finish work faster", get promoted quicker" or "cut corners to achieve the same result" diminish learning’s status but these are the simple, straightforward benefits that real workers usually want to hear about. Any feedback that comes in because you promote new course ideas early is invaluable market research that will speed a course’s development and help ensure it’s properly positioned for the target market. 3. Cultivate big creative ideas Great ideas are actually the evolution of lots of ideas inspired by lots of people. Since much of the marketing that supports course material in the workplace is bolted on late in the day, L&D people are essentially looking for the silver bullet in a vacuum: that’s quite a stressful environment to work in. Much better to create an eco-system where lots of ideas allow the best ideas to stand out on their own. In the workplace, this means getting marketing engagement at the start of the course development process and encouraging early input to go viral.  If agile marketing is in the mix from start to finish, "marketing that just works" is what comes out of the process. Cool stuff that just makes it easier: Hatch great ideas with a #hackday James Webb Young, in his book "A technique for producing ideas" advocates a particularly ordered 5 step approach. Jon Warning summarises the entire process in his 3Sixty Design blog. Paul Brown’s "The 6 best marketing ideas I have ever had" 5 lessons to learn from McDonald’s marketing See the full story How to support L&D output with marketing that doesn’t stink

Content from the nowcomms.com: the B2B marketing company for tech busineses in education, sports, security & ID. See the full story here Is Net Promoter Score any good? Anyone who knows us knows that we’re pretty analytical here at Now Comms. We think that B2B marketing needs to be evidential if it’s ever going to support really effective lead nurturing campaigns. This reputation for data based decision making means we’re often asked about the Net Promoter Score System. Usually the discussion goes along the lines of: "What is it?", "Is it any good?" and "As customer satisfaction surveys go, should we be using the Net Promoter System to build our business?" What is it? Business analyst Fred Reichheld helped create the Net Promoter Score (NPS) about 10 years ago and has been promoting its value ever since. Today it’s one of the most recognised methods for measuring customer loyalty. The score is based on answers to the question: "on a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to refer a friend or colleague". How it works Customers scoring zero to six are your detractors within the NPS system. These folks are unhappy; and they account for more than 80% of negative word-of-mouth. Sevens and eights are passive "comme si, comme ça" kind of customers; they think that what you do is barely adequate, but it’s better than nothing. Nines and tens are your promoters; these guys are loyal fans. NPS says that this group delivers more than 80% of the referrals your business receives. Is it any good? Well consistency is always good when you’re benchmarking, and since the Net Promoter Score System is pretty popular, respecting it can deliver valued results simply because there’s a good chance your competitors are using it too. But NPS has as many friends as it does foes. Here’s the science bit NPS is calculated by subtracting the percentage of customers who are (unhappy) "detractors" from the percentage of customers who are (happy) "promoters". Essentially it’s trying to create a score based on customer loyalty, using the customers’ likelihood to recommend a company.  Dr Robert East at Kingston Business School equates this to Positive Word of Mouth (PWOM) versus Negative Word of Mouth (NWOM) but argues that NPS measures only the volume of positive or negative Word of Mouth, not its impact. Others say that there’s no real scientific evidence to prove that the "likelihood to recommend" question is a more reliable predictor of business growth than any other customer loyalty based questions (for example: overall satisfaction, likelihood to purchase again, etc).  When data snobs say they hate the NPS metric it’s usually because (they say) no correlation between NPS and growth has ever been proven, so using the score to support actionable insights diminishes the role of the mild mannered data analyst to flaky snake oil salesman. What else is out there? The American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) represents the popular alternative to NPS. ACSI is based on a model originally implemented in 1989 for the Swedish economy called the Swedish Customer Satisfaction Barometer. In the UK, ACSI is localised to become the NCSIUK and similar models have evolved in other countries. Unlike NPS, there is no ultimate question with ACSI. Several questions focusing on areas like merchandise, functionality, content and price are asked to ascertain customer satisfaction. This degree of sophisticated generally results in less criticism from die hard data junkies but more bamboozlement  from the board. Therein perhaps lies the problem. NPS is clever enough to keep things really simple. It’s success is based on it’s ability to market effectively beyond the hard core analyst geek. In his own blog Net Promoter’s founding father Fred Reichheld admits that "The reason that so many researchers hate NPS is that so many senior line executives love it." So are customer satisfaction surveys worth doing? Hell yes. The models might be flaky and the methods diverse but any customer satisfaction data is better than none at all we say. Fuse together the best aspects of all the best methodologies and you get an easy to implement contact programme that supports both sales and marketing.  Sales people can use the insights to increase engagement and up sell; marketing teams get the solid statistical base they need to support realistic positioning and messaging, and power effective campaigns. It’s fear that stops many companies starting regular surveys; not knowing how satisfied customers are is just easier than knowing how dissatisfied they are, But in the world of social marketing ignoring the elephant in the room is deadly, because if customers aren’t letting you how they feel about your products and services, you can be damn sure they’re telling someone else. More: Use our tried and tested customer satisfaction process to get started with customer surveys Discover the best and worst features of NPS by reading  Richard Evensens’s blog B2B marketing analytics is easy when no ones asking difficult questions Get the official sales pitch from NPS’s developers Bain & Company See the full story Is Net Promoter Score any good?

