My vote for the Top Tools for Learning 2016

Here’s what I submitted to the annual poll (http://c4lpt.co.uk/top100tools/voting/).

Tool 1: Name and (optionally) reason for choice: Old Reader – personal RSS reader of choice for news, sharing and current awareness.
Tool 1: How do you use it?: Workplace Learning, Personal & Professional Learning

Tool 2: Name and (optionally) reason for choice: Xmarks – bookmarking for personal knowledge library and sharing of folders/topics with contacts and colleagues
Tool 2: How do you use it?: Workplace Learning , Personal & Professional Learning

Tool 3: Name and (optionally) reason for choice: YouTube – still most used video platform in terms of access to recorded webinars, tutorials, etc.
Tool 3: How do you use it?: Workplace Learning , Personal & Professional Learning

Tool 4: Name and (optionally) reason for choice: Articulate Storyline 2 – authoring tool of choice for content distribution and for developing support tools.
Tool 4: How do you use it?: Workplace Learning

Tool 5: Name and (optionally) reason for choice: Totara – simplifies our L&D management requirements for regulators, government, etc allowing more of our time on performance support and career development.
Tool 5: How do you use it?: Workplace Learning, Personal & Professional Learning

Tool 6: Name and (optionally) reason for choice: LinkedIn – learning via groups and 1-2-1 communication. A source for news and useful links (but less so than Old Reader or YouTube).
Tool 6: How do you use it?: Workplace Learning , Personal & Professional Learning

Tool 7: Name and (optionally) reason for choice: WordPress – for reflection and sharing my learning.
Tool 7: How do you use it?: Workplace Learning , Personal & Professional Learning

Tool 8: Name and (optionally) reason for choice: Prezi – started using it again this year to share messaging where the templates/zooming helps.
Tool 8: How do you use it?: Workplace Learning , Personal & Professional Learning

Tool 9: Name and (optionally) reason for choice: Firefox – as the entry point to other tools remains essential. Used over other tools for speed, plugins, etc.
Tool 9: How do you use it?: Workplace Learning, Personal & Professional Learning

Tool 10: Name and (optionally) reason for choice: Grover Pro – Podcast app of choice for learning on the go.
Tool 10: How do you use it?: Workplace Learning, Personal & Professional Learning

Game elements often ignored by learning pros

Gamification has been a buzzword for a few years now but the success of Pokemon Go has, inevitably, led to a raft of ‘what can L&D learn from Pokemon’ articles whilst the even more inevitable backlash has already begun (Should employers clamp down on Pokemon Go?).

1 – Reflections on elements ignored

Electronic gaming has been a huge part of my life (at least if we use ‘time spent’ as a measure) since my brother got his C64 many years ago. Having, therefore, played games for 30 or so years it is with interest to see a few points missed by many:

Gamers are not one-size-fits all. Like with other media, gamers are not a universal group. There have been long running cultural differences between, for example, some Japanese-focused releases versus the American/Europe market based on real (and presumed) preference. Opera and pop fans are not normally lumped together as ‘music fans’ but even though there are differences, for example those who primarily aim for quick fixes versus being happy to play the long game, gamers often are. Where there is a more widespread group, such as mobile phone playing commuters they’ve been seen as the exception “casual gamers” rather than what they actually are, the majority (in terms of everyday use as Pokemon has highlighted). What this means for learning is what we already know – we need to personalise and tailor to the audience.
Games are not one-size-fits all. Yes, there are some standard elements of games (see “What is a Game”) and there is a science behind gamification (check out Yu-Kai Chou) based on a number of neurological and psychological elements. However, sports games versus grand-strategy games, for example, represents a decision between, say, a 10 minute commitment versus 100s of hours. What this means for learning is again what we already know but often fail to implement – activities need to be correct for the desired outcomes, not just fitting into a set time limit based on what regulators, room booking systems, technology or other limiter puts upon us.
Ultimately it is an industry, not just a game. Games even have a CrashCourse series on the evolution of the market and related topics. Too often learning is a breed apart from the business and ‘gamifying’ to make things more interactive/addictive is likely to just make this even more obvious. ‘Serious games’ should be able to avoid this, others need to be used appropriately for your culture.
Effectively game entertainment relies on neurology/psychology. Gaming can become a very real addiction. It is not some kind of magic Greek fire that the learning department needs to discover the recipe for for our own means, instead it is about making things compelling which learning pros have traditionally had mixed success with.
Gaming is often to ‘zone out’. Yes there are engagement design decisions but often a game is taking the place of a book, TV, exercise, etc. as a way to unwind and relax. The game playing becomes almost subconscious. The challenge here is to take a new decision when thinking about learning – when is non-engagement okay? This shouldn’t be a lack of engagement in the way that, say, repeated ‘next’ clicking in an e-learning module creates but instead something where people are able to learn even if they are not necessarily making notes, discussing with peers, etc. Podcasts are an obvious route to support this, for example by allowing people to pick up key corporate messages whilst on their commute.

