Macintosh Rapid E-Learning Authoring Software

Is there a rapid elearning or screencasting production tool for the Mac? A contributor to my post Capture that E-Learning Demo: Update, asked me:

We have been looking at both Camtasia and Captivate for our online development. My question is if you have knowledge of ANY Apple compatible capturing software with the same capabilities of Camtasia and Captivate? Or if either Adobe or Techsmith ever plan on making this available to the Apple community?

Two great questions centered around the notion that there is no screencasting killer app for the Mac. Now, I have a Intel-chip MacBook (it also runs Windows using Boot Camp), but I use Windows PCs for learning content development and production – it’s a work / life balance thing. As a result, I have never really considered the options for e-learning authoring on the Mac before now. But since I was asked, here’s my two cents worth…

There are a number of choices. First, you could run the programs you're evaluating (TechSmith Camtasia or Adobe Captivate) on a Mac with Windows / Boot Camp, but my view would be given the processing resources needed to generate content in a native Windows environment, running them via a virtual machine would be to enter a world of pain I’m not prepared to contemplate: there are too many links in the chain; it’s too risky. Murphy’s Law says that on a death march project with a deadline looming, the the authoring environment would not be up to the task, regardless of how well it behaved prior to to that.

With that option rejected let’s look at the other choices available for the MacOS. To answer my correspondent’s second question first, it seems that TechSmith are looking at a mid-2009 release for the Mac version of Camtasia. Click here to view a screencast about the latest developments in this product.

Camtasia for the Macintosh is soon to be a reality

Not so good, I’m sad to say for Adobe fans. According to The Apple Blog there are currently no plans to bring it to the Mac. When questioned, the Adobe development team responded:

Captivate is built from a program that ties deeply into the core Windows. To bring it to the Mac would require a total rewrite, something that we’re not sure we can justify at this point. If we had significant interest from Mac users, it’d be a different story.

If you want to register your interest in a Mac version of Captivate, click here to let Adobe know via their feature request form.

Next, the third of the "Big Three" rapid e-learning development authoring tools, Articulate similarly does not support MacOS natively. However, in a very comprehensive post here, guest blogger Jim Gritton (co-founder of GB Learning Consultancy) discusses

Parallels Desktop for Mac, followed by CrossOver Mac and now VMware Fusion. Both Parallels and Fusion are Windows emulators: they use virtualization technology to allow you to run Windows as a virtual machine alongside the Mac operating system, as you can see from the screenshot below:

WinXP login screen on Parallels

While it may seem contradictory that I discuss an emulator here, Articulate is a little different, in that it can interact with Mac-native KeyNote-created presentations and even integrates with the Mac Dock (via Parallels).

Obviously more optimistic than me (see Death March above) Jim asserts that:

If you’re wondering about my set-up, I’m currently running Parallels Desktop with Windows XP on a 20-inch, all-in-one iMac, sporting a 2.16 GHz Intel Core Duo Processor, 1 GB memory and a 240 GB hard disk. This isn’t the fastest or most powerful Mac on the block, but it isn’t the slowest, either. I’m not going to pretend that running Windows applications using Parallels is as fast as running Mac applications natively on my iMac, but it’s no slouch. Nor has it let me down.

One approach that seems to me to have some potential is CrossOver Mac, which builds on the open-source implementation of the Windows API, Wine. This enables Unix-based operating systems (like Mac OS X and Linux) to run Windows applications “natively.” Hmmm... might look in to this myself, but it breaks my "Macs are for fun" work / life balance rule, in a thin-end-of-the-wedge kind of way...

What are we left with? Quite a lot, as it turns out.

In terms of native MacOS screencasting Mac, the evidence of my research suggests that Telestream’s ScreenFlow is the most popular application.

ScreenFlow Export wizard screenshot

According to their website ScreenFlow includes:

Feature	Description
Video Capture	Using a custom multithreaded SSE & Altivec accelerated, 64-bit enabled compression system, ScreenFlow can handle everything from capturing DVD video & audio to fast moving Keynote presentations.
Record Everything	You don't need to pick an area of the screen for capture, ScreenFlow has advanced algorithms that only encode areas of change on your screen. The application is powerful enough to simultaneously record from your iSight or DV camera at the same time as your screen (and your microphone and computer's audio!).
Highlight	During your screen capture, ScreenFlow tracks where your mouse cursor is, when you click and when you press a key. This allows you to add mouse click effects (both visual and audible), an overlay showing your key strokes and even lets you zoom the mouse pointer up & down.
Edit	Once your screen capture is complete, you're transported to the ScreenFlow editor. Using a familiar timeline interface, ScreenFlow lets you easily add zoom & pan effects, trim clips, add drop shadow & reflection, adjust audio levels etc. You can even combine existing media into your screencast.
Callout	Callouts let you highlight & focus in on the mouse or front-most window. Want to circle the area around the mouse? What took an experienced user minutes or hours in Final Cut Pro or After Effects is now a couple of clicks away.
Motion	ScreenFlow introduces actions to the editing interface. These make it very quick & easy to modify parameters of your screencast over time. For example, adding a video action lets you put zoom & pan effects on your clips, while the audio action lets you adjust volume at different points in your screencast.
Export Quality	When resizing high resolution screen content into a QuickTime movie, ScreenFlow uses custom GPU algorithms to give your finished movie the best possible quality. You'll find even small text suddenly becomes legible for your viewers.
Leopard Only	ScreenFlow was built for Mac OS X Leopard. It makes extensive use of the best of Mac OS X technologies: Core Animation, QuickLook, Spotlight, QTKit, Quartz Composer, OpenGL, Core Image, Automator, Core Data and many others.

