Introducing Totara! Webinars in December.

We had fun at DevLearn last month giving some sneak peeks of the new Totara LMS.  If you missed us on the stand, now’s your chance!

If you haven’t heard yet about Totara, it’s a new corporate distribution of Moodle. 

It includes a wide range of features designed to meet the specific needs of corporates, including competency management, staff development plans, team management, individual and corporate dashboard reporting, and the management of classroom events.

The new Totara distribution of Moodle is open source and available on a subscription basis which provides ongoing support and enhancements.

Totara officially launches in January 2011.

The nine webinars will take place on 15th, 16th and 21st December. There will be three webinars each day to cover Pacific, European and US time zones.

The webinar covers:

• Overview of Totara
• Demonstration of key features including: competency management,  team management, individual development plans and reporting
• Subscriptions, hosting and support

To register for the webinar: Totara LMS.

Totara LMS: Open for Business

Eager to learn more about the new open source learning management system Totara?  The website is now open and ready for browsing: http://totaralms.com/

And if  you’re going to be a DevLearn this week, we’ll be demonstrating Totara in all its open loveliness.  Stop by Kineo Booth #100.

San Francisco, see you soon!

Announcing Kineo Totara – an open source LMS for corporates!

If you know Kineo, you know we’ve been talking up Moodle for a number of years. To date we’ve implemented somewhere in the range of 80-90 Moodles for corporate clients.

And now we’ve got something totarry cool to announce. I mean totally cool…

…the formation of a joint venture company to develop a distribute an open source Learning Management System for the corporate sector.

It’s called Totara.

Read the Totara press release here.

And if you’ll be at DevLearn in San Francisco in November, be sure to stop by booth #100 where we’ll be giving sneak previews of Totara!

Crowdsourcing: Authoring Tools & LMS Questions

I'm talking to an in house learning team as they work on developing a strategy around eLearning -- including authoring tools and LMS selection.

They've posed some questions to me that I was hoping to get your input on -- wisdom of the crowd and all that:

• What should we look out for when selecting a tool to do simulation development or quizzing/evaluation?
• Do we need a full-blown authoring tool like Lectora or Outstart if we already have something like Captivate?
• What developments in elearning are becoming commonplace and how can we factor them into our tools selection?
• What do your clients (or others in the biz) say they wish they’d done differently when they committed to an LMS and in-house development of elearning?

Leave your ideas in comments or feel free to email me directly cammybean @ gmail

Thanks!

Recommended: "In Defense of the LMS"

Are you an LMS naysayer? Do you have any idea what an LMS is actually capable of these days?

Either way -- or whatever your LMS experience -- I heartily recommend this post from Dave Wilkins: "A Defense of the LMS (and a case for the future of Social Learning). It's a long read, but he makes it more enjoyable with swears.

Dave is currently a bigwig at Learn.com. So, yes, he's got a bit of a bias, but he certainly knows his way around an LMS.

Kineo Insights Webinar: The Truth About Open Source – a conversation with Sakai’s Executive Director

Today as part of the Kineo Insights webinar series – a conversation on open source. The following are my notes from Part 1 of the webinar: The Truth About Open Source: A conversation with Michael Korcuska, Executive Director of Sakai.

The Truth About Open Source

• Who writes the code?
• How safe is it?
• Is it really free?
• And other burning questions about source…

Poll #1: How many of you currently use open source LMS?

• 5% currently use one
• 95% do not use an open source LMS.

Poll #2: What do you consider the primary benefits of an open source LMS?

• Cost (55%)
• Avoiding vendor lock-in (40%)
• Ability to customize (70%)
• License flexibility (35%)
• Other (20%)?

Poll #3: What are the biggest barriers to open source LMS?

• No support/Accountability (58%)
• Sustainability risk -- how long will that product be there? (37%)
• Total cost of ownership (32%)
• Difficulty to maintain (68%)
• Lack of security/quality control (53%)

Poll #4: Who is the audience for your training?

• Employees (60%)
• Customers (30%)
• Partners/Resellers (5%)
• Consumers/Public (5%)
• Other (5%)

Michael Korcuska – big picture issues with open source LMS.

Michael is the Executive Director of the Sakai Foundation – open source Course/Learning Management System focused in education space (a “competitor” to Moodle). In the open source world, these projects tend to be friendlier than Google vs. Microsoft :)

Sakai started in 2004 – collaboration of universities (Michigan, Indiana, Stanford, MIT, Berkeley). – 5 schools with homegrown systems. Inefficient to build 5 systems; figured they were already experts in learning. Now used in over 200 institutions around the world. Used by some companies. Primary market is higher ed, k-12.

Free?

Is it really free? Free beer you can enjoy in moderation without long term costs. But a free puppy – requires care and feeding. Long terms costs to maintain that are much higher than any initial purpose costs.

Open source isn’t free. No license costs. You can direct that savings to other areas.

But it’s free as in freedom! No one tells you what you can do with the software. Or that you can’t keep running it or that you have to upgrade or customize with this fee. Freedom to do what you want to do with the software.

Support?

Who you gonna call? There’s no “one throat to choke”.

Is support going to be better in a proprietary company or an open source support?

If you hire someone like Kineo – they survive only on the quality of their support. You can always take your business somewhere else! This pressure on support vendors works in the customers favor. Support providers know who butters their bread.