Content from the nowcomms.com: the B2B marketing company for tech busineses in education, sports, security & ID. See the full story here How to become a confident B2B marketer in five days or less: Day 1 Day 1: trending and amending Marketing internships are more searched in the UK than media, journalism and BBC internships according to Google trends. Therefore I realise I’m lucky in starting my first of a five-day placement - a marketing internship - with B2B marketing company, Now Communications. This is the first piece of work I’ve been tasked with; attempting to compose, tweak and publish a blog post before I go home tonight, charting the first day of my journey from clueless to competent as a B2B marketer. This begins with the attempt to write a successful blog post, including relevant and highly searched words for SEO, as part of their marketing campaign. After searching how long a good blog should be - and dismissing the results; those over 2,000 words are supposedly the most successful and I only have an hour - I turn to looking at the language to use to make this blog an internet sensation. This means including words that are relevant to the content and also popular search terms. Previously, I’ve been referring to this opportunity as ‘work experience'; however a search on Google translate meant I swiftly corrected myself, to completing an ‘internship’. While ‘work experience’ was searched the same amount as ‘internship’ until 2007, since then ‘internship’ has steadily overtaken, and so using this as a keyword in a blog on the subject should, hopefully, increase the chance of it being spotted. To put the finishing touches to my to-be talked about blog, the focus keyword, title and description all included the term ‘marketing internship’ to increase the SEO. Now if this doesn’t get me thousands of views I don’t know what will. What I’ve learned: It’s important that a post is high in a search engine’s results - otherwise what’s the point. Carefully selecting the words used based on popular searches will optimise your chance of being seen. Marketing campaigns are conducted in many ways, and a blog by a nonplussed intern is one. View the next instalment here: http://www.nowcomms.com/how-to-become-a-confident-b2b-marketer-in-five-days-or-less-day-2/ See the full story How to become a confident B2B marketer in five days or less: Day 1

Content from the nowcomms.com: the B2B marketing company for tech busineses in education, sports, security & ID. See the full story here How to become a confident B2B marketer in five days or less: Day 2 Day 2: stats and social media Who knew just how many functions Google has. Of course, I knew there was more to it than the standard search - I spent the majority of my French GCSE plugging my homework into Translate, and everyone’s had fun on I’m Feeling Lucky - but discovering Google Analytics has upped the ante. Analytics shows everything that anyone would want to know about their website - the number of viewers, those that ‘bounce’, which pages are most popular. For today’s education in B2B marketing, I was most interested in where the hits were coming from - how users found their way to the NowComms website. Twitter, Quora and Facebook all attract traffic, but here’s where I come in; attempting to increase and expand the social media presence of NowComms and in turn increase website views - which could lead to all important conversions (those who purchase, sign up and so on). The aim is to gain more follows, more retweets, more likes and more comments across the various social media channels - the other target suggested by a colleague was to double the hits to the website by tomorrow morning, I’m not rising to that one - but also to be more social, returning the favour to other users. I began this task by creating an Instagram account, linking the post to Twitter, and providing a link to yesterday’s blog. A couple of things became clear from this, mainly that hashtagging relevant words, such as marketing and internship, does indeed increase the presence of a post on Instagram; the photo had 27 likes in five minutes (I was slightly disheartened that never has a picture on my private Instagram account had anywhere near that response). However, it was also clear that these people were not following us and not necessarily linked to marketing. But maybe any response is better than no response. What I’ve learned: There is no point having content on a website if no one looks at it, but there is also not much point in having hits on a website if these aren’t made into conversions Twitter is most successful for bringing people to NowComms marketing website. The aim is to increase the success of NowComms on social media. Hashtagging does work, but maybe not so well on Instagram as Twitter; Instagram has far more strange people on it. View our Twitter and Instagram: https://twitter.com/nowworkplace https://instagram.com/now_comms/ Read the previous instalment here: http://www.nowcomms.com/how-to-become-a-confident-b2b-marketer-in-five-days-or-less/ And the next here: http://www.nowcomms.com/how-to-become-a-confident-b2b-marketer-in-five-days-or-less-day-3-2/ See the full story How to become a confident B2B marketer in five days or less: Day 2

