Once I’d won the SMEs over (I’m still pinching myself to be honest) I invited 3 x local vendors to come and meet with me to discuss my idea and to see if they would be interested in participating in the procurement process. This was a huge advantage for both sides as it:

• allowed me to sense check my ideas and proposed approach
• provided the vendors with an opportunity to take a brief look around my organisation, observe some of the resources and channels that we currently use (and may well use to communicate the campaign resources) and ascertain whether they felt we could work together.

I’m pleased to say that at this stage all 3 vendors were keen to work with us and all of them commented on how refreshing it was to see a traditional subject such as compliance training having a radically different approach taken to it.

Having previously worked as a vendor I understood the complications and ‘quirks’ that can be associated with a tender process, so I was very keen (from both perspectives) to own a process that was as transparent, fair and simple as possible. Rather than wrestle with (or expect others to) the typical procurement portals that are often the bane of a vendors life I decided to use Google Docs (I can’t get into the habit of calling it Google Drive) to write and communicate my Request for Proposal (RfP) through.

This had the advantage of being:

• free
• simple to use
• mobile friendly
• able to allow each of the vendors to ask any questions ‘within’ the document, thus negating the need for a procurement portal and allowing each of the vendors to see each others questions – and of course my responses – thus keeping the process as fair and transparent as possible.

Several of the vendors said that they seldom saw GDocs being used in this way and were welcoming of the approach.

In terms of what I included in my RfP I used a great deal of the advice contained in this post from Stephanie Dedhar along with my own previous experience as a vendor

Once I’d released the GDoc RfP I set up a f2f meeting at our offices to:

• allow each of the vendors to come in
• ask further questions in an open forum
• and also to provide them with another opportunity to look at some of our existing comms channels etc.

Again, the feedback I got from this was very positive with one of the vendors saying that it helped to confirm their interpretation of the RfP and removed any ambiguity.

At that point I:

• sat back
• answered questions
• arranged some access to some of our portals
• conducted a few Adobe Connect session to explain our internal collaborative platform to some of the vendors
• waited…..

I did learn some lessons along the way with this approach, here they are:

• Get your potential providers in early, way before you write the RfP – the conversation will inevitably help you shape your thinking.
• No matter how long you provide people with the opportunity to respond, somebody will be late.
• Include a ‘please let us know if you intend to submit a proposal by xyz date’ request. I didn’t, and as a result had a vendor drop out with only 1 week to go until final submission, despite having the best part of 2 months visibility of the project scope!!!

Keep on reading this series of posts to discover what happened after we’d received the proposals and what I’m calling the ‘end of the beginning‘

If you’d like to discuss how we may be able to work together to bring about a fundamental change in the way your organisation delivers its mandatory training or would like to advise on how you can maximise the effectiveness of your next tender process then please get in touch.

As previously alluded to, one of my perceived areas of challenge in moving compliance training from a course to a campaign, had been the buy in from the SMEs/sponsors/Compliance team.

The 8 x subjects mentioned in the previous post were distributed over 4 SMEs/sponsors. All bar one of them wholly bought into the idea of replacing a stand-alone course with an ongoing campaign approach. The 4th sponsor was bought into the campaign approach, but didn’t want to move away from having a self-contained course wrapped up in a SCORM object.

Here’s a short video outlining the questions I asked to each SME/sponsor.

OK, I’ll admit to some artistic licence when producing this video, but it fundamentally follows the thinking that I tried to get the SMEs/sponsors to consider, which was the juxtaposition between the importance of the subjects and the method of delivery.

Keep on reading this series of posts to discover how I communicated what we wanted, engaged with suppliers and (in the fullness of time) the end result!

If you’d like to discuss how we may be able to work together to bring about a fundamental change in the way your organisation delivers its mandatory training, then please get in touch.

Why so?

Well because since the beginning of 2013 I have been working to revamp our mandatory compliance training offering from 2 perspectives

1. Is the content technically correct (fear naught Dear Reader, I’m passing the buck on this one to the SME)

2. Is the method and media we are using the most likely to positively effect behavioural change (this is where I swing into action!)

Our current mandatory training is offered via traditional ‘click-next, self-paced’ eLearning delivered via our LMS and covers the following subjects

• Data Matters

• Manual Handling

• Display Screen Equipment (DSE) awareness

• Risk Assessment

• Health & Safety (H&S) Induction

• Diversity (I’m still arguing the toss as to whether Diversity training is mandatory or not and I have some interesting researched kindly surfaced by Donald Clark that suggests even if it is, that it’s not proven to effect any positive change)

• Financial Crime Prevention

• Privacy and Confidentiality

• Treating Customers Fairly (TCF)

My plan is to adopt a campaign not course approach for each of these subjects, which (in my head) seems a logical and effective thing to do, all I have to do is convince the compliance department….

…. and you know what….

I have!!!

Keep on reading this series of posts to discover how I managed to get the SMEs/sponsors buy in, ascertain what we wanted, engaged with suppliers and (in the fullness of time) the end result!

I’m once again participating in the 2013 Virtual Learning Show, however this time I’ll be chairing a panel discussion which isn’t something you tend to see a lot of in online, synchronous activities. I won’t pretend that I don’t have some nerves about this:

• Will having multiple ‘presenters’ cause problems?
• As I want the panel to use their webcams, will this cause technical problems?
• Will participants want to attend a session that doesn’t have a clearly defined structure and objectives?

However I’m sure that I’ll be able to put some of my concerns to bed over the next couple of months as I start to push Adobe Connect into areas I haven’t taken it before (either that or drastically change my plans!).

Whilst the title of the panel discussion is

How can emerging technology enrich our offerings and add value to our business?

I’m expecting that the session will turn into a general Q&A session between all participants.

When it came to selecting the panellists I wanted to avoid the ‘usual suspects’ and approached people who I know are doing some really great work within their own organisations but may not always get the airtime that I know they deserve – I hope you agree.

In order to maximise the time within the session itself, I’m inviting questions ahead of time via this Google Document

please feel free to drop any question you might have into this document.

Let us all know if you are planning on attending the panel discussion, or indeed #VLS13 in general.

Part of that exchange involved this tweet

@burrough @kategraham23 @craigtaylor happy to hear any ideas you have that will make #learninglive even better

— LPI (@YourLPI) April 13, 2013

 

I had a think about it overnight and have come up with these ideas

@yourlpi Allow speakers to add multimedia to website session content pages (or have you do it for them)

— Craig Taylor (@CraigTaylor74) April 14, 2013

I’ve spoken at quite a few conferences/workshops etc over the past couple of years and always strive to produce ‘something’ (blog post, podcast, video etc) for the attendees to access prior to the actual session itself to help them prepare, add context and ultimately help them get the most out of their investment in the session. Unfortunately the majority of organisers don’t allow that sort of material to be included in the official conference webpage – I know, I’ve asked! Instead they suggest that I market the material via Social Media (d’uh, hadn’t thought of that!), of course there are several short falls to this approach, some of which are:

• Not everybody follows me via Social Media
• Not everybody uses Social Media
• Not everybody will be aware of hashtags

For me the almost guaranteed place that you will find attendees will be on the conference website and in particular on the session overview pages. So come on conference organisers, don’t hinder those speakers who have gone the extra mile – let them include a ‘link out’ in their session overview, maybe even an embedded video?

@yourlpi Create a *decent* conference app (see #Devlearn app for example) — Craig Taylor (@CraigTaylor74) April 14, 2013

I’ve been to many conferences that had a conference app. I’ve only been to one that had a good conference app and that was Devlearn. If you’re planning on having a conference app for your next event, pleeeeeeeease make it a decent one!

@yourlpi Record each session (or audio as a minimum to allow speakers to sync it with their slides)

— Craig Taylor (@CraigTaylor74) April 14, 2013

I’ve never researched this, but I’d be happy to concede that a full-on video recording/slide sync recording is an expensive matter, particularly if you’ve got a lot of sessions taking place, however in this age of affordable HD video recorders, tripods and editing software why not set up some DIY recording of each session? An even simpler option might be to record the audio of each session and then ask the facilitators to sync it with their slides (Hey, if they want to speak at your conference make them work for it!). Here’s one I prepared earlier (won’t work on an iPad/phone)

@yourlpi Conduct 15 min Adobe Connect sessions with each speaker to allow them to pitch their sessions ‘ in advance’. Help ppl make decision

— Craig Taylor (@CraigTaylor74) April 14, 2013

Let’s be honest, when your conference attendees have a number of concurrent sessions to select from, other than previous experience/recommendations of the facilitator, all they’ve got to go in is the session overview on the conference website. Why not invite each speaker (and potential attendees) to participate in a 10 minute online session in which they pitch their session and take part in a Q&A. It may also give the potential attendees an insight into the presentation skills of the speaker (AKA are they going to rattle off a load of bullet points at me?)

@yourlpi Run an online session a wk or 2 *after* the event to provide a reflective Q&A session for attendees.

— Craig Taylor (@CraigTaylor74) April 14, 2013

 

If you decide to conduct a ‘pre’ conference online session, why not go the whole-hog and think about a ‘post’ conference session. This could be a 15-30 minute session in which session attendees (I think ‘only’ session attendees) could follow up with any reflective questions and share any experiences that they have had in relation to trying to implement the speakers subject (if applicable). I’m sure this would help to break down the perception of the conference/workshop being a stand-alone event.

I’m sure that Sam and the rest of the guys ‘n’ gals that have been thinking about redesigning the conference experience will have tonnes more ideas, so make sure you keep your eyes peeled on their blog as I know that Sam is about to produce a write up on their thoughts.

Do you attend conferences/workshops?

How would you change things to maximise the experience?

Do you plan/host conferences/workshops?

Have you tried implementing any of the ideas above?

Did they work?

What have you tried in the past (regardless of whether it worked or not)?

