The Total Learner Experience

Going Blended: Questions to Help Define Your Learning Strategy

I often work with clients who have questions and are interested in blended learning solutions. Here, I've outlined what I believe are a few positives and challenges for going blended, and then I leave you with questions you can ask yourself to help determine the best path to follow.

Classroom Training Positives:

• Face to face. The Instructor can see/recognize when a student is understanding the material or not, and offer a personal touch.
• Classroom training is the current comfort zone in many organizations. Students may be more accustomed to it, and may not feel comfortable with online training.
• Classroom training often comes with a manual that students can use to refer to after the class is over.

Classroom Training Challenges:

• Time away from the office.
• Travel expenses when necessary.
• Training is more generalized in order to reach a broader audience. A student may find it necessary to sit through half the class before the Instructor hits upon what they really came to learn.
• The cost involved in creating a classroom course can be absorbent. Time spent on development, cost of materials, etc.
• The cost involved in contracting an outside vendor to teach specific classes can have a large impact on a training budget.
• Deciding what courses to develop and train in-house is often limited due to budget constraints, which means you will need to choose wisely where/when to allocate resources.

Virtual, CBT, or Online Training Positives:

• Typically these courses are offered anytime, anywhere, so scheduling is not a problem.
• The cost involved in contracting with an outside vendor for online courses is often volumetric driven. This means you can often offer hundreds of courses per user for often the same price you pay for one course offered via classroom taught by an outside vendor. 
• Broader selection also means that you can use online courses to supplement classroom training.
• Online courses often allow the student to take an assessment, which enables them to hone in on the specific lessons they really need to learn while by-passing the lessons they already have sufficient knowledge within.

Virtual, CBT, or Online Training Challenges:

• Online learning sometimes means learning a new technology. This can cause some to see it as a stumbling block rather than a building block.
• Students may feel online learning is not personal enough.
• Students may lack the discipline to work through online courses on a regular basis. Sometimes they are challenged to find the time to dedicate.

So here are a few questions I would suggest you ask yourself in order to better understand how you may want to build your training program:

1. What is your current budget?
2. Can you afford classroom training?
3. If yes, how many and which classes would you have resources to create and offer? 
4. For those classes you are not able to offer, what virtual or online courses can help supplement your classroom training?
5. Are there any virtual or online courses that would complement your classroom training? For example, would they make good pre-requisites or post follow-up reference material?
6. How many students do you support? Are they global?
7. What initiatives will you need to consider in this training year/cycle? One-time (like an office upgrade), short-term (like leadership training for managers), or on-going (like those tied to job families). What courses would support those initiatives?
8. What is your organizational culture and how do they currently "like to learn"?
9. What is your vision for your training program?

Understanding the audience and plugging in the appropriate training for them is key for success.

The Mobile Landscape for Instructional Design

The last few years have been quite revolutionary for the field of instructional design. Since the release of the iPhone in 2007, the “mobile revolution” has spawned an entire new design and delivery mechanism for training. Additionally, the focus on developing “courses” has evolved to developing “learning applications” and more "chunkified" content experiences. With this rapid pace of change occurring, it can be somewhat overwhelming to pause long enough to figure out how to leverage emerging technology in a meaningful way that appropriately supports the mobile workforce.

As we continue the transformation away from tethered to mobile computing, there are a few "new normals" for those of us that design learning experiences:

• Over the next 5-10 years more people will be typing on glass than keyboards.
• This year, over one billion Internet users will connect only through mobile devices. That’s half of all Internet users in the world. In Indonesia and Southeast Asia the majority of Internet access already occurs via mobile devices.
• The way you conceptualize content experiences now should be mobile-first, rather than PC first. The PC era is behind us.
• Most of the content that’s going to be developed over the next decade is going to be built for connected, mobile devices.
• You should be less concerned with the actual devices people are using, and more concerned with the operating systems on those devices.
• When people are using mobile devices, they are usually on the go or multitasking with limited attention spans. I recommend you focus on two strategies as it applies to mobile learning:
  • Spatial data, which more than location-awareness, allows learners to access data around them, and
  • Smarter search and social integration with search. You don't want to create data optimized for specific devices -- you want learners to easily access content relevant for them regardless of the screen they're on, wherever they are.
• The two primary elements of mobile socialization are the user’s social graph and their feed. Mobile devices need to integrate these elements seamlessly to create cross-device social experiences. The blending of people's digital life and who they really are, the things they do, and what they need is the real mobile revolution. It’s a new form of communication, adopted en masse because of its naturalness. Although there’s no common technology language yet, the ideal of social communities is anything but new.
• Connected, mobile devices is the primary way consumers will connect to your content in the future.
• There are now more searches conducted on mobile devices than on PCs.
• Mobile devices are basically appliances. A lot of the processing that’s happening on the devices is happening in the cloud.
• Hundreds of millions of users still use features phones, and feature phones will continue to be a major source of new-to-net users in the coming years.
• People want their achievements to be transportable and under their control.