Risks?

Perception of risk associated with open source -- “it’s not as safe” “there may be more bugs”…”security”

There is really no fundamental difference between os and proprietary.

Open source code is open from the first moment – see bugs earlier, fix before goes into production – lots of eyes! Look at the track record of the orgs behind the development of the project.

Your comfort needs to come from who’s using the product in production? If there aren’t a lot of reported bugs and security concerns – that should give you great comfort.

Roadmap?

How do these projects get developed? Where do innovation and ideas come from?

At Sakai – all of the 200 institutions help determine what the future of Sakai is going to be. Programmers are all over the place.

Moodle has a central team that works out of Moodle HQ – works more like a proprietary software vendor in that sense. Moodle does get contributions from all over the world – but those get inspected by Moodle core team who control the direction.

Who else is using the product? Has their experience been good? Can you find a robust set of users who are doing the same things you want to do with the platform? If you find them, you can be sure there will be effort and innovations going on in that direction. You can have confidence that investment in the platform will support customers like you.

Sustainability?

Where does the money come from? Why are people working on open source projects? Some work out of respect; some because institutions want to cooperate. Very few open source projects succeed just because people like the respect they get – most need a solid source of funding. (Moodle gets a fee that Moodle commercial affiliates pay back to Moodle HQ to ensure money for future development).

Need to understand how the money flows. And that the revenue stream is stable. Moodle stream is safe – given # of users and # of businesses. Moodle is a solid bet and a stable org. (Same is true of Sakai – because of institutional commitment). Sustainability of Moodle shouldn’t be a concern for anyone!

Questions:

Does Sakai or Moodle have restrictions on # of users and # of admins? No.

Is Sakai only used in education or is it also used in industry? Sakai is used a bit in industry, although Moodle has more of a base.

How is Sakai different from Moodle?

• Both are open source.
• They do have different licensing. The Sakai license enables commercial entities to build custom additions on top of Sakai and sell the resulting product. Moodle license says if you want to modify Moodle and redistribute that modification, that modification must also be open source.
• Sakai is java; Moodle is PHP.
• Sakai more education; Moodle more focus on corporate training world.
• Sakai was considered more enterprise adaptable; but Moodle has caught up around that.
• Moodle focused on teaching and learning use case; Sakai has built in ePortfolio system.

Where is Sakai going in the next few years? Sakai is building a new version from the ground up right now. Michael continues to see the education feature set being what’s attended to rather than the corporate training feature set.

Sakai doesn’t have an ecommerce module, but Moodle has that.

You can access Part 2 of the webinar here: Our Journey: Harnessing Moodle to Deliver Customer Training – A case study with Kronos.

Join us for our next Kineo Insights webinar:

March 11, 2010: eLearning Insider: Challenges and Best Practices for Internal Development Teams

8:00 AM Pacific/10:00 AM Central/11:00 AM Eastern/4:00 PM UK

• Rory Lawson, Instructional Design, Manager Learning Design, Learning HSBC Group Management Training College (UK)
• Anne Marie Laures, Principal at Laures Consulting, former Director Learning Services at Walgreens
• Ellen Wagner, Partner Sage Road Solutions, former Sr. Director Worldwide eLearning Adobe Systems

Click here to register.

Kineo Audio Interview with Ellen Wagner "The Evolution of the LMS"

I love my job. I get to talk to really interesting people in the eLearning community and then share it with all of you. Is it work if it's fun?

Last week I got the chance to chat with Ellen Wagner about the eLearning Guild's LMS 2009 Report: The Evolution of the LMS: From Management to Learning.

The big story? The growing impact of Moodle and open source on the maturing LMS market.

Listen to my audio interview with Ellen Wagner over at the Kineo website.

You may already know Ellen from her blog: eLearning Roadtrip. If not, I suggest you join her on her journey.

Name That Tool

I just got a FaceBook query from someone and I thought you all could help:

I'm looking for a tool you might have come across, but I don't even know what product/programming group it belongs to.  I want to be able to ask people a series of questions and correlate their answers with topic areas to indicate what courses they should take.

So if you say, yes I have signoff authority for travel vouchers, I could tell this tool to mark four courses.  I'd want to be able to do a couple things with the data before giving the user feedback.  I'm sure I could do a better job describing this, so let me know if I've been clear.

To me, this sounds like competence management as handled by an LMS.  But that's not really my expertise.

What tool do you think he's looking for?  Can you name any names?

Free the Learners -- Free the LMS

Jay Cross in Free the learners talks about his afternoon omelette and anarchy and then goes on:

People ask how to track informal learning in their LMS; my response is don’t. But how will we know if they are learning? I reply that it’s the same way we always do: check afterward to see if they’re performing up to expectation.

So my question is about LMSs. I'm wondering if people actually use all that data that does get tracked now for formal learning. I'm mean -- do they really use all that data? What if we got really crazy and didn't track much of formal learning either?

In What to track? Dan observes,

From this they are able to get stats on time spent elearning, who has completed
what and a whole host of stats that, at the end of it tell them nothing at all
about how the behaviour of the learner has changed as a result of the training.

I've always been on the vendor end of things in this equation. We build it because they ask for it. We make our courses comply with their so-called needs. Who can tell me what is actually used of all these piles and piles of data captured by all the piles and piles of LMSs out there? If you use it, what does it really tell you about your employees?