Image source

]]> http://tayloringit.com/2013/04/some-simple-ideas-on-how-to-redesign-the-conference-experience/feed/ 28 http://tayloringit.com/2013/04/what-learners-want-part-4-the-results/ http://tayloringit.com/2013/04/what-learners-want-part-4-the-results/#comments Fri, 12 Apr 2013 17:57:32 +0000 Craig Taylor http://tayloringit.com/?p=3679 If you haven’t read this series to date, it may be worthwhile doing so in order to set some context.

Having decided upon a pre-survey marketing campaign, we accepted that despite our best efforts to promote the survey that it would inevitably be ‘lost‘, ‘missed‘ or just ‘forgotten about‘ by many people, so we needed a plan to maintain the momentum of the marketing campaign…

During our planning stages of this survey the team that worked with me on it decided that it was critical for us to communicate the results (I used the word ‘results‘ lightly as the in-depth analysis would not take place until after the survey had closed) throughout the survey as well as some immediate stats upon completion. We were also resolute that we would not gloss over any critical or developmental feedback and would ensure that it was shown within any results/stats and not ‘buried’ beneath any overtly positive feedback.

Here’s what we did:

At the end of each week, I created a simple animation. The animation ran for a calendar week on our internal TV screens and was communicated via our internal emagazine, intranet, collaborative platform groups, blogs etc as well as being played at the start of as many meetings as possible in order to stir up discussion and debate around the survey.

The purpose of the animations  was twofold:

1. To act as a method of being able to communicate some basic stats/comments that people had made. It was incredibly important to us that people could see that somebody was reading the survey submissions and wasn’t afraid to show comments/feedback that others may have felt were risque.
2. To act as a reminder/prompt for those who hadn’t undertaken the survey. The last frame contains a link to the survey itself.

Week 1

Upon completion of Week 2

Upon completion of Week 3

Upon completion of Week 4

Upon completion of Week 5 (the survey closed at this point)

In my next blog post, I’ll go into the data/findings that the survey provided us and how we plan to use it.

Image source

Me?

I facilitated a session that essentially said “don’t bother” – well at least for some things….

Want to know more? Then check out my Slideshare below. I’ve added some accompanying audio that I recorded live on the day. Whilst this means that you get to hear the ‘real thing‘, you also have to put up with the vagaries of live recording….

Enjoy.

Upon completion of many of the lessons/workshops there is an assignment to undertake as well as some additional reading.

Here’s my 4th assignment:

Assignment A

Start preparing the slides to support your final assessment, using what you have learned today. Be prepared to share at least 7 of these slides and an ‘interaction’ in the session advised by your course facilitator.

Image source

Having agreed upon the questions that would be asked in the survey, I went through a short period of validating the questions with colleagues and QA’ing the survey before deciding on a survey ‘launch’ date of 25/02/13 with a window of 5 weeks complete it, leaving a survey end date of 01/04/13.

I knew that in order to maximise the responses to the survey the marketing and engagement leading up to the survey launch and indeed during the launch would be critical.

Here’s a brief rundown of the activities that took place up to and including the launch of the survey

w/c 04/02/12 - Our HR Director (who is also the sponsor for this initiative) wrote a blog post explaining why he believes it is critical for people to participate in this survey and the benefit that both they and the overall business will gain from it. This blog post was featured in both our intranet and our weekly global magazine. A link to this article was also the ‘weekly announcement’ on the L&D homepage of our internal collaboration platform.

07/02/12 – A series of Focus Groups took place throughout the day during which 23 people from various areas of the business, representing our global workforce, from Directors downwards, participated in 1:1, group and telephone interviews. These interviews were conducted by myself and Laura Overton and allowed us to gather anecdotal, ‘free text’ responses to back up the hard data that the online survey would be gathering.

In order to maximise the ‘keenness’ demonstrated by the Focus Group participants we decided to provide them with immediate access to the online survey as opposed to making them wait for the ‘official’ launch date some 2-3 weeks later. We also hoped that it would increase the chances of those people recommending the survey to their colleagues once it was widely available.

w/c 11/02/12 - I produced a short video explaining how the survey would be distributed and the format that it would take. This video was featured in both our intranet, our weekly global magazine and became the ‘featured video’ on the L&D homepage of our internal collaboration platform.

w/c 18/02/13 - We are fortunate to have a number of info-screens distributed amongst our offices so a simple TV advert using static image and text was displayed throughout this week on a ‘looping basis’ advertising the launch of the survey the following week and directing people towards the previously written artcicles.

Learner Survey infoscreen advert

w/c 25/02/13 – The survey officially launched. My organisation no longer sends ‘organisation-wide’ emails (although that doesn’t explain why I keep getting ‘scheduled maintenance’ emails, for systems I have no access to!), so we were reliant upon our previous comms and an intranet article once again from my HR Director, this time the article included a link to the LSG magazine that mentioned the learner survey that we were undertaking. A link to this article was also the ‘weekly announcement’ on the L&D homepage of our internal collaboration platform.

We also commenced a series of ‘floor walking’ exercises during which we visited every desk over the 6 floors and 2 buildings ouf our Brighton location. We left a small ‘calling card’

Learner Survey desk-drop cards

on each keyboard as seen in the photograph above, which contained a link to the survey itself (this has been obscured in the photo). It also provided us with a wonderful opportunity to speak to people face-to-face about the initiative and answer any questions that they may have.

From a personal opinion, I took 2 things away from the floor-walking exercise:

1. People were surprised, but very welcoming of the fact that L&D were getting ‘out and about’ within the business.
2. Very few of the people that I spoke to (there were 5 of us involved in the floor walking) had seen the articles that had been placed on our intranet, in fact a lot of people said that they rarely, if ever visited the intranet.

In my next blog post, I’ll explain how we maintained the momentum of the initial marketing campaign and started to drip-feed weekly survey findings to people via some simple animations.

Having decided to commit to deploying the survey, Towards Maturity and myself started to create the question bank that our employees would be asked to respond to. Laura Overton already had a significant foundation for this survey so as a result it was more of a process of tweaking some of the questions to be able to the language that my organisation uses.

I took the decision early on to allow the survey to be undertaken anonymously, with the ability for respondents to enter their contact details should they wish to contacted by L&D to follow up on any of their responses.

As I’m sure you’ll appreciate there is a commercial agreement in place between my organisation and Towards Maturity, so I will not be posting the 23 specific questions, however they fell broadly into the following areas:

• Demographic information
• How people acquire info to do their job
• Hardware people use
• BYOD related questions
• Willingness to share with others
• Formal and informal methods
• Rating of currently available methods/tools/platforms etc
• Barriers

It was important that we didn’t alter the actual questions or response types themselves as our survey results will be feeding into a benchmark study in much the same way as the Towards Maturity Benchmark study, however there were some occasions where it was logical to amend the wording to some of the response options in order to provide clarity such as:

• Using organisational roles instead of the default role options
• Using organisational department names instead of the default options
• Referring to our LMS, intranet and internal collaboration platform by name as opposed to generic titles.

All in all, the questions do a great job of gathering hard facts and data in order to help inform our L&D strategy and next steps.

In my next blog post, I’ll explain how we went about marketing and promoting this survey ahead of the official launch

Image source

During one of those initial meetings Laura Overton made an almost throw away remark about a ‘Learner Audit’ (I’m not overly keen on the name, so we’ve labelled it as a Learner Survey) that she had undertaken some time in the past and that she was considering resurrecting as an offering.

Unlike the Towards Maturity Benchmark survey, which tends to rely on answers by those in an L&D role/perspective, the Learner Survey allows every single employee in the organisation the opportunity to comment on

• how they access content that supports them
• from what devices
• from what locations
• what methods and media they find most effective
• whether they are members of social networking sites
• whether they are/would be willing to share their knowledge and practices with others etc

My eyes lit up at this point as I am about to assist in the development of our L&D strategy, so of course being able to hear from about our learners about their preferences, expectations, etc would be hugely beneficial.

Needless to say we took Laura up on her offer which as this press release explains made us the first organisation to do so.

If you’d like to hear more about the rationale behind the survey, here’s a short video of Laura explaining further.

In my next blog post in this series I’ll go into a little detail about the construction of the survey and how we worked together to provide a bespoke survey that would still allow multiple surveys to feed accurately into a wider-benchmark.

Upon completion of each of the 9 lessons/workshops there is an assignment to undertake as well as some additional reading.

Here’s my third assignment:

Does your organization already use Web Conferencing? If so, write a 100-word report onwhat it uses it for.

My organisation presently uses web conferencing and virtual classrooms, however this is to a very limited degree and the efficacy of these activities may be being reduced due to a lack of knowledge from the host/facilitator as to how to conduct traditionally ‘face-to-face’ activities in an online environment.

Within my organisations, I have seen examples of ‘telepresence’ meetings taking place and virtual classrooms being facilitated for some of our globally distributed personnel. I have also personally used and heard examples of people using their personal/work provided mobile devices to use tools such as Skype, G+ Hangouts and Facetime to enhance participation and collaboration.

Do you think it could use it for other parts of the organization?

I am struggling to think of areas of my organisation that would not benefit from utilising webinars/web conferencing/virtual classrooms etc.

Here’s a list of potential opportunities for use:

• Conduct a monthly ‘clinic’ for the ‘Top 5′ reported issues to the IT Helpdesk
• Conduct traditional meetings (perhaps I should lead the way with this with our monthly L&D meeting)
• Systems training ahead of and during the early days of a new system launch
• Explain products and services to potential/current clients
• As a way of helping people transfer previous learning activities (regardless of method/media) to peoples workplaces i.e. as a way of connecting people to share their ‘what’s worked and what hasn’t’ stories
• As a method of conveying the ‘why’ / ‘theory’ behind a subject that may require a future physical aspect to it. This approach would allow people to reflect upon the WIIFM prior to engaging in the face-to-face aspect

I’ve no doubt that there is a plethora of other ways for my organisation to maximise this approach, but at the moment the list is above is where I can see immediate benefit.

What others can you think of?

Image source

Upon completion of each of the 9 lessons/workshops there is an assignment to undertake as well as some additional reading.

Here’s my second assignment

Image source

Upon completion of each of the 9 lessons/workshops there is an assignment to undertake as well as some additional reading (I’m making some assumptions here as we’ve only just completed the first session).

