Twitter Contest Winner

The first round of the Digital Habitats Twitter Contest had 94 entries and the winner was:

@ChristyATucker

Congrats Christy!  I'm now a bit jealous as you are getting a book that's going to be sitting by your desk for many years and it's signed by John and Nancy.

I think that the contest has already been successful, but there's still another chance to win. 

Go here: http://bit.ly/MYIw to find out how you can still win.

By the way, even if you don't win a copy of the book, you can still come hear Nancy and John at LearnTrends 2009.  In fact, John is doing two sessions.

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Defending 2.0

I saw an interesting post by Mark Oehlert "Learning 2.0" and why that name suddenly is torquing me off...  Mark's main complaint and one that I've seen voiced before is that people are not really learning differently:

I really don't believe that humans are learning differently - meaning, I think we are constituting memories, adapting behavior, practicing new skills - those activities that typically make up learning from the human standpoint - in much the same way as we have for hundreds if not thousands of years. I'm talking about our internal processes.

This is pretty much what was discussed in New Way of Learning and the general answer was that it's doubtful that there's really a new way of learning, but there certainly are many related metacognitive tools and methods that have changed and that we need to adapt.

Still, I believe the crux of Mark's concern and where the disagreement comes …

So there is no "Learning 2.0" from the learners' view - there could well be "Instruction 2.0" or "Teaching 2.0" but think about what is really different there - those last two (and you could throw in Government 2.0, Education 2.0) address organizations and not learners and this gets to my second bothersome point about "Learning 2.0."

Let's put the burden on us and not on the learner.

That's exactly it.  We aren't really talking about the learning itself, but rather the way in which we support learning within an organization.  What is the role of the Learning Professional?  And I would claim that there's a fairly substantial change when you go from eLearning 1.0 to eLearning 2.0 solutions.

The reason you can't call it "Instruction 2.0" or "Teaching 2.0" is that the very point of eLearning 2.0 is that it's learner driven.  We are no longer in charge.  We take a supportive role.  We create an environment.  We foster.  We coach.

To do this, it requires a considerably different mindset.  It makes sense for us to discuss this as 2.0 just to indicate that there's this substantial shift.

Certainly this has been debated quite a bit (see Is eLearning 2.0 Meaningful? - You Vote and 2.0 and Interesting Times).  But I think the discussion is over.  We've come to accept that we'll use the 2.0 moniker.

Mark – how about if we agree that if your Oregon State Beavers go down to defeat this weekend, we'll just agree that it's okay to use the terms Learning 2.0 and eLearning 2.0?

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Rapid LMS

I've been asked numerous times over the past couple of years by various types of people and companies a very similar question:

I plan to or have been conducting and charging for training workshops for clients. I'd like to creating this as self-paced eLearning possibly with other capabilities as well. And I want to charge for this. How can I do that?

Two years ago, after quite a bit of discussion with most people who had this general question, I would figure out that it was going to be relatively easy for them to figure out how to author the eLearning courses, but it was going to be a harder decision on how to get that posted somewhere and available to their existing or new clients.

I was just asked the question again the other day. It's a company that has been offering 3-day workshops and now they want to put some portion of that content online. Ideally, they would offer it both publicly for fee and as well to particular clients.

While there are a lot of different Learning Management Systems with very different features, the requirements in this situation are a bit different. So here are some of the requirements I see for this customer that are a bit different from what you would find in a normal corporate LMS RFP.

To me this is a new kind of system. I'm temporarily calling this a Rapid Learning Management System. It's hosted. It's easy to use. It's a bit like rapid eLearning authoring tools, but aimed at the learning management side of this equation. If you know the right term for this, please let me know.

White Label

For their existing customers, they should be able to point them to a system that looks just like their own site.

Company Clients / Groups of Learners

Many of their customers (companies) come in with several learners. They need to be able to have these learners grouped together and provide reporting over those learners. The company will have a single administrative contact. The system should look and act like an individual LMS for that administrator. Also, if they make changes to the LMS overall, the company should inherit those changes.

Marketplace for Content

While they are going to need to take the lead on driving traffic to their courses, the system should allow for individuals and companies to find and sign up for their content.

My impression though is that despite the claims that the marketplace will help you get new customers, you should plan to do the work needed to get people there. Thus, you probably should be thinking about all the normal internet marketing approaches to driving people to sign up. And once they get to your landing page, it should be easy to get them across to the marketplace and have it transact with them.

