Barry Sampson – Page 2 – Onlignment Archive

The New Learning Management

At the Learning Technologies conference in January, I took part in a debate about the future of learning management with Andy Wooler and Charles Jennings. We each had ten minutes to make our point. Here’s mine.

Some Background

If you’ve seen me speak at conferences, read articles I’ve written, or just got in to conversation with me, you’ll know that I’ve been an advocate of collaborative and connected learning for more than eight years now (I say collaborative and connected because no one was calling it ‘social’ back then).
I believe that such collaborative and connected activity has a key role to play in organisational learning, today and in the future; at the same time I still believe that there’s a good case for managing learning. Those two statements are not mutually exclusive; this isn’t a zero sum game.

Learning Management <;>; LMS

First of all, let’s clear up one big misconception.
Learning Management does not equal LMS.
Learning management is a process, a way of doing things; there’s certainly a lot more to it than LMS.
If you do make the mistake of thinking that LMS is the be all and end of all of learning management then you’re on the way to the next flawed assumption; that managing learning means tracking it.

Management Should Not Be The Default

That’s not to say that I believe everything needs to be managed, nor that management should be done in the same way it always has been.
Last year, Clive wrote a book called the The New Learning Architect, and one of the ideas he put forward was that when you are designing a learning solution the default option should be online, and that you should have to make a strong argument for any other approach, such as face to face.
He has since extended this to suggest that the default option should also be asynchronous – and again you should have to make a robust argument for doing something synchronously.
I’d like to further extend that and suggest that as a default we should not be managing learning. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be managing anything, but just as with the choice of online vs offline and asynchronous vs synchronous, it puts the onus on us to make a solid case for doing so.

Why We Should Manage Learning

And there are some very good arguments for managing learning.
It’s too important
Some things are too important to leave to chance. This is a really broad category, but some of the more obvious things that fall in here are compliance and regulatory subjects; things that are being done to ensure legal compliance and to mitigate risk.
It also includes things that are critical to the way you do things in your organisation, for example; customer service standards, reporting procedures or keyholder responsibilities – in essence things that have a ‘right way’ to do them.
You should think very hard about what really falls into this category – when designing learning content, I think most of us would expect SME’s to say that people need to know everything, and they’re also likely to think that everything needs to be managed; be prepared to really challenge that.
Every day is someone’s first day
Every day is someone’s first day, whether that’s their first day in the organisation, their first day in a new role or just the first time they do something.
It’s tempting to assume that everyone knows how to go about finding the information they need and where they should go to look for it. It’s easy to forget what it’s like to be a novice; someone who lacks the necessary knowledge, skills and organisational context.
This is a serious issue. If you look at attrition rates in newly recruited managers, by far the most commonly stated reason for leaving is some variation on “I didn’t know what to do, or how to do it”.
They want and need some structure; they want their learning to be managed.
There’s another problem too. Even if it is possible for someone to explore and discover these things themselves, it’s often much quicker if their learning is given some structure; if it is managed. Reducing the time to competency is a very reasonable business goal.
But remember what I said earlier – even if we make the case for managing the learning we shouldn’t assume that means tracking elearning modules or face to face workshop in an LMS. It could just as easily be other employees adding content to a wiki, or on blogs or whatever platform you want to use.
The business of learning
Then there’s the business side of learning. I’ve been an L&D manager, in traditional face to face delivery environments as well as technology driven ones, and a lot more of my time was spent on management than it was on learning delivery – and that’s as it should be. I had a responsibility for managing budgets, and suppliers and the management and allocation of resources. Just like managers in every other department.
To do that effectively I needed the right tools and the best possible data, otherwise how would I know where to focus my resources? That’s learning management.

Learning or Training?

I’ll leave you with one final thought. In this post I’ve used the word learning a few times, but is that actually what we’re talking about? Ten years ago the kind of jobs we did were called training, and we worked in a training department. Some time after that the name changed to learning and development, but has the job really changed? Indeed, has the business changed it’s expectations of us? I don’t think so.
In the debate all three of us agreed on one thing; only learners can manage learning.
The thing is, that much of the time when we say ‘learning’ what we mean is ‘training’ and that can, and in some cases should, be managed.

What’s Yours Is Mine – Copyright in the age of Social Media – Part Two

In part one we looked at the shift to sharing content and the potential challenges that may present to L&D.

Part 2 – Copyright and IP

Let’s just pause for a moment to consider what copyright and intellectual property are, because they’re both terms that are used frequently without being fully understood.

