Private sector ears pricked up when they heard that Moodle was adaptable, easy-to-use and above all, open source. That means no license fees and an army of enthusiastic volunteers to do your development for you. Every day Moodle grows new functionality.

But many still have reservations, and I can understand why. When I bought my first laptop, much like IT purchasing managers everywhere I trembled at the thought of paying a license fee for the operating system. And so it was that Tux, the Linux Penguin, beckoned to me with his bright, booming eyes. Linux was in many ways beautiful: free, fast and totally immune to viruses. But as the months rolled on I sensed I was abusing my Penguin.

Basic functionality like downloading updates and plug-ins and connecting to different devices isn’t easy with Linux for a novice (this was long before I had any programming know-how). It was like I’d never seen a Penguin before and I was keeping it alive by cramming it into a humid reptile breeding box and feeding it cheese slices all day.

My Penguin stopped working properly. I turned to the Linux community of experts for help and found more impenetrable programming-speak and the assumption of proficiency. The open source party was rocking, but there were no invites for average users.

Things are very different now. The joy of Moodle for enterprises is not only that there is no license fee, but that learning professionals don’t need to be IT professionals to create a virtual learning environment that looks and feels exciting.

You want a news feed to deliver live headlines about your company? Easy – just add an RSS block and paste in the link. You want videos of all shapes and sizes sprouting from customisable players? Child’s play – Moodle has a multimedia plug-in filter that can turn any link into whatever media you want.

SCORM assessments, progress tracking, certificates? Click-and-drag page design? Self congratulatory webinars? Sure! And here’s the best part. You know that guy on the IT helpdesk who sneers at you and makes you feel two inches tall every time you spill coffee on your keyboard? Forget about him, Moodle just wants you. The dead Penguin is as far from my mind as it has ever been.

Moodle in its standard form may be very easy to use, but on the other hand, you can’t just download Moodle all shiny and ready to go. It has its quirks and corners (and a few gaps to fall into). Like any potent and open sourced thing, an enterprise Moodle that’s fit for purpose needs to be brought into the world with care and shepherded well.

It must also be disciplined. The interface is actually so easy to use that if you aren’t careful you can have a blooming, uncontrolled social jungle of blogs, chats and forums before you know it – and find the rest of the internet pouring into your Moodle in places where it isn’t always welcome.

Just like Linux and the Linux community of experts, the success of Moodle is based on a set of open-source assumptions that need to be managed and modified for its successful deployment as an enterprise-wide VLE. At Saffron we’re a part of the Moodle movement, but we understand that successful companies don’t march with the herd.

The recession and rise in unemployment can actually be a good time for recruitment consultancies, which are experiencing a growth in demand for their services in a flooded market. However, companies face being left behind unless they can meet the training challenges created by different market conditions. To succeed, recruiters across the whole organisation need to improve their ability to pick and prepare the best candidates and win new business.

When Recruitment Juice was faced with the task of creating an e-learning platform to deliver this training for a major recruitment consultancy they turned to Saffron Interactive’s LMS in-a-box. The client required a customised Learning Management System which would not only deliver training videos but also track learner progress with bespoke quizzes and assessments, and allow the client to upload their own training material.

Matt Trott, Director and Co-founder of Recruitment Juice, explains: “Building an e-learning platform with this kind of capability and rolling it out enterprise-wide for a major client within tight budget restraints is no mean feat. Out of the twelve suppliers I researched Saffron won hands down, and when a friend also recommended Saffron my mind was made up.”

Saffron’s solution is based on Moodle, an open-source platform. Moodle is one of the most widely used Learning Management Systems in the world and is proven to be effective with large organisations such as The Open University, but for a specialist project like this one finding the right vendor is crucial for success.

Saffron already provides specialist e-learning solutions for high-profile, now the Saffron team is working closely with Recruitment Juice to build and launch the platform and will provide ongoing advice and technical support as the system evolves to suit the client’s needs.

Contact us for more information or a demonstration of Saffron’s Moodle-in-a-box

About Recruitment Juice

“The World’s freshest approach to recruitment training”

Recruitment Juice pioneers innovative and ground-breaking DVD training programmes for recruiters worldwide. Revolutionising the way recruiters learn by engaging, educating, and inspiring, Recruitment Juice delivers tangible and significant results to business.

The company aims to bring about change by influencing attitude, increasing knowledge and developing skills. Changes for clients that mean a permanent shift in behaviour and consistent improvements in performance.

Recruitment Juice was awarded a Finalist Certificate at The New York Film Festival 2009 – Professional Education category.

