The advance of social media
Barry Sampson

Anyone even vaguely connected with technology, in learning or otherwise, can’t have helped but notice the growing interest in social media tools and technologies. In fact you don’t even need to be working with technology to see this, when every day another celebrity is on TV talking about Twitter. Of course, celebrity endorsement is not a valid indicator that the technology is good or relevant to L&D, but it’s a clear indication that we should be paying attention. Social media has gone mainstream, and choosing to ignore it is a risky strategy. As Jack Welch said when he was CEO at General Electric, “if the rate of change inside an institution is less than the rate of change outside, the end is in sight.”

Whilst it’s not without its challenges, we’re actually being presented with a huge opportunity. Previous learning technology tools, such as e-learning and LMSs, required us to first educate our learners as to how they work. In this case, however, our audience is already using many of the tools and techniques available to us.

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Liberté, égalité, fraternité
Angus Main

A rather grand title for an Advance article I hear you say. However, I believe we’re covering a grand topic – accessibility – which has two things in common with the cries heard in 1789. Firstly, it promises to free our content, making it accessible to all. Secondly, the term has different meanings to many people and is implemented in various ways.

The title of the article is where the fancy stuff ends. This article is a practical introduction to accessibility for e-learning projects. It’s designed to help developers, designers and project managers understand the key issues involved and the practical steps that they can take to make their content easier to use, easier to understand and more engaging. Drawing on many years of experience, the article also features the thoughts of the only team to have won the e-Learning Age award for ‘Care Taken to Achieve Inclusivity in an e-Learning Programme’.

So, why worry about accessibility?

Recent research conducted by CSR Europe indicates that as many as 20 per cent of people have a disability that may interfere with the use of a computer for educational purposes…

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Delivering global e-learning programmes
Grahame Stehle

As the benefi ts of e-learning become more widely appreciated, some international organisations nevertheless remain wary of rolling out global e-learning solutions, due to concerns about the effort and expenditure required and fears of training content becoming ‘lost in translation’. If it is carried out appropriately, however, global e-learning offers an unbeatable, cost-effective solution for large multinational companies.

Training a workforce that is united by brand but dispersed across all geographical and cultural corners of the world requires a level of consistency that makes classroom training an unviable option. Aside from the logistical diffi culties of subject matter experts (SMEs) personally delivering their messages to a global mass of employees, it is unrealistic to assume that they will have mastered twenty languages along with their specialist subject matter.

This is where e-learning comes into its own, as a vehicle by which the messages of SMEs can reach the desired audience at an appropriate and convenient time for each individual employee. In addition, e-learning courses also distil SMEs’ knowledge into a form which can be reasonably easily altered to suit a particular purpose or context – through translation into different languages…

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Recession proof your learning provision
Laura Overton, MD Towards Maturity

‘These are harsh times and right now most businesses are focused on survival. So why bother with skills training?’ This is the challenge in the Alliance of Sector Skills Council’s latest ad campaign. And it is a good question to think about. Skills are high on the government agenda at the moment – the high profile focus on train to gain, apprenticeships and diplomas on poster boards and the television can’t be missed. But are skills uppermost in the thoughts of business leaders? It is clear that their focus is now on business efficiency; each cost item has to pull its weight. So what can we do to ensure that learning is adding value?

Towards Maturity has just released Driving Business Benefits – a new suite of reports resulting from research with 300 organisations to find out how learning and development professionals are adjusting to business demands for delivering more with less.

The study is the third in a research series over the past four years looking at trends in the use of learning technologies1 in the workplace. We now have data on the experiences of over 700 organisations that have invested in learning technologies in the workplace. Over the years we have been keen to look beyond the hype to understand why some organisations are delivering…

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Writing for the reader: banishing the business speak and energising your e-learning
Stephanie Dedhar

Recently I wrote a post for the Spicy Learning Blog about banishing business speak from e-learning.1 I began the piece with a quote: ‘If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book.’2 Don’t recognise it? If you’re not either of primary school age or the parent of someone who is, that’s hardly surprising. This particular line is the one that opens Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events and I think you’d be forgiven for questioning the wisdom of choosing these as the opening lines of your book. For those of you unfamiliar with Mr Snicket, he – along with the Baudelaire orphans and the ruthless, unscrupulous Count Olaf – has been the biggest thing to hit children’s bookshelves since Harry Potter.