The Potential of Augmented Reality for Education

This month I will be participating in a panel discussion about the Potential of Augmented Reality (AR) for Education at SXSW in Austin. I'm lucky to be joined on the panel with some leading experts in the field of AR: Tish Shute, Brendan Scully, Karen Hamilton and our fellow blogger here, Enzo Silva.

Tish Shute, founder of Ugotrade, a leading AR blog, explains that AR is in a critical development stage:

"Augmented Reality is in its infancy and we are just beginning to see AR learning apps emerge for young children on consumer devices, and museums are pioneering AR in situated educational experiences. AR has a long history in military and industrial training and simulation excercises because in these areas bulky high priced equipment is not an obstacle to adoption. We are in the middle of a data revolution. Soon just about everything in our world will have a data shadow. Sensors everywhere will allow us to communicate with the world around us in totally new ways. AR is the natural interface to bring relevancy to data. It will turn arcane spreadsheets, vast unstructured data sets - the data wakes of our cyborg lives - into visible, visceral, interactive, optimizable, and actionable parts of everyday life." 

Others on the panel include Brendan Scully from metaio, Karen Hamilton from George Brown University in Toronto, and Enzo Silva from Oracle. Enzo organized the panel, and will be moderating.

We're hoping to have a dynamic and interactive discussion about where AR is currently, where it's going, and how organizations can begin to leverage the technology to build more authentic and immersive educational experiences.

We hope you can join us in Austin! Until then, check out this cool video from metaio on multichannel AR:

 

What the Apple/Adobe Flash Debate Means for Learning Developers

I've been following the "Apple vs. Adobe" debate about Flash for several weeks now, and have recently come to the conclusion that it's not really about Apple forcing its will on Adobe as many in the media seem to be reporting. A milestone occurred yesterday when Adobe's Flash Platform product manager, Dan Chambers blogged about Adobe giving up on creating further iPhone app development tools.

As a designer and developer of corporate training materials, I obviously have a vested interest in this debate. Why, you may ask? Well, if you scan the landscape of eLearning development you can be rest assured that a large majority of online educational material relies on Adobe's Flash platform for its delivery.

I go back all the way to the pre-Internet Authorware days... yes, Authorware 1.0 when it was Mac-only authoring software. I loved Authorware. It was designed specifically for development of computer-based training programs. As the Internet era dawned and Macromedia put its energy behind Flash, I saw the writing on the wall for Authorware. I mean, at first, it was great... Macromedia kept rolling out new versions, and even put a lot of effort into the Authorware web player. The dark days eventually came, and I knew when I talked to some friends at Macromedia what was happening when they lamented that no new Authorware engineers were being hired... and there was only one left at that time!

As Flash emerged, the learning developer community embraced it and began retrofitting it for educational interactivity. I never completely transitioned from the flowline to the timeline. I still remember Robert Milton's explanation of the flowline in Authorware training, and how dang logical it was. For me, the timeline was anything BUT logical.

When Flash became the de facto standard for learning development, chaos ensued:

• Constant player updates adversely affected courses designed in earlier versions of Flash
• Just TRY to get Flash to communicate with any LMS without having a programming wizard (if you could find one). I used to beg Andrew Chemey (a Macromedia engineer) to help, and he could always make it work, but he could never explain how.
• Say goodbye to Authorware's text handling capabilities and welcome Flash's completely horrible rendering of fonts.
• Throw out the idea of modular development, which was Authorware's coup de grace.
• Expect a new or heavily modified scripting language with major updates
• And the list can go on

All this for a "light web player" -- people complained about the 3-6mb Authorware web player (this was pre-broadband). Granted, Flash has made important progress as it relates to learning development, but this whole "Apple/Adobe" conversation got me to thinking about the state of tools in eLearning design and development.

