Who moved my corporate training cheese?

Technology and the demands of digital natives are disrupting the corporate training market as never before.  I had this belief further crystallized this morning upon reading this article in the HBR blog network. I highly recommend if you are in the learning and development field, you devote a few minutes today to reading it.  Kinda reminded me of that oldie but goodie Spencer Johnson book for some reason, maybe because- "if you do not change, you will become extinct!"

Though the piece mentions massive, open, online courses (or, MOOCs) as the technology driving the disruption in the educational market, it’s not just MOOCs that are disrupting the corporate training sector.  The advancement in cloud technologies, collaboration software, and the advent of easily available social networking and learning management tools are all changing the business of corporate training.  Technology is fundamentally altering the way we receive information.  Everything from how we receive information, who or what delivers it, and how we measure and track what information was exchanged is changing.  With the release of the Tin Can API, you could even argue that “big data” is finally coming to corporate training.  Think about it, integrated with your HR and talent management systems, you can build a pretty complete picture of all of the learning and development experiences of your best performers.

Speaking of your best performers, many of them are what Marc Prensky described as digital natives.  These new workers and their demands are having a huge impact not just in HR, but throughout your organization.  They are servicing your clients via social networking channels – maybe even collaborating with them after hours, driving your IT department to open up your network to their devices, and altering how your HR people attract, recruit, hire, train and develop them.  The nerve!  You must get a grip on this one fact- your workers are networked, connected, and mobile. 

If you’re a corporate training executive, this is a curve you want to get ahead of before you find yourself unemployed and with a skill set that could best be described as “expired”.  What can you do, you ask?  Start by taking an online course; there are literally thousands available for free that you can take at your own leisure.  Don’t know her start, visit the Khan  Academy, Lynda.com, or Coursera.  Take this revolution out for a spin.  You’ll be surprised at how much you can learn.   

The idea of ‘digital mentors’ has been used successfully by many organizations, if not within the confines of your own organization – reach out to other training professionals via local chapters of organizations such as the e-Learning Guild, the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD),  the Society for Applied Learning Technology (SALT), and the International Society for Performance Improvement ( ISPI) and discuss with your peers how these technologies are being used in their corporate environments. 

Ready to talk about e-learning? 

- Alex Santos

Alex is a co-founder and Managing Member of Collabor8 Learning, LLC, an instructional design and performance management consultancy. His firm collaborates with organizations to enhance the way they develop  and train their people. To learn more about Collabor8 Learning, click here.

Alex can be reached at 786-512-1069, alex@collabor8learning.com or via Twitter@collabor8alex.

One Tin Can E-learning designers shouldn’t kick down the road

Getting started with the Tin Can API, Part 1

The e-learning development standard SCORM, or Sharable Content Object Reference Model, is nearing the end of its useful life. Many in the e-learning development community, from designers to trainers alike, would agree it is way past its prime.   In case you haven’t heard, its replacement – the Tin Can API, is here and slowly but surely making its way into the marketplace.  If you’d like to learn more about the API and the changes it brings with it, there’s no better explanation in my book than this short clip by Tim Martin from Rustici software.   

What does this mean for your training courses, and how can you leverage the Tin Can API for the benefit of your end users?  Additionally, what should you be doing now to prepare?  I’d like to explore these questions with you in a series of posts, and encourage you to chime in on the discussion. 

Built on the philosophy that learning is taking place everywhere, and not simply through an active browser session inside of your learning management system you can now track all types of learning and development activities.  Keep in mind that simply tracking learning activities is not in and of itself evidence of improved performance due to the use of your learning assets.  The Tin Can API will however allow you to track all kinds of learning activities from reading a book to highlighting the sentence on your Kindle and attending an industry conference. These are all activities that due to SCORM’s limitations, you could not easily track.

