Phew! Reflecting on #ASTD10

I generally leave conferences both exhilarated and exhausted, and sitting on the flight home from three days in Chicago at the ASTD International Conference and Expo, I realize this one was no exception.

(What I would give right now for a foot rub. Anyone?)

Three days of booth babe duty at our lovely Kineo stand with my colleagues Steve Lowenthal, Steve Rayson, Mark Harrison and Gabe Rosenberg.

There was a lot of energy this year, overall felt like a lot more bustle and excitement than at last year’s ICE. As Ron Burns of Proton Media said, “what recession?”

I had no time to attend any sessions, but did imbibe much learning and connections nonetheless:

Moodle

On the stand, we had lots of interest in our corporate Moodle LMS offering. I’ve asked before whether the corporate Moodle is at a tipping point, and the strong indicators are, yes. Yes, indeed.

Companies want the flexibility and freedom of an open source model. People are frustrated with ongoing licensing fees, lack of good customer support and responsiveness from traditional LMS vendors, and slow time to implement.

I heard a lot of, “I’ve been looking into Moodle and we’re really interested...tell me more.” (If you want to know more, be sure to read some of the case studies on the work we’ve been doing in the corporate Moodle space).

Hanging out with Mr. SCORM himself

If you’re in eLearning, you’ve heard of SCORM. But did you know there is actually a Mr. SCORM and that he is the fabulous Aaron Silvers of ADL? (@mrch0mp3rs)

What I like most about Aaron is that he can talk about these really technically confusing things like metadata and metaparadata and the semantic web and I sort of get it.

Aaron and I talked about his vision for the new SCORM. Expect to see some exciting changes to SCORM in the next bit.

Getting social

I didn’t have a lot of time to cruise the expo hall (man, there were a lot of vendors!), but I did make a point of checking out Bloomfire and their Collaborative Social Learning Community. Josh has a great vision of helping groups put out user generated content in an easily accessible way. Bloomfire (@Bloomfire) even has a built in screencasting and video recording tool, making it super easy for people to share informal bits with each other.

Talking leadership

I love connecting face to face with people I’ve known online and I really enjoyed meeting Terrence Wing. (@TerrenceWing) Terrence does leadership training and is very involved with ASTD (he was on the conference committee!) I like his approach to training, “We create leadership packages – tools and resources for managers based on situational needs.” (He made an analogy to Jack Bauer’s hostage packages on the show 24.)

Talking content

As always, it was great to connect with Thomas Stone (@ThomasStone) of ElementK and hear what they’re up to with off-the-shelf content and LMSs. He’s possibly the most sincere person in the eLearning biz. And I mean that most sincerely.

Meeting the legends

I’ve known Professor Karl Kapp for years, but it was a bit of a shock to meet him face to face after all this time. (I told him my head would explode if this were to happen and it did.)

Great to catch up on his book (Learning in 3D continues to be a top seller!) and he even brought around Ron Burns of Proton Media to share a what’s happening in the immersive learning space.

Be sure to check out Karl and Ron's video tour of ASTD!

Top tips

Our own Steve Rayson was on the prowl with his flip cam, recording eLearning top tips from the likes of Mark Harrison of Kineo, Tom Kuhlmann of Articulate, Karl Kapp, Allen Partridge of Adobe, Ethan Edwards of Allen Interactive, and yours truly. Check out all the new additions to the Kineo TV channel.

Here’s a few to get you started:

All in all, a great show! Thanks to all of you who stopped by our booth and look forward to seeing you next year!

Now that’s an Enterprise Moodle! -- Kineo Moodle for Retail Giant Tesco

In case you’re still not sure if the open source LMS Moodle is ready for prime time corporate use, have a second look.

Kineo has just deployed a Moodle/Joomla learning portal for Tesco, the world’s third largest retailer. For those of us in the US who haven’t heard of Tesco it’s like the Wal-Mart of the UK.