In the multiplatform world, Qarbon’s offering ViewletBuilder seems to have potential. This product seems to have some powerful e-learning features including LMS integration.

Qarbon’s ViewletBuilder

According to Qarbon, the product’s highlights are:

• Create and publish Flash tutorials and simulations in minutes
• Expand the reach of your online marketing with interactive slideshows and presentations
• Develop and deliver powerful, dynamic courseware without programming
• Capture detailed viewer responses with quizzes, tests, surveys and polls
• Seamlessly share Projects amongst Authors
• Integrate your content with your organization’s learning management system (LMS)
• Benefit from its multi-platform solutions Windows, Linux & Mac

From the open source world SWF Tools is also available for the Mac. SWF Tools is a collection of SWF manipulation and creation utilities written by Rainer Böhme and Matthias Kramm. It is released under the GPL.
Features included are:

• PDF2SWF A PDF to SWF Converter. Generates one frame per page. Enables you to have fully formatted text, including tables, formulas etc. inside your Flash Movie. It's based on the xpdf PDF parser from Derek B. Noonburg.
• SWFCombine A tool for inserting SWFs into Wrapper SWFs. (Templates) E.g. for including the pdf2swf SWFs in some sort of Browsing-SWF.
• SWFStrings Scans SWFs for text data.
• SWFDump Prints out various informations about SWFs.
• JPEG2SWF Takes one or more JPEG pictures and generates a SWF slideshow.
• PNG2SWF Like JPEG2SWF, only for PNGs.
• GIF2SWF Converts GIFs to SWF. Also able to handle animated gifs.
• WAV2SWF Converts WAV audio files to SWFs, using the L.A.M.E. MP3 encoder library.
• AVI2SWF Converts AVI animation files to SWF. It supports Flash MX H.263 compression. Some examples can be found at examples.html.
  Font2SWF Converts font files (TTF, Type1) to SWF.
• SWFBBox Allows to readjust SWF bounding boxes.
• SWFC A tool for creating SWF files from simple script files.
• SWFExtract Allows to extract Movieclips, Sounds, Images etc. from SWF files.
• RFXSWF Library A fully featured library which can be used for standalone SWF generation. Includes support for Bitmaps, Buttons, Shapes, Text, Fonts, Sound etc. It also has support for ActionScript using the Ming ActionCompiler.

SWFTools has been reported to work on Solaris, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, HP-UX, MacOS X and Windows 98/ME/2000/XP/Vista.

If you want to experiment with a ‘lite’ authoring environment for the Macintosh, try free-to-use Jing (by TechSmith).

• Screenshot still image capture
• Record onscreen video
• Share instantly over the Web (FTP), IM, e-mail
• Audio Narration

Jing lacks many features that proprietary screencasting software has, including local saves, multiple output types, and delivery formats, but it’s free to use, so a restricted function set should be expected. Once content is captured and saved, a URL for the file is automatically created and can be shared with others to view or access.

So there you have it. A whistle-stop tour of content capture and rapid e-learning authoring tools for the Mac. I would be very interested to hear how Mac users fare with these applications, or can suggest any others that are used in this context on the MacOS platform. What really surprises me is that there aren’t more tools already, after all, the Mac is the doyen of the digital media development industry and I would have thought that the tools available for e-learning development would reflect this preference for the platform. But that’s another story.

NOTE WELL:

Given the number of positive comments I have made about TechSmith recently, I want to emphasize that I am in no way associated with them, and that the purpose of this blog is not to showcase or cheerlead any commercial interest. It just happens at the moment they seem to make the most effective tools in this market space. I would suggest to their competitors that they step up to the mark and compete with applications that really meet the needs of learning and development practitioners and I will certainly be pleased to discuss their solutions in positive terms. Equally, should anyone fall short of the mark (MPEG4 or FLV, anyone?) I will highlight it on the E-Learning Curve Blog with no prejudice.