There are several things that you can be doing out here for this monumental change first and foremost is educating yourself.  I’m a very tactile learner, and require engaging and tinkering with things in order to learn. One of the things you can do is to open up a learning record store and learning about all of the statements that you will be able to track in the cloud.  My recommendation is to checkout the Wax LRS by SaLTBOX.  Open up and account for yourself, it is currently free.  Having an account will allow you to test learning experiences from your own experiences in an actual cloud-based learning record store.  Additionally, if you have old courses are lessons created using articulate storyline you can republish these activities for the tin can API. Again this is simply for testing purposes, so that you can gain experience into working with tin can statements.

From a more strategic vantage point, say you’re a Director of Training, instructional designer, or Manager of Learning and Development in your organization or institution of higher learning. Odds are that many of the learning and development opportunities you’ve been providing your clients have not been tracked via your LMS using SCORM.  Thanks to the Tin Can API you can now begin defining statements of achievement for all of these L&D activities, and brainstorming ways you can track them in a learning record store.  You can learn more about tin can statements from the sites of one of the cloud-based LRS vendors, I have found this one particularly useful.  Additionally, you can experiment with validating your Tin Can statements here.

Steve Flowers over at e-learning heroes also provided me with several very useful sites you may also want to check out if you’re just getting started. 

For "less technical explanations" of Tin Can API in general, here are a few resources. The cartoon sequence is pretty clever.
http://floatlearning.com/2012/11/the-tin-can-api-a-non-technical-analysis/

http://floatlearning.com/tincancartoon/

My explanation and use-case descriptions for senior leadership of my org isn't really that technical but contains org specific contexts and language so it might be tough to follow:

http://androidgogy.com/2012/12/11/tech-people-and-systems/

Kevin Thorn and David Kelly gave a presentation at ASTD's TK13 last week in San Jose. Here's a description of that session and the slides:

http://davidkelly.me/2013/01/what-is-tin-can-and-why-should-i-care-resources-shared-at-astdtk13/

We’ll continue to discuss this topic in future posts, but as the title of this post suggests―I highly recommend for you to begin getting your feet wet with the Tin Can API. 

- Alex Santos

Alex is a co-founder and Managing Member of Collabor8 Learning, LLC, an instructional design and performance management consultancy. His firm collaborates with organizations to enhance the way they develop  and train their people. To learn more about Collabor8 Learning, click here.

Alex can be reached at 786-512-1069, alex@collabor8learning.com or via Twitter@collabor8alex.

History of E-learning

The word “E-learning” seems so general and common today, especially the speed with which it is becoming a learning norm nowadays, labels it as one of the widely practiced concept all over the world. But, till 1999, no one could even imagine that learning would be possible without meeting at a physical location and there had never been a term like “E-learning” till then. The word “E-learning” and its concept first emerged in October 1999, in a seminar at Los Angeles, organized by CBT systems. In this seminar, the origin and usage of this word in a professional field, was never thought to be the most admiring and adopted idea in just few coming years. It implies that the concept of E-learning is not that old.

The world “E-learning” is also associated with the expressions like “virtual learning” or “online learning”. Experts define E-learning as a mean to gain learning that is based on the utilization of new advanced technologies that permit access to interactive, online and sometime tailored training via Internet and other media like interactive TV, Intranet, CD-ROM, extranet etc so as to expand competencies while the course of learning is self-determining from place and time.

The growth of the e-Learning concept has derived from so many other ‘educational revolutions’. Some of such revolutions are quoted by Billings and Moursund (1988) as:

• The development of writing and reading
• The emergence of the teacher/scholar profession
• The development of portable technology
• The advancement of electronic technology

It seems that the basic ideas, didactical grounds and methodologies are not so new!

The history of E-learning has been a gradual evolution since long.

In the beginning of 1960s, Psychology professors from Stanford University, named Richard C. Atkinson and Patrick Suppes tested computers to be used to teach math to kids in elementary schools in East Palo Alto, California. These experiments gave birth to Stanford’s Education Program for Gifted Youth.