Why is this? It might be the tales of murderous money-grabbers and absurd adventures that keep the kids entertained, but parents up and down the country have become just as devoted fans because of Lemony’s ability to tap into how people think. Someone tells you not to blink, you blink. Someone warns you not to press the flashing red button, you want to press it…

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Twenty-first-century e-learning: are the dreams still to come true?
Ian Clive Holtham

There has been a huge growth in the use of technology as part of learning, especially in the last decade. But there is no guarantee that it will actually improve learning itself. Indeed there continue to be examples where the opposite is the case; I recently saw a piece of health and safety training where the technology was so badly implemented that quite honestly reading a booklet and doing some multiple choice tests at the end would have been far more effective.

e-Learning is the application of digital technology to learning. There is a huge literature on the take-up of digital technology, of technology adoption, and much of this is simply ignored when it comes to the design of e-learning. It has been understood since the pioneering work of the Tavistock Institute in the 1940s that the mere physical implementation of technology does not guarantee business success. The Tavistock socio-technical systems model identifies two further interacting dimensions in addition to technology and task (that is, business success). These are structure and people. Unless structure and people are considered alongside technology, it will only be by chance that technology investment leads to business success.

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The impact of feedback
Ian Lee-Emery

With businesses under pressure and budgets even more so, deciding who to develop and progress has never been more challenging, more important or under such financial scrutiny. HR departments are responsible for delivering focussed and accountable training programmes, creating up-to-date succession plans and managing talent pools, and are increasingly being asked to deliver more and to do so more quickly and for less money.

Feedback is a very powerful and surprisingly cost effective means to assess and develop individuals, teams and the business as a whole. Cost effective ‘talent’ tools are now available for organisations of all sizes and the wider benefits can be accrued without the need for full-blown enterprise systems. Used effectively, these tools allow employees to receive structured and meaningful feedback on their performance, construct focussed training plans and work experience opportunities and set realistic career aspirations. For the organisation, collating results can help inform the overall skills development plan, training and succession plans. This article examines the role and contribution that feedback can make to the development of both individual and organisational capability.

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e-Learning is not an event, it’s a stage on a journey.
Phil Green

We often speak of voyages of discovery, and indeed it is not hard to draw parallels between the traveller and the learner.

Some people travel for business or necessity; others for escape, discovery or pleasure. Some delight in mystery tours, even though they run the risk of covering old ground; for others it is the very familiarity of old ground that holds the attraction. Some depend upon a travel agent to help guide their choice of destination and plan for the richest experience of sights and sounds upon the way; others make do with a map or guide and a phrase book to overcome cultural and language barriers at more exotic destinations.

Some check itineraries and tickets, making certain their passports are valid; others go ill-prepared, lose their way or check in too soon and suffer a long and frustrating delay; yet others arrive so late that they run the risk of missing their plane. Some carry too much baggage and so find it hard to maintain a brisk pace; others pack too little and soon feel the lack of some essential. Indeed, not all journeys are problem-free. Even the best-prepared traveller can suffer delays or discomfort caused by external and unpredictable factors – a late train, a fellow…

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Vive la Révolution: e-Learning 2.0
Laura Ross

If you haven’t heard of e-Learning 2.0 yet, you soon will. The e-learning industry is part of a wider social and cultural revolution that is fast determining the way we access, share and create information. That revolution has its origin in the term Web 2.0.

Web 2.0 started as just a whisper among media folk back in 2004, but now it is a cry of deafening proportions in almost every technology-based industry. Everyone is talking about it, from the most junior programmer to the biggest movers and shakers in software development. And it isn’t a technological revolution that has brought this about, but a social one.

So the term itself is a little misleading – there’s no real update as such to the World Wide Web, but rather in the ways in which people are using it. Of course, there have been advances and improvements to software, but that is almost incidental to a wider cultural change. Anyone, not just software developers, can now make their mark on websites.

Originally, the web used one-directional communication similar to that used by other media…

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The Point-of-Need: where effective learning really matters
Dr Brian Sutton
Director of Learning for QA-IQ

In a previous paper, “The Sage of Paradox”, I argued that as learning professionals we need to stop thinking of learning as an event that is organised by one set of people and imposed upon another, regardless of whether that event takes place in a classroom or via the medium of e-learning. Learning is a natural consequence of living and working: work has always involved problem solving, judgement, conflict resolution and choice – these are all learning opportunities. We can experience them and move on regardless or we can reflect upon them within the context of our environment and our core principles and, as a result, produce new insights that move us forward.