When the assignment was originally discussed it was indicated that it should be submitted via a Word document, however when I enquired as to whether the submission could be made using any media format (as long as it was accessible by the facilitator), I was pleased to hear that that would be perfectly acceptable (I also suspect that this may become an overt option in the future for participants).

Here’s my first assignment

Additional resources:

What stinks about webinars? – Alison Rossett

Image source

I checked my stats for the same time period as last year and the number of posts have indeed come down slightly, although to be honest I still feel that I’ve been blogging regularly and the hits/comments suggest that people are finding my posts to be of value, however ‘perception is everything’ as they say, so I thought I’d share with you what’s been keeping me busy over the past couple of months, especially as I’m planning to write a series of blog posts around some of these activities.

• Co-designing, arranging, marketing and launching our Learner Survey in partnership with Towards Maturity. (blog series to follow)
• Designing, creating, marketing and launching an online programme that builds upon an approach that Google themselves use and demonstrated at Devlearn. (blog post/series to follow)
• Organising an ‘in house’ COLF programme for my colleagues in the L&D team. (blog series to follow)

Image source

One of the interesting aspects of this article was Chad Udell’s desire to see a mobile authoring platform that utilised a devices native functionality.

I’ve seen 3 mobile authoring platforms so far in the UK

GoMo by Epic
Linestream by Line
K Tango by Certpoint

none of which allow the devices native functionality to be tapped into. Furthermore, having spoken to each of these organisations it appears that none of them have any plans to incorporate the functionality into their platform anytime in the near future.

So, I’d like to repeat Chad’s plea

Chad continues his long-running hope that a mobile learning development tool will be released that takes advantage of the affordances of mobile devices, whether it be through sensors, multitouch/gestural input, and so on. Many eLearning tool vendors say they support mobile learning output, but honestly, they mostly just mean they come with a channel to get the output onto a mobile device via HTML or maybe a set of mobile-optimized templates. Someone in 2013 will change that

If you are aware of any platforms that allow a ‘Joe Average’ end user to create mobile resources that tap into the devices native functionality then please let me know or of you already own such a platform – please get in touch as I’d love to take a closer look, possible even Beta test???

I have made the mindmaps into ‘Wikimaps’, so please feel free to add to them for the ‘greater good’.

Day 1

Making learning a memorable experience

Mobile Performance Support

Day 2

Understanding Learning

(Whilst reviewing this mindmap, it dawned on me that it is the ‘poor relation’ of a mindmap that @britz spearheaded a few months ago which a number of us contributed to – I’m sure you’ll agree it’s a better map)

How to make games-based learning work for you

I hope you find these to be of use and hopefully you’ll be able to add to them….

First and foremost, I’ve always been flattered that these people have thought that I had ‘something’ that others would be willing to enter into a contract with me to obtain.

Secondly, I’ve always admitted to those people that I have a fear and a dread of leaving safe and secure roles to enter into what I perceive as a more risky world of the ‘self employed’.

However, I now realise that even full time employment in established organisations is still fraught with risks and that anybody – and I’m probably including you, Dear Reader – who doesn’t have a back-up plan or a safety net of some description is probably not doing themselves any favours.

That’s why I’ve decided to take Tayloring It to a slightly different place than I had originally intended when I first started blogging 3 years ago.

I’ve decided to start up my own small consultancy ‘Tayloring It’. Before you ask, “No“, I haven’t left my current role and nor is the writing on the wall - I’m probably happier in this role than I have been in any role since I left the Army in 2006. But that doesn’t mean I can’t start establishing contacts along with developing a portfolio of work and business accumen just in case my world looks different in 12, 24 or however many months in the future. Plus, I’m pretty sure I can help some people/organisations with what they’re trying to achieve too – without it interfering with my day job.

My plan is to offer down to Earth advice on the subject of Learning Technologies and their application in today’s work place.

This advice won’t be based on past glories from years ago or from being a member of elitist Industry ‘think tanks’ – No! – My consultancy will be based upon recent and current experience of deploying learning technologies and the associated aspects within conservative and risk averse industries such as the Nuclear, Rail and Financial sectors.

Recent experience within the eLearning vendor industry has also provided me with fantastic opportunity to become involved in a large number of industries, organisations and projects, the experience from which has only added to my own workplace experiences.

My website is currently being built by a fantastic supporter of my idea, Zak Mensah and will be launched in the next couple of weeks explaining how I might be able to help you out in more detail, but in the meantime here’s a short explanation which will no doubt feature on the website:

Tayloring It is a consultancy that works with individuals and organisations to practically apply technology as a solution to real-world challenges. It could be large scale projects or supporting everyday tasks, but our team has successfully created new approaches that maximise the use of technology while actually saving money/reducing spend. We enhance
communication, learning and performance in the workplace, focusing on outputs not inputs. There are no other services like ours.

Tayloring It aims to change the face of learning technology in practice, one solution at a time.

I’ll be attending both days of Learning Technologies Conference & Exhibition 2013 and will be armed with my rather natty business cards

Tayloring It business card

so if you’d like to find out more about what my plans are the future, why not track me down, have a chat and grab a business card?

Alternatively, if our paths don’t cross, my details are on the card above.

What I can’t wrap my head around is that in recent years we, as L&D professionals have (and are) taking considerable steps in:

• Moving away from ‘learning’ to performance
• Trying to make the ‘learning’ as transparent as possible
• Accepting that ‘work is learning and learning is work’

So why, once a year, do many of us jump on this particular bandwagon and before you say

“it’s nice to give it its own space”

or

“it’s good to concentrate and focus on it”

know that my response will be

“what are you doing for the other 364 days of the year”

“why aren’t you/your organisation concentrating on embedding learning and performance in every day life and if you are, why the need for this ‘focus’ once a year?”

Hell, why don’t we have an annual ‘Performing at Work’ day? (can you imagine how that would go down with your leadership team?)

I know it’s ‘fashionable’ to get on these sorts of bandwagons and with many ‘trendy’ names backing this, I’m sure that I’ll get some flack for these thoughts…….

Incoming…….

To date these have been:

1. ‘elearning….. discuss’ – a 2 hour sessions which helped people to see ‘e’learning as being more than just traditional, ‘click next’ SCORM objects
2. ‘Getting Started with Mobile Learning’ – a 2 hour session which was essentially a dry run of my DevLearn 12 session
3. ‘Welcome Aboard’ – a 2 hour session  centering around the use of technology within the onboarding / induction process

The latest ‘Welcome Aboard’ session was facilitated as an Alternate Reality Game. In order to add the context in which the game was being unknowingly played I referred to some research that I heard about at DevLearn.

Only problem is that there was no such research at DevLearn – it was lie, a misdirection, a bluff, an economical use of the truth….

To help me with this bluff I created the animation below using Powtoon  which I played during the early stages of the session/game after I had prattled on about the DevLearn research ‘discovery’

It’s a cracking piece of software; cheap, intuitive, a great trial period.

Why not give it a whirl and let us all know how you get on?

As the end of a year approaches it’s time for the blogging fraternity to turn to the tried and tested ‘Top ‘this that and the other’ of 2012″ and ‘My predictions for 2013″ blog posts.

Far from me to turn down the opportunity to poke a little fun, here are my 2013 predictions / absolute cast iron guarantees…

1. My Twitter stream will continue to be bombarded with Instagrammed photos of hot beverages and food. Fortunately I use Tweetbot which allows me to permanently block hashtags. Unfortunately hardly anybody tags their #instagram photos.
2. We will see a new word being made up within the L&D fraternity.
3. Certain bloggers will still rant on about ‘killer <insert any of the following, or choose your own> apps / platform / piece of hardware. Why can’t things just be ‘good’, ‘effective’, ‘worth having’?
4. Any podcast with ‘week’ or ‘weekly’ in the title is unlikely to ever be that, beyond its 5th episode.
5. I will unsuccessfully use facts, data and research against gut feelings and anecdotes.
6. 2013 will be the year of mobile. Again.
7. Apple will release an ever-so-slight modification of a product. Tech bloggers will work themselves up into a crotch-twitching, salivating frenzy reporting….. erm…. on the ever-so-slight modification.
8. We’ll continue to have a L&D wide survey released approximately every 4 days
9. Many vendors will continue to ignore the native functionality of mobile devices whilst blowing their trumpets about how they are ‘leading’ in the mlearning world.
10. A ‘free to use’ service will change its Terms and Conditions. Users will form baying mobs and burning torches will be seen.
11. Certain ‘thought leaders’ in our field will use ever more bizarre diagrams to explore their concepts. It’s cos they’re clever see….

I’ll see you in 2013…

… no doubt saying ‘I told you so‘

• “what is elearning”
• Mobile Learning
• The use of technology in the onboarding/induction process

My most recent session on onboarding / inductions attracted some conversations on Twitter

Here’s a ‘Storify’ to allow you to take a nosey at that backchannel…

]]> http://tayloringit.com/2012/12/a-storified-reflection-on-my-recent-lunch-learn-session/feed/ 0 http://tayloringit.com/2012/12/podcast-26-one-month-on/ http://tayloringit.com/2012/12/podcast-26-one-month-on/#comments Sat, 15 Dec 2012 20:47:24 +0000 Craig Taylor http://tayloringit.com/?p=2773

Devlearn 12

 

Craig chats with Bianca Woods about what they took away from Devlearn 12, but more importantly what they’ve been able to implement back in their organisations in the 6 weeks since Devlearn concluded.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bianca also shares her tips on how to maximise your engagement with your ‘non conference attending’ colleagues prior to, during and after any conference attendance.

Listening time: 25 mins

Download the podcast in m3 format: Podcast #26 One month on..

Subscribe to the podcast in iTunes.

Shownotes

Bianca’s blog

Music Source

Image Source

Here’s a bit of the official blurb

Take a course. Make a course. Change the world.