For more information, please visit Recruitment Juice or call 08700 677 567

The workshop, designed to help charity and community organisations overcome the challenges they face with social media, offered delegates the chance to gain advice from social media specialists including professional blogger Sam Coates from the Conservative Party and Gerard Maguire, an experienced director in British TV and senior lecturer of BA TV Production at the College of Westminster.
With over 40 participants from community organisations, communication and broadcasting companies, there was plenty to discuss and learn. Kim and Joanna focused their presentation on how best to use Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to raise charities’ profiles while Amiera Sawas from the reputation management consultancy ReputationInc shared her ideas on the principles of social media.

Mark Hutcheon, Director at ReputationInc who led the workshop, says: “We really enjoyed being a part of the workshop and interacting with different professionals. The discussions were lively and productive and so many great ideas were contributed by the group. We learned a lot ourselves and will definitely make sure we keep in touch with the charities and social media experts, online and offline to keep sharing best practice and stories!”

Marie Broad, Employee Volunteering Manager at Time & Talents for Westminster, adds “The workshop was a huge success; it brought together experienced social media experts and charities and enabled them to work together on practical ideas, helping charities to reach out to beneficiaries, increase fundraising and benefit from tips on keeping up to date with social media trends. The event has itself initiated a new network – we are all now connecting online to continue sharing ideas.”

Saffron’s Kim George is thrilled to continue the exciting work Saffron is doing in the social learning arena, and says “The activities of charities significantly transform people’s lives so it was a pleasure to co-facilitate the social media workshop and to be able to extend our knowledge of social media tools to this sector.”

To download the various presentations from the day as well as top tips and a glossary on social media, click here. You can also visit Time & Talents’ social media resource page for more information on using social media.

About Time & Talents for Westminster

Time & Talents is a not for profit partnership working with private, public and voluntary sector organisations. We broker employer supported volunteering projects that serve local needs, with a particular focus on skills based and sustainable work.

In addition to the individual consultancy and support we provide, we also run a joint programme of events to enable our partners to network and collaborate together.

Time & Talents is part of Volunteer Centre Westminster, a registered charity with a mission to ‘transform lives through volunteering’. We are working in partnership with Volunteering England on a new Time & Talents Network, with the first pilots in Exeter, Darlington and Oxford.

Contact
marie@volunteer.co.uk
020 7087 4350

About ReputationInc

ReputationInc is a global reputation management consultancy based in London, Dublin and Dubai. Our international team of skilled reputation management professionals combine communications skills and knowledge with a deep understanding of business strategy, ambition and the commercial realities of doing good business.

For more information, visit:
www.reputation-inc.com

Used well, video can be a valuable addition to your course; used badly, it will have heavily impacted on your resources to no discernable advantage and, worst of all, could alienate the learner. After all, who wants to watch a video that gives the same tired clichés the learner has probably encountered X times in Y years?

To steer clear of this, there are three concepts that I believe are fundamental to scripting an effective video scenario:

• Content

Catherine Blanchard, Camilla Weich and Stephanie Dedhar have all mentioned in previous blogs the importance of making your content relevant to your audience. Video scripts are no exception. Make sure that the content of your conversation is succinct – don’t try and force in fictional discussion that isn’t relevant to the scenario. For example:

Subject A: “Hey, did you and Toni go to the cinema last night?
Subject B: “Yeah, but all we could talk about was due diligence procedure”

As you can see, the script doesn’t flow and seems quite unnatural. Not that I’m saying talking about due diligence in your spare time would be unnatural, but it isn’t necessarily something you would bring up in a conversation with a colleague within the context of the conversation. Instead, keep it focused on business and the learning objectives:

Subject A: “Hey, have you had time to look at the due diligence guidelines?”
Subject B: “Yeah, I tried having a read last night, but I got really confused”

This admission from subject B can then be used as motivation for subject A to give a definition of due diligence. Subject B also seems more human, and the learner may also sympathise with the confusion. It’s less false, concentrates on the course objective and flows better than the first example.

• Character

Character is perhaps the area that those new to script-writing will find the hardest. Again, the key to integrating them into the fabric of your course is to make your characters relevant, enhancing (and I apologise, as I’m about to use a clunky neologism that makes me cringe) the “believability” of your fictional scenario. Think about the target audience – information such as targeted learner age and the diversity of the business. With this information, you’ll be better equipped to create believable, plausible characters that the learner can identify with.

• Conversation 

If you can accurately capture the tone of the business and successfully replicate how the learner interacts with colleagues on a day-to-day basis, then you should find that the learner immediately finds the video more engaging. Proceed with caution though – if you get too bogged down in trying to recreate the vernacular of the business, then you’ll only highlight the falsity of your video. To put it another way, you wouldn’t try and have a conversation with a cockney by constructing a whole sentence with rhyming slang. But drop in the odd colloquial phrase here and you’ll find your video interaction becomes more than just Robin Hood (good).