Content from the nowcomms.com: the B2B marketing company for tech busineses in education, sports, security & ID. See the full story here How to become a confident B2B marketer in five days or less: Day 3 Day 3: the long and short of successful B2B marketing Yesterday our Instagram (Now_Comms) went live, Twitter was inundated with links to the first blog, and another widely anticipated post went up. But did it make a difference? Today is the day to evaluate the success of this blog and increased social media in the B2B marketing world of NowComms. Apparently, it did. The hits to this blog significantly increased, nearly half of which were Entrances - people who went directly to the blog page rather than through other areas of the site. There was also increased activity on social media - more followers on Twitter, and activity linked to the tweets put out there. I have to admit, this is mostly from a colleague sharing a blog link, which was  immediately favourited multiple times, while mine all sat untouched. Clearly I have a bit to learn still. To manage these increasingly hectic sites, I was introduced to Hootsuite, from which I will be carefully letting it do all the work for me in managing where posts are sent, to who, and when. In even more exciting news, this blog is the first that appears when entering the (perhaps rather specific) title of it into Google. Although this was very exciting for me, it is a slight niche, and so I set about trying to increase its search return with slightly broader search terms. In doing this I’m working on the basis of The Long Tail principle, proposed by Chris Anderson probably as a way to make small time bloggers etc feel better about themselves. Although there are a couple of web pages that get a large number of hits (here it’s The 100 best eLearning websites chart), the large number of small hit pages are just as important; a few hits on many pages brings just as much traffic as many hits on few pages. The top hit page for NowComms brings in just over 57% of the traffic, while the smaller pages bring in about 0.1-2.0% of all traffic each, amounting to just under half of all traffic. From Chris Andersons book The Long Tail, http://www.longtail.com/about.html This is valuable - if people are looking for something specific, they are likely to find it because there’s less competition. And Google likes new material, making it likely to appear higher in searches. It’s also more likely that these may convert to sales compared to a more general search. And although I would love this blog to be the top hit website, this reassures me that I am indeed contributing in - nearly - just as significant a way to the hits to this website. So on only my third day on the job in B2B marketing I can confidently say I’ve learned a few things. Watch this space for a full review of why a B2B marketing internship is undoubtedly worth doing…let’s just say my CV has suddenly filled up. What I’ve learned: The Long Tail is approach in marketing allows most content to be valuable in some way Social media is an invaluable tool for B2B marketing for spreading the word An internship in B2B marketing is worthwhile - and I am safely on my way from clueless to competent as a B2B marketing expert. Read my previous instalments here: http://www.nowcomms.com/how-to-become-a-confident-b2b-marketer-in-five-days-or-less/ http://www.nowcomms.com/how-to-become-a-confident-b2b-marketer-in-five-days-or-less-day-2/ And my next here: http://www.nowcomms.com/how-to-become-a-confident-b2b-marketer-in-five-days-or-less-day-3-3/   See the full story How to become a confident B2B marketer in five days or less: Day 3

Content from the nowcomms.com: the B2B marketing company for tech busineses in education, sports, security & ID. See the full story here How to become a confident B2B marketer in five days or less: Day 4 Day 4: B2B goes big screen As the trendy marketing company NowComms is - and following the idea of a client’s Video Selfie project - we decided it was time to jump on and get the Camcorder out. For the purpose of this project, substitute Camcorder for my iPhone placed on a carefully constructed pile of stationary and books, and held in place with Blu tac. The challenge: to film a short video explaining the NowComms’ B2B marketing #hackday, in under an hour… and to edit, touch up and make look brilliant in under a day. The filming was relatively straightforward - I moaned about having to be filmed, the