As the UK’s first ‘crowd-sourced content’ learning centre, we want to help you join in and start creating your own learning content to share your knowledge and skills. But when it actually comes to making a course we understand you might not know where to start. You probably haven’t created any kind of online content before. You might even not be technologically minded. But we believe everyone has a course in them.

So here’s how we’re going to help you get started on making your course, whatever your area of interest, and earn some money out of your existing skills and knowledge. By the end of the day you’ll achieve level one of the mylearningworx expert status, meaning you are ready to rock and roll, and get cracking on creating your own learning content.

My reasons for attending were:

• A colleague of mine @HayleyGordon was attending the event, who is a self confessed newbie to the world of learning technologies. Therefore I wanted to attend alongside her to provide some context between the workshop and what we are doing/plan to do within our Organisation.

• Despite Kate Graham’s concern (Kate is one of the founders of Learningworx)  that she didn’t want me to think I was being told how to ‘suck eggs’, I’m a firm believer that there’s always *something* to be taken away from workshops and events such as these, so I was still keen to attend and find out what that *something was*.

Readers of my blog will know that I long ago gave up trying to capture everything from every session/workshop I attend and much prefer to identify one or two ‘Monday morning, quick wins’.

Here’s a bit of background to each session along with my ‘key take aways’.

Track 1: Content Production

Gill Chester is the founder of the Little Man Project and has been involved in online learning for many years. Gill’s going to be taking us through the different tools and technologies you can use to create your learning content, many of which you’ll have already. Her tips and tricks are invaluable and will help even the least technical person get started. The session will include harnessing the power of Powerpoint, using simple PDFs for learning, screen capture tools, video and elearning authoring suites.

My key takeaways:

• Look into Mozilla PopcornMaker
• Seriously challenge the next request for a screencast of a simple process. Let’s give our people some credit
• Look into the possibilities of using telephones to provide audio based performance support. (this may be difficult as many of our employees work in a call-centre and their ability to ‘dial out’ is restricted)

Track 2: Writing Great Content

One of the most important principles underpinning mylearningworx is to help our content creators write great courses. Tony Frascina of Objective Training and Chair of the annual Elearning Awards, will explore the theory of learning design, how to avoid common elearning pitfalls and how to engage your learners with your content. We’ll look at setting learning objectives and also consider how best to incorporate assessments and quizzes, or if they’re needed at all.

My key takeaways:

• Tony’s session provided affirmation around the approach that I’ve taken recently and also provided some great tips for Hayley to act as a starting point for her journey into online learning design.

Track 3: Telling The World

Now once you’ve made your course, you’re going to want people to take it. But they’re not going to be able to take it if they don’t know it exists! So our communications director, Kate Graham, will be working through the different elements of how best to promote your course; from writing an attention grabbing yet appropriate course title, through to PR and promotion on social networking sites. Kate will also show you how the mylearningworx team will be working on your behalf to market your course to the world.

My key takeaways:

• Think about the keywords that would be associated with your solution. More importantly get out and ask your employees what words they would use to describe the solution. Use these words to help you form your solution title, description etc

Well done to everybody involved in today’s launch and all those behind the scenes who have contributed to Learningworx, I’ll look forward to the next worxshop.

• A key ‘take-away’ from the sessions content itself
• The way in which it was facilitated (in part or in whole) with a view to what can I re-use/build upon for myself.
• Overall view on undertaking essentially a day’s worth of webinar/virtual classrooms.

• A key ‘take-away’ from the sessions content itself
• The way in which it was facilitated (in part or in whole) with a view to what can I re-use/build upon for myself.
• Overall view on undertaking essentially a day’s worth of webinar/virtual classrooms.

How to move your company webinars from enraging to engaging

 Presented by Donald H Taylor
11.00 – 12.00 GMT (UK time)

Webinars are getting a bad name. Why? Because they are too often dull knowledge dumps, a tedious background of noise while you clear your inbox. But they needn’t be like that. According to Donald H Taylor, chairman of the Learning and Performance Institute and veteran of several hundred webinars, they can be very engaging – if done right.

Join Don as he examines the gap between what people say about synchronous online events and the reality. We’ll look at the simple tricks needed to make webinars engaging and consider whether everyone can run a good event online.

• The difference between a ‘webinar’ and live online training
• Delegate momentum, and why polls are often a bad idea
• Ensuring interactivity in your events
• The six key roles in an online event
• Your next steps back in the office

Tomorrow I’ll be participating in Day 1 of a 2-day online activity entitled the Virtual Learning Show.

Here’s why I’m getting involved:

• The titles and content of the sessions interest me (although I’ve been let down in the past in the gap between what was promised in a synopsis and what was delivered in the event itself)

• I’m interested to see ‘how’ some of the ‘big names‘ facilitate their sessions as I’m always up for stealing a few ideas!

• If I’m brutally honest though, what I’m really interested in is whether it’s feasible to run a days worth of online sessions. Admittedly they’re not back-to-back sessions, but my experience in the past has always been that of my ‘attention wandering’ towards the end of an hours session…..

How will I cope with multiple sessions over a day?

Am I the only one who finds even the *best* online sessions difficult to engage with beyond 45 mins?

I guess I’ll find out tomorrow…..

One of my sessions included this much publicised infographic

What happens in an internet minute

which generated a great deal of surprise and in turn, discussion – Great!

Prior to facilitating the session for the second time (I facilitate each session twice to hopefully attract as many attendees as possible) I reflected on the fact that the infographic references a ‘minute’; a period of time we are all familiar with, but one that let’s be honest is a bit too ‘abstract’ to the majority of people.

I then decided to approach the ‘time’ aspect with something that many people will be all-too-familiar with – the time it takes to commute to work.

Here’s a video that I put together to help to illustrate just how much is taking place on the t’internet as we all travel work (and on this particular occasion during my 38 minute daily cycle commute to work)

I’m not overly happy with the angle of the video, but to be honest it was a Flip camera ‘masking taped’ to my cycling to my helmet so I guess I should be happy that it didn’t fall off mid-commute!

Day 1

Morning Buzz session – Content Strategy – Clark Quinn

When I asked Clarke what common pitfalls he sees organisations fall into when devising their L&D content strategies, he informed us all that centering on ‘courses’ was the biggest pitfall he observes. This was a timely response for me as I am about to get involved in writing my Organisations L&D strategy. It had certainly never been my intention to centre on ‘courses’ within the strategy, however I’m sure that having the advice of Clarke on my side will come in very useful, should we hit any ‘problems’ during it’s creation.

My action: Take extreme care when developing my Organisation’s L&D strategy to steer clear of making any suggestions that ‘courses’ will be the default learning solution.

Keynote – Braving a New World: Innovation in Avatar and What Lies Ahead – John Landau

John informed us James Cameron never writes a script with ‘what’s technically possible‘ in mind, with that ringing in our ears he suggested that we write our business plans with that mantra in mind. Oh, and I won a signed DVD from him…

A copy of Titanic signed by John Landau

My action: This “don’t write for what is possible ‘today’” concept is something that I intend to weave into my Organisations L&D strategy.

Evidence-based Training: No Yellow Brick Road – Ruth Clarke

An interesting piece of research was discussed during Ruth’s session in which it was shown that a ‘simple’ piece of learning content faired better in terms of achieving the learning outcomes than a ‘complicated’ piece of content. This may seem like an obvious answer to many readers, however Ruth then revealed that when the learners involved in the research were asked to reveal which of the two activities they preferred, the more ‘complicated’ piece of content faired better. I believe this should act as a reminder to us to balance achieving the learning outcomes with delivering what the learner ‘likes’ (and the whole issue of ‘learner engagement’ that comes with that)

Ruth Clarke discussing research into many common myths and questions

My action: Continue with my mantra (which is echoed by Clark Quinn) of “what’s the least I can do for you“

Taking Video to the Next Level – Mark Locke

This session was waaaay to advanced for the likes of me with my Flipcam and iPhone with a great many references to high end cameras, specialist lighting and editing software. There were some good tips on how Mark had developed characters for his series of videos and his use of humour as well as the mantra ‘tell a story…. always tell a story‘!

My action: Review my organisations usage of video in the coming months and determine whether the small hand-held ‘Flip-cam-esque’ cameras are suitable for our needs or whether an upgrade to a DSLR would be advisable.

Building mLearning for iPads using HTML5 and iBooks Author – Jason Baker

I’ve been tinkering around with iBooks Author for a little while writing a book and had been able to get to grips with almost all it’s functionality, however the ‘HTML 5′ widget has had me stumped!

Fortunately, Jason had been working with iBooks for some time and had discovered a tool called Hype (Mac only) which seemed to provide a very simple and intuitive way of creating HTML 5 animations that allowed direct exporting to iBooks. On a few occasions a few technical minded attendees asked some quite technical questions, which to his credit, he swiftly answered but reminded people that this was an intro to Hype and iBooks and quickly got back to the focus of the session.

The opening slide from Jason’s session

My action: Purchase Hype to allow my exploration of iBooks to continue, with a view to offering some organisational resources via iTunes U. Look into gaining access to an area of my Organisations server so as to trial pushing mobile web content to iPads.

Day 2

Morning Buzz session – Compliancy, How Can We Do this to Our Advantage? – Neil Lasher

As ‘good-an-idea’ as the Morning Buzz (0715-0815) sessions are, I guess they are always going to have to do battle with the desire to have a lie-in, add to the equation that this was the morning after an almighty Las Vegas Halloween party and that probably explains why there were only a small number of attendees at this session.

The session took the form of an informal conversation with each of us swapping compliance war stories. Neil suggested that we reaaaaaallllly do some digging with our external regulators to fully understand ‘The Rules’, as opposed to guessing what is expected of us or taking our compliance department’s word for it. He also provided a novel insight into a piece of work he had been asked to undertake around ‘anti-money laundering’. Neil took an antagonists approach to this subject and developed a resource more aligned with ‘How To Launder Money’. This approach initially proved controversial, however Neil assured us that over time it began to have the desired behavioural impact.

My action: Set up a meeting with our designated external regulator to discuss ‘The Rules’. Consider taking the antagonists approach, the next time I produce any material(s).

