Category: Conferences

LearningPool Live South

Last week I was something of an impostor, attending the LearningPool user community’s third and final regional conference of the season.

A puppy
A dog yesterday

The session I attended on LearningPool itself introduced the organization under their four service offerings:

  1. Content
    • Off-the-shelf resources, including some customer generated eLearning modules.
    • Core catalogs are compliance, health & safety and public sector (including health care).
    • What they develop is based on the customer base (for example they have gained housing sector customers and have responded appropriately).
    • They also offer customers ebooks, resources, image libraries, etc for their own content.
    • Authoring tool (moving to online, producing adaptive content, from desktop) to help you build your own eLearning.
  2. Platform
    • Dynamic Learning Environment (DLE) based on Moodle.  Includes some customizations, such as ‘classroom connect’ for booking onto f-2-f environments.
    • Second solution is based on Totara version of Moodle with more development mapping tools (including user-owned aspirational paths), rather than just a focus on courses, and management tracking dashboards.
  3. Support
    • Offer first line support to customers’ platform users.
    • Learning consultants to help you with your designs and blended experiences.
  4. Community
    • Events such as this one, online communities, sharing of resources, tips, etc.

The event also saw advertising for their new Encore product, a tool for learning reinforcement via mobile application, helping to tackle the forgetting curve.

I have been aware of LearningPool and their services for a while and whilst most of the attendees were from their public sector-centric user base the list of speakers suggested it was worth me attending.  This proved the case, with me coming away reinvigorated.

Learning Futures: How new & emerging technologies will impact learning and development

The day started with Steve Wheeler on the ‘developing possibilities’ for future learning.  I have seen Steve present a few times before and this was on some similar lines, indeed he even mentioned how his own views and conference presentations have changed over time.  The biggest shift in his thinking of late being the role of pervasive tech, the web everywhere, rather than being specifically about ‘mobile’ devices.

The biggest eyebrow raising moment on my desk was when Steve argued that Learning and Development staff can no longer be happy working a 9-5.  Now I have mixed feelings on this.  In my current role I have been lucky enough to get in and out of the office largely on my contracted terms, this is quite different to my previous role – not least in that I am contracted for 30 minutes a day less anyway.  However, whilst this means I am home on good time to entertain my puppy (gratuitous photo included) I am then checking Tweetdeck, attending webinars, reading emails, checking my employer’s social network via the mobile app, etc.  This ‘informal’ learning may or may not help my employers directly in the future but will build up my personal abilities in the knowledge economy.  I would argue that you need to be flexible but that is for all staff.  However, as the recent Dispatches episode showed, you need to be careful in moving toward flexible hours, etc.  That said, you have to agree with Steve that, in many ways, you are lucky if you do have a job in the current environment and as such should look to develop yourself to offer a great service in every way possible.

This all said, L&D departments must surely now recognize that their technology enhanced learning solutions must support 24/7 learning.  Steve advocated that this is now developing away from just-in-time (JIT) to just-for-me (JFM) via the personalization options afforded by technology, such as augmented reality, with employer supplied learning options just part of an individual’s personal learning network (PLN).  Digital literacies will be needed to make best use of this and L&D can help develop staff along an evolutionary path, described as:

skills > competencies > literacies > mastery

Within this changing environment, Open Badges were advocated as the way to support the 70 of 70/20/10 and accredit that development activities and competency developments are actually happening.  One term, if not theory, I think was new to me was ipsative assessment – assessing you against your own previous attainment rather than that of others.  These assessment methods are useful when dealing with specialists where bench-marking is difficult due to limited numbers/data and is closely associated with some of the ideas around gamification and motivation.

Why does Employee Engagement matter?

I thought the pieces on PLNs and motivation were interesting in light of the following presentation by Dan Hardaker.  Dan argued that off-the-shelf surveys, such as those supplied by management consultants and ‘best places to work’ surveys, do not tell the correct picture.  What really matters is the combination of engagement, involvement and direction.  Using tips from engageforsuccess.org Genesis Housing created quadrants to label staff from their annual staff survey data.  These quadrants used deliberately provocative names to foster internal discussions which has helped create a participatory organization and speed up the authoring of policies and agreement on ways forward.  Overall, the message was that getting people involved is more important than surveys and other such reports – this is how you get people to ‘offer more of their capability’.