camera fell over - but we got a large amount of footage quite easily. Too much, in fact, for a short clip, and deciding what was unnecessary was a tricky task. In fact it was this that forced me to think more like a marketing expert than I’ve had to so far. What’s the most important message here? To explain #hackdays, but why not show how great we are too… One clip has a good message, but is delivered badly… Is this actually interesting to watch? It was a perfect exercise in marketing, and I like to think it also employed some kind of psychology (as a Psychology student I’m always looking to claim this). There were also more unlikely sources from which most difficulties came; loading videos to Google Drive, and then searching for a USB lead when I couldn’t make it work, trying to find the ‘change font colour’ button on Windows Media player for an absurdly long time, being completely stumped for music ideas. But it came together in the end - and here is the finished product, with an all-star cast from Now Communications HQ. Want to explore more? Contact us on the phone or fill out this quick form First Name Last Name Email Company Phone And another thing Read my previous blog here: http://www.nowcomms.com/how-to-become-a-confident-b2b-marketer-in-five-days-or-less-day-3-2/   See the full story How to become a confident B2B marketer in five days or less: Day 4

Content from the nowcomms.com: the B2B marketing company for tech busineses in education, sports, security & ID. See the full story here How to become a confident B2B marketer in five days or less: Day 5 Day 5: the finale Today I pack up my desk, take my tea mug back to the kitchen and return my visitor pass to reception. So here are my Big Three recommendations if you’re looking to fill my space in a marketing internship: 1. Go somewhere with a Kanban board Monday morning, just as I was settling down, a colleague announced it was time for a Scrum meeting by the Kanban board.  Nodding as if I knew what this involved ("cabman? crab nan?"), I became witness to a fundamental idea here. The Kanban board is a whiteboard charting the progress of all tasks, projects and ideas from ‘current sprint’ to ‘in progress’ to ‘test’ and then ‘released’. The point is to make sure projects move through each stage by members of the team focussing on different tasks, but being adaptive so ideas can change as it becomes clear what works. The Kanban board charts this process, which is good because you can see the progress you’re making, but you also have everything you could do up in front of you, and can choose what you want to focus on, and how. I’ve had free reign in my little section of the office all week - create a survey or upload to Instagram?! The power’s going to my head. 2. Use every bit of software available Not only is my Skills section on LinkedIn probably over the maximum allowance, it makes your week far more interesting. Most of the software I used - Hootsuite, Limesurvey, WordPress - I had never used before but reassuringly saying, ‘oh yes that’s fine I can do that’ meant that I wasn’t sat there sending out boring emails and making tea all week (in fact I never once made a cup). Creating and editing the video for yesterday’s blog was one of my most enjoyable tasks, and although I have used MovieMaker before - there was a period when I was about 12 when making pointless videos was how you spent your time - I was having to think professionally about it rather than deciding on the most garish background possible. 3. Write blogs (surprise surprise) It not only gave me lots to do - no one wants to be bored on work experience - but also meant I’ve had to think of interesting content to put up, maximise its SEO, use social media to broadcast it… Most of the skills I’ve used this week are related to this blog. It’s also made me dredge up my AS level writing skills, and revision is always good. And it’s been thoroughly enjoyable watching the number of views steadily rise - especially knowing that they can’t all have been from my dad. My final words of wisdom on a marketing internship: Men in offices still get bored Marketing companies are too modern to have biros - everything I wrote was in green Sharpie Always say yes when there’s an offer of tea   See the full story How to become a confident B2B marketer in five days or less: Day 5