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The Impact of the Current Economic Crisis on E-Learning: February ‘09 LCBBQ

This month’s Learning Circuits Blog Big Question asks

What is the impact of the economy on you and your organization? What are you doing as a result?

In response, I returned to a post I wrote about a year ago. While reflecting on the LCBBQ I formed the view that the argument I outlined then bears repeating now. Where appropriate I have updated the article to reflect recent developments as the Recession turned into Depression.

The dialectic I am presenting here can be summarized in the following manner: will the positive economic, organizational, and social value of e-learning outweigh traditional human responses an economic crisis? What strategies can we use to ensure the survival of and even the growth of e-learning as an industry in these changing times?

So what's changed in the e-learning industry since the last recession in 2001? I've outlined some discussion points below:

1. First of all: Traditional business practice
2. Developments in Infrastructure & Hardware
3. The E-learning Hype curve
4. Refinements in Content Development Methodologies
5. The Rise if the Read/Write Web
6. The PlayStation Generation - Digital Natives in the workplace

Scroll down to find out more about each of these points.
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Traditional business practice
Historically, when a slowdown or company rationalization occurs, the first against the wall are the folks in the PR, marketing, and training departments. Typically, individuals and organizations revert to previously-learned behaviors in tough times; this usually means going through the process of carrying out tried-and-tested, though not necessarily logical responses to the problems put in front of them. The rationale is as follows:

• Profits are down
• Revenue projections aren't great for the next 12/18 months
• We need to cut our costs
• We need to keep the guys that make the widgets (we need to have product to sell)
• We need to keep the managers of these people (or productivity will go down)
• We need to keep Human Resources in place to manage everyone obviously (it's just a coincidence that I - that is the decision-maker - work in HR!)

• What about those training people? High travel costs for the ILT guys, they pull people out of work for 3 days to go on courses. Large budgets spent on implementing and maintaining an LMS/LCMS, third-party e-learning libraries, custom courseware etc, but they do seem to add value to the organization. And let's face it, they don't really improve the quality of our product, because they never convince us with their ROI metrics...
• Outcome: tea and sympathetic chat, and the Training team get their pink slips / P45s.

Sadly, I reckon that this will be strategy undertaken by a significant number of organizations over the next year or so. However....

...and it's a big however.

Let's look at the evidence for factors that have changed in the e-learning industry since 2001 and the recession following the Dot-Com Crash.

Infrastructure & Hardware
More-or-less general availability of high-speed internet access just wasn't there in 2001. To take the example of the company I worked for at the time, our high-quality courseware was developed in Authorware and Director and delivered to customers on CD-ROM for distribution via their intranet or accessed directly from the disk. Our on-line courseware was a 'lite' version of the CD material - not out of choice, but because of the limited functionality that could be provided to a user via a 56k connection.

Over-compressed images, poor animation, and very poor audio - hardly the immersive learning solution that e-learning flattered to promise at the time. Assuming the learner could access the content successfully, the chances were that the PC (for it was always a PC) that they were using to view their content was processing and displaying the date at a rate that we wouldn't find acceptable on a PDA now (screen-size excluded). Pentium or pre-Pentium processors, 8-bit sound cards, 16 colors, 800x600 pixel displays. And so on.

In short, we could see the potential, but our imaginations exceeded the available technology.

The e-learning hype curve
This brings me neatly to the e-learning hype curve (see Figure 1). Kevin Kruse described 2001 as the year that

...brought the harsh, steep slope of unfulfilled promises. Several high-profile providers shut their doors while many more announced large-scale layoffs in the face of missed revenue targets and crashing stock prices. E-learning advocates retreated to the more defensible ground of "blended learning. This year [went] down as the Trough of Despair.

Figure 1. The E-learning Hype Cycle

I would suggest through familiarization and use, learners expectations are more reasonable about what can be achieved (and perhaps more importantly how it can be achieved through digitally mediated delivery). Given this environment, organizations are now more willing to invest in e-learning as part of their overall training strategy. But is it perceived as a necessity or a luxury?

A year ago I wrote that:

I can't answer that question right now. I suspect that I will be able to answer it 12 months from now, because there will be evidence as to whether decision makers consider e-learning to be a core requirement that effectively meets organizations' training needs.

In light of recent research by Bersin & Associates among others, it seems that The Powers That Be in organizations have judged online training to be found wanting, and are responding by cutting budgets and reassessing learning & development strategies, apparently by beginning to disintermediate training by using non-formal and informal knowledge transfer methods in place of ‘e-training,’ LMSs, and VLEs.

Content development methodologies
I would assert that there is a real opportunity for e-learning here (if L&D professionals are in a to position stand their ground). Without going into the history of this too much, the development of (relatively) easy-to-use authoring tools like Captivate, Articulate (and a whole raft of others), Rapid E-Learning development methodology and the disintermediation principle means that e-learning has fewer up-front costs associated with it than at the turn of the century.

