Announces the new illustrated version of the Live Online Learning e-book.
We’ve updated our free Live Online Learning e-book with scores of illustrations, photos and screen shots to make the key points even clearer.
To download your copy, click here.
Ten commandments of social media.
Robb Clarke has posted these excellent 10 Commandments of Social Media :
A look at the webinar series run by the Learning and Skills Group.
Those looking for a good model to follow when it comes to running webinars could do worse than to look in on the series of events run by the Learning and Skills Group (LSG). Although fashioned primarily around the needs of attendees at the Learning Technologies conference, all of the webinars are actually available freely to all comers. They must be doing something right because they’ve been running now for many years and attract audiences in the hundreds. So, what do they do well:
All of the partners in Onlignment have presented at LSG webinars. Peek back through the archive and you’ll find Phil Green talking about Building e-learning for classroom trainers and Barry Sampson on Social media behind the firewall – the paranoid organisation. My own webinar, held this morning, on bridging the e-learning skills gap, will be available shortly.
News of Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro 7.5
Adobe has announced version 7.5 of their Acrobat Connect Pro Flash-based web conferencing service.
The new version will integrate with any audio conferencing provider, allowing organisations to leverage existing investments. Telephone audio can be recorded along with a web conference and streamed to VoIP-only meeting participants. Advanced integrated audio teleconferencing capabilities include call controls, participant management and synchronised recording.
Increased webinar capacity will enable users to engage up to 80,000 participants in high-impact sessions that can incorporate rich media demonstrations, live and recorded video and interactivity.
Additionally, work is currently underway on the Acrobat Connect Pro Mobile application, which will enable meeting participation from mobile devices. The first devices that Adobe is working to enable are the Apple iPhone and iPod touch. And I thought Apple didn’t support Flash!
Argues the case that it is pointless training l&d professionals to create fully self-contained online courses, a job best left to specialists. However, l&d professionals do need to know how to create simpler forms of digital learning content.
I am becoming increasingly aware of the the need to make clear a distinction between the broad concept of digital learning content, in all its many varieties, and the much narrower idea of interactive tutorials of the traditional CBT (computer-based training) variety.
In the former category I’d put the following:
I’d say that every l&d professional should have at least a basic level of competence in the design and development of digital learning content, at least those forms of content most relevant to the learning domain for which they are responsible. This is no more than a natural evolution from their traditional responsibility for the production of PowerPoint slides and handouts which support most classroom events.
What this is not saying is that l&d professionals need to be able to create interactive self-study courses which completely replace their face-to-face predecessors. While some trainers will have the aptitudes and interests which will help them to excel in this area, in most cases this will remain a job for specialists. It is much, much harder to create a set of fully self-contained instructional materials than it is to develop the components – the explanations, the examples, the demonstrations, the practice exercises, the assessments.
Unfortunately, most attempts to train l&d professionals in the design and development of digital learning materials begin and ends with the assumption that the end result will be a self-contained tutorial. Because it is typical to try and achieve this in a couple of days with only a minimal amount of practice, these interventions are very unlikely to lead to any useful level of competence and will most likely only reinforce the idea that this is a job to be put out to full-time instructional designers.
What is much more feasible and much more useful is to concentrate on far simpler forms of content:
The way I see it, the idea of rapid e-learning needs to work at two distinct levels:
What’s needed is more training and encouragement to support the latter, rather than a futile attempt to develop advanced levels of instructional design expertise across broad swathes of the l&d profession.
back channel, Twitter
One of the great benefits of using web conferencing as a conference presentation tool is the way that the text chat panel can be used as a back channel to allow participants to share comments, queries, links and so on, while the presentation is taking place. Rather than acting as a distraction, the back channel provides added value to participants.
Increasingly we’re seeing facilities provided to allow participants at face-t0-face conferences to enjoy the same benefits. There’s Twitter of course, but for those without Twitter accounts, or who get tired of entering hash tags to identify the meeting they’re attending, there are new forms of instant chat rooms which allow a back channel to be set up within seconds. I’ve just tried two:
For maximum benefit, as a presenter you should have equal access to the channel, which takes some organising. See Olivia Mitchell’s How to Present While People Are Twittering.
