Will the Real eLearning Industry Please Stand Up?

When we talk about the “industry”, we (and by “we”,  I of course mean those of us in the industry) often refer to it as if it’s this monolithic thing that you can touch. 

The Industry.

Ummm.  Yeah.

So.  What is the eLearning Industry?

Is it the vendors? --  The LMS companies, the custom content developers, the off-the-shelf content creators.

Is it the tools we use to create eLearning?

Is it the companies and people who create those tools? – Adobe, Articulate, Microsoft, etc.

Is it the pundits and bloggers? – the names we know and associate with eLearning – Jay Cross, Ellen Wagner, Tony Karrer, Brent Schlenker, [insert your  name here].

Is it the associations?  -- the eLearning Guild and ASTD.

Is it the research organizations that produce the industry reports?

Is it the companies that give out the awards?

Is it the companies who use eLearning to train their employees?

Is it the Learning & Development/Training departments within all of those companies?

Is it the little companies who don’t even have training departments but still have a lot of training needs?

Is it the schools who use eLearning to teach their students?

Is it the teachers at those schools?

Is it the non-profits who create eLearning for their members?

Is it the institutions that issue the certificates and degrees in ID and whatnot?

Is it the professors who teach at those institutions?  The students who come out of them?

[What did I miss?] 

The point is – and I don’t really know what the point is – the point is, that’s a whole heck of a lot of perspectives. 

The eLearning Industry.

***********

This post  and a few others have been itching to be written for a couple of weeks now.  Since I had the opportunity for a nice schmooze fest after the eLearning Guild ID Symposium in Boston. 

I didn’t attend the sessions, but I DID get to eat a nice Arctic Char at Jasper White’s Summer Shack with the likes of Ellen Wagner, Brent Schlenker, Steve Martin and Kay Wood. 

And then Dave Ferguson incited me further.  He was going to talk about Canada in reference to this rant.  C’mon, Dave.  I dare you.

Photo credit:  Liverpool Street station crowd blur by victoriapeckham

IPhone Test

Don't mind me. I'm just testing to see if I can blog from my iPhone. Which may not be a good thing, trust me...typo city.

Last Week's Kineo Product Knowledge E-Learning Webinar:

On Thursday Kineo's Stephen Walsh and I presented a webinar on Product Knowledge e-Learning. After having participated in and live-blogged many a webinar, this was the first I've actually helped present. It was great fun.

I was sitting outside at a picnic table overlooking the Atlantic Ocean in Maine, while gratefully connected to a neighboring house's wifi. My weak connection probably contributed to my choppy audio delivery, but all in all things went smooth with DimDim.

Stephen's done a nice write up on the Kineo website and we've included the slide deck from the presentation.

In August, we'll be running another webinar: Rapid e-learning and compliance. Stay tuned for dates and more info.

Kineo Product Knowledge E-Learning Webinar

Kineo will be holding a free webinar on creating effective product knowledge e-learning on July 16th, 2009.

Product knowledge training creates major challenge for organizations, including:

• Keeping content up to date: products change rapidly. For example there have been over 60 new versions of the Blackberry since its launch in 2002, that’s one every 5 weeks.
  
• Keeping it short and focused: sales people who need product knowledge information work in challenging, fast paced and often noisy retail environments. The learning has got to get to the point, quickly.
  
• Making it engaging: Delivering ‘just the facts’ about the product isn’t enough to increase sales. Learners need to know the benefits, how to recognize customer needs for a product, and how to close the sale.
  
• Keeping costs down: Given the pace of change, product knowledge e-learning has got to be cost effective, otherwise the maintenance costs will be prohibitive.
  

The free Kineo webinar will use real case studies to demonstrate:

• Effective designs for product knowledge e-learning
• How to use sales scenarios as part of the learning
• Prototyping effectively
  
• How to use xml files to update product e-learning in a matter of minutes
• How to use games and challenges to motivate learners
• How to design and deliver a product portal
  

The one hour webinar will be held at 3pm UK time/10am Eastern on July 16th, 2009.

If you would like to reserve a place please contact Kineo at info@kineo.

[Seats are filling up fast so be sure to sign up!]

Designing for Articulate: A Newbie’s View

I’m new to Articulate. Although I’ve been reading Tom Kuhlman’s Rapid E-Learning Blog now for a couple of years, I’ve never actually designed (or for that matter, built) an Articulate course.

My canvas for the past four years has been custom Flash. I’d have an idea and then someone much smarter than me would go figure out how to make it work.

At Kineo, we often work with our clients’ tools of choice. That is, if a client uses Articulate in-house, they may ask us to build a few courses for them in Articulate. (We also do a lot of custom Flash, Mohive, etc.)

For the past few weeks I’ve been designing and scripting my first Articulate courses. I’m such a n00b.

I started off feeling a bit pegged in: “I have to design and write for a set of templates? How constricting!”

But now I’m starting to loosen up a bit, with help from my Kineo colleagues. (Thanks especially to Matt!). It’s a fun challenge.

Some beginning tips:

Keep variety. Don’t use an Engage Tab screen for every other page. Mix it up.

Intersperse questions throughout the content. Formative questions break the content up with momentary pauses for reflection and to reinforce the learning process.

Use Engage Labeled graphics as question pages. “Which of these widgets would you use to paint a monkey?” There’s no penalty for a wrong answer. Let the learner explore.

Spice it up with scenarios. This is true for any tool. Keep it interesting with a story. Compel the learner to want to find out what comes next.

Use interesting images. I’m lucky to have some graphic artists on my team who know how to turn a page into something quite lovely! That doesn’t hurt.

I uploaded a final script last night for the UK team (five hours ahead of me) to start working on. This morning, when I logged on to email, I saw a message that the course had been built! Holy cow. That’s rapid.

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.

The Scrambled Egg Mind of a Beginner

Apparently, when Tom Kuhlman links to your blog, crazy things happen. So hi to all of my new readers and thanks for joining.

Thought I'd check-in and give you all a quick status update on what I've been up to:

As you may know, I recently started with Kineo as the VP of Learning Design.

As with any new job, there are a lot of transitions to navigate. I'm in that beginner-mind zone. Although I've been doing this work for 15ish years, the ground beneath me is shaky and I feel like I'm in new waters, navigating new people, new processes, new tools.

Traveling. The past two weeks have been a whirlwind: ASTD, client visits, seminars on Moodle/Articulate in Boston and Chicago. I'm suddenly racking up lots of frequent flyer points. Next week I'll be heading to Kineo World Headquarters in the UK for 5 days. The kids may not take it so well...

Adjusting to life as a virtual office worker. When I'm actually in town, I work from the shed.

There are a lot of great things about this arrangement: lunch breaks with the kids, secret visitors who spy on me through the window, the occasional drum jam.

Has its downsides: the occasional drum jam while I'm trying to talk on the phone, my work is my home is my work is my home, and there's no one but me to bake cookies for the office.

My blogging and tweeting has been a bit sporadic with all of this mania. I'm in scrambled egg mind mode most of the time. Will hope for a few opportunities for reflection as things unfold.

Hope you're all doing well and please take the time to comment on the blog. I enjoy the conversations immensely. I do post a lot of learning tidbits to Twitter that never make it to the blog, so join me there if you're so inclined. I'm @cammybean.