Intellectual property (IP) refers to a number of distinct types of creations of the mind for which a set of exclusive rights are recognised. Under intellectual property law, owners are granted certain exclusive rights to a variety of intangible assets, such as musical, literary, and artistic works; discoveries and inventions; and words, phrases, symbols, and designs. Common types of intellectual property rights include copyrights, trademarks, patents, industrial design rights and trade secrets in some jurisdictions.
Copyright – a legal concept, enacted by most governments, giving the creator of an original work exclusive rights to it, usually for a limited time. It gives the copyright holder the right to be credited for the work, to determine who may adapt the work to other forms, who may perform the work, who may financially benefit from it, and other, related rights. It is an intellectual property form (like the patent, the trademark, and the trade secret) applicable to any expressible form of an idea or information that is substantive and discrete.
The contemporary intent of copyright is to promote the creation of new works by giving authors control of and profit from them. Some jurisdictions require works to be registered to establish copyright, but most recognise copyright in any completed work, without formal registration.
Original source: Wikipedia

In short, the creator of a work is usually the copyright holder and in the UK and US a work is the copyright of its creator as soon as it is created, without any requirement to register it or to explicitly claim copyright, such as by adding a copyright symbol. That’s not say that it isn’t good practice to be clear when content is copyrighted and who the copyright holder is. Of course this situation is effected by legal arrangements, so you may want to check any contracts of employment or other agreements to find out whether the IP that you create as part of your work belongs to you or your employer.

Alternative Licensing Models

So if we accept that all of the content we produce is our own IP, and that for most of us in L&D that IP either directly or indirectly provides our income, how should we address the issue of sharing? How do we protect our IP when there’s a universal shift to sharing content.
We could certainly take a stance in which we fully enforce all of the rights granted to us through copyright,
aggressively pursue anyone who breaches them, and limiting the access and use of our content. This is a perfectly legitimate and understandable approach; after all if we’ve worked hard to produce something we should be rewarded for it. Most of us use this approach by default, perhaps because it’s the only one we know.
In some cases this approach may be quite straightforward. If you produce a piece of elearning content and then licence it to be used within a company, the technical constraints around hosting or delivery should make it easy to control. On the other hand, if you run a training course during which you give the attendees handouts, how do you stop them being circulated amongst their colleagues when they return to work?
If your content is online, or in any digital format, potentially it becomes much harder to manage.
One option is to consider an alternative licensing model, in which we retain our IP but at the same time make it possible for people to share it. There are a number of licences that allow us to do this, but probably the best known and most widely used is Creative Commons.
What is Creative Commons?
Creative Commons (CC) provides a set of free licences that offer a more flexible approach to copyright than the usual “all rights reserved” method. Instead they allow you to take a “some rights reserved” approach, meaning you as the creator of the work can decide which rights you will grant to the end user.
There are four key aspects to a CC licence:
Attribution – Every CC licence requires attribution, meaning that when CC licensed content is used the original creator must be acknowledged, in effect saying “I created this, give me credit for the work I did”.
Commercial Use or Not – In allowing other people to reuse your work, you can choose whether it can be used for any purpose or only for non-commercial activities.
Derivative Works – You can also choose whether people are only able to use your work in its original unaltered form, or if they can create derivative works based upon it.
Share Alike – If you do allow people to make something based on your work, you can also choose whether they must offer it on the same terms (i.e. a Creative Commons or compatible licence)?
As well as the many independent content creators using CC licences, there are some big names you will undoubtedly be familiar with, including Wikipedia, the White House and Al Jazeera. CC also provides the legal framework for the Open Educational Resources (OER) initiative under which some educational institutions are making their courseware freely available.

Potential Benefits

We’ve already established that our IP has value to us, so why would we want to give away some of the rights to it? If we are going to give up some rights we needs to offset that against the good it may do us, and beyond simple altruistic reasons, there are quite a few potential benefits.

It clarifies the copyright position of the content, offering a clear set of licence terms instead of relying on implied licence terms such as fair use or fair dealing.
It encourages and legitimises the sharing of content, without hiding the source. If we think back to our earlier example of workshop handouts, there is a good chance that the delegates will share them anyway. By explicitly granting permission to share them we would remove any motivation to hide their origin, thus allowing our name or brand to be associated with the resources as it spreads through the organisation.
Services such as Youtube, Flickr, and Picasa integrate Creative Commons search, as do search engines such as Google and Yahoo. This can be beneficial to anyone creating content where it’s hard to find original resources, such as photos on niche topics that you wouldn’t find in a typical stock image library. It’s beneficial to the creators of that content too, because it helps to ensure attribution.
Taking a pragmatic view, it also saves the time, effort and cost of chasing anyone who infringes your copyright. As an individual this would be very difficult to do, and even for organisations it can be a time consuming and costly process with no guarantee of success.