Estoy convencido de la irrelevancia de los estilos de aprendizaje a la hora de diseñar elearning. En las revisiones de un diseño que está ya tomando forma, no hay nada que me haga temer más por la integridad del proyecto que un compañero apuntando con preocupación al hecho de que "no estamos poniendo nada kinestético", o alguna apreciación similar relativa a los estilos. El efecto Forer Se presenta a cada participante una lista personalizada de preferencias personales. Se les pide que indiquen, en una escala de 1 a 5, en qué grado coincide esa preferencia con su personalidad. Los resultados indican una clara concordancia con una buena parte de la lista personalizada. Pero ocurre que la lista no es personalizada: todos recibieron la misma. El principio de afinidad, bien descrito por Cialdini, tiene el potencial de cambiar nuestra "forma de vida". Existe una tendencia bien documentada a identificarse con parámetros y pautas. El horóscopo es un ejemplo perfecto. Del mismo modo, es muy sencillo "encasillarse" en un estilo de aprendizaje simplemente por el hecho de haberlos conocido, y muy posiblemente, haber hecho algún tipo de "test" que no hace sino reafirmar el convencimiento personal de que la preferencia descrita se exhibe habitualmente como parte de nuestra personalidad. ¿Somos los profesionales de formación y desarrollo los primeros en caer en esta "encasillamiento", y por extensión someter a nuestra audiencia al mismo proceso? Me temo que todos somos susceptibles de caer en esta falacia. La teoría es discutible No voy a rebatir aquí la validez de los estudios realizados hasta el momento sobre estilos de aprendizaje porque ya hay quien lo hace con mucho acierto, también en el campo de la formación corporativa. Prefiero, como hace Cathy Moore, preguntar qué utilidad práctica nos brindan estos estilos: de acuerdo, puede que existan ciertos estilos… ¿y qué? ¿Existen ejemplos de soluciones elearning en los que un diseño especialmente adaptado a un estilo de aprendizaje haya dado resultados superiores a los que se obtendrían sin realizar esas concesiones? Me gustaría verlos y añadirlos a este blog. "Pero yo soy muy visual" Los niños no tienen "estilos": aprenden indiscriminadamente. (Foto: Outdoor Classrooms blog) ¿Muy visual? De acuerdo. Pero nuestro cerebro no cierra puertas. Durante nuestra infancia aprendemos de muchas formas. Somos una especie incapaz de sobrevivir sin aprender, y lo hacemos de forma innata, versátil, improvisada o planificada, consciente e inconsciente, y recurriendo a todos los medios que tenemos a nuestro alcance: mirando, saboreando, oyendo, tocando, haciendo, vicariamente, equivocándose y más adelante escuchando y después leyendo. Aprendemos a través de todos estos canales continuamente, y nuestro cerebro no dispone de "grifos" que cierren una u otra forma de suministro: aprendemos de todas estas formas. Por tanto, afirmar que una persona acostumbrada a la lectura "no va a aprender nada" con un vídeo o ejercicio práctico (o que va a aprender menos) es, en mi opinión, un insulto a esa persona. Es como afirmar que un vegetariano no puede digerir un filete (vaya esta frase con todo el respeto del cuasi-vegetariano que suscribe). Colegio y universidad: los anti-estilos Las pruebas de que todos podemos aprender incluso en las condiciones más adversas son, tristemente, el colegio y la universidad. Son estos lugares especialistas en suprimir muchas de nuestras vías de expresión, comunicación y potencial inquisitivo, al mismo tiempo que nos someten a una restringida dieta sensorial basada en el monólogo y el texto. Aquí está mi monólogo, delante de esta pizarra. Que nadie contraste opiniones mientras yo hablo. Que nadie baraje hipótesis. Usaremos este libro, que he escrito yo. Ahora, aprended. (Foto: Malate269). Es aquí donde adquirimos la vergüenza al dibujar, hasta perder el interés por el dibujo y el boceto. Es aquí donde dejamos de actuar, de experimentar, de formular hipótesis. Es aquí donde aprendemos a callar y levantar la mano antes de preguntar. Es aquí donde aprendemos que hay preguntas tontas, y que el experimento fallido no es válido ni sirve para aprender. Es aquí donde se va por el libro. Es un clima increíblemente restrictivo para el aprendizaje. Pero a pesar de todo, prácticamente todos salimos airosos de la prueba; prueba que es, para cualquiera que crea en los estilos, una de las privaciones estilísticas más prolongadas y estrictas de nuestras vidas. Las estadísticas de fracaso escolar y abandono apuntan a factores familiares y socioeconómicos, por supuesto. Una vez más, sugerir la más mínima incapacidad escolar del individuo basándose en unos supuestos estilos sería un insulto personal y directo contra los alumnos. ¿Estoy defendiendo los modelos escolares y universitarios actuales? No, estoy diciendo que aprendemos sin problemas en ellos a pesar de su escaso cromatismo estilístico. El elearning como solución, no como terapia Rechazo la noción de los estilos y su aplicación en el diseño como medida para "optimizar" el aprendizaje; dichas medidas son una acusación implícita de incapacidad o capacidad limitada. (Foto: ‘lil pick-me-up blog) Cuando me planteo el diseño de una solución elearning, no hay cabida para estilos de aprendizaje. Hacer este tipo de concesión sería similar a que una empresa ofreciera dos horarios de trabajo, uno para los que son madrugadores, y