I would agree with much of what Dan said, emotional involvement and a feeling you are making a difference will be key for many staff and opening up decision making will help with this.

Getting the most from your DLE

Andrew Jacobs presented on Lambeth Council’s approach to L&D, now that their team has gone from 7 to 2 with 45% funding cuts.  What Andrew presented is not dissimilar to the approach I designed at my previous employer, using your VLE/LMS/DLE for JIT and self service learning.  Lambeth now offer no face-to-face training bar some classroom health and safety content, with some synchronous learning via virtual briefings.

Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) are responsible for maintaining their subject on the Moodle pages with links to ebooks, videos, LinkedIn, eLearning, etc as appropriate.  Andrew’s team offering fairly minimal support on this.  It is then up to the business and those SMEs to determine the success of what is offered in terms of impact on work and what might need to change.

This is not dissimilar to academic environments where the teacher/lecturer will manage the online environment and be supported by learning technologists.  Andrew may yet be a trailblazer for bringing this model to a corporate environment, albeit one where the business needs to take responsibility for elements they have previously passed on to a support department.  Overall, the approach has brought a culture change where people feel more empowered and the presumption that solution equals ‘course’ has disappeared.  Of course, this partly comes down to what a course is – and the corporate presumption that it is ‘classroom training’ is somewhat disparate to the academic which tends to assume some sort of blended learning these days.

Some of the points in this talk raised eyebrows near me again, including:

  • People can learn what they need via internal networking – external accreditation is facilitating people to leave so your L&D department should not pay for it.
    • I would say this is partly true but it is an interesting one in light of PLNs and that going forward your career may be based more on an ability to demonstrate prowess in multiple ways across multiple media.  However, I would advocate that external training still has a role for bringing in skills to your organization when they are missing, often more economically than hiring an expert or consultant in that area.  The problem comes when you encourage someone to develop via an MBA, or similar development activity, only to then not empower them to use that internally.
  • No training calendar.
    • Before working in corporate L&D I never realized how big a deal this was, enough said?
  • Without face-to-face training budgets they have instead given people a set amount of time that they should be seeking out personal development, for example in a public library.
    • Interesting but I do worry about the future of ‘time tracking’ in organizations and if it is simply unfeasible in the blurred world of learning anytime anywhere.  The need to set such guidelines seems to always suggest, to me, that the relationship between staff and their managers is not working.  However, it does at least give prominence to the idea of learning in the way Google’s 20% time gave prominence to internal innovation.

The argument was that, overall, we need to be the facilitators of training/learning in an organization, not simply the provider of courses.  I asked if Lambeth have a standalone Knowledge Management department, they do not, and I do think their DLE is ultimately being a success partly because it is performing the important task of structuring learning around tacit knowledge.  This is a similar chain of thought that led to me previously querying if Corporate Universities are dead.

The web has shown the way. eLearning needs to follow to be relevant

This presentation from the BBC Academy pointed out some of the old problems with eLearning and suggested some ways forward.  The presenter argued against the course/LMS centric model and that too much is signed off by L&D/HR rather than the consumers.  The point seemed to be to encourage a more open mindset, including breaking the course model to recognize the possibilities of the web (i.e. curating resources).

For what eLearning the BBC does have, an example was shown:

  • It looked nice
  • Navigation was standardized across modules for ease of use
  • Navigation was for discovery not locking progress
  • Visual elements were used throughout
  • Design for mobile first
  • Include onward navigation to web resources

I would hope most people would recognize these are relevant/appropriate, would anyone really disagree?  The only point I would perhaps criticize is a ‘mobile first’ approach as what is possible on different devices should be recognized and those different experiences levered in appropriate ways.