Super-charging Google Sales Readiness with Gamification and Social Media – Erika Grouell & Patrick Williams (no, not ‘that’ Patrick Williams)

Google talked to us about their SalesPro+ platform and how they have moved away from what we might call ‘traditional click next’ elearning to a collaborative, games-based approach. This approach resonated with me as I have been mulling over ‘free text’ assessments for a little while now as part of a project I am involved in. I had been worried about taking this approach as I was concerned about the time it would take to assess and provide feedback to free text submissions compared to multiple-guess assessments being marked by SCORM / LMS (this ain’t gonna happen!)

Fortunately Google were able to put my mind at rest as they had been taking approx 2 hours a week to review, assess and feed back on the free text assessments for an audience of approx 700 people.

Google SalesPro+ reflective essay slide

My action: Step up my plans to include free text assessments should they work out being the best form of assessment for my upcoming project.

Straight Talk on New Tech – Koreen Olbrish, Cammie Bean, Jane Bozarth, Janet Clarey & Jeanette Campos

A great dynamic session here involving a ‘panel discussion’ with several members of the panel being physically there in person, 1 Skyping in and one participating via Twitter all answering questions relating to the emergence and usage of ‘new’ Tech. There were a number of pre-prepared questions along with the opportunity for people to ‘Tweet in’ relevant questions as well as traditonal ‘questions from the floor.

The Godesses of elearning in action both in person and online

My action: Discuss this option with a colleague of mine in our Internal Comms team as a way of bringing more people into the regular Q&A sessions with our MD.

Implementing Gamification with Media – Alicia Sanchez

I love watching Alicia speak as she has a great way of combining her vast knowledge in this area with great facilitation skills and a sharp sense of humour. Whilst I’m not a fan of the word ‘Gamification’ it was still very worthwhile attending to gain a perspective on how others have been using gaming mechanics to increase engagement and ‘stickiness’ of resources.

Alicia facilitating her session

My action: Identify examples of where gaming mechanics have been used for L&D activities that are NOT enclosed within self-paced, click next tutorials. Consider a games-based learning session for the Lunch and Learn sessions that I facilitate.

Developing a Multi-year Learning and Development Technology Strategy – Allison Anderson & Sarah Johnson

I had been looking forward to attending this session however after about 10 minutes one of the speakers suggested conducting an organisation-wide Learning Styles survey…. I took this as my cue to leave and move to….

Ignite! Six Provocative Perspectives on the eLearning Industry - Jane Bozarth, Kris Rockwel, Megan Bowe, Judy Unrein, Robert Gadd, Chad Udell

A series of Ignite presentations across a range of topical subjects. I found myself wanting to hear more from some of the participants, so was naturally frustrated at the 5 minute air time that Ignite rules provides them. In particular Jane Bozarth encouraged us to ‘Show Your Work’ a subject that I’d be keen to hear more from Jane about…… who knows…. perhaps she’s planning to tell us more…..

My action: Include Ignite into a future Lunch and Learn session I am planning on ‘Getting Beyond Bullet Points’

Day 3

Morning Buzz session – One-person eLearning Departments – Lisa Goldstein

I hadn’t planned to attend Lisa’s session, however once I saw that it was directly next to the room that I was due to be facilitating my session in 1 hour later (and was currently in use) I decided to pop in, join in the conversation and say “Hi” to Lisa, who I have been having conversations with on Twitter for some time, but have never had the good fortune to meet. Lisa was facilitating a (large) group conversation around the challenges of being a 1-person L&D team. Some great pieces of advice were passed around, but for me the piece that really hit home (even though I’m not in a 1-person L&D team), was the reminder that we can only do 1 thing at a time, that sometimes work needs to be pushed back, that sometimes we need to learn/remember to say “No“.

My action: Feel comfortable with saying “No”. Promote the Twitter hashtag – #1PDept – to ensure that the small group that formed during that morning session can grow in size and can benefit from a wider audience. 1-person teams can be tough enough, so if you feel that you can offer some insights or even of you fall into that category, why not search them out on Twitter?

Getting Started with Mobile Learning – Me!

My session served as a timely reminder that people / organisations are at different points in their journey of understanding / adopting mobile technologies. The audience were fantastic and very forthcoming in asking questions, providing responses and generally getting stuck in!

What did surprise me, was the fact that approximately 30 minutes into the session I announced the practical element of the session and informed people that they were to break down into groups and use a mobile device to create a piece of content, push it to Twitter using the event # and then we could all consume the content via our mobile devices – at this stage approx 5 people stood up and walked out of the session?!?! To this day I have no idea why, however I do know that many people commented on how much they enjoyed the practical element of the session and saw it as a refreshing change to some of the other ‘info only’ sessions that they had attended.

My action(s): Send slides to the eLearning Guild for publication on the event resources page. Upload slides to Slideshare. Create Slidecast on Slideshare, so verbal context is not lost.

Measuring the Impact of Social Learning – Jane Bozarth

All to frequently hear the cry “but how do we know Social Media adds value, blah, blah, blah” so I was keen to see and hear what Jane had to say. Jane ran a wonderful session which from my perspective, centered around a story in which Jane had used Twitter to crowdsource an answer to question. Jane has blogged about this example in detail and I would encourage you to take a look at it, in particular the ‘Value Creation’ table shown in Figure 1.

Jane Bozarth discussing measuring the value of social learning.

My action: Re-read the article that I referred you to above. Discuss with my boss as to whether the Value Creation table could be applied as an evaluation method to all our L&D activities and not just those that center around ‘communities’.

Overall conference observations / take aways

• Good to see the conference and exhibition being co-located avoiding the ‘upstairs, downstairs‘ that has been mentioned before. It also makes life a damn site easier for attendees.
• The mobile app was extremely useful and became my real ‘workhorse’ during the conference and indeed before it actually started. I would have liked to have seen the inbuilt Twitter function with a greater degree of functionality i.e. RTs, DMs, attaching images, following people etc – however having said that the fact the app overall was very impressive and I’d like to see something of this standard at UK conferences. (if any UK conference organisers want my app login details to fully explore it, then please get in touch)
• The Conference staff all wore eLearning Guild branded sky-blue(ish) shirts/tops which massively helped attendees in terms of being able to know who to ask for help.
• I went to some trouble to ensure that the phrases, stories and examples that I used were ‘non-UK’ specific and were therefore more likely to be understood by an International audience. Unfortunately not every speaker went to this trouble, resulting on a number of occasions with me spending valuable time trying to Google/understand the context that they were talking about – time that would have been better spent listening to / watching the facilitator. Perhaps the eLearning Guild could be more explicit about asking future Devlearn facilitators to consider this?
• The conference badge holders were actually little ‘around the neck’ bags (see first image in this post) that not only allowed you to display your conference badge, but also had a small zipped section to store business cards, a pen, some money. A simple little thing, but one that made a difference.
• The morning buzz sessions are 0715-0815 sessions designed for the early riser (or like me, the jet-lagged). The sessions that I attended were very informal, had a small number of attendees and were very much geared towards having conversations with like-minded people around a given subject. I thought it was a great way of maximising the time of the conference and an idea that I’d certainly buy into, should they ever make an appearance at UK conferences.
• The conference was much less formal than others I have attended, which in my opinion, provided a much more ‘friendly’ and welcoming atmosphere. You had to look hard to spot somebody NOT in jeans/casual dress! I don’t believe that this dress code effected anybody’s morale or motivation…..

Devlearn backchannel

Dave Kelly has curated an ever growing list of Devlearn related resources.

Devlearn utilised a great curating platform know as Hashcaster

If any of the overviews that I’ve provided above make you curious for more info, why not check out the backchannel or drop me a below?

Question mark made out of coloured poins on a cork board

Weeeeeell not exactly come *with* me, more of a ‘would you like me to ask any questions on your behalf whilst I’m there‘ (let’s be honest, you probably wouldn’t enjoy it and I’m sure you’ve got better things to be doing next week)

Why not take a look at the sessions I’m attending and let know via the comments section below (please include the hashtag #DevLearn) if there’s anything you’d like me to enquire about on your behalf.

Of course I can’t promise to ask every question or indeed guarantee a reply, but I’ll do what I can….

Evidence-based Training: No Yellow Brick Road

Taking Video to the Next Level

Building mLearning for iPads Using HTML5 and iBooks Author

Super-charging Google Sales Readiness with Gamification and Social Media

Developing a Multi-year Learning and Development Technology Strategy

Measuring the Impact of Social Learning

Image source

At the time I dumbly nodded, but later that day during my bike ride home (this is my new ‘time for my best ideas’ time) it dawned on me that I was wrong to have ‘dumbly nodded’ as I certainly don’t believe that corporate and creativity have to exist in separate places and that it needs an ‘Act Of ‘ for the 2 to co-exist.

Perhaps instead of dumbly nodding I should have mentioned

Google
Facebook
Apple
Lego

because let’s be honest, they’re corporates, they’re creative and let’s be honest, they’re not doing too badly for themselves!!!!

Can you think of any other corporates who have been able to balance things?

Do you have any heartwarming/horror stories of your own, where the balance has been made/not made?

Of course I’m excited to speaking at such a renowned conference but I have to admit that I’m more than a little intrigued by Neil Lasher’s blog post comparing the US to the UK conference circuit – I guess I’ll be able to take a look for myself soon!

In preparation for my session, I’ve put together a short video that I’m hoping attendees will watch prior to attending the session (previous experience at an eLN event demonstrated that the take-up of this approach was woefully low!) therefore maximising the precious face-to-face that we will have during the session. In the meantime, why not take look at the video yourself (it’s the first movie I’ve created on my Macbook using iMovie) and leave your responses in the comments section below.

Who needs books?

Craig is joined by @zakmensah for the second in a series of podcasts in which Zak helps to make sense of the whole ebooks subject. If you’ve got any questions for Zak relating to this subject, then please feel free to raise them in the comments section below.

Listening time: 22 mins

Download the podcast in mp3 format: Books and ebooks Part 2

Subscribe to the podcast in iTunes.