The ease with which such licences allow people to legally share your works is a significant benefit. The trend for sharing and the increase in online content places ever greater importance on our networks, the people in them and the content that flows through them. Anything that ensures we keep the credit for our work as it moves through these networks can only be a benefit.

Conclusion: To share or not?

Thriving in a networked world means using every available tool to spread our content and our reputation. Choosing to licence our work in a way that encourages sharing has the potential to give us visibility far beyond the reach of regular marketing channels. That’s not to say that everything we do needs to be licensed this way, but we should be open to forms of IP protection that are fit for purpose in a network economy.
As an example of the simple practical benefits of CC licensing, in this article I’ve used and remixed content from Wikipedia and the Creative Commons website, safe in the knowledge that I’m within the law.
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License too, so you are free to share and remix it yourself if you wish.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Note: It probably goes without saying, but this post isn’t legal advice and you shouldn’t make any big decisions about your intellectual property without consulting a suitably qualified professional.

What’s Yours Is Mine – Copyright in the age of Social Media – Part One

Part 1 – The Shift to Sharing

If there is one concept that sums up the way we use the internet today it, would be “sharing”. We share interesting articles and blog posts that we find. We use services like Foursquare to share our location and activity. We post our presentations on Slideshare, our videos on YouTube, our photos on Flickr. We share reviews on everything from book purchases to holidays. Some of this we do from our desktops, but ever more commonly we’re instantly sharing content from the same mobile device on which it was just created, irrespective of location.
Our online world is expanding at a rate that’s hard to grasp. There was more data transmitted across the internet in 2010 than in all the previous years combined. According to Intel, the number of internet connected devices is expected to grow from an already staggering 4 billion today, to 15 billion in 2015 and 50 billion in 2020.
Nearly everywhere we go on the internet, content publishers are actively encouraging us to spread the word. They add buttons that make it a one click activity for us to share their content with our own social graph; utilising our relationships with other individuals to promote their product.
There is also the human element to consider. I don’t subscribe to ideas that divide the population into digital natives and digital immigrants, but we have to recognise that the people currently reaching adulthood are younger than the web. They don’t remember a time when sharing content was harder than tapping a button.
So we can be pretty sure that the amount of content will grow, and the sharing will continue.

What Does That Mean to L&D?

So what does that mean to those of us in the world of learning, development and training? Potentially, quite a lot. Much of the L&D industry is based on the sale of intellectual property (IP), whether that’s content or advice. No wonder then, that so many people in our industry work so hard to extract as much value as possible by controlling their IP.
Not everybody is effected in the same way, but if you’ve built a business model based on the sale of training materials, this shift to a culture of sharing is a real challenge. Let me give you an example.
I recently spent time with a group of people from some of the biggest software vendors on the planet, and they were responsible for the sale and delivery of training to the users of their products. Anyone that’s worked in a large organisation will be familiar with their model; they supply their software at very low cost, sometimes at no cost at all, and the bulk of their revenue comes from selling a range of related services (which of course includes training).
The trouble is that their clients are creating and sharing their own learning content. They’re not producing courses, they’re mostly creating practical “how to” material in all sorts of formats from short videos, to blog posts to pdf documents, and they’re not just using it internally, it’s being shared on the internet too. You only have to do a quick search on YouTube or any other video hosting site to find examples of this.
You may not be effected to the same extent, but if you’re in the learning or training business, you will have some form of IP that you need to manage; consultants sell their expertise, training providers and elearning vendors sell course content, product vendors sell supporting materials. Even internal L&D departments are likely to produce content in which they own the IP.
In part two we will consider intellectual property, copyright and alternative licensing models.

Getting Started With Social Media and Learning

We’re always keen to include more useful giveaways, and today we’ve added an articles page to the resources section of the site.
To kick things off we’ve added a series of three articles on getting started with social media and learning, which were originally published in Inside Learning Technologies magazine between November 2010 and January 2011. After a basic introduction to what social media is and how it can be used for learning, we move on to the all important step of creating a business case before exploring how social can be added to a broader blend of learning activities.
You can download the articles here.