The initial rollout will go to 15,000 with plans to roll out to the global staff over two years -- that's potentially 400,000 users! The eventual scale of the project will make it one of the largest ever implementations of the Moodle platform in the corporate learning space. Now that’s an enterprise Moodle!

Read more about Kineo’s Tesco Moodle/Joomla Online Academy.

Moodle in 2010

Back in June, I asked if the corporate Moodle was at a tipping point?  People were on the fence.

And then the eLearning Guild published their LMS report in the fall of 2009, with Moodle clearly gaining a foothold in the corporate market.  (Hear my October 2009 interview with Ellen Wagner, one of the report’s authors).

So is Moodle still gaining traction in the corporate market?  Surely seems to be.

Last week over 200 attendees joined in the Learning Technologies Moodle seminar which Kineo helped out with – How Companies are Making the Most of Moodle.

A few articles have come out of that session that I think are must reads if you’re wanting to learn more about Moodle and how it fits in to the corporate LMS landscape.

• Mark Berthelemy writes a nice overview of how Moodle can help corporate L&D departments out of the box, and what Moodle can’t do without customization.  Introduction to Moodle for Corporate L&D.
• And there’s Donald Clark Plan B: Moodle: e-learning's Frankenstein, which provides a nice historical overview of the evolution of Moodle.

So where is the corporate Moodle going?  Time will tell, but we’re keeping ourselves busy!

Join us at the Learning Solutions Conference & Expo 2010 in Orlando, March 24-26.  We’ll be showing Moodles demos at booth #208!

(Be sure to check out the video on the Learning Solutions main page – see if you can spot me! *blush*)

Kineo Insights Webinar: Kronos Moodle Case Study

Today as part of the Kineo Insights webinar series – a conversation on open source.  The following are my notes from Part 2 of the webinar: Our Journey: Harnessing Moodle to Deliver Customer Training

Kronos – Scott Severn and Lynn Bennett – manage the customer training team for Kronos.  Kronos delivers products and services to customers managing workforce.

Scott and Lynn are with customer services group and deliver training to customers – through Moodle.

Today:

• How we’re using Moodle from customer usability.
• Why we chose Moodle as a platform.

Kronos had a vast library of elearning content to help customers betters use products.  A long list of courses that the user had to identify what was relevant learning.

6 months ago started working with Kineo to take new approach to subscription site.  Decided to stay with Moodle.  Now the system identifies relevant learning – put together a wizard to be much more supportive of audience. 

Users can now create a My Learning page to find the content they needed.

Vastly changed the Moodle’s look and feel.

A great place for customers to reinforce what getting in ILT, to help new hires on board, to enhance usability of Kronos products.

Why Moodle?

2 1/2 years ago – Knowledge Pass Subscription offering was first released on Moodle.  Compared it to a # of diff open source offerings as well as large commercial systems and smaller vendors as well.

• Decided would rather spend money on support and implementation rather than licensing.  Low start up costs helped us out (no licensing fees; minimal server requirements).  Annual cost of hosting with a hosting vendor was cheaper than licensing options with commercial vendors.
• Professional support available through numerous support vendors.
• Easy to implement
• Relatively easy to modify (use in house programmers to do simple changes to PHP codes – not a huge risk)

In January, did a redesign with Kineo.  But first did an analysis to see if should stay with Moodle.  Looked again at commercial LMS options, but chose to stay with Moodle. 

• Kineo customizations gave granular security – customer A sees certain products, customer B sees different set of products.
• Implemented Moodle’s Flash video module – created fabulous video experience.
• Integrated Moodle’s mySQL database to integrate with Kronos’ internal reporting system –

Questions:

Does Moodle have support for competency based role analysis?  Out of box, Moodle doesn’t have competency or role based training.  But Kineo has done some customizations.  We’ve also taken that one step further to do a gap analysis.  This has become a common request from corporate customers.  Looking at how to use Moodle for more traditional HR functionalities…corporate world is taking open source much more seriously.

Did Kronos want open source or proprietary?  Kronos considered both, but Moodle won when weighing the pros and cons.