Flash the parent, and all its unruly siblings such as Articulate, Captivate, Camtasia... all the tools that produce .swf files, are essential for various tasks in eLearning development. And Adobe seems to be whining that Apple is being a big bully about the Flash platform. I think it's actually the opposite. I think Adobe has been the bully over the last several years.

Apple is basically saying, "we don't want to have to adopt or promote a company's proprietary technology on our platform when it's not consistent with the technologies that serve as the foundation for our platform." Flash is anything but open.. it's locked technology that requires software available only from the vendor. It's not open source, or even open for that matter.

I remember the days before the Flash player (remember DHTML?). I remember coding HTML to work in various versions of browsers, and it wasn't pretty. Flash made life a whole lot easier on several fronts because it created its own "walled garden" that was guaranteed to operate consistently across multiple operating systems and browsers. I fear HTML5 will bring back the whole issue of compatibility and interoperability.

I also know from first-hand experience that creating a software product with the Flash platform is fraught with potential issues because any potential change in player versions could cripple features/functionality. And try getting updates from Adobe on changes, or roadmaps on functionality.

I tend to side more with Apple on this matter, only because they're really not bullying Adobe -- they're just saying, look we have our "walled garden" and we've decided what the best technologies are to support it. You have your proprietary technology that may be a standard with a specific group of developers, but it's not an open standard for the Internet.

What does this mean for learning developers? I think just as we all were forced to move away from Authorware several years ago, we need to have our eye on where the industry is going. I tend to think more open technologies will always win at the end of the day. But that must be countered with how we get our jobs done as well. Tools like Flash do allow developers to get work done in an efficient manner. Change is guaranteed, and learning new tools and languages will always be a task we must perform.

Language Communities on the Web

Having spent many years in a language classroom, I was excited to discover the abundance of free language instruction on the web. The three I found the most impressive were Livemocha, Babbel, and Busuu. All three offer interactive language lessons for a variety of European languages while Livemocha includes a number of less traditional languages (such as Persian, Esperanto, and Urdu).  Busuu is based upon the European system of language levels (A1, A2, B1, B2…) and was selected as an official UNESCO project while Livemocha follows the American system of classes (101,102, 201…)

Here is a rundown of each:

Busuu tracks your language progress via a “language garden” where your plant has the opportunity to grow into a tree as your progress through the lessons. Busuu’s strength is vocabulary building since each lesson begins with a picture, pronunciation, English translation, and example sentence. It also attempts to have you learn the language via short passages and related questions.  Like Livemocha, there is also a writing section where other users rate your responses. This feature is the main advantage of a true online community where the website can take advantage of a speaker’s native fluency. Thus, the user becomes both the student and the teacher.

Babbel gives the user more freedom to adjust the language to their level and has a stronger focus on common phrases.  My favorite aspects of Babbel are its forum and the chatrooms. In the easy to use forum, you can ask specific grammar questions not covered in the lessons. For instance, what really is the difference between nouvel and neuf? Also, the chatroom is a quick and easy way to put your language skills to the test. It should be noted that although all three sites offer a great array of services with a paid membership, Babbel is the most limited for users not willing to pay.

Livemocha tries to incentivize its users to progress with a points system that also hands out awards at different levels. While it is rather basic, I can attest that I have continued to practice lessons simply to attain the next shiny medal available. The lessons are very structured. Each includes a section to learn vocabulary/phrases, review them, complete a writing submission, and record a spoken section. The last two sections are then rated by native speakers in the community. In a sense, this tool provides you with free teachers who correct your grammar and pronunciation. One area I would like to see them add would be grammar. This fall before visiting Turkey, I wanted to use Livemocha to learn a few phrases and sentences. However, I found it difficult to extract even basic grammar only from the vocabulary and sentences the site provides.