In this article I intend to take a closer look at how we can increase the impact of learning by interleaving it more closely with the world of work.

To make a difference with our learning initiatives we should think less about content and more about environment.

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The Point-of-Need: where effective learning really matters
Charles Jennings
Global Head of Learning, Reuters

Reuters is the world’s largest multimedia information company, publishing more than 8 million words in 18 languages every day and maintaining more than 200 million data records used by the world’s financial industry. This financial data is updated 8,000 times a second, increasing to 23,000 times a second at peak times. The volume and change rate of this data is such that the half-life of the information used by financial professionals to do their jobs is measured in milliseconds. So Reuters is one company that knows better than most how rapidly the nature of information and how we use it is changing.

Information, and the knowledge, skills, capability and innovation that are derived from it, powers the world’s economic engines and forms the fundamental particles of every business, every government agency and every economic entity, whatever their nature. What’s more, information is not in short supply. We live our lives in a world awash with it. In fact, the problem that the twenty-first century worker faces every day is not one of a lack of information, but one of having the right information at the right time.

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Rapid e-Learning : The Emperor’s New Clothes?
Hanif Sazen

This year’s catchphrase is undoubtedly rapid e-learning. And, it seems, the faster the better. Everywhere you look, gurus pop up to tell you about the latest process and newest tools, all designed to help you to build e-learning at the speed of light.

The idea of rapid e-learning is that if you can put the development tools in the hands of the Subject Matter Expert, you can save yourself time and money. The tools are in two camps – the PowerPoint generators and the authoring tools.

The generators take content developed in PowerPoint and allow you to generate Flash based courses. Audio, video, animations, quizzes and learning games can all be included. Many of these tools come with pre-built components such as multiple choice quizzes, drag-and-drop interactions and so on. They usually provide the code to allow you to integrate your e-learning with your SCORM compliant Learning Management System. The generators, however, can be limited in what you can do beyond the pre-defined components and can restrict your flexibility when it comes to the look and feel. These tools rarely allow you to write your own code in order to extend their functionality.

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Interactions pose a dilemma to all instructional designers. While they can be fun, visually exciting and effective, they can also require a lot of development and be difficult to create.

It’s worth taking the time to get your approach to interactions right because they’re key to making e-learning effective. Think about it… do you remember how to cook by reading the recipe or by having a go at cooking it?

Here are our top five tips for creating effective interactions…

1. Make them relevant
Interactions should mirror the realities of the job. If you’re creating a financial management course, why not get the learner to solve a fictional financial dilemma? This gives them an opportunity to safely make mistakes without looking stupid or incurring consequences. You can also surprise the learner by following up on an interaction – demonstrate the consequences of the action they took and those they didn’t. Focus on what learners need to DO not just what they need to KNOW!

2. Test, don’t just tell
Just like in the classroom most people prefer to be involved in something active rather than a passive experience – learning doesn’t occur passively. Test the learner when introducing a new topic and make the learner justify their answers. Don’t just ask the learner to click, you should also ask them to think. One of our favourite testing interactions is the myth or reality screen. You can surprise the learner and dispel misconceptions by including false statements and delivering the true facts in the feedback.

3. Be creative… and savvy
It’s possible to make interactions carry a visual punch by making small changes to traditional and familiar templates. Why not animate hotspots, or use images in the place of boxes? Get to know your templates – you may be able to use an existing one – and find out what your developers can achieve in a set amount of hours.

4. Follow the Goldilocks example
Each learner is different, so getting the degree of difficulty right can be a challenge. We try to follow the Goldilocks example: if it’s too easy, people will be bored… If it’s an impossible task, people won’t try… success should be possible but not guaranteed! Double negatives and options that are very similar can make interactions too difficult. Similarly, the longest answer being the correct one can make testing too easy.

5. Know when not to use an interaction
Think – does an interaction really add value? Or are you adding an interaction for the sake of it? Some parts of a client’s content may seem more suited to interactions than others, and this is fine. However, try to make sure your interactions are fairly distributed and test the learner on the key learning objectives.