2 – Key things to take from gaming

So what else would I say learning can learn from games? Well there are obviously plenty of people who have written and researched on this topic. I would particularly highlight:

Be entertaining. Tackle Netflix, Pokemon and the rest via edutainment. Podcasts and some other educational media have achieved relative success in this. In comparison workplace learning remains, too often, a chore. Narrative, where appropriate, can be key in tackling boredom…remember even a mega budget Hollywood blockbuster can flop if people do not engage with the characters, story and/or special effects.
Be non-linear. Allow the learner choices, for example, I can lead my medieval kingdom in Crusader Kings down unlimited paths whilst my eLearning is too often a locked down exercise.
Design for “one more go”. We want deep learning experiences to be addictive or raise a challenge that people want to tackle. Here we need to balance carrot and stick and this aligns with the Stella Collins’ presentation at the CIPD exhibition last year.
Support around the experience. Many games do not expect you to become a pro via game-time alone; magazines, user guides and websites have been used to provide tips, cheats and walkthroughs. Use all the communication and information management tools at your disposal, think beyond ‘learning’ solutions for your blend.
Don’t be cheesy. Fixing learning into a model such as a car racing visualisation isn’t engaging – you are almost certainly using animation without emotion, chance, risk, etc. You can of course be ironic in this but it would depend on your culture if people would would like that, for example, I’m trialling putting funny Easter eggs into my e-Learning and seeing what the reaction is – inevitably some people like them whilst others think I’ve lost the plot, ultimately we’re all different…see point 1.1!

The future of the Learning Management System? The LMS move from destination to distribution

I have mentioned many a time on this site that the use of an LMS has got to make sense within the ecosystem of tools that an organisation makes use of. However, having recently taken over day-to-day responsibility for one in my new role, I have been thinking again about how they can be used.

The VLE/LMS is dead debate has, in my opinion, long become a bit boring.

My experiences so far, in my first months in my role, has reinforced my views. Overall, your LMS may well be dead but it does not mean that is best for everyone. This largely comes down to the platforms and communication channels you have available to you.

There is much talk currently about platforms, the school of thought being you need to control the platforms that people use so that the social (conversational) and push (advertising, etc) can be monetized, as well as the users and their data. Facebook is the platform in this chain of thought – especially with Oculus and Live making their moves into the real world. Now, of course, part of the VLE is dead debate was that we could distribute to users via Facebook and elsewhere that meant the platform was no longer needed. This ignore the fact that for many organisations, at least education companies/suppliers/institutions, the organisation is the LMS. It is the face of the company to the users/clients/students and often the authoring and collaboration place for staff.

For many non-education/learning focused organisations the LMS is, of course, not high on the lists of priorities for any staff. Therefore, it is then a case of understanding how it can help. Distribution by geolocation, time, etc. is surely then the future, no longer relying on ‘time out’ to go away and do learning in a training room where productivity is impacted rather than enhanced.

This stub has been in my drafts for a while so I thought I would post it.

Learning Tech Summer Forum 2016

Learning Tech Summer Forum

Intro

I attended the morning of this year’s summer forum, making my way around the exhibition and attending a few of the freebie sessions.

It’s always an interesting exhibition space, containing a number of big players (Kineo, Brightwave, Cornerstone, etc.) squeezed into smaller stands and a few of the smaller players from the main winter event too. Quite how firms decide to be here or not doesn’t always seem particularly obvious but there’s certainly a less manic feel than the ‘big’ event.