There is no generic formula for scripting an effective video scenario, no magic words that will work in every case – but if you make these three concepts integral to your script and execute them well, then you’ll find your video content doesn’t fade into the background of your course.

Got any ideas of your own about what makes a script effective? Maybe you’ve seen a really good video interaction – what was it that made it great? Likewise, what is it that you feel contributes to making a bad script? Share your experience in the comments section below.

I recall an engineering adage that goes, ‘build it fast, build it well, build it cheap – pick two.’ In rapid e-learning, we don’t get the luxury of just picking two. The challenge, the long hours spent building the content into the course, and the satisfaction of getting a release turned around in ten days all go hand-in-hand.

The rapid development of e-learning projects is all about adaptability and versatility. Let me use a recent project as an example. This was a two-hour systems simulation which took – if you’ll permit me to quickly check my Outlook calendar and do a double take – six days, as well as a few hours in the office over a weekend.

Now, I work with some extremely bright and professional Instructional Designers (IDs). And even they struggle with workload from time to time. So what does a rapidly developing ID like me do when, suddenly, a new brief lands on their desk with the final release date looming closer than most pilot release dates?

Here’s where adaptability and versatility come into the equation. Working on rapid projects, even for a little while, makes you especially sensitive to any change in your schedules. Having contingency is a great thing. Sweeping everything non-essential aside, I set about trying to shoehorn the development hours into the hours available.

Naturally, no amount of contingency can prepare you fully for the arrival of a whole project, so it’s important to build a solid plan as soon as possible. Once I had the time blocked out for this project, the next thing was to figure out the best possible use for it. I asked colleagues to help and delegated as much work as possible. We roped in senior management to tackle the client queries. The tech team got themselves stuck into the LMS.

After six (and a bit) days we’d built, quality checked and released a course which our client was very happy with.

Adaptability and versatility are your greatest weapons when going into battle against a seemingly impossible list of deliverables. You have to ensure that all of the essential processes are followed while simultaneously making the most of every possible shortcut you can take. Without doubt, it’s risky business.

I made a few mistakes along the way – rapid development isn’t only a learning process for your target group of users. The upshot is that if you can adapt and stay versatile, it won’t just be your courses that are being rapidly developed.

Social Learning on a shoestring
Hanif Sazen

Earlier this year, many of you may have seen David Carroll’s humorous tirade against United Airlines. Carroll, a Canadian musician, had his guitar damaged by United and although this was upsetting, the customer service he received in the following nine months drove him to distraction – United just refused to accept any liability. So he wrote a song, made a video and put it on YouTube. Following over three million hits on YouTube and Mr Carroll’s appearance on all the major news networks, United scrambled to compensate the musician – but it was too late, the damage had been done.

There’s obviously a message here for the big corporate machine: the customer now has the power to expose poor customer service and shoddy business practice. There is also a message here for us L&D professionals. Our customers, the learners, are being exposed to a multitude of technologies at a frightening pace. They get a customer service message from Mr Carroll’s YouTube video, they get information and help on their BlackBerry or iPhone, they network using LinkedIn and they participate in online seminars from home and in the office. We have a great opportunity to embrace the changes and make sure that these technologies are embedded in
our learning strategies. We need to break away from the traditional one hour course and leverage
the power and the resources that are all around us.

• Click here to download the full article

Saffron is striving to change this by organising a social media workshop in collaboration with the not for profit partnership Time &Talents, the reputation management consultancy ReputationInc and Whizz-Kidz, a charity for disabled young people.

Taking place on Thursday 29 July 2010, the workshop has been designed to help charity and community organisations overcome the challenges they face with social media and to learn more about using the various platforms to enhance their services.

 Key barriers are:

• A lack of knowledge and confidence on how to use social media
• A lack of a strong business case to invest time and resources
• Confusion over the number of social networks available
• Problems with firewalls preventing access
• Concerns about sharing personal and professional data

Kim George, from Saffron’s award winning instructional design team, will be co-facilitating the workshop, presenting case studies of organisations successfully using social media and running surgery-style sessions. In these sessions, charity representatives will have the opportunity to share their real life social media challenges with media professionals and gain tips on raising their profile, promoting their services, spreading ideas and gaining volunteers via social media.

If you’re from a charity or community organisation wanting to find out more about social media or if you’re a social media enthusiast or marketing executive who can offer guidance and advice, we want to hear from you! For a place at the workshop, contact sholi@volunteer.co.uk.