Trivantis announces Snap! by Lectora

Today the Lectora user Conference began in the US, and it brings with it a couple of firsts.
For a start, the event (or at least parts of it) are being streamed live online. This is a trend we’re witnessing with many organisations and events, and it’s something we hope to see more of. Why limit exposure to your product to just those who can make it to the event, when you can share it live, globally? They’re also encouraging the back channel conversations on Twitter.
Of the announcements made by CEO and Chairman Charles Beech, the one that really grabbed my attention was the launch of Snap! by Lectora. This is a PowerPoint plugin that they are positioning as a competitor to Adobe’s Presenter and Articulate’s Studio as the entry point for anyone wanting to get started in elearning development.
Without a doubt, it’s most interesting feature is it’s price, just $99 compared to the $500-$999 you’d pay for it’s targeted competitors.
Will it really prove to be a competitor? That remains to be seen, but we’ll be doing a review just as soon as we get the demo installed.

Virtual Meetings With Slideshare

Most people will be familiar with the big web conferencing providers, but there is an increasing number of smaller, simpler services that let you set up instant meetings with the minimum of fuss. The latest entrant to this market is slideshare with their new Zipcast offering.

This isn’t an in depth review, and in fairness the tool is so simple it probably doesn’t need it.

What did I like?

It really is as simple as they say; from any presentation on slideshare (yours, or anyone else’s) simply click on the Zipcast link to log in and start your meeting
There’s no requirement to install anything (assuming you have the Flash plug in)
In the brief testing that I did this morning, there was no lag in updating the slides
Video quality was acceptable
The overall functionality is most of what you need for a simple presentation
Guests can log in with their slideshare or Facebook account

What was I less sure about?

The free version doesn’t provide audio (a conference call service is available with a premium plan). This is an understandable limitation, but if I was going to fire up Skype for audio, I could just share my presentation that way.
As I have accounts with the bigger services, I would tend to use them when at my desktop. This kind of simple ad-hoc meeting is something I’m more likely to do on the move, but the problem is these days I may only have my iPad with me, and the lack of Flash means this is a no go

Despite having a couple of criticisms, I think this is a really promising start. It’s already a very usable solution, particularly if you already have presentations stored on slideshare.

The end of free?

The new decade has only just started and already we’re seeing significant changes in the virtual meeting/classroom market.

Yugma

First of all Yugma changed their terms and conditions to reduce the service offered on their free accounts. Previously the free account allowed you to host unlimited meetings for up to 20 people, albeit without some of the features of the paid for version. Now you get access to all of the features of the paid version, but meetings are limited to three participants and 15 minutes.
In effect, the free version has been replaced by a limited trial.
I’m not sure of the logic in this move when the Webex Meet and Elluminate vRoom services currently offer much more for free.

DimDim

This morning I received and email from DimDim to announce that the company has been taken over by Salesforce.com. They are no longer accepting new registrations, although existing accounts will remain active until they expire. DimDim as a service will no longer exist as Salesforce made the acquisition to add real time collaboration features to their Chatter platform.
DimDim was unique in offering an open source version of their software, which will remain available on Sourceforge, although Salesforce have already stated that they will no longer be contributing to its development. The code available is very out of date, and only time will tell if there is enough interest in the open source version for it to survive.

The end of free?

It doesn’t surprise me to see this happening, as there are so few companies that seem able to make a commercial success of free B2B services. The likes of Google can only offer so many free consumer services because the data it produces feeds the commercial services they offer.
As already mentioned, there are still some free services still available, but there’s no guarantee they’ll remain that way. Webex Meet is described as ‘free while in beta’ which gives them scope to charge as soon as that beta is over, should they so wish. Elluminate’s vRooms are part of the free LearnCentral offer, which is described as ‘sponsored by Elluminate’; will they continue that sponsorship indefinitely?. On the plus side, it has seen continued development since the merger with BlackBoard.
What do you think? Will 2011 see a continued shift away from free services? Did you rely on these services, and if so what effect has it had on you?

Seasonal tips…

In case you haven’t already seen it, I thought I’d mention that the eLearning Network is running a virtual advent calendar on tips relating to online learning. Mine was published today and is a little advice on preparing for a virtual online session. You can read it here.
Clive’s post on writing a voiceover script was published yesterday.

Cisco Launches Home Telepresence

As rumoured here a couple of weeks ago, Cisco have launched their home telepresence in the US. Named umi, it offers full HD 1080p video calling through your TV.
This could be an interesting development, because home use of this kind of technology can only help drive corporate adoption.
To use it you need a umi box, camera and remote which will set you back $599.00, as well as a subscription of $24.99 per month which gets you unlimited calls. You’ll also need an HDTV to plug everything into, as well as a broadband connection.
It’s greatest plus point as I see it, is the decision to centre it around the existing TV, rather than creating an entirely separate device. There isn’t a great deal of information on the website, but it certainly looks like it should be fairly simple to operate judging by how few buttons there are on the remote.
Of course the obvious down side is that you can only connect to someone else who has umi, and it may be some time before it gets past the early adopter audience.
Oh, and before anyone in the UK gets too excited, it could be that the broadband requirements would be a stumbling block if Cisco are considering a roll out here. It requires an upload speed of 1.5Mbps for 720p and 3.5Mbps for 1080p. Just in case that wasn’t clear that’s the upload speed. I’m using a 24Mbps service, which gives me an actual 16Mbps download speed but I’m lucky if I can get an upload speed of 1Mpbs (according to Cisco’s test, I managed 0.933Mbps).