Similarly, if it's done correctly it can be argued that ongoing maintenance and support costs are lower than they ever have been. By developing content with smaller, more flexible teams, the value proposition of e-learning has been enhanced, and the total cost of ownership has been significantly reduced. Outside of e-learning, the take-up of podcasting and streamed media on sites like Blogger and YouTube demonstrates that this ease-of-use of tools and technologies has extended into the community at large.

The Read/Write Web
Who would have thought in 2000 that blogging, social networking, wikis and podcasts would be as big a part of life as they are now? At the start of the century, the Web (and e-learning) could at best be described as a half-duplex medium; it was pretty much all one-way traffic. The development of information platforms has facilitated knowledge-sharing, folksonomies, social interaction, and, key to all this, reciprocity.

We now live in a multiplex world of many voices and ideas, mediated by the internet. At the forefront in using these web technologies is the e-learning industry. By using these tools to develop content I feel we can demonstrate quite effectively that e-learning has a value now that it did not have a decade ago. I would assert that this is particularly true if you take a social-constructivist approach to learning. By the way, I'm happy to entertain debates about the role of formal as opposed to non-formal and informal learning in this environment.

The PlayStation Generation
Concomitant with the read/write web is the PlayStation generation that have grown up over the last number of years. In his seminal essay Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants (2001), Marc Prensky declares:

...students have changed radically. Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach.
Today’s students have not just changed incrementally from those of the past, nor simply changed their slang, clothes, body adornments, or styles, as has happened between generations previously. A really big discontinuity has taken place. One might even call it a “singularity” – an event which changes things so fundamentally that there is absolutely no going back. This so-called “singularity” is the arrival and rapid dissemination of digital technology in the last decades of the 20th century.

Today’s students – K through college – represent the first generations to grow up with this new technology. They have spent their entire lives surrounded by and using computers, videogames, digital music players, video cams, cell phones, and all the other toys and tools of the digital age. Today’s average college graduates have spent less than 5,000 hours of their lives reading, but over 10,000 hours playing video games (not to mention 20,000 hours watching TV). Computer games, email, the Internet, cell phones and instant messaging are integral parts of their lives.

Extending from this, there is a generation of workers who are comfortable with and practiced in the concepts and use of e-learning - take a look at the resources available on www.skoool.ie, an initiative for second-level students in Ireland. I was involved in the development of the first iteration of this site, and it's changed a lot (for the better) since we took those first steps creating it 8 years ago. Similarly in third-level education, there have been significant developments in on-line learning, and I think that it's fair to say that it has become quite embedded in the pedagogy employed by universities: tools like Moodle enable students to upload coursework, take tests, build their own knowledgebases and wikis, and have on-line discussions through a single point of access.

This generation is in the workplace right now. It will expect to learn new skills as their careers develop using the tools that they have always learned on in the past: that is, by using e-learning.

Conclusion
This is a blog entry, not an essay. But consider other factors including transport costs and training in the era of $100 a barrel oil and the value of virtual classrooms; the ROI of e-learning as opposed to traditional methods; even the impact of traditional ways of teaching on the environment ("e-learning" becomes "eco-learning" anyone or even ‘economical-learning’?). I think that if they are in a position to do so, learning professionals are repositioning themselves to re-use the skills they’ve acquired in different contexts – perhaps undertaking their activities from a different platform, or through working in a different domain of expertise.

Ultimately, I would say that all anyone can do at the moment is keep their powder dry and hope for the best in the short term, while preparing for what may be a completely different business environment when the green shoots of recovery finally emerge.

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Upload Adobe Presenter content to a Learning Management System (LMS) – more

Further my recent post on Adding E-Learning Presentations to Blackboard, Brian S Friedlander was kind enough to comment on my post. He suggested that you could import e-learning presentations and courseware to LMSs like Blackboard as PDFs.

Figure 1. Presenter 7 Publish dialog box

Sure enough, Adobe Presenter 7 does have a ‘Publish to PDF’ output option (see Figure 1), accompanying the ‘Publish to My Computer’ and ‘Publish to Connect Pro’ rendering options available with the previous versions of Presenter (see Figure 2).

Figure 2. Presenter 6 Publish dialog box

Having only just installed Presenter 7, and while I have published some test presentations locally, I have yet to upload any PDF-formatted content to an LMS. So, I have no idea how well this output type functions in comparison to the more traditional XML, SWF, and HTML-formatted e-learning content package when it’s deployed from an online or networked platform.

I will carry out one of my famous comparisons between the two formats at some point in the future. My preliminary view is that the ability to distribute content as a PDF certainly opens up some interesting possibilities and opportunities.