The presenter’s suggested takeaways being:

  • Need a different skill set going forward:
    • Design
    • Information architecture
    • User experience
    • Lifecycle of products, including data analysis
  • Move from course production to products which are improved continuously

Getting out of the Classroom

From the Houses of Parliament ICT training team – talking about shifting support for their 7000 staff from the classroom toward performance support and JIT.

Part of the change has been winning a battle with IT support to break the model of engineers taking calls which were assessed through metrics to one where staff perform floor walks and can immediately go to someone’s desk, having taken a first line call, to help people with what they are trying to do.  In my opinion this is a much more suitable approach in a world where everyone has different skill sets and you/they do not know what they do not know – a major problem in the new world at work and one where Grovo and others offer solutions.  I am a keen advocate of this, having seen how much help I could be to people in the past when pulling myself away from my desk to offer VLE/LMS support serendipitously.  To an extent this is not new, work-shadowing by support teams having been advocated in the past, but is perhaps something which has fallen away as organizations have looked to decrease the relative size of support teams.

This has all been done with the trainers supporting the IT engineers and as such the IT team have found their interpersonal and support skills have improved.  Morale has also jumped in that they are now clearly helping people and are seeing the faces at the other end of the line.

This was an interesting point to end on.  How much is this a success of personal, in-person, support versus making the IT department more transparent which could have been done via social networking, DLEs and other approaches?

Their IT helpline has been rebranded as ‘customer advice and support’ – answering calls with ‘what can I do for you today?’  The challenge for L&D today is, perhaps, how to make sure that all members of staff think ‘what can I do better today?’ with L&D offering the supporting infrastructure to ensure that can happen.

#fote13 – Some remote observations (including on Open Access)

Today I have been following tweets from the Future of Technology in Education event (#fote13) which a lot of my Twitter contacts seem to have attended.  Interestingly, it included some content on Open Access, less encouraging is that according to this blog at least the only question emerging early on was “so what else is new?”.

This made me think back to my previous comment that (learning technology) conferences all too easily preach to the converted.  Contrast this to Noam Chomsky, who I have been catching up with a bit of late, who successfully seems to suggest a way forward at the end of speeches/Q&As.  Admittedly, those ways forward may be difficult, even unrealistic, but he does seem to do a good job of at least proposing something.

Open Access interests me partly as it was a fairly big topic when I did my MA but also in that it offers alternatives to very established business models, which at the very least makes it worthy of attention considering how entrenched some are. Pre and prior to the MA I have attended a number of sessions over the years where the feeling in the room has been academics/librarians vs publishers and its interesting that Open Access models still seem to revert to that or concerns around quality.  The alternative discourse then becomes publishers saying ‘well you don’t want Amazon to win do you?’ when it perhaps should be academics saying ‘okay so what about self publishing?’.  Even though the web has various platforms for self publishing the argument seems to be that take up doesn’t happen due to the RAE, or equivalents, or that Amazon is already the one-stop shop.  This is how I see it though…

Accenture’s offering to help publishers establish new digital business models is an interesting development but also surely too little too late for those who have not progressed already, especially considering that the publishing industry is itself dominated by a fairly small number of big players (and even more so at the delivery level with Amazon, Play and iTunes dominating digital distribution).

For universities, the real value in MOOCs seems to be that it is bringing up old debates on improving the format of university courses and I would hope the outcome will be:

  1. A chance to reinvigorate the ‘university press’, with iBooks, Kindle and other formats bringing in funding.  If Korean secondary school teachers can make millions of dollars selling videos online surely UK academics could make a few quid via rethinking scholarly communication as mentioned above?
  2. Publicly funded research made available publicly.  Papers, yes, but also make academics disseminate via Wikipedia, etc.
  3. A better offering of varied course length/types for different audiences.  Foundation degrees were a start, but there is plenty of room for MOOCs to influence the pre and post degree skill/knowledge set (I’m presuming the degree already has plenty of online/blended elements – if it does not it more than likely should have had about 5 years ago).