The Elearning Debate 2010

For the second year running, elearning developers Epic hosted The Elearning Debate at the historic Oxford Union. I was pleased to be able to attend, although this year I was without my Onlignment colleagues who were both committed elsewhere.
This year’s motion was:

This house believes that technology-based informal learning is more style than substance.

Speaking for the motion were Dr. Allison Rossett, Nancy Lewis and Mark Doughty, and arguing against the motion were Professor William H. Dutton, Jay Cross and David Wilson. The debate was chaired by Rory Cellan-Jones, the BBC’s technology correspondent.
The arguments
Allison Rossett (for) opened the debate by stating that they were not there to argue against informal learning per se, but rather to integrate the informal with the formal. She argued that formal training is the better option for training doctors, pilots and others whose roles dealt with public safety. Research was quoted to support her argument that discovery based learning isn’t reliable; novices need to be shown what to do and how to do it. To attain expertise requires structure, guidance and repeated practice and according to Rossett this can only be achieved in a formal environment.
William Hutton (against) didn’t speak with the same confidence and self assuredness as Rossett, but made an argument that focussed on the impact of the internet not just on learning but everything that we do. You cannot overestimate its importance as a source of information. Research undertaken by Hutton and his colleagues has shown that people trust the internet more than they trust traditional media outlets, and he argues that we should be asking how much students trust their lecturers.
Nancy Lewis (for) focussed her argument on the lack of structures and frameworks to support informal learning. It was her contention that as learning and education professionals we set high standards of excellence for ourselves, and that similar standards must be set for informal learning. Until we have agreement on what informal learning is (a common set of templates as she described it) and formal proof of its impact, it remained more style than substance.
Jay Cross (against) asked to think about how we learnt to walk and talk; was it through formal education or an informal approach? He believes that informal and formal already co-exist, and always have done, and that it’s only within formal teaching environments that any distinction is made. In a world in which the pace of change continues to accelerate, formal learning simply can’t keep up and people are getting the information they need from informal sources. He got the biggest laugh of the day by reading out a quote about the effectiveness of informal learning – by non other than Allison Rossett.
The debate was then opened up to the floor. There was noticeably less contribution than last year, and a real struggle to find anyone to speak for the motion.
Mark Doughty (for) asked the question ‘when did technology last make a difference to the bottom line?’ and then argued that it hadn’t, at least not for a long time. Through an anecdote about Apollo 13 flight director Gene Kranz, he argued that when ‘failure is not an option’ only formal learning will do.
David Wilson (against) like last year, was left to remind us what the motion was (or more accurately what it wasn’t). It’s not an argument about whether technology supported learning has value. He argued that the question of substance over style was only being asked by L&D, whereas for worked who are using these tools every day there’s no question that it has substance. He challenged the need for L&D to put labels on things; informal learning is part of work and doesn’t need an extra layer added to it by L&D. He closed by stating that if we view informal learning as something to be controlled by L&D we’re on the wrong path.
In the summing up Rossett argued that we need guard rails around our learning and only formality provides that, while Hutton said we should embrace the informal and that institutions have nothing to fear from networked learners.
The result:

The Ayes to the right 54, the Noes to the left 259

It probably comes as no surprise that I was with the Noes.
Much of the conversation before we went into the debating chamber was that those speaking for the motion had something of a poisoned chalice, and it was hard to see how they could possibly win. It’s easy for me to say of course, but I did think that those speaking for the motion fell very quickly into the trap of arguing for formal learning despite that not being what the debate was about.
There was some lively backchannel debate taking place on Twitter using the #elearningdebate hashtag, and Epic did a great job of pushing out audio clips on AudioBoo throughout the debate. The only additional thing that I would like to see next year is live video streaming for those not there in person.
Epic should be congratulated for organising a very entertaining and enjoyable event, that got positive feedback from everyone I spoke to afterwards. The only part that didn’t really hit the mark was ‘Magic Seth’ who demonstrated why even magicians shouldn’t rely on technology in live events.
The debate continues on the Elearning Debate website where you can view videos and photos, as well as adding your comments and casting your vote.