Instructor, Virtual Classroom and Social Learning Support

In some cases, all that is needed is for the self-paced eLearning to be hosted, but in this case, they also still want to be able to interact with the learners. Instructors will still be there for the companies. And there should be some basic capabilities for asking questions, getting answers. Possibly some forums. In this case, it's limited, but I've run into situations where the plan was for 8 hours of self-paced online and then 1 day of online virtual classroom.

Authoring Support or SCORM?

A lot of the systems on the market seem to start with some kind of basic rapid authoring tool. I personally believe that it would be better for these systems to accept SCORM content from a few of the top authoring tools. Of course, that implies additional cost. However, if you are really authoring several hours of content and are going to take this seriously as a business, it would seem like that should be a good investment. Or maybe you just use an open-source or free. But I'd rather not have to learn all the quirks of one of these platforms. And I'd want my content to be transportable in case the platform goes away.

Other Requirements?

What am I missing? What other requirements are important in this situation?

Systems?

I'm currently pointing people to the following rapid learning management systems. I'm not claiming these address all of the above requirements. Rather that they generally are a hosted LMS solution that roughly corresponds to most of the requirements:

• Coggno
• LearnHub
• Litmos
• Odijoo
• Learn.com Personal Edition
• Articulate Online
• CourseMill
• CourseMax
• Xerceo TrainingAtom
• Geo On-Demand
• Upside Learning Upside LMS
• Ultralearn
• TOPYX
• Sclipo
• CoursePark
  

What other systems should be on the list?

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LearnTrends Speakers and Topics Announced

We've put up a preliminary schedule for LearnTrends 2009. You can find the conference description, preliminary schedule and session descriptions at:

LearnTrends 2009 Conference Agenda

Topics and Speakers include:

• Introduction: Convergence in Learning - George Siemens, Tony Karrer & Jay Cross
• The Immernet Singularity - Tony O'Driscoll
• Extending Learning to the Edges of Organizations - Charles Jennings & Andy McGovern – Thomson Reuters
• Reinventing Organizational Learning - Clark Quinn & Jay Cross
• Enterprise 2.0, Convergence, & Innovation - Deb Schultz & Jerry Michalski
• Building a Social Learning Environment - Jane Hart
• Breaking Down Walls - Laura Overton
• Convergent Learning and Web Squared - Jon, Jay, Clark, Charles, Jane, Harold
• Merging Information, Learning and Social Media - Christy Confetti Higgins - Sun
• Microlearning - Janet Clarey
• Personal Knowledge Management - Harold Jarche
• Challenge of Convergence - Pam Borios – Skillsoft – Books 24x7
• Tools for Diverse Communities at Xerox Global- Jack Merklein & John Smith - Xerox
• eLearning Outside the Training Box - John Smith & Nancy White

Register Now – Its Free - To register, you must first register on the LearnTrends community and then register on the Conference Event Page.

Innovation Awards - The conference will also include the LearnTrends Innovation Awards 2009. Please see that post for details.

Win the Twitter Content - And don't forget that you have until tomorrow to help promote the conference and win a free copy of Nancy and John's book. Contest - Win a Free Copy of Digital Habitats via LearnTrends 2009. Please help promote the conference and maybe you'll get a great book as a result.

I think this is going to be a really great online conference and discussion.

One of the things we are doing this year is asking speakers to keep their presentations to 25-30 minutes so that we have lots of times to have discussions.

I'm particularly looking forward to discussions around:

• How information services and enterprise 2.0 are intersecting with Learning / eLearning?
• Where does social really fit? Are social features really heading in the right direction or do we need to be thinking about stitching things together?
• How are people thinking about structuring organizations with all of the stuff going on?
• How and where do networks and communities fit in?
• How the heck am I supposed to come up with an eLearning strategy when there's so much change going on?

One thing I should remind people is that a big part of the genesis of this conference was George, Jay and myself lamenting that while we go to conferences all the time, the presentations and discussions were most often aimed at broader audiences and more introductory topics. The purpose of this discussion is to dive into meatier topics that the three of us are interested in exploring. If you are a beginner, this may be a bit of a fire hose. If you've been in the industry for a while, but are grappling with some of the questions I've listed above, then please join us in the discussion.

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eLearn 2009

Just a quick note that I will be up in Vancouver for E-LEARN 2009 - World Conference on E-Learning in Corporate, Government, Healthcare & Higher Education. If you are attending and see this post, please drop me a note. It's always good to connect with people face-to-face at events.

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Convert ILT to eLearning - Estimating

I received an inquiry from a reader and I'm hoping that people can chime in on their thoughts. It relates to my post about eLearning Costs, which bases cost estimates on seat time of the eLearning course. So, the basic question is:

We current provide a two day (16 hour) classroom training course for our employees. We are planning to prepare an e-learning course based on this classroom course. How should we estimate the e-learning course duration for this lesson? What are the important criteria in estimating eLearning duration when its based on a classroom course?