The latest figures from Elluminate, which specialises in supplying web conferencing solutions to the education market, demonstrate just how significantly this market is growing:
“Bookings for the third quarter of 2009 grew over 60 percent year-to-year, fueled by significant customer renewals and upgrades.”
“Elluminate is experiencing exponential growth in adoption and usage with more than 625 million minutes of live, online instruction served annually.”
“During the third quarter, Elluminate welcomed over 270 new customers.”
So why this sudden flurry of activity? Well, the economy might have something to do with it: “Much of this growth is fueled by the use of Elluminate web conferencing solutions to address tightened operational and travel budgets.”
Expect to see similar growth in the corporate sector.
Explores Digitell’s 3D virtual conference room.
Thanks to Eliane Alhadeff from the Future-making Serious Games blog for bringing Digitell’s VirtualU to my attention. According to Elaine, “VirtualU provides an immersive, interactive, 3-dimensional experience that replicates its real-life counterpart in a realistic online environment. If you are currently running webinars, tele-seminars, or live educational sessions, VirtualU can easily transition your event into Digitell’s virtual platform, allowing you to convey your message in a highly-effective format while increasing your ability to interact with attendees through text chat, voice over IP or integrated social media.”
Elaine suggests this just might represent the future of conferencing. Obviously only time will tell. The issue for me is whether the 3D environment provides a more compelling experience than you can obtain from simple 2D web conferencing. The name ‘Digitell’ isn’t a promising start, suggesting a rather one-way experience, although the product certainly supports a highly interactive format.
Much more info and more pics in Digitell’s Serious Games: The Future Of Conferencing.
IT tends to make the decision on web conferencing systems. L&D should try to ensure they get in the loop.
From discussions I’ve had with people in learning and development over the past year, it seems to me to have been quite a rarity for l&d to have taken the initiative when it comes to the use of web conferencing in their organisations. I know that virtual classrooms are well established in the US and that some 10% of formal training is carried out this way, but very few l&d people that I’ve encountered in Europe were aware of the possibilities until either (1) they were invited to a webinar and were brave enough to participate, or (2) their organisations started to use web conferencing to run virtual meetings.
The decision to use web conferencing is most likely to have been made by the IT department, quite possibly as part of a broader strategy for online collaboration. The drivers will almost certainly have been the potential for efficencies in terms of time and cost. It’s quite possible that, when they made the purchasing decision, the IT people had no idea that the software would have implications for l&d or, if they did, they neglected to tell anyone. It is unlikely that they considered the additional functionality that would be needed to support l&d activities, not least integration with learning management systems and tools such as breakout rooms and object-oriented whiteboards.
It’s becoming increasingly important for senior l&d people to form a close relationship with IT, because more and more of the decisions about the infrastucture that supports learning also have to take into account the application for more general communications within the organisation. Obvious examples are wikis, blogs, podcasting and social networks, none of which are likely to be regarded primarily as l&d technologies, but all definitely of interest when the l&d strategy is viewed holistically.
Describes how an electronic whiteboard can be used to support brainstorming sessions in an online meeting.
I’ve been giving some thought to how you could undertake an effective brainstorming exercise in an online meeting. I was distracted for a while by a distant memory that the word ‘brainstorming’ had been deemed offensive to epileptics and that we should now use the term ‘thought showers’ instead, but thankfully it seems that this whole idea has been rejected – see TrainingZone. Anyway, a brainstorming session will usually include these steps:
The electronic whiteboard is the obvious tool to use for this process. If you have an object-orientated whiteboard tool, which allows contributions to be deleted or moved around once they have been pasted onto the whiteboard, then this is ideal: simply summarise the problem at the top of a blank screen and allow participants to type away; when they’re done, you’ll be able to work together to remove the least feasible options and then place the best contenders in order.
Without an object-orientated tool (and Webex might be the market leader but it still doesn’t have an object-oriented whiteboard), you could either divide up the whiteboard so each participant has their own space, or act as scribe for contributions received through audio or the chat facility. You still can’t drag and drop the various contributions around to place them in order, but you can use the annotation tools to cross out the least feasible options and mark the best contenders. A little less elegant but should do the job.