Overall

Anyway, my takeaway feeling was that we’ve perhaps, finally, broken the paradigm that has dominated the online learning environment. Whilst the LMS is not dead, as mandatory reporting and off-the-shelf mandatory content were still out in force, what was more obvious was that the web is finally changing what people think of as a learning department’s responsibilities.

Whilst my rather short review of the winter show was that organisations were still moving too slowly, I’d say this show (or at least the parts I attended) made me feel that, at last…

Corporate learning is moving to the web and the corporate web is moving towards learning.

If the LMS was born to track the delivery of existing content (session scheduling, reading material, online versions of what was effectively CD-ROM-esque Flash material, etc.) then we are starting to see ecosystems where learning is more embedded throughout an organisation thanks to the technology. This is less technology enhanced/enabled learning and more performance supported by technology. This is largely down to the combinations of HTML5, TinCan/Xperience API and other technology that means there is less need for a controlled ‘management system’ whilst maintaining elements of the management through reporting.

The presentation from gomo (http://www.gomolearning.com/) was focused on the ‘future of offline learning’ and really amounted to an update on their product. Gomo has been impressive for a while but the new additions are native iOS and Android apps for running content offline. This in itself is an interesting ‘development’, effectively the industry recognising the challenges that come from needing consistent Internet connectivity. Of course some LMS systems have had their own solutions for this, for example I remember NetDimensions presenting on their offline access a while back. As Microsoft discovered with the Xbox One – you may have a user trying to access on a submarine and it’s interesting that if you publish out of the Gomo infrastructure to your LMS you then lose the opportunity to download and run offline using the ‘Gomo Central’ apps. Whilst things change the option still seems to be go “all in” on one solution or another.

With the acquisition of Rustici, into the parent Learning Technologies Group, you suspect gomo are going to be able to really drive the way forward with combining the Xperience API and their ecosystem of collaborative authoring and publishing, adaptively, once to all platforms. The most interesting piece for many orgs, I’d suspect, is the micro file option for LMS – where content runs like SCORM but always picks up latest version of content from Gomo.

Now the collaborative and HTML5 web page style output of Gomo is where the tool gets even more interesting, effectively it could become THE authoring tool for an organisation. Just as Xyleme has promised for some time, you could have a single source of truth for all content. With Xyleme this includes publishing to PPT, PDF, etc. with Gomo we are perhaps recognising that all corporate learning could be delivered via HTML5 pages and that all corporate content and web communications could be delivered via the simple authoring tool. Indeed the presentation included examples of taking Gomo content for your public facing .com website. This is where I feel the platform is now the web, and your organisation could work almost entirely in this ecosystem, even if it was just originally designed for learning. Similarly Learning Pool’s version of Adapt is being adopted for easy-to-build HTML5 content beyond learning departments. In many ways the LMS offered the educational organisation a way to move online (a ‘course’ to web model) the new HTML5 based tools are allowing the corporate world to move online (an individual/department to page model). Potentially this offers all staff in an organisation a way to build ‘nice looking’ (I’ll avoid ‘quality’) web content via WYSIWYG type interfaces in the way that blogging and other ‘web 2.0’ tools did for enthusiasts of those platforms.

Of course the challenge is in trying to get people to move away from the familiarity of Office tools and Office 365 and other products may well supersede anything that comes out of these learning industry players.

How suitable this is for you also comes back to where you are the evolution curve. When I attended the Adobe event last year it was similarly clear you could use tools originally purposed for web designers and marketers but now easily useable for corporate workers and learning professionals. A little like with Apple vs Microsoft vs Google, it feels like organisations are increasingly adopting a route to digital transformation and running with it.

Simpleshow’s presentation made the point that ‘explainer’ videos can achieve a lot. I like the Simpleshow concept, not least as they think in terms of ‘reducing’ online learning – a view I always approve of, i.e. reducing a world of content into something useful, rather than ‘producing’ yet another presentation, course or huge manual. The presentation effectively digged into a question akin to “if the word of the year can be a pictograph then why are corporations so tied to lengthy documents and spread sheets”? Hear, hear!!