Firstly, anyone in the e-learning industry will encourage you to be innovative with your writing and while this is certainly a worthy aim, before leaping straight into an exciting approach, you should first look at what has worked well in the past. I’ve learnt that addressing the learner directly is really effective (using ‘you’), as it will make them feel that the course is relevant and designed specifically with them in mind. Using the active tense rather than the passive tense is often a good way to infuse some energy into your writing. Also, try to inject emotion – perhaps by adding humor – because emotion engages like nothing else does.
 
Secondly, keeping the learning outcomes in sight is essential because otherwise the training will drift away from the course objectives. So glance at the learning outcomes after you’ve written a few screens of a course and imagine being asked by an uninspired reader just why they need to know this. Keep doing this every now and again – although it may seem time consuming, it really did save me time in the long run and ensured that I kept on track!

Thirdly, really understanding the content is a crucial part of instructional design. Imagine this scenario: you’ve been given the material for a course and it’s about, say, VAT or financial management. Your task is to get to grips with said content and mould it into an engaging, interactive storyboard. How? Sustainable (and transmittable) ideas only come to those who really spend time familiarising themselves with the content – it’s an ID’s job to become the expert. Also, read a little around the area – you won’t necessarily use everything you research but it will increase both your knowledge and confidence and it’s that which will show in your writing – and engage the learner.
 
Fourthly; know your audience. You can’t structure content coherently unless you understand who they are and what they need to learn. Otherwise, you’ll be tempted to include as much content as possible, to cover every eventuality, and trawling through text which isn’t personally relevant to them can make a learner switch off double quick. Knowing your audience also means you’ll be able to use realistic examples and scenarios familiar to them. You should aim for the learner’s sigh of recognition, their empathy and emotional involvement, which is likely to lead to better retention of information.

Lastly, signposting is something which should be included in every storyboard written by a good instructional designer. The learner only has the screen in front of them to indicate where they are in the course and what’s left to cover, so it’s important that they’re reminded of what’s coming up and what they’ve already learnt. Why? Because that way they not only understand how each screen is linked, but they are also able to organise their time and choose how much of the course to take in one sitting. Having a sense of control over their own learning will further engage them and can only add to their positive experience of an e-learning course.

So here lie my words of wisdom but I’m sure there are many points which I have missed as I’m still learning about instructional design every day. But these are good pointers to start with, and I hope that they help any new instructional designers as much as they helped me!

1. Think before you write

It’s crucial to plan the structure of an e-learning course. List the topics which need to be covered. Make a note of the points you want to cover on each screen. Focus on the learning objectives – and bear them in mind as you write!

2. Keep your sentences short

Clear writing should have an average sentence length of 15 to 20 words. Be concise. Try to stick to one idea in each sentence, and vary your writing by mixing short sentences (like the last one) with longer ones (like this one).

3. Write like you speak

One of the most effective ways to engage a learner is to use everyday English. Scrap the jargon and avoid legalese, and always explain any technical terms and acronyms. A light and conversational tone works wonders for learning.

4. Use active verbs…

Active sentences sound more crisp and punchy, and will bring life to your writing. So, for a health and safety course, instead of ‘the accident was prevented by the employee’ why not write ‘the employee prevented the accident’?

5. …but don’t ignore passive verbs

It’s tempting to steer clear of the passive voice but there are times where it may be better to use: to avoid allocating blame for example (such as ‘a mistake was made’ rather than ‘we made a mistake’), or if it simply sounds better.

6. Avoid nominalisations

Nominalisations are a type of abstract noun and are formed from verbs. They make writing really dull and difficult to read so rather than ‘the introduction for the event was presented by the team’ write ‘the team introduced the event’ instead.

7. Imagine you’re talking to the learner

One of the most effective ways to emulate the best aspects of classroom training is to involve the learner by addressing them as‘you’. Why not make them feel even more included by saying ‘we’ – it will add a human element to your writing.

8. Give instructions

Remember! Click the image below. Take a look inside your resources folder. These are all commands and are the fastest and most direct way to give instructions. Don’t be afraid to be bossy in e-learning – you won’t scare the learner!

9. Don’t be afraid to list

As I mentioned in a previous blog, not even lists have to be boring. They are useful for splitting up information in an e-learning course and, as long as they have bullets and are logical, they will draw the learner’s attention to each point.

10. Blitz those myths

You can start a sentence with ‘but’, ’so’ or ‘however’ because that’s how we speak. And you can end a sentence with a preposition, like ‘for’. You can also split infinitives and seize the opportunity to boldly cause grammatical controversy!

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.

• Click here to download the full article