Shownotes

Book designers launch Twitter discussion

ePub – what’s it all about?

Calibre – ebook management

Preparing for Effective Adoption and Use of eBooks in Education

MobileRead Wiki

Epub validator

Epub straight to the point

Music Source

Image source

Chapter 6 – Getting Concrete

This chapter provides an insight into several real-world, concrete examples which demonstrate a range of mlearning possibilities and applications, each of them following this template. (which with a little tweaking, would make a nice business case template)

• The organisation: Who was involved?
• The challenge: What was the need?
• Why mobile: What made mobile a solution?
• Making the case: How was the solution presented?
• The solution: What was actually done?
• The benefits: What was expected?
• The results: What was observed?
• Lessons learned: What recommendations came out of this project?

There were an impressive number of examples in this chapter and I won’t spoil your future reading by going into each one, however what I will highlight is a few surprises that some of these case studies held for me?

Reading many of these case studies also brought to light just how long many people/organisations/vendors have been developing mobile solutions (as we might define them today) with Hybrid Learning Systems developing XML SCORM compliant mobile solutions in 2006 – that’s 6 years ago folks!

There are no questions being posed at the end of this chapter, which was a little disappointing as I found that in previous chapters they had helped to focus my thoughts and gave me an opportunity to openly reflect and share.

Listening time: 25 mins

Download the podcast in mp3 format: Books and ebooks

Subscribe to the podcast in iTunes.

Shownotes

Zak’s recent blog post on why we should bother with ebooks

Zak’s blog post: The challenge of ebooks

Dan Roddy’s blog post following his recent attendance at a weelearning event

My Kindle highlights

Doug Belshaw’s books

Music Source

Image source

One of the tools whose ‘hidden functionality‘ I’ve discussed in the past is Flickr’s ability for people to be able to add ‘hotspots’ to images and then add text to those hotspots, here’s an example. Whilst this is a great idea, the fact that you have to be logged in to the Flickr account where the image is hosted in order to be able to add the annotations is something of a drawback, add to this the fact that when you then embed the ‘tagged’ image away from Flickr, the hotspots disappear and you have a limiting platform….

Enter ThingLink…

ThingLink allows you to tag images that:

• you have uploaded
• are within Facebook
• are within Flickr
• have a url associated with them
• are within your blog or website

How might you be able to use this platform within your own organisation?

What advantages and disadvantages can you see?

Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section below

I’ve just spent the best part of 24 hours, hunting for a WordPress HTML5 audio player, wrestling with its incompatibility with the Jetpack WordPress plugin and then finally trawling my way through my blog history converting my audio player from Flash to HTML5 for all 23 podcasts to date.

Admittedly when I first started blogging and podcasting, the whole Flash Vs HTML5 debate either didn’t exist, or it was very much in its infancy, either way I have to admit that I didn’t really know what the hell it was all about, so ignorance/naivety probably played a significant in my decision to opt for a Flash based audio player for my podcasts.

However since owning an iPad and having an iPhone as a work phone, I have discovered how inaccessible my podcasts have been to other people using iOS devices, hence my decision to spend some time this weekend overhauling my podcasting process and infrastructure.

I also took the opportunity to change my podcast feed from Feedburner to Jellycast (because I’d basically ‘ballsed up’ the previous feed up completely!).

What does all of this mean?

Well it means that all of my previous podcasts are now visible in iTunes

https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/tayloring-it-podcasts/id556074469

And of course, it means that my podcasts are now accessible by people using iOS devices.

 http://tayloringit.com/category/podcast-2/

If you do take the time to listen to my podcasts, or indeed if you have already listened to some, would mind leaving some feedback in iTunes? (pretty please)

Image source

As I mentioned in a previous blog post, I intend to provide a brief synopsis of each chapter of ‘Designing mlearning‘, but more importantly I intend to answer the questions that Clark poses at the end of each chapter and then pose those same questions back to you ‘Dear Reader‘

Chapter 5 – Getting Contextual

We start this chapter off with the statement “content may be king, but context rules“, which provides a nice stepping stone into a number of examples that Clark provides to show what others have done to take advantage of mobile capabilities, via some concrete examples as opposed to abstract principles and possibilities.

We start off with an example from within the formal K12 education sector in which it was identified that laptops were the wrong form factor for children’s little hands so Elliot Soloway started developing software for the much more ‘form factor friendly’ PDAs to support note-taking, collecting and the sharing of data, whilst elsewhere the portability of mobile devices has supported children in conducting out-of-class experiments.

We then skip forward to Higher Ed and look at how students are accessing course management information such as schedules, syllabi and assignments from their mobile devices as well as accessing online recordings of lectures. The are a few interesting examples of educational establishments providing iPods, iPhones and iPod Touches to students (with varying degrees of success), which has regenerated my thinking around providing low-cost devices (I’m thinking iPod touches) within businesses to facilitate the uptake of mobile device usage.

We naturally progress onto Organisational uses of mobile devices, where Clark promises us some case studies in the next chapter, but for now we are reminded of the use of handheld scanners for stock control, data tracking, healthcare data provision, a drug trial in Canada using Blackberries to remind subjects to take their medication and finally the perhaps most recognised use within businesses, of employees connecting with Enterprise-wide contacts and calendars.

We finish off the chapter with these questions being posed (along with my responses):

• What examples of mobile use have you seen that can provide models for what you might try?
• A few weeks ago I attended an eLearning Network event during which I observed a demonstration of a native app ‘shell’ that allowed content (of pretty much any file type I think) to be contained within it. For me the real ‘wow’ factor of this was the fact that access to each piece of content could be set to activate upon arrival at a physical location as opposed to having everything ‘on show’, this led to me to start thinking about whether it would be possible for the content to be activated as a result of other factors i.e. those that have been mentioned in this mindmap that was produced last year. All I need now is an opportunity to put this into practice!

• What barriers do you face in your context, and what possible solutions have others found?
• As a vendor, one of the biggest barriers I face in my role, is the client perception that mobile learning is ‘shrunken down’ desktop learning. I attempt to overcome this perception by demonstrating ‘best use’ examples of mobile devices and even challenge/question the client as to how they use their mobile device to support themselves in both their personal and professional lives. This usually leads to an interesting conversation that highlights that ‘shrunken down’ desktop learning didn’t figure in their response. I won’t say that this approach works all of the time, or even most of the time, however I’m sure it provides food for thought……

Close up of a Zeiss scope

Regular readers of my blog and social media followers will know that I’m not a huge fan of click-next, self-paced eLearning. Sure, there’s a time to wrap the whole learning experience up in a SCORM object, bury it deep within a Learning Management System and track the bejesus out of everything. (When I say everything, of course I’m not actually referring to whether the learner has been able to synthesise the content and has an ability to recreate it in the real world and the subsequent business impact, I’m actualy talking out who did it, when they did it, what score they attained, whether they ‘passed‘ and lets be honest about this; how good their short term memory is!).

The time being when an organisation needs to tick a box and cover their asses to prove that ‘training’ was provided to a learner, the place being (alas) most organisations. (I’ve just re-read the text above and realised I’m going off on one again, so I’ll get back on track…)

I much prefer the approach of providing support at the point of need via relevant resources. Many people will assume that those resources would be of a technical nature and of course they could be. They could also be a poster, a handout, a leaflet etc.

Given my interest in technology however, I’ve always been intrigued and surprised at just how overlooked the intranet is in many organisations, in terms of being able to deliver support in a way that is no doubt far more in people’s ‘workflows’ than an LMS is!

It’s this fascination with how under utilised intranets tend to be, that led to me volunteering to facilitate a number of scoping workshops in a previous organisation when the decision was made to overhaul its intranet offering.

Being a global organisation those workshops took place at each location with the same questions being asked of each group.

Below is the Google Doc that I produced to present the outcomes of the scoping workshop that I conducted, I hope you find the questions that were asked to be of use to you if you are considering developing your own intranet platform. As you can see very few of the questions actually refer to an ‘intranet’ at all, but instead ask how people work, the types of info they require, the media that info is presented in etc

Let me know if I missed anything

Image source

The purpose of this blog post isn’t to review the programme as a number of other people including Jay Cross and John Curran are already doing that, although I will say that I disagree with John to a degree over his comments on the decor of the room that that facilitator is being filmed in and the quality of the Google Presentation slides (not PowerPoint). For me the content of this particular programme is what interests me, not the aesthetics. I guess you could say that from a ‘care curve‘ perspective, I ‘care’ enough about the content/substance to overlook the aesthetics/style.

The trigger for this blog post has been the realisation or maybe a re-realisation of how much we overlook the everyday things, the things that are under our nose, the things that we take for granted.

None of the tools/techniques that have been revealed in the programme so far are ‘hidden away’, none of them require you to dive into the settings or to hack your way around the ‘accepted’ way of doing things!

They have been right there, hiding in plain sight, under my nose, under your nose!

This got me thinking about what else we overlook in our lives that we could use to enhance our or others learning. It’s a tricky question as I’m obviously asking myself to know what I don’t know – a tricky feat, but I am going to make more of a conscious effort to look more closely at the tools/platforms/devices etc that I am using and see if I’m missing anything.

What about you? 

Do you have any example of where you have missed a blatant opportunity to use a functionality/approach/method  that was staring you in the face?

How did you find out about it?

As I mentioned in a previous blog post, I intend to provide a brief synopsis of each chapter of ‘Designing mlearning‘, but more importantly I intend to answer the questions that Clark poses at the end of each chapter and then pose those same questions back to you ‘Dear Reader‘

Chapter 4 – The technology it’s not about

We start this chapter with a nod to the fact that the iPad (1) was announced during the writing of this book. Given that this is still considered a ‘recent’ book, this shows very clearly how dynamic this market is.

From looking forward we take a look back at a brief history of mobile devices commencing at the Palm Pilot, skipping ahead to mobile phones, through media players to smartphones. From there we review the advent of handheld games, tablets and recording devices, before acknowledging that by the time many readers pick up this book some of the descriptions will already be out of date.