Conversion Estimation

Some resources on the conversion of Instructor-Led Training (ILT) to eLearning / Web-Based Training (WBT) – found through eLearning Learning using Convert ILT as the starting point:

In What Training Costs Part I: Converting Content from ILT to WBT, they discuss compression of ILT when its converted to eLearning:

Compression ratio: What would the length of the course be if it were online vs. classroom based? There's been a lot of research on this, and answers vary anywhere from 20% to 80% of the original length, but there's general agreement that an average compression ratio is typically about 50%, or a four hour course in the classroom should take the student 2 hours to complete online.

In Costs, Donald Clark talks about seat time during conversion:

Seat time is the time spent by the learner in a learning environment. For many types of content, elearning clearly offers an advantage. The research generally shows that there is at least a 50% reduction in seat time when a course is converted from classroom learning to elearning. Brandon Hall reports it is a 2:1 ratio.

"Brandon Hall, editor and publisher of the Multimedia & Internet Training Newsletter, cites an overall 50 percent reduction in seat time required for a student to learn the same content using online training as compared to in a classroom (Puget Sound Business Journal)."

Of course, a lot of this has to with the type of content. For example, we normally read at least twice as fast as compared to someone speaking. Thus such courses as compliance training offers a seat time advantage due to rather than having an instructor do all the talking, we can now just read it. However, if we are practicing a new skill, then there is normally no real time advantage as we need the same amount of time to practice in an elearning environment as we do in a classroom.

And Donald makes a good point about the fact that it takes more time when you are listening to audio as compared to reading (or skimming).

The 50% compression ratio is similar to what I've heard, but in almost every case there are a whole lot of factors the come into play. In Case Study: Converting an Existing Course to E-Learning, they detail a series of factors. Quite a good article when you are thinking about this conversion.

• If there is an existing ILT course, how complete is it?
• Are there any hands-on labs in the ILT course? Will these need to be converted? Is it feasible to do so?
• Is the person doing the conversion already familiar with the ILT course?
• Is the person doing the conversion already familiar with the product or service being taught?
• Will subject matter experts (SMEs) be available for consultation as needed?
• Will the person doing the conversion be dedicated to this project exclusively?
• How many people will be working on the conversion team?
• How much animation is required?
• Is the scope of the conversion effort clearly defined?
• What is the approval process? Who will sign off on the project?
• How will the finished product be implemented within the organization?
• Does the organization use a learning management system (LMS)? If so, will this product be required to interface with that LMS?
• How will learning be measured?
• Is the person doing the conversion familiar with the e-learning software? Does the person doing the conversion have prior experience with similar projects?

What factors do you consider? Do you think rules of thumb are okay to use?

Cost Comparison

The other question the reader asked is about calculating the value of doing the conversion:

For example, the current ILT course takes 2 days (16 hours). There are 10,000 employees who will take the training. Travel is not as much the issue as it is time away from the job and trainer costs. How do we go about calculating the possible return of delivering this as eLearning instead of ILT?

I'd recommend using some of the resources from a fairly old post ROI and Metrics in eLearning such as:

• Cost Comparison: Instructor-Led Vs. E-Learning
• Assessing the ROI of training
• Comparison of Web-based and Face-to-Face Training Concerning Patient Education Within a Hospital System

They look at a whole series of cost comparison factors and the last of these compares outcomes and costs in a research study. Quite good.

Again, I'd welcome pointers on this topic.

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eLearning Portal Integration

I've had a similar discussion several times over the past few months.  These discussions center on what requirements should go into an LMS RFP and more broadly how the LMS should really be integrated into the organization.

Initially, the conversation was about having learning content appear on the enterprise portal.  Many LMS vendors provide portlets, gadgets or widgets that allow for access of learning content (most often meaning courses and courseware) through the corporate portal.  Assuming that your learning audience regularly visits the enterprise portal, then its great to be able to show employees upcoming learning events, training requirements, content that might be of interest, or other similar things.

This has been a common requirement for a number of years.  And it's definitely a nice thing to have done.  It's certainly better than putting a static link to your LMS somewhere on the corporate portal / intranet.

But this only scratches the surface of what it means to integrate the Learning Management System (LMS) into the systems that people use day-to-day in an enterprise.  And this whole question is becoming more complicated as we look at the integration of the LMS and Social Learning.  There's a question of whether social tools will be part of the LMS or outside the LMS.  My gut says these tools are going to be separate from the LMS, e.g., SharePoint.  So, this naturally brings up how you integrate the LMS with social tools as well.