otro para los que no lo son. El elearning es una solución a un problema específico, que nunca es la capacidad de aprendizaje de su audiencia. El diseño de la solución debe: Resolver el problema. Probablemente en conjunción con otras intervenciones de naturaleza no formativa (tema para otro post) Resolverlo de forma efectiva. Además de las intervenciones mencionadas, aquí entran en juego variables como la motivación y lograr que la experiencia usando la solución de elearning sea amena. (La formación como experiencia es también tema para otro post en español) Entre los factores que influyen en el diseño de la solución, incluiría: Contexto y cultura de la empresa La estrategia de talento ya presente en la empresa (¡o su ausencia!) Tecnología y medios disponibles Calendario de actuación y esperanza de vida de la solución Con la notable ausencia, por supuesto, de los estilos de aprendizaje. The post La irrelevancia de los estilos de aprendizaje appeared first on A Learning Blog.

Agile, iterative, successive approximation… There are many terms that broadly encapsulate the same concept: agile L&D development, or the delivery of small incremental value-add to your business through an iterative approach. Here’s why you should be agile too. Life is agile It’s never this straightforward (photo: William Warby) We have all heard someone complain about a specific goal being "a moving target". Usually, this type of complain implies that it is not worth pursuing such goal. But the reality is that almost everything today is a moving target. In fact, the targets that are not moving are most likely the ones not worth pursuing. In an organization that strives for continuous improvement, everything, including learning, is a moving target. And with that comes the realization (deep down you knew all along) that your learning design will never be "finished", and that you may have to work towards the goal in small but usable increments. Courses, workshops, elearning, blended learning solutions that are launched frequently, incorporating minor additions and changes as you learn from them. Welcome to agile L&D development. Once restricted to the realm of software development, agile has found supporters in many activities involving design. There are many good introductions to the concepts relating to agile development, such as Leandog’s discussion guide. Agile, in short But a frequent, usually off-putting feature of agile literature (at least for us in L&D) is the fact that it focuses on software design. So if you are not inclined to read that 112-page ebook, or a similar one, here’s the essence as it relates to learning: Work with your team and your learners, not with documentation and processes Aim to design and create the smallest learning solution that solves the problem Launch it and ruthlessly collect and analyze feedback Refine the solution, informed by the feedback you get Launch revised solutions as soon as you feel they address enough previous feedback to add new value Constantly seek ways to remove non-value steps so you can cycle through the above as fast as you can In practice How this looks in practice depends on many factors. For example, classroom solutions lean themselves to quite frequent iteration. In fact, you could revise the material and delivery script after reading the survey from each class. In teams, it gets only slightly slower. The way I have done rapid iteration of classroom solutions within a team involves: a common storage location in the cloud a standard way of documenting changes a regular video conference to coordinate changes In practice, your personal delivery kit will be somewhat off sync from the central repository, since you need time to fully assimilate changes made by others before being able to incorporate them in your own sessions. Blended and elearning solutions are somewhat less agile in that there is a production and deployment process involved that may cause too much overhead if done frequently. Still, adopting an agile methodology will help the L&D team be more nimble, launch solutions faster and keep them fresh and topical over time. It’s easier than it looks When thinking about implementing agile practices, the L&D field has some important advantages over the software field. Paper prototypes are quick, cheap and effective in testing new concepts (photo: theuxreview.co.uk) Perhaps the most important one is prototyping. It is generally much easier to prototype a learning solution than it is to prototype software. This applies both to classroom and elearning. There are many approaches and techniques to quickly create useful prototypes for the purpose of testing an idea, visualizing the solution or requesting feedback from customers (learners). When it comes to elearning, we also enjoy the same benefits of the software world. Particularly, practices like A/B