 Did Kronos use a score card?  How should we evaluate these tools?  Download Sakai and Moodle and try ‘em out!  It’s free.

You can access Part 1 of the webinar here: The Truth About Open Source: A conversation with  Michael Korcuska, Executive Director  of Sakai.

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.

The Corporate Moodle: A Tipping Point?

Richard Nantel of Brandon Hall recently posted about average LMS prices. A ‘low-cost’ LMS starts at an average of $58K. That’s the low price. Which is still a whole LOT of money.

And “in times like these…”

Why pay for a pricey LMS when you can Moodle or Drupal or Sakai?

Why do companies continue to pay huge dollars for products that are now being offered for free? Web conferencing services like DimDim now offer the equivalent of WebEx. For free.

(I’m a recent convert, perhaps on the path to open source evangelism.)

So what are some of the hurdles to overcome in the corporate market? Here are just a few:

It’s free. Because it’s open source, there are no licensing costs. This, apparently, freaks people out. Free must mean sub par, right? Wrong. Moodle and other open source products have huge communities behind them. Talented individuals who can program like hell and believe in the open source philosophy. (Note: Hosting costs aren't free and any customizations you do or support you'll need may require some moolah.)

Support. There’s no vendor who creates Moodle per say. That means there’s no 800 number or help desk you can call. That means your IT department has to know how to do all the code. Sure they can. Or you can contract with a company like Kineo that can host and support your Moodle for you (at the risk of sounding like a company shill!)

It’s not for corporate use. Well, it’s true that Moodle was originally created for academic use and it already has a great foothold in the academic world. But Moodle is increasingly being used in the corporate market. According to an eLearning Guild survey conducted in 2007, 18% of respondents in corporate settings reported using Moodle.

Out of the box, Moodle may not have all the features an enterprise needs, but simple add-ons can be created. Kineo has recently worked on creating a classroom management add-on for a corporate client and has a fabulous Moodle reporting tool.

It looks so very bland. Moodle out of the box is like vanilla pudding. Pretty plain. But the beauty of open source is you can customize it. Kineo has done some really fabulous interfaces that look slick, modern and way beyond what you might think possible. We’ve integrated Flash animations into Moodle home pages and replicated clients’ existing web sites. Take some vanilla pudding, add raisins or rainbow sprinkles or a caramel swirl.

I think the time for open source is now. What about you? Do you think we're at a tipping point?

Update: Want more evidence of the tipping Moodle? Check out a more recent post from May 11, 2010 profiling Tesco's Moodle.

Reminder: Boston & Chicago Articulate/Moodle Seminars This Week

Just a reminder that our Boston and Chicago free seminars on Articulate and Moodle are this week. The response has been great. (So great, in fact, that we had to move the Boston session to another location to accommodate the crowd.)

Join the Kineo team in
Boston on June 9th
and Chicago on June 11th.

Delivering Quality at Speed - Articulate & Moodle

This seminar will focus on getting the best out of Articulate and Moodle with case studies from Motorola, BP, Apple and McDonald's.

The seminar will cover:

• Rapid e-learning design with Articulate
• Top tips for getting the best out of Articulate
• Rapid development processes
• Delivering engaging learning portals with Moodle
  

To learn more and sign up, visit the Kineo website. Hope to see you there!

Free Articulate & Moodle Seminars in Boston and Chicago

Are you in Boston or Chicago? Want to learn more about Articulate and Moodle? Want to meet me?

Join the Kineo team in
Boston on June 9th
and Chicago on June 11th.

Delivering Quality at Speed - Articulate & Moodle

This seminar will focus on getting the best out of Articulate and Moodle with case studies from Motorola, BP, Apple and McDonald's.

The seminar will cover:

• Rapid e-learning design with Articulate
• Top tips for getting the best out of Articulate
• Rapid development processes
• Delivering engaging learning portals with Moodle
  

To learn more and sign up, visit the Kineo website. Hope to see you there!