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References:

Adobe Presenter 7 Homepage: http://www.adobe.com/products/presenter/

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Capture that E-learning Demo 2: Captivate

As I’m doing a lot of demos at the moment, I thought that it would be apposite to discuss demo capturing and authoring tools. Yesterday, it was the turn of Camtasia, today, it’s Adobe Captivate.

Adobe Captivate is an e-learning tool (for Microsoft Windows) which can be used to author software demonstrations, software simulations, branched scenarios, and quizzes for distribution online or via CD-ROM.

Recording
Even before the term 'Rapid E-Learning' was coined (and Captivate was RoboDemo), this app was designed to be an e-learning authoring tool. As such, once opened, the author is presented with three recording modes (Software Simulation, Scenario Simulation, Other), depending on the activity you want to undertake. To capture content, the author carries out each step in the demonstration, in sequence. As with Camtasia, it's possible to cycle between applications without interrupting the recording process. The author can pause or stop recording (at which point the software renders the media that has been captured) at any point. When the recording (or a section of a larger recording) is complete, Captivate opens in editing mode.

Post-production
Once the presentation has been captured, the content is displayed as a number of discrete slide, representing each interaction of the recording. A timeline is available to integrate audio, onscreen text, and other enhancements. Similar to Camtasia, the author can record audio while screen-capturing is in progress. In edit mode, the author can import, record and edit a voice-over narration and other audio elements into the presentation.

Deployment
Captivate saves files in a proprietary *.CP format, which is only readable by Captivate. Content is generated as ShockWave Flash (*>SWF), which can be played on most computers via a browser with the (nearly) ubiquitous Flash Player plug-in.

Uses
Once exported, content is easily distributed to a wide audience; as well a online delivery, content can also be distributed via CD-ROM or DVD, by e-mail, and on Adobe Connect. Learners can easily access Captivate content through learning management systems (LMSs) and content management systems (CMSs). Captivate is both AICC and SCORM conformant, facilitating learner usage tracking, as well as through scored quizzes and other interactions.

Instructional Uses
Captivate enables learning professionals to create new content and transform existing learning collateral in a (relatively) easy-to-use "one-stop" media creating environment. It's unified API means that very little programming experience is needed to generate attractive, immersive e-learning content.

Criticisms
As well as the positives, Captivate has some deficiencies; integrating, editing audio can be tricky, as can estimating slide duration; it's a bit of a memory hog on long presentations, or content containing a range of media assets; it can take a LONG time to generate content. In terms of rendered files, it's reliance on the SWF format, rather than, say Flash Video *.FLV) can make download times quite long when compared to its competitors. Finally, in an increasingly mobile world, devices like the iPhone cannot be used for playback.

Tomorrow:

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Captivate vs. Camtasia - Head-to-head in a Fight for the Byte – It’s an E-Learning Authoring Tool Deathmatch!

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By The Way: I’m toying with the idea of using Articulate: any experiences / war stories / opinions?

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Capture that E-learning Demo 1: Camtasia

Getting right back to basics here, but what a good way to start the new year! So, if you’re new to e-learning courseware development, read on…

Ever wondered how to capture demos for delivery online ?

I generally use two pieces of software to capture high-quality, post-produced demos. In this blog entry, I'll give you a bit of background on Camtasia Studio, and in the next blog post I'll discuss Adobe Captivate.

Camtasia Studio is a screen video capture program for Microsoft Windows, published by TechSmith. It is a screen-recording application that allows users to record almost anything on a computer screen, including application demonstrations and PowerPoint presentations. Users are able to use their own computers to demonstrate some aspect of motion-based content.

The presenter defines the area of the screen or the window to be captured before recording begins; it is also possible to capture the entire screen area.

Recording
Once Camtasia's recording mode is activated, the presenter carries out all steps of the demonstration, in sequence. It is possible to move between applications without interrupting the recording process. The presenter can pause or stop recording at any time - at which point the software renders the input that has been captured - as well as apply user-defined settings, such as when and how to display the cursor.

Post-production
Once the presentation has been captured, the presenter is able to revise it by integrating multiple recordings, if required (and this is typically the case on longer-form demos and course learning objects). In addition, the presenter can dub in a voice-over narration, sound effects, as well as music onto the presentation. Camtasia also allows audio recording while screen-capturing is in progress, so the presenter can narrate the demonstration as it is carried out. Most presenters, however, prefer to wait until they have finished the screen capture, and then record the narration from a script as the application is playing back the recorded capture.

Deployment
The application allows files to be stored in its own proprietary *.CAMREC format, which is only readable by Camtasia itself; this format allows for quite small file sizes, even for longer presentations. Much more useful is that Camtasia also allows the generated video stream to be exported to common video formats which can be read by most computers, even if the Camtasia software is not installed, such as Flash FLV & SWF, Windows WMV and MPEG-4. MP3 audio and podcast files may also be generated.