testing, where a small portion of the learners are shown a different version of the elearning so we can study their reactions and feedback. Many software companies are constantly in A/B testing mode. There are also great low-tech approaches to gathering feedback and understanding the business, the learners and their needs, and quickly incorporating these insights into the agile development cycle. It’s easier than it looks because the key, as in any agile practice, is not so much the technical ability or tools used by the L&D team, but their grasp of how agile can help in their specific environment and their ability to work together to deliver that promise. Actually, if you are leading an L&D team, a good conversation starter is reading the Manifesto for Agile Software Development but placing the word "Learning" whenever you see "Software". When to do agile Of course not every learning solution is an ideal candidate for agile. For example, solutions with short shelf life or those where participants are getting externally certified and consistency across groups, industries and countries is expected. Onboarding new hires. A great scenario for agile L&D development (photo: Arthur Grigoryan) But there are many other areas where I have seen or practiced agile development of some sort, including: Employee onboarding. I consider this the perfect scenario in large companies or those with high turnover. As this post suggests, it’s hard to get it right; iteration becomes your friend Role-specific training. This is a great example of a "moving target", as the learning solutions must quickly adapt and support the company’s talent strategy Compliance and other courses that must be repeated over time and for every new hire Time to park ADDIE? Probably not. Although it’s time to look at ADDIE not as a flowchart or fixed set of rules, but as a set of principles. The principles that guide ADDIE are solid. But it is easy to be slowed down by the waterfall approach that is traditionally applied in ADDIE. If you’ve only worked on ADDIE models, experiencing agile L&D development will change the way you think about learning solution design. The post Why you should be doing agile L&D development appeared first on A Learning Blog.

Tēnā koutou katoa Welcome to you all related posts - >> ( 2 ) (1) I'm still new to blogging. Recently I’ve had a thing about comment guidelines. In my last post, I was lucky and grateful to receive some useful opinion from Britt Watwood and Sue Waters. So I’ve reviewed my set of guidelines again and given it a new look.I’d be delighted if you’d check it out. My aim is to make the guidelines as inviting to commenters as possible. So your opinion is very valuable to me. Please let me know what you think. If there is anything that you feel I should change - pitch, use of words, issues listed etc - just put a comment beneath this post and let me know.I really appreciate your opinion.Ka kite anōCatch ya later

Tēnā koutou katoaGreetings to you all Secondary Futures, New Zealand is writing a paper on how will we decide, in future, what technology is good or bad for kids. YOUR opinion is important.Check out the video. Then go to the Secondary Futures Post to leave your opinion there in a comment.Comments are turned off on this announcement post.Click the Secondary Futures link to leave a comment.Ka kite anōCatch ya later

Tēnā koutou katoaGreetings to you allThe Large Hadron Collider is a gigantic particle accelerator beneath the ground, near Geneva. Very soon it may provide information that could throw light on the fundamental structure of matter.The project aims to provide colliding particles with huge amounts of energy never before observed on earth. Information gathered may explain some of the unanswered questions surrounding the so-called Big Bang Theory of the origin and evolution of the Universe.Fermi's paradoxEnrico Fermi was a famous Italian physicist who lived in the first half of the 20th century. He built the first nuclear reactor. Known for his contribution to Quantum Theory, Nuclear and Particle Physics and Statistical Mechanics, he was awarded a Noble Prize in 1938.At a luncheon in 1950 Fermi asked the question "Where is everybody?" when considering the compelling evidence, available at that time, that intelligent life was likely to exist throughout the Universe.Fermi had already deduced that millions of civilisations could be far in advance of those on Earth. Some of them could have found solutions to many problems we have not yet solved, such as intergalactic communication and intergalactic travel.Despite the SETI projects, conceived in 1971, and pursued even to this day, the ubiquitous absence of evidence for civilisation, other than those on our planet, remains a mystery. It posed a conundrum known as the Fermi Paradox, that is still being debated.Ka kite anōCatch ya later