Fosway (looking to get feedback on the industry to build out more of their independent reports: http://www.fosway.com/research/ ) were first up as you came out of Olympia’s crowded lifts. They now have gomo as the leading core challenger in the authoring tool market, sneaking into the Strategic Leader quadrant. I came away from the conference thinking they are the tool that makes a lot of sense, with Learning Pool’s Adapt tool a simpler, leaner, solution (including a new freemium option I have expressed an interest in).

The Cornerstone session I attended (Love Learning Love Sharing) picking up the idea of the talent system supplying the social and engagement (for the ‘New Work Environment’) around the content. This includes exposing people’s capabilities inhouse with profile type tools that many people are used to from Facebook, etc. Again this feels like a “which ecosystem are we going to buy into” type issue – made even more clear by Microsoft’s purchase of LinkedIn and undoubted ability to leverage such data into Office.

2017 information here: http://www.learningtechnologies.co.uk/learning-and-skills-group/

Some recent reading

I recently realized that I had made various rough notes from a number of different things I have read over the last year or so. Below is an attempt to aggregate these, all very rough.

How HR Technology Bolsters Learning

I would consider that we are now seeing the end of workplace technology’s focus being on replacing paper processes to areas where the value is more ephemeral and informal. This includes the explosion of ‘social’ tools and their ability to amplify work, especially in cultures where working out loud is encouraged. This article (How HR Technology Bolsters Learning) highlighting that HR technology is beginning to focus on both “employee’s self interest as well as that of the organization” – see my previous post mentioning my professional interest in supporting people and therefore their organizations. However, I would fundamentally disagree with the article for stating that the more “radical” improvements in HR tech for learning are “because millennials demand it”. This contradicts the articles own chain of thought – there are many reasons for improving the use of tech for learning not least that “retention was frequently low” with “historic…online training”. It is not a generational thing, sorry, lets just stop that already.

Stop With “The Future Of Learning” Already

A nice article in both encouraging an end to TFOL talk but also recognizing that there are different types of workplace learning – compliance, professional development and capability acquisition – needing to be recognized and often approached differently.

Digital Curation: A Collection of Dusty Old Curiosities?

I’m always interested in the idea of curation as a competency for L&D professionals, having come into learning from the ‘dusty’ world of libraries. Indeed many of my concerns over the need for learning professionals to see themselves as part of a bigger support structure comes from my experience of seeing what has happened to the information professionals’ world. There is one line in the article that will be particularly familiar to information professionals: “when learners/employees are more skilled in searching and sharing, they don’t need L&D to curate for them. Experts emerge and take over from L&D, and rightly so”. This sounds very familiar to the ‘why do we need information professionals when we have online resources’ mantra of many an information service/library cutback.

The learning professional is no alien to such logic of course, with e-learning business cases too often focused on the cost savings (including headcounts) compared to face-to-face, rather than anything about quality. We can see this across the board for support professionals though, for example, individual reputation management (via LinkedIn, etc.) is supposed to be replacing marketing in many industries. Indeed when at a previous organization, working as a learning technologist, I rewrote my job description to be a two year contract to try and encourage a move to self-sufficient maturity by the wider organization. This was not accepted, as I expected, as there is always scope for an expert pushing the boundaries and trying something new, updating policy as appropriate whilst maintaining standards. However, the key thing that cuts across all of the questioning of support roles is time, support staff tend to earn less than those they support and thus the likelihood of, for example, teachers taking on responsibility for classroom technology over technicians/IT/learning technologies or lawyers handling their own research will always come down to cost.

As the article actually says, people will curate when “they value it” but, as we know – not least from the ‘The Future of Learning’ article above – there are types of learning people value more than others. Therefore, I would argue, there will be areas where the organizational experts, SMEs and the individual will play a different part of the mix. The learning professional, in my opinion, can curate to feed into a professional’s personal network as there will be mutual trust. The learner will trust the organizations they are a member of (professional bodies, employer, etc.) to feed into their PLN whilst those same organizations will entrust their learners to appropriately develop their expertise.

Information service cutbacks have often based on the false idea that “everything is googleable”, as called out by another article on Curation, and value can certainly be gained from a learning team acting as the gatekeeper to quality hidden web/subscription resources. It is certainly no surprise to hear presentations on the LSG Webinars, for example, espousing the value of HBR and other content for learning blends.