Uses
Once exported, content is easily distributed to a wide audience; highly compressed files, such as files encoded in the FLV format are especially suitable for distribution online via platforms like Adobe Connect.

Instructional Uses

Camtasia is popular among instructors and learners because presentations are easy to produce and distribute, saving instructors the time to repeat presentations many times, especially in courses that teach a certain application or computing environment. Many learners appreciate the ease with which Camtasia-produced presentations can be viewed, especially presentations that are embedded into a web page and are shown in the client browser window.

Criticisms
One of Camtasia's primary shortcomings is its long rendering times and excessive consumption of system resources during production. Output file generation times can be improved by using newer hardware, such as a dual processor system, as well as an increased amount of RAM.

Next Time: Captivate

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SlideShare makes PowerPoint a little more Web 2.0-friendly

If you’re a regular (and dedicated) reader of The E-Learning Curve Blog, you’ll recall that in did a compare / contrast between authorSTREAM and SlideShare some months back. At the time I concluded:

So which service is better? Well, I guess that comes down to WIIFM - what's in it for me. The broad sweep of features and functionality are pretty similar on both services: deficiencies in one are accommodated by lack of functionality in the other, so it really comes down to personal choice.

My user experience of authorSTREAM was slightly superior to that of SlideShare: upload and conversion times were lower on the former service, for example. Equally, the enhanced slide animation and transition support on authorSTREAM was a positive advantage, as was the ability to view presentations in full-screen mode via a third party environment (my blog in this case). I also prefer the extended functionality afforded by the desktop-based client client, as well as the better audio integration.

In the end... well, I recommend that you try both out yourself, and you decide which service meets your needs.

Since then, both services have been nice enough to keep me up-to-date with developments in their respective apps. As you can imagine, most of these updates are incremental changes in functionality, better app stability, and so on, but the latest update from SlideShare really excited me.

As an inveterate user of PowerPoint Add-ins (Camtasia, Presenter, PowerManual etc) I find the facility to generate e-learning content from within an authoring application to be an essential component of the Rapid E-Learning production process. As it happens, I’m presenting at an event tomorrow where my e-learning “wow factor” will be How to Create E-Learning Content in Four Mouse Clicks; and a PowerPoint add-in is an important part of that narrative.

You can now generate e-elearning objects in PowerPoint and publish them to the SlideShare website, using the new SS ribbon add-in. This looks like being a very cool tool indeed, and if I get all my shopping done, I’ll install and test over the next few days.

Meet the SlideShare Ribbon in PowerPoint 2007

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Rapid E-learning: using the 80/20 rule to prioritize learning needs

Today's post concludes my short review of Kineo's 80/20 approach to rapid learning content prioritization and development.
Previously, I considered how the 80/20 Rule could be applied to e-learning, and suggested that Juran's Axiom of "the vital few and the trivial many" meant that we could say 80 percent of learning results originate from 20 percent of inputs for any activity or process. For example, 80 percent of an organization sales come from 20 percent of customers, or 80 percent of performance in an organisation is attributable to 20 percent of workers.

In the learning domain, this rule can be applied to the process of training prioritization. In organizations the purpose of learning and development is to improve worker performance. There are many ways and opportunities for employees to improve their performance:

• reducing procedural mistakes
• identifying new customers
• influencing the behavior of others
• reducing error in products

Effective training should focus on providing what’s necessary to enable people to improve performance. However, the 80/20 rule suggests that not all performance improvement opportunities merit the same focus. Rather it suggests that 20% of opportunities, if addressed 80% of the total potential value of a training solution (assuming the ‘perfect’ solution will address 100% of opportunities completely. Focusing training efforts on that top 20% is a far more efficient model than attempting to cover the remaining 80%. For rapid e-learning with a relatively short duration, having this focus is critical.

In this context, Kineo recommend a value-driven model for identifying and prioritising opportunities for rapid e-learning to influence performance that will contribute the most to organizational performance.

According to Stephen Walsh from Kineo, this process has a number of key activities:

• Ensure that you have identified prioritized needs that rapid e-learning is best placed to address
• Use the 80/20 rule to guide your analysis of the prioritization of training
• Use the three-step approach (see Figure 1) to conduct rapid training needs analysis

1. Identify the full range of performance improvement opportunities
2. Establish criteria and rank accordingly with experts – concentrating your efforts on top 20%
3. Translate to objectives and seek approval

• Use rapid tools (check-lists) and rapid methods (phone, workshops, virtual classroom, surveys) to gather your data.

Figure 1. Value-driven model for rapid training needs prioritisation (courtesy Kineo)

For a more detailed look at this approach, go to Kineo's website, or download the Rapid Guide on How to Rapidly Identify Training Needs.