We then take a look at a trend that gives a fairly clear indication of how things are going at the moment – “convergence”. More and more devices are providing a 1-stop shop for much (if not all) of the functionality that we used to associate with multiple devices.

Towards the end of the chapter we are reminded just how quickly this field is developing as Clark suggests that we may even be moving towards wearing glasses with a Heads Up Display - imagine that!

We finish off the chapter with these questions being posed (along with my responses):

• How can you take advantage of any of the dedicated devices (media player, camera, PDA, phone)?
• I’m not sure that we really need to go out of our way to take advantage of the plethora of dedicated devices, after all our learners are already using them within their day-to-day lives to take pictures, record video, access the web, read novels etc. Given that dedicated devices are in my opinion “High Street” what I think we need to do is to tap into learner’s familiarity with them and start to drip-feed examples of how they can use them within a workplace environment. Why not model some good examples using dedicated devices? Often when I facilitate face-to-face activities, I make a point of recording audio feedback, video voxpops and photographs of interactivity using dedicated devices in order to model good practice for the attendees to (hopefully) follow.

• How can you capitalize the increasing ubiquity of the converged devices?
• Let’s be honest most organisations (even now) are not providing converged devices (read phones and tablets) to support learning programmes or ‘overtly’ to maximise performance. I believe they are providing them so that you have little or no excuse for not responding to emails! But let’s not let this worry us, instead let’s leverage the growing distribution of mobile devices for our own ends and start to offer resources, assets etc that can benefit from the functionality of the converged device.

• Have you considered the tradeoffs of providing (devices) versus supporting devices ?
• I guess the provision of devices ensures (to a certain degree) greater control and in turn ‘peace of mind’ (wrongly in my opinion) to organisations, but hey, if it  increases the chances of mobile uptake then maybe it’s worth it? Of course, this approach no doubt brings significant expense with it in terms of providing the devices, however I’ve no doubt that it is easier to support 1 x device type as opposed to trying to support learners own devices. Of course allowing learners to use their own device means that they will be familiar with it and therefore more likely to use it and quite possibly less likely to need support, although the cost and logistics involved in trying to support multiple device types cannot be ignored.

As I mentioned in a previous blog post, I intend to provide a brief synopsis of each chapter of ‘Designing mlearning‘, but more importantly I intend to answer the questions that Clark poses at the end of each chapter and then pose those same questions back to you ‘Dear Reader‘

Chapter 3 – A brief history of learning and cognition

Confession time!

I’ve struggled somewhat with this chapter, having had to read it 3 or 4 times in order to be able to internally process its content for this review. I’m not saying that this is a bad thing at all, but it did feel a little awkward for me having breezed through the first 2 chapters and seeing them as confirmation of my current thinking.

In chapter 3 Clark starts off by reminding us (I’m liking the fact that he is drumming this into the reader) that mLearning is, by and large, not about learning, but about augmentation. About letting us as human beings get on with what our brains do well and providing support for what our brains struggle with (rote learning), rather than trying to ‘drill’ the information into our/others heads! Let the mobile device remember the facts and allow yourself to make decisions or detect nuances in the many variables we base our decisions every day.

In case we haven’t got the point yet, he reminds us that mLearning is not about putting courses on a phone (I’m hoping he raises this point again, as it seems to be something of a common misconception in my opinion)

Clarke then takes us on a whistle-stop tour of media psychology, that I’ve got to be honest, wasn’t any clearer on the 4th reading as it was on the 1st – perhaps I’m not of the target academic demographic for this book, perhaps I’m reading it at the wrong time of day; I don’t know.  What I’m hoping is that this lack of comprehension doesn’t impact upon my understanding of the rest of the book….. we’ll see….

We finish off the chapter with these questions being posed (along with my responses):

• Are you considering more than just courses and including performance support?
• As a member of the vendor community, I have seen a fairly respectable number of mobile solutions being provided to clients and I have to say that the vast majority fall into the ‘course on a phone/tablet’ category. We could go into the whole “who’s to blame for this?” debate, that we’ve all no doubt contributed to in some way, shape or form in the past, but on this occasion I’m not going to, maybe you’d like to in the comments section? What I will say is that I’ve seen a few good examples of performance support apps for the NHS (detailing drug dose calculations) and for some areas of retail (providing ‘just-in-time’ support for a new season range of products), as yet I’ve still to see any solutions that make use of the phones native functionality.

• Is your pedagogy advanced beyond the basic “event” and content presentation learning approach?
• I think the answer above goes somewhere towards answering this question. Some organisations are obviously only seeing mobile as a portable desktop solution, whilst others are grasping the potential for it to ‘augment’ their people. I’d say that it’s probably (based upon a Sophisticated Wild Arsed Guess) less than 3% who have spotted this.

• Do you include social learning as part of your learning solution?
• I’ve seen a growing number of clients who are currently/planning to include social learning as part of their solution. My fear is the assumption that people will flock to it, just because organisations have built it. I also see a number of organisation building internal platforms as opposed to using existing ‘public’ platforms for these conversations to take place. I know from experience in a previous role that the ‘doomers and gloomers’ will cite commercial sensitivity or security for reasons not to engage in ‘public’ conversations and there are a growing number of collaborative platforms to circumvent this, but I can’t help but feel that this approach is only papering over the cracks of a bigger problem.

Chapter 2 – The Details

In this chapter Clark shares a small exercise he undertakes when speaking on the subject of mobile devices, in which he allows people to acknowledge that cell phones, PDAs, iPods are ‘mobile learning devices’. I have to say that I’m surprised that there is anybody left on the surface of the planet that wouldn’t recognise those devices as mobile learning devices and wonder whether that is an exercise that may have lost its impact since the publishing of the book?

Some blisteringly high figures are shown as to how many hours a day the average American spend accessing the mobile web (and let’s not forget that these figures are 2-3 years old!!)

Next we take a look at, and dispel, some popular misconceptions around mlearning including (amongst others) such classics as

“we can’t provide mobile devices”

“courses on phones doesn’t seem like a good idea” (the response to which is thankfully used to introduce performance support)

“mlearning is limited to smartphones”

We then take a look at the business case for mobile learning and Clark explains that he believes that it should be the role of the learning function to take on the role of designing mobile performance – a point which I disagree on.

I believe that it should be the function with the clearest understanding of mobile learning and greatest passion to succeed that should take it on. In my previous organisation I spent the last 12 months as a member of the Comms team driving forward the organisations understanding of what mlearning was, wasn’t and how it could add value. I even pitched to the L&D team themselves and was met by some of the misconceptions that are included in this chapter. So I’m far from convinced that L&D should be the only potential champion of this.

We finish off the chapter with these questions being posed (along with my responses):

• How many mobile employees are you supporting?
• This question raises an interesting point in my mind which is “what is a mobile employee”? Surely, unless you eat, sleep and live in your work environment then you are ‘mobile’? Admittedly there are some roles (such as mine) that have a very overt mobile nature to their role and as such attract the term ‘mobile employee’, but surely we should start to consider the effectiveness and value that all employees can add if they can maximise their mobility? Anyway, to answer the question we deploy 43 smartphones throughout the organisation.

• How widely distributed are mobile devices across your employee population?
• 43 of ‘em, making about 30% distribution.

• What are the opportunities for improvement in mobile worker performance?
• Being able to complete web forms for various parts of our processes from mobile devices as opposed to Office docs from lap/desktops. 
• Accessing client data immediately prior to a meeting. 
• Accessing of network based data via VPN 

• What are the benefits of mobile access to content for the employee population at large?
• Flexibility of working arrangements. 
• Maximising ‘desk time’ by better utilising ‘dead time’ i.e. travelling, waiting for meetings to start etc
• Potential for less stress as they can call up info ‘as and when needed’ as opposed to waiting for ‘desk time’

;

Chapter 1 – Overview

OK, so I’m off to something of a false start here as I’ve just realised that there are no questions asked of ‘The Reader’ at the end of this short introductory chapter, but we are provided with a list of very realistic and pragmatic situations in which a range of ‘everyday’ roles and occupations can/could/do harness the benefits of a mobile device to increase their performance and value.

And guess what?

Only one of the examples is to undertake a compliance ‘course’! This (thankfully) fleeting mention of a ‘course’ provides me with a warm, fuzzy feeling that the rest of the book won’t be trying to convince me of the benefits of shrinking down desktop learning onto a smaller screen.

He also provides us with a definition for mlearning that he admits the eLearning Guild mobile learning research team struggled to come up with:

“Any activity that allows individuals to be more productive when consuming, interacting with, or creating information, mediated through a compact digital portable device that the individual carries on a regular basis, has reliable connectivity, and fits into a pocket or purse”

(eLearning Guild 360 Mobile Learning Research Report, 2007)

He finally reminds us that the pace of change in this area is so fast that any suggested, specific solutions would be unlikely to stand the test of the publishing process time, so instead explains what the book is really about; preparing the reader to take advantage of the mobile revolution.

I’m hooked.

I’m reading on…..

I’ve always said to myself that I would never write a book review, until the day that I had pored in the (no doubt) significant effort that it would take write a book myself. A sort of ‘who am I to criticise‘ perspective.

That was until this weekend; allow me to explain.

I have been looking for a non-fiction, work-related book to read for some time, to break up the months of fiction reading I have been doing. I started to gravitate towards ‘Designing mlearning‘ by Clark Quinn, however I was out off by one of the 1-star rating comments that had been made. (I tweeted about this experience and since then the book has received 2 x positive reviews). Given that the book was quite expensive for a self-purchase (even on Kindle), I decided to look for something else….

Fortunately for me I popped into work the next day (it was a weekend) and lo-and-behold, it was sitting on our library bookshelf – Result!!

I’ve only got 2-3 chapters into the book, however I have decided to stop reading and start again.

Why?

Well because Clark has very cleverly asked a small number of questions at the end of each chapter, which I think is a great way of providing a period of self-reflection and ‘action planning’ for the reader. So great an idea in fact, that my plan is to write a blog post after each chapter in which I will briefly explain what the chapter covered, but more importantly I’ll answer the very questions (where possible) that Clark asks and will then turn the tables on you ‘Dear Reader’ and ask them of you..