I would say curation has to be seen as a social activity, thus it will be hugely influenced by organizational culture. Do you have a global, regional or local culture? ESNs and the scope of curation and sharing will undoubtedly help you identify this.

The feeling remains though, when talking about things like weekly news round ups, how the information world has too often lived in isolation whereas curation as part of curriculum, capability frameworks or looser support of lifelong learning can play a more valuable role for our clients/colleagues. However, whilst there is undoubted value in curation, I would be fearful of ‘learning’ departments looking too closely at the world of information for survival techniques.

Lost in translation: re-imagining L&D

I love the core concept here – that what we think about as ‘learning technology’ can be far more pervasive than L&D teams manage to see/implement. Fundamentally it is about the productivity of the workforce and understanding of where things can work well. As the article states the “focus on implementing learning innovation at this granular level [the course] rather than at the macro organizational level…[means] practitioners are in danger of viewing organizational learning in the narrowest of senses”.

The idea, set out in the article, to move “upstream” to “design learning ecosystems” are inline with my personal views that to create a learning organization/culture we must establish the opportunities for people to learn and reflect via technology, policy and some formal training. Even if, for example, only 10% of employees use a social learning tool, that is going to be a % increase on local learning that would not have happened with the possibilities for wider audience/amplification via such a tool. Let’s not suppose we can do everything, but we can establish where there is room for improvement and tackle those issues and provide opportunities for people to learn from the appropriate people.

Office Mix: To Mix, Or Not To Mix, That Is The Question

I have asked if people are using OM on both workplace and HE-centric learning tech forums in the past with little or no response, so it was interesting to to see this article pop up. I’m still to try OM in anger, due to the need to have the latest PPT version, but it sounds like a real opportunity for encouraging digital content production with a low tech skill entry point.

The “dramatic introduction” in the article will sound familiar, just updated, to anyone working in learning tech – the decades old battle of inconsistent behavior on browsers and the failure of browsers/standards to offer users/learners a standard experience. My view on this would be, generally speaking, to avoid large scale ‘packaging’ and instead chunk content into formats we know should work, such as video, PDF, etc. including finally moving away from SCORM*. Of course nothing is going to be perfect but by leveraging the delivery platform we make learning more like the platforms/networks we use outside of work.

As the article states, Microsoft are after the education pie; OM was one part of their products on show at BETT. In many ways it offers the easiest route yet from Office/standalone learnign to digital multimedia content, here’s hoping it is worth the wait when I really get a chance!

* Can’t we just skip SCORM-packaging and go straight to HTML5?

I totally agree with the sentiment in this thread. However, I would say HTML5 is not necessarily the answer.

Fundamentally I think there remains a lot from the historical legacy. We can perhaps simplify the situation to see the evolution to eLearning v1.0 (SCORM packages) as being about taking slide/CD-ROM style corporate learning online.

This is quite different to other sectors, for example Higher Education. HE effectively looked to LMS systems for file sharing and communication from the start – Blackboard managed huge market share even though their SCORM player did not work for years! This was partly as the LMS itself did lots of the tracking – resources could be chunked appropriately rather than lumped into one tracked package. When Web2.0 came then wikis and other tools could be integrated to mix-up the learning activity offering.

Most organizations have probably moved on to some extent from v.1 but the need to support legacy requirements means scrapping the old and starting afresh is always going to be difficult. However, one solution would be to use online systems as platforms for a variety of content formats (in the same way social media platforms can be used to distribute) rather than authoring/packaging into html5 and having ‘courses’ that are single items.

The L&D world is splitting in two

I perhaps wouldn’t go as far to see the world as split in two. I’d consider a blend of elements from the past, but with a clear drive to move on and improve, as the way forward. Nonetheless this is an excellent article and has led to plenty of discussion since. That said, the conversation is really a continuation of L&D’s professionals tendency to, in my opinion, be overly reflective (yes I know I’m reflecting and blogging to make that point) and not acting on where we know things can be improved. Why? Well that will vary by organization but it will often be about a lack of time of course.

Overall we should be agreed that productivity, performance and engagement can be impacted by learning professionals and will play their part in avoiding another major economic meltdown.

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Probably enough for now – I have some more notes I will be in their own post.