All of the above would mean big changes for HE organizations and I suspect discussion will inevitably run and run, meaning plenty more conferences on such areas.  Ultimately they could find themselves in a more diversified industry but ultimately that makes sense – seeking revenue streams away from the traditional under/postgraduate teaching/research restraints.

“No more sitting on the fence” (Learning Technologies 2013 Summer Forum)

It was great to hear this, just a shame it was from a Learning Management System (LMS) vendor talking specifically about Tin Can.  However, it was my take away message from the recent Learning Technologies 2013 Summer Forum (LTSF).  The statement acts as something of a wakeup call; Learning and Development departments need to deliver, not just responding to fads but offering a joined up approach.  A Learning Management System that offers holistic support is, realistically, probably the easiest way to structure that support.

The challenge in my eyes, however, is if a LMS remains realistic.  In many ways they have evolved to the point where they cross over with many other systems, not least the near universal SharePoint.  Their USP remains testing/SCORM tracking and as such a stripped down basic LMS might work better than one which supports all the possibilities now discussed at events like LTSF.  If you are going beyond this then you need a joined up approach between L&D, Knowledge Management, competitor intelligence and other teams for:

  • Internal communication,
  • Sharing resources
  • Learning

With this in place professionals’ (in whatever company) know where sharing is recommended (although they’ll of course still use Twitter), how to collaborate, where to access relevant learning (preferably embedded with the relevant work tools) and have a clear understanding of how their career can progress both within their current organization or elsewhere.

Fad – A fashion that is taken up with great enthusiasm for a brief period of time; a craze.

L&D now have tools to deliver what a business needs by combining pieces of the puzzle so they are no longer seen as fads.  Indeed the LTSF presentation I attended from MindClick outlined some of the ways an LMS can be used for 1-2-1 support (the importance of which has been recognized by Bloom and others) at a distance, including via personal development plans, BYOD and badges (which in isolation could be seen as fads).  One way for your new LMS to not be seen as impractical is to make money and the SAAS LMS model is increasingly being sold as one to enable course sales via the extended enterprise.  This could be a fundamental shift for some L&D departments from pure internal support and, arguably, help drive up quality as a result.

The LTSF was dominated by a number of topics/tools for me:

1)    Tin Can/The Experience API/xAPI

2)    (Open) Badges

3)    (Learning) Analytics

4)    Mobile (Learning/Delivery/Authoring)

5)    Social (Learning/Collaboration)

6)    70/20/10

7)    Personalization (development plans/personalized curriculums)

8)    LMS/Portal developments

9)    eLearning

So, when is a fad not a fad?  Perhaps items 8 and 9 on this list can now be seen as evolutionary rather than revolutionary but the others are still gaining slow adoption.  The struggle for mobile adoption picked up by Andrew Jackson’s article (The shortest lived technology fad ever?) over on TrainingZone.  He also points out that eLearning is still revolutionary for many businesses which, whilst keeping some e-learning companies and consultants going, is – I would say – just a little depressing really in 2013.

I would agree that mobile was a fad but I would say it must now be considered as part of the learning designers’ toolkit, just as it is for marketers and other industries.  I would effectively consider 3-9 ‘traditional’ tools and 1-2 simply new ways of doing old things.  Ultimately the speed of ‘new’ technologies has changed and working them into a learning model should not be as hard as many people at such events seem to feel they are.  That said, they are not always as easy to adopt as the vendors would like to suggest but that is technical adoption rather than the enthusiasm of working something into your learning approach.  Enthusiasm, vision and a willingness to try things do not really need to be restricted by budgets either.  It was clear from a number of LTSF stalls that ‘phase 1’ deployments are something vendors are willing to support to prove concepts locally.

Yes, as Andrew says, we shouldn’t get hung up on the technology but neither should we discount the potential (especially of Tin Can) to transform learning and development.  Both 1 & 2 potentially open us all up to the world and make us think about our skills development in new ways, which can only be a good thing in my opinion (taking into account certain risks of course).  That said, LMS tracking, certifications and other tools did some of this in the past.  The outstanding question at LTSF seemed to be if capturing experiences should be automatic via Tin Can or rely on self certification.  I can see a value in a learning log of the (noun>verb>object) statements but reflection is also needed somewhere in terms of goal setting, and understanding your own learning.  I can see TC and Badges reinvigorating the personal web space and ePortfolio debate (or at least pushing LinkedIn into full adoption).