So, when I'm thinking about eLearning Portal Integration, I'm now thinking about:

• Exposing links to learning content in the enterprise portal
• Searchable learning content integrated with enterprise search
• Integrating social tools with learning content
• Integration learning management with other day-to-day tools

Links and Searching Content

The first two items are a bit more common today and it really starts with the question: Is there content and knowledge in the LMS that would be useful day-to-day?  In the post What Goes in the LMS? the general conclusion was that the LMS was really about housing finished course materials that need close tracking.  But generally some of that content would be useful in a day-to-day context.

The first stage of integrating this content is to simply provide links to individual content items that are housed in the LMS.  This requires the simplest kind of deep links.  You can refer to a SCO from outside the LMS and launch directly to that SCO without the user needing to do anything else.  FYI - deep linking is the ability for learning content to be linked to and launched from outside the LMS.  Many LMS vendors provide this capability.  And it can be really important if you want to create web sites outside the LMS that might provide context to a set of courses in the LMS. 

For example, a Plateau case study (PDF) talks about:

The biggest benefit Reuters has seen from its Plateau LMS to date is from deep linking functionality. Previously it took users up to 15 clicks to go from system access to content launch. With deep links in Plateau, users can launch content in two or three clicks. Deep linking also enables Reuters to have a centralized, single point for all content.

Which also addresses why we don't really want to plan to send the user directly to the LMS for day-to-day access.  See also:  Tools for On-Demand Information - An LMS? 

But the next level of content access from outside the LMS is search.  The idea is that the course content should be integrated into enterprise search so that it can be found and used when the person needs help with something.

This is a more complex requirement as it means requirements for enterprise search, the LMS and most often the content as well.  The content must  content must be indexable, in other words, the search engine must be able to run through the content to see what's in there.  For web pages, wiki pages, PDFs, Word Docs and other standard content that's easy.  For courseware it can be hard.  First the search engine may not be able to index the content because it'd buried in a proprietary format.  Second, even if the search engine can find it, it may not know how to get a user to that piece of content.  Launching a user to the beginning of a one-hour course because there is something in the middle that relates to the search is not a great result.

I would definitely like to hear from people who've made this level of integration happen – search level.

There are some off-the-shelf content vendors that have done a pretty good job around search integration.  For example, Skillsoft along with its Books 24x7 provide good hooks for search and deep linking. 

And what's interesting about both of these requirements is that we really are talking to exactly the issue that David points out in Who wants to see the LMS anyway:

Afterall, with the exception of the LMS vendor and the team who put it in, who really wants to see an LMS anyway....?

Integration with Social Tools or Other Day-to-Day Tools

A couple years ago, in New Kind of LMS?, I raised the question of whether we are headed to a new kind of LMS that will be much more integrated with day-to-day activities.  What seems to be happening in the market is that LMS vendors are integrating social capabilities, but I'm not sure that gets us where we need to go.  It somewhat relates with the issue above around search.  Is the LMS only aimed at big pieces of content that will be used separate from the job?  Or will it try to integrate into day-to-day. If it's separate from the job, then having embedded social tools might not make a lot of sense.

Other vendors are looking at taking things a different way.  For example, SumTotal Systems recently announced SumTotal Stream that provides integration with particular tools:

• Microsoft Outlook: SumTotal's integration allows access to Talent Development tasks within the widely adopted Microsoft Outlook email client.  Not only will employees be able to react directly to Application alerts, they will be able to view Profile Information and provide real-time feedback to other employees with the SumTotal profile launch button that is available next to each User within the email view screens.
• Facebook: With SumTotal's new Facebook Application, employees who typically use this Social Network will be able to receive Talent Development alerts and connect with colleagues all while in the Facebook site.
• LinkedIn: SumTotal's LinkedIn API integration will allow employees to maintain their Portable Career Profile in LinkedIn, and then make this information available through SumTotal's ResultsOnDemand Performance application. 

I applaud SumTotal for recognizing that these tools exist in a network of other systems.  The interface is not really even the enterprise Portal.  The interface is all of the places where that user goes and does things.  Great move SumTotal!

This is really all about the issue I raised 3 years ago in terms of strategic choices for LMS Vendors in a few different posts such as: Moving from One to Many - LMS Products are Two Generations Behind and Point Solutions vs. Suites and Composition.

Of course, the challenge is deciding what you really want from your LMS today. The reality for today in most cases is to try to keep solutions relatively simple and hence keeping these requirements to a minimum.  However, I am very curious what other people are doing around all of this today.  Please chime in.

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