…. stay tuned for Chapter 1.

Craig is joined by Lilian Soon for a chat about how we can better utilise than often overlooked tool of text messaging in order to enhance and enrich our learning programmes - and maybe even help our administrators out?

Listening time: 26 mins

Subscribe to the podcast in mp3 format: Back to basics

Subscribe to the podcast in iTunes.

Shownotes

• Xlearn
• Textwall
• Retenda
• Smiles SMS
• The Excellence Gateway material that Lilian mentions

Music Source

Image Source

The sessions are almost identical, (with the only changes to design being to cater for the difference in dynamics) however they bring some additional challenges in that

a) 1 of them is face-to-face and the other is online
b) they are less than 24 hours apart

Meaning that it will be a challenge to incorporate any feedback or observations from the first session into the second session, not impossible, but quite possibly a late night is in store!

The first session will be a webinar for Citrix UK and the second session will be at an eLearning Network event.

I have prepared a short video in order to maximise the time during the sessions by asking the attendees to consider 3 questions. If you’re attending either of the sessions (or even if you’re not) then why not view this short video and consider my questions…

If you hover over the video, you’ll notice the ‘scenechat’ toolbar appear at the bottom. Why not leave your responses to my questions using the ‘scenechat’ tool? (I must admit to being quite impressed with this to being with and then it disappointed me by not allowing me to see the ID of the people posting comments, or indeed ID the comments that I made!?)

It’s probably worth me expanding upon the deliberately vague title of this blog post before I go any further.

By ‘this‘ I mean ‘mobile’ learning.

By ‘another‘ I mean as we did all those years ago in the early days of ‘e’ learning. (admittedly I have no personal experience of those days, only anecdotal examples)

By ‘we’ve‘ I mean us in the L&D community. Both within the vendor community and the client community.

So what do I mean by all this?

During a recent meeting with some colleagues, I reflected upon the conversations that I have had with potential clients over the past 6 months with regards to the use of mobile technologies. With a very small exception (probably 2-3 out of approx 60 conversations) those conversations have revolved around the creation of ‘mobile learning’, which actually translated as the “shrinking down of desktop content to allow it to be viewed and interacted with on a mobile device“.

Very little, if any mention, of creating performance support resources…

No consideration of using the devices native functions I.e. camera, keyboard, GPS, voice recorder, to enhance the experience….

A heavy focus on the learner ‘learning‘ something from it, as opposed to the worker ‘enhancing‘ their performance from it (Hell, who needs to learn the London Underground routes if you’ve got the app in your pocket?)

And this is where I think we have got it wrong again!

We have used the blanket phrase ‘m-learning’ to describe the use of mobile devices to facilitate learning. Now to *us*, we acknowledge (at least I hope you do) that this can include using the device to (amongst other things)

• Consume traditional self paced click next eLearning (yes of course there is a place for this)
• Listen to podcasts
• Take pictures of things to help us remember something in the future
• Engage in online dialogue conversations with others
• Record audio
• Determine your proximity
• The creation of User Generated Content for others
• Call for help!

Of course, with some degree of thought and design the above functions can (and probably should) be incorporated into many (I may even dare to say ‘all’) learning programmes, but in my opinion (based as I said on my conversations with many people on this subject) this simply isn’t the case.

Why?

Well I think the fact that we have used the term ‘m-learning’ which is not a million miles away from the term ‘e-learning’ (which let’s be honest, most people see as being click-next, self-paced stuff) hasn’t helped matters, I think we’ve inadvertently given the impression that it’s traditional eLearning on a mobile device has a part to play in it.

I also think that the recent hysteria over some eLearning authoring products and their ‘mobile readiness’ (which translates as traditional eLearning but outputted to HTML5 or a native app) hasn’t helped matters either

“Ooooo look! I can recreate my traditional self-paced, click-next stuff to work on a mobile device – I must be creating m-learning”

Well technically I have to concede

“Yes. Yes, you are”

but I feel that unless we start to make more noise about the fact that m-learning is more than shrinking down content and actually the ‘learning‘ part of it could well be redundant, we will miss another opportunity to really harness these technologies just as I guess we have done in the past……

Image source

Gillian and I met several months ago and discussed potential subjects and settling upon me looking at the use of YouTube, whilst other facilitators delved into other areas.

As always, I’d like to share my ‘take aways’ from the sessions that I attended, as well as the content from within my session.

Sue Beckingham - Looking in from the outside: Developing your own windows of opportunity using Social Media.

Sue delivered a great session that I’m sure would have had a HUGE impact on those individuals who were still debating/in the tentative stages of using Social Media. The takeaway for me from this session, wasn’t the content as such, it was the way that Sue delivered that content using Infographics – which Helen Keegan has done a good job of capturing here. Thanks for the inspiration Sue!

Matthew Stephenson – Legal and Policy implications of Social Media

I have to be honest here and say that I didn’t enjoy this session. Whilst I understand that there are implications of using Social Media incorrectly and for that very reason it is important to provide a balanced view during an event such as this, I felt that this particular session involved a lot of scaremongering, which I actually tweeted and which attracted quite a few ReTweets

Some scaremongering taking place here. Suggestions that no1 should push boundaries & should wait for 'top down' direction #UCISASoMe

18/04/2012 12:28 via Osfoora HDReplyRetweetFavorite

@CraigTaylor74

Craig Taylor

the notion of not pushing boundaries and waiting for ‘top direction’ seems very ‘old school thinking’ to me and I hope didn’t put any of the attendees off!

Gillian Fielding – Facebook for Facilitating

Gillian took us on a whistlestop journey of a recent ‘QR codes’ course that she had facilitated in Facebook and the successes and challenges that this had brought.

We were then asked to discuss whether the constant changes and updates to Facebook (which, unlike an LMS are obviously out of your control) meant that this platform was unsuitable as a VLE/LMS. Having had some time since the event to reflect upon this question, I feel that as long as the changes/updates haven’t lost any content and still allows the learner to interact with that content then it’s not really a big deal.

Let’s be honest, there will be a few reasons why you are choosing to use Facebook and as long as one of those reasons is because that’s where your learners eyes are then the chances are they have already cottoned onto the changes (as happened with the recent Facebook Timeline changes)

Yours Truly – Using YouTube for Training

Given that it would be somewhat ironic to attempt to do deliver my sessions content without using YouTube coupled with the fact that I only had 30 mins to facilitate my session I decided to record and publish a number of YouTube videos focussing on some ‘less obvious’ uses of YouTube and encourage attendees to view them in advance, interact with them and then use them as a catalyst for conversations during the the f2f session itself – a ‘flipped‘ approach if you will!

My greatest concern over doing this, was that the attendees may not have taken the time to view the content ahead of the session, however of the approx 50 people that attended my session (split over 2 x sessions), only 2 or 3 people had failed to viewed the videos in advance. I’ve no doubt that this was down to the very clear direction provided in the pre-event information.

Here are the videos; I’d recommend clicking through and watching them on YouTube itself, as that way you will be able to read the responses to the videos and more importantly view the video responses that many attendees (and even a few that weren’t attending) took the time to upload.

I even created one on my phone, titled it, tagged it and uploaded it via my phone just prior to my 1st session commencing to show how quickly it can be done, here it is.

Just prior to the event taking place (in fact it was on the train travelling to the event), I discovered a great little trick courtesy of Jane Bozarth’s Social Media for Trainers book that I unfortunately didn’t get time to screencast prior to the event, so I ‘walked and talked‘ the attendees through the trick with a promise to screencast it and post it to YouTube…..

…. as promised!

My next step will be to upload my slides to Slideshare, but more importantly (and time consuming) I’ll be adding some audio to the slideshare to create a slidecast.

Image source

That’s what’s been rattling round my head since I saw this tweet from Sam Taylor earlier today.

I get the need for UGC,but when the content is badly scripted, inaccurate & pushed out across business,shouldn't it go past a learning team?

20/03/2012 11:26 via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@samt_el

Sam Taylor

I responded with this

@samt_el could that reduce peer feedback to the poor content and in turn any ensuing conversations?

20/03/2012 11:43 via Osfoora for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@CraigTaylor74

Craig Taylor

and got this reply back from Sam

@CraigTaylor74 there isn't any of that anyway!!

20/03/2012 11:59 via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@samt_el

Sam Taylor

Putting Sam’s last response to one side for the benefit of this blog post, I thought this would be a good opportunity for me to put down my thought as to the ’allowing UGC to be posted directly into an organisation‘ Vs ‘being approved by L&D‘ debate

So let me start off by listing what I believe the benefits are of allowing UGC to be posted directly into an organisation:

• It’s fast, as it doesn’t rely upon any approval process
• It provides the contributor with a sense of ‘being trusted’ as their content has gone ‘live’ immediately.
• The target audience is far more likely to be able differentiate good content from crap than L&D are and if the correct tools are in place will be able to allow good content to rise to the surface as Mark Berthelemy alludes to in his tweet below.

@samt_el Or else build in filtering mechanisms like ratings and comments so the best can rise to the top?

20/03/2012 11:54 via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@berthelemy

Mark Berthelemy

As always there are 2 sides to every coin, so here are the potential downsides to allowing the content to be pushed directly into an organisation without any approval process.

• As the process is fast, this could lead to incorrect and even unsafe information being picked up and used by colleagues before the community as a whole has had the opportunity to vote/comment/feed back on the content.
• An employee may, in good faith, contribute some content which is found to be lacking in some way by the community. Low ratings and less-than-positive comments may lead to embarrassment  and reduce the likelihood of them contributing in the future.

If I’m honest I’m not a big fan of all the L&D online surveys that seem to be doing the rounds nowadays for 2 reasons.

1. There seems to be about 1 survey a month (at the very least)! Can’t somebody just say “you know what, I’ll cover ‘em all Guys”
2. Reading that 87% of senior executives would consider utilising xyz technology if it added value to the bottom line, doesn’t really float my boat or add much value to what I do.