I think what Andrew tries to suggest is that, with mobile, we have simply responded to new devices, fine, but I would like to think that that response is about acknowledging issues such as flash vs. html5, app vs. browser, form factors, location of learner, etc. it should have never been about tablet vs. phone vs. laptop vs. desktop per se.  Similarly Epic’s talk at LTSF correctly identified that the Experience API (aka Tin Can) is useful in what it can mean for analytics, such as assessing the impact of learning, and thinking differently about the courses rather than about the development of a Learning Record Store for the sake of the learning logs alone.  KnowledgeAdvisors hinted at the potential of combining MetricsThatMatter data sets with performance data to change how L&D operates.  This includes making use of data to drive “performance based vendor management”, such as paying eLearning vendors only a percentage of their bills if their materials fail to improve workers’ performance.

Now, I appreciate my main interest is in Learning Technologies but many people seemed new to Tin Can and Badges.  That so many people did not seem to comprehend these is worrying and indicative that, like with mobile, we face years of presentations, white papers, etc that simply rehash arguments.  Maybe I have a ‘start-up mentality’ but I would rather see people presenting on early adoption failures than introductory presentations.  I hope this is what we see at Learning Technologies in January but I will not hold my breath.  Even better will be successful coming together of the two with experiences (captured via Tin Can) driving badge creation.  Another interesting piece will be to see the development and interaction of “apps everywhere” (as NetDimensions called them) with learning record stores and/or LMSs.  However, this is potentially not too different to offline LMS access that NetDimensions, and others, have supported via USB drive LMS systems.

The problem may be that for L&D to succeed in implementing what appears to be an optimized learning strategy it would need to be all encompassing of an organisation.  People will only socially collaborate and ‘surface’ informal learning in a tool if it is a tool they have to use or, unlikely, want to.  Thus, new ‘social learning’ tools at LTSF do not fill me with confidence – if someone is already using SharePoint, Yammer or similar has L&D not got to leverage that?  It would seem nigh on impossible to work in a light weight LMS/social tool such as Svelte Social (new to me I think at LTSF) if you have other tools in place.  NetDimensions, whose presenter used the “fence” idea, did a good job in explaining if the LMS can fit in as the social tool or not by saying organisation need to decide what system will be the “social bedrock of their organization”.  Here I would argue culture comes in as, say, a university has an advantage that the ‘place of work’ will be the VLE/LMS so the university’s staff can be encouraged to use that same tool for their own development as it is already the “bedrock” for their daily work.  It is more difficult in a corporate context but the big tools, like Salesforce, have acknowledged it by working social into their own tools.

I came away from the main Learning Technologies event earlier in the year feeling somewhat underwhelmed.  The question now seems to be, as vendors are making the jump into Tin Can and other solutions, can Learning and Development departments use these appropriately to meet business needs?  Simply adding on bells and whistles to an existing, monolithic LMS doesn’t seem to be an option to me.  Instead, organizations as a whole need to consider if L&D professionals in their organization really are just about running/building courses (as NetDimensions pointed out L&D and LMSs in some organisations are simply for compliance) or if they are true partners in making organizations “collectively smarter”.

For the record these are the talks I attended:

1)    The use of Tin Can and Open Badges for learning programmes (EPIC)

2)    Meeting learning objectives with Totara LMS (MindClick)

3)    How to build a business case for formalization of learning analytics (KnowledgeAdvisors – largely the same as these slides)

4)    What you need to know about portals (Redware)

5)    LMS – Evolution or extinction? (NetDimensions – seemingly a follow up to this article)

6)    Apps and video communications – top 5 things you need to know (Dreamtek)

Some more pointless stats

Following on from the dubious numbers in my Google Reader post, Slideshare have recently been kind enough to hint at what is possible via their pay plans by emailing me (on April 29th) stats on views of my presentations:

  1. Questionmark vs Blackboard for online tests – 778 views
  2. Whose education is it anyway? – Blackboard UK User Group 2010 – 566 views
  3. Supporting the transition from the physical to the virtual classroom – 480 views
  4. Using Blackboard for Pre-Entry Diagnostic Testing – 333 views
  5. ALT-c 2011: Breaking the ice, an instructional design approach for institutional growth – 252 views

These basics stats are also available via the ‘My Uploads’ section – my most viewed item being Pdp: Its Role And Implementation In The Law Curriculum as of today (926 views).

In total my 7 Slideshares have been viewed 3503 times (as of May 10th).

An issue here is how Slideshare deals with sites such as docs.hut effectively copying the resource.  Therefore, whilst there is some use in such statistics and analytics there is little value without some narrative from the users engaging with them, unfortunately a lack of comments means this is tricky to say the least.  Slideshare do offer some further functionality but there are clearly issues here – for example the best interaction around a presentation I have had is perhaps the ALT-c 2011 one above whilst its numbers in terms of views are not great.

When LinkedIn recently took Slideshare content and worked it directly into your profile I removed the presentations, whilst I am happy for these to be shared they are very much of their time and I would not necessarily recommend them as examples of my work.  I see Slideshare as something of a historic evidence archive of my development rather than examples of the kind of work I would produce today, another example where it is useful to keep different social and web tools separate for different use cases.

Vetiquette – the new Netiquette?

I recently attended the CIPD’s HRD Exhibition and amongst the free seminars was one which covered Vetiquette.  Now the presenter seemed to think that everyone would have heard of this, but I must admit not remembering it if I had.  Indeed a Google search shows that unless you start adding some ‘-vet’ and ‘-pet’s it is not a term with a particularly big footfall.  The basic idea in the talk was that Netiquette was somewhat out-of-date as it came out of early web discussion boards and email; vetiquette relates to the modern web of video conferencing, multimedia collaboration, etc.  I did not think too much about this until this weeks BSN MOOC grouped Netiquette within digital citizenship.  How much citizenship and literacy overlap are probably a matter of opinion but it made me take another look at vetiquette…

Safari books online has Vetiquette as the below:

VEtiquette, is coined to represent the special subset of behaviors required in a virtual team and to explore the difference in context that virtual work creates that makes special attention to such behavior particularly important…VEtiquette, which stands for “virtual etiquette,” is required in work that is typically real time and synchronous. Vetiquette guides team members’ behavior as they collaborate virtually either while speaking or writing using Internet, mobile, or video technologies. It can be summarized as, “Be effective, or don’t be heard.” This extra attention to virtual interaction matters because the effectiveness of the team depends on it.

Thus for the Blended Schools MOOC we perhaps can consider the need for vetiquette in fostering young people’s belief to be effective/heard but not pushy/rude when online.  This is personally interesting for me as my workplace performance reviews in the past have identified a need to be more assertive in getting my ideas across.  This is perhaps my oh-so-polite Britishness coming through in online environments or might simply be that I find the behavior of others too pushy and ‘tone myself down’ as a result.  As we all move towards a globalized world this will be increasingly important and it is difficult to get the balance right across borders.  It can also be easier to pick a level of appropriate virtual behavior with someone if you have met them in person.

When I did draft a netiquette policy for a previous job I included both the traditional ‘net’ and ‘et’ issues, as well as those identified as ‘vetiquette’.  I guess I really saw all of it as ‘netiquette’ within information/digital literacy.  There is a little bit about what I did on this presentation but in general:

  • The policy was drafted by looking at existing netiquette policies from around the web.
  • It was not really enforced, instead it was embedded in training resources for teachers and students.  It was up to individual instructors how they might adopt, adapt and enforce it with their own students.
  • One would hope that as time passes people will be increasingly confident in this area and the need to train people in vetiquette will be something for schools rather than the 16+ education providers.  Thus it is great to see it being considered in the BSN MOOC (see last two blog posts for more on this).