In the year 1963, Bernard Luskin set up the earliest computer in a community college for teaching. At that time he was working with Stanford along with others and made progress in computer assisted training. Luskin finished his milestone UCLA thesis while working with the Rand Corporation in examining the problems to computer assisted education in 1970.

Initially the e-learning systems, that are based on Computer-Based Training frequently tried to replicate conventional teaching methods whereby the function of the e-learning system was assumed to be for conveying knowledge, as contrasting to systems that were developed afterward. These were designed on the basis of Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL), which initiated the idea of shared growth of knowledge.

In 1993, William D. Graziadei introduced an online computer-conveyed lecture, seminar and evaluation project via electronic mail. The first most online high school was founded by 1994. Till now the e-learning has become the hot norm of societies at large, all over the world. The global e-learning industry is anticipated to have value over $48 billion as per some conservative estimates.(Nagy, A., 2005, pp. 79-96). From 1994 till 2006 i.e. just within 12 years, over 3.5 million students had been reported to participate in on-line learning environment at various higher education institutions in US.

E-Learning is now being adopted widely and used by a number of companies to update and educate both their customers and employees. Companies with big and spread out division chains employ it to teach their staff even for the newest product advancements without the requirement of arranging physical courses.

Reference:

1. Nagy, A. (2005). The Impact of E-Learning, in: Bruck, P.A.; Buchholz, A.; Karssen, Z.; Zerfass, A. (Eds). E-Content: Technologies and Perspectives for the European Market. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, pp. 79–96

-Jay Chun

Jay is an elearning developer and instructional designer, as well as a valuable contributor to the Collabor8 Learning team.  He has worked on eLearning projects for fortune 500 companies and in industries ranging from Healthcare, Military, and Education and Scholastic.  

To read more about his past work and experience, click here.  Jay can be reached at 949-407-6460, or at jay@jpchun.com. 

E-learning saves the day

This piece by our former governor of Florida Jeb Bush does a great job of illustrating several advantages of moving education online.  The learner in the piece, Kaleigh, was not just motivated but determined to continue her education under very difficult circumstances.  Due to a medical condition, it was simply impossible for her to complete a traditional “one-size-fits-all” classroom education.  Fortunately for her, online education was able to meet her needs where a more traditional approach was simply not feasible. 

This is a case where e-learning clearly saved the day, and not just states but companies can learn much from these cases.  In this case, e-learning:

1.       Met the learner at the point-of-need,

2.       Gave the learner the flexibility to learn on her own time, at her own pace, and presumably on her own device,

3.       Provided an alternative to a traditional education where a more traditional education was impossible, and

4.       Likely saved the state money in the process.

More importantly for me however, is that e-learning enabled Kaleigh to continue to grow and develop.  Jeb makes a wonderful observation at the end of the piece that is not to be missed-

“While digital learning may not be the best way to learn for all students, it is the best way to learn for some students.”

While I could write an entire post about the qualities that make Kaleigh an ideal virtual learner, I’ll leave you with this―many of your employees face challenges to their continued development.  These challenges include everything from a hectic schedule to a poor manager who does not coach properly or allow for sufficient training time.  E-learning can be blended into your existing training strategy to help eliminate several of these challenges.  

- Alex Santos

Alex is a co-founder and Managing Member of Collabor8 Learning, LLC, an instructional design and performance management consultancy. His firm collaborates with organizations to enhance the way they develop  and train their people. To learn more about Collabor8 Learning, click here.

Alex can be reached at 786-512-1069, alex@collabor8learning.com or via Twitter@collabor8alex.

The online learning sector is burning up!

“We think this industry of online education is in its infancy and there will be lots of approaches. We’re very confident in our approach.”

- Lynda Weinman, Owner of Lynda.com

Very interesting development I just read about this morning, as it appears Lynda.com will be expanding very soon.  Also of note, they've been around for 17 years, profitable for the last 15 of those.  Ammunition for prospective clients who are always asking me, "Do you think there is a market for my training if we put it online?"