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Rapid E-Learning and the 80/20 Rule

You'll know if you're a regular reader of The E-Learning Curve Blog that I have discussed the usage of the Pareto Principle (also known as the 80/20 Rule) in previous blog posts. Elsewhere in the e-learning blogosphere, Tony Karrer at the eLearning Technology blog has also discussed what he calls the "Corporate Learning Long Tail" in some depth.

Over the weekend, I encountered a very useful paper describing a practical application of the 80/20 rule (though not, as we'll see, the Pareto Principle).

Now read on...

My experience of the e-learning industry is that the best and most effective practitioners are always looking for even more efficient content development methodologies, media production technologies, and approaches to content distribution to enable them to design, develop and deliver content to learners. In this regard, British e-learning development house Kineo always seem to have something interesting to say about the potential uses - and value - of Rapid E-learning, and one particular piece published in this month's Newsletter struck me as being particularly useful. In the article How to Rapidly Identify Training Needs Stephen Walsh discusses a strategy to pinpoint and prioritize training needs - "rapidly of course."

The value of any learning intervention is the change it achieves. If you know where the business challenge is, and you can pinpoint how learning can change behaviour, correct costly errors, and improve performance at the right time, you're setting yourself up for laser-accurate learning.

In his seminal article Rapid E-learning: Disintermediate or die! Ted Cocheu asserts that:

Learning is rapidly changing from today’s hierarchically-driven, curriculum-based training process where instructional designers and trainers intervene to transform subject matter knowledge into courseware, into a “flattened” world where experts transfer their knowledge more directly to those who need it. In this brave new flattened learning world, training professionals will focus more time on capturing and transferring expert knowledge than developing formal courses.

To support these changes in the design, development, and delivery of content, a number of factors need to be considered:

• Speed is king.
• Knowledge is exploding.
• Budgets are shrinking
• Classrooms are not scalable.
• Workplace learning is informal.
• People forget.
• Key knowledge is proprietary.

Rapid E-learning "changes the development model, leverages new tools, and dramatically changes the economics of content development" (p.2). By focusing on specific learning needs, e-learning developers can generate a much higher return on investment in training when compared to content designed using a more traditional ISD-based approach.

The methodology suggested by Kineo is designed to assist learning professionals identify and prioritize learning needs that are appropriate for rapid e-learning in organizations using a "value-based analysis."

This will get you to the outcome that a more detailed training needs would, but in a fraction of the time, by focusing specifically on the greatest points of pain and potential to add value. Identifying those key points means taking an 80/20 approach to needs analysis.

The Kineo interpretation of the Pareto Principle is based upon Dr. Joseph M. Juran's pioneering work in Quality Management in the 1930s and '40s. He "reduced to writing" his generally applicable observation (which I suggest that we should really call Juran's Axiom) of the relative importance of the "vital few and trivial many." Juran observed that in any activity or set of tasks, a few (20 percent) of the functions are vital, and many (80 percent) are trivial. However, as he stated in his 1975 article The Non-Pareto Principle; Mea Culpa he "...mistakenly applied the wrong name to the principle." In Pareto's case it meant one-fifth of the people owned four-fifth's of the wealth. In Juran's research for the US Government, he identified 20% of defects in a production process causing 80% of the quality issues. Project Managers know that 20 percent of the work (the first 10 percent and the last 10 percent) consume 80 percent of time and resources. Extending from this, Juran asserted that the 80/20 Rule could be generalized, from the science of management to the physical world, and indeed to learning and development processes.

In this context, 20 percent of learning interventions, if properly identified, should address 80 percent of the learning needs of an organization, and 80 percent total potential value of a training solution (assuming the ‘perfect’ solution will address 100% of learning.

Focusing training efforts on that top 20% is a far more efficient model than attempting to cover the remaining 80%. For rapid e-learning with a relatively short duration, having this focus is critical.

(How to Rapidly Identify Training Needs p.2)

As such, implementing a value-driven model based on the 80/20 Rule for identifying and prioritizing learning interventions can be a highly effective means to enhance worker performance in an organization.

More..

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References:

Cocheau, T. (2005) Rapid eLearning: Disintermediate or Die! [Internet] Available from: http://ww.elearningforum.com/downloads/rapid_elearning.doc [Accessed 15th May 2006]

Juran, J.M. (1975) The Non-Pareto Principle; Mea Culpa [Internet] Available from: http://www.projectsmart.co.uk/docs/the-non-pareto-principle.pdf [Accessed 30 August 2008]

Walsh, S. (2008) How to Rapidly Identify Training Needs [Internet] Available from: http://www.kineo.com/documents/Kineo_Rapid_Guide_Identify_Needs.pdf [Accessed 30 August 2008]

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Rapid E-learning Authoring Tool - PowerManual Demo

You may recall this post where I discussed a new Rapid E-Learning authoring tool I was beta-testing for a friend.

If, like me, you've spent extended periods of time creating manuals from other media formats, you'll appreciate the hard work and, to be honest, tedium involved in generating, formatting, proofing, and finally producing documentation to accompany ILT and WBT courseware. However, it's a necessary task, and generally something I just get on with doing, usually with a certain bad grace (if I can't delegate it to an intern or other downtrodden junior contributor).

In my first post on the topic, I suggested that the utility tool simplified this repetitive, time-consuming, and error-prone activity: in my estimation, it cut production time of documents converted from PowerPoint presentations by 80%.

Well the utility is now complete; it's called PowerManual, and I've created a quick (six-minute) How To demo which covers

• Context
• Introduction to PowerManual
• Downloading the application from PowerManual.ie
• Installing PowerManual
• Creating a manual from a PowerPoint Presentation

Click here to view the demo in 800x600 Flash FLV format, or enjoy the YouTube version (below):




I've made a PDF of PowerManual-generated file I created for this demo available on my website; click here to view the PowerManual sample file.

I'll be undertaking a complete review of PowerManual's functionality over the next few days, so watch this space.

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Links:

PowerManual Website http://www.powermanual.ie
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Online Presentation Tools as a Knowledge-Sharing Channel 1: AuthorSTREAM

I'm very impressed by some of the presentation-sharing tools available to educators. Over the next few days I'm going to evaluate two of them - authorSTREAM and SlideShare, starting with the former.

Now read on...

I think the best way to evaluate them is to go through the process of signing up, uploading content, using the functionality available to content authors, and finally assessing the user experience of viewing content via each site's UI.

Today's presentation is called "An Introduction to Rapid E-Learning."

At the end of this presentation you will know about:

• Organisational uses of Rapid E-Learning tools
• Authoring tools used in developing multimedia-based learning content
• How these tools are implemented to develop content using the Rapid E-Learning methodology / approach
• Introduction to Techsmith Camtasia
• Stage
• Menu
• Task List
• Clip Bin
• Timeline
• Practical
• Create a learning object using Camtasia

Uploaded on authorSTREAM by mhanley

I'd be very interested to get feedback on any aspect of using this type of learning channel; if you have a view on this dear reader, let me know by posting a comment.

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Online Media Delivery Channels to benefit E-learning

In my last blog post I wrote about the optimism learning professionals are currently expressing about the short- to medium-term growth of the industry, despite the current economic climate, and the traditional impact that recessionary times have on learning and development in organizations. I've been thinking hard about the factors that may be influencing attitudes, but I'm not ready to put my thoughts to (electronic) paper just yet.

So today, I'm going to look at some developments that have the potential to positively affect e-learning content delivery.

Now read on...

I have talked on other occasions about using what Douglas Adams called PETs (Personal Electronic Things) to deliver e-learning content. On May 20th, British e-learning company Atlantic Link announced that they had developed an e-learning authoring solution for the Sony PlayStation Portable (PSP). According to their press release:

Atlantic Link's ...rapid e-learning authoring tools ... now allow courses to be designed specifically for the Sony PSP Slim & Lite. The courses can be deployed locally (from the Memory Stick Duo) or from the Internet, giving users a true mobile learning experience ... all the functionality of Atlantic Link’s rapid e-learning authoring tools can be applied to small screen format.

[Click image to view demo]

Atlantic Link MD Mike Alcock states:

The potential applications for this technology are huge ... [t]ourist guides, language training, product training and updates, maintenance guides and training, medical training, interactive museum guides, schools training, the list is almost endless.

Based on the information available from Atlantic Link's website, I can't tell whether the organization have developed a new set of templates for their current Rapid e-Learning authoring tools, or have created a new authoring platform specifically for PSP /Lite content development.

Given the range of potential applications for their content development system, Atlantic Link may have opened up a niche market for themselves by repurposing e-learning content authoring tools to deliver informational material in predominantly non-networked environments (see Mr. Alcock's quote above).

Is this innovative or new?

No.

Flash Lite has been around since 2004; what Atlantic Link seem to have done is created a point solution by simplifying the authoring environment (much like Captivate and Articulate do) to enable output on the PSP device. Similarly, I can't discern from the press release or website whether this content supports learning tracking, SCORM / AICC specifications and learners' formative and summative test results can be sent to and stored on an LMS.

It also may be the case that this type of approach has just been overtaken by events.

As well as announcing the latest version of their enterprise collaboration solution Adobe Connect Pro 7 (I'll review it once we get our sticky hands on it here in the office), Adobe have also announced the Open Screen Project, which they say is

dedicated to driving consistent rich Internet experiences across televisions, personal computers, mobile devices, and consumer electronics.

[by] taking advantage of Adobe Flash Player and, in the future, Adobe AIR -- that will remove barriers for developers and designers as they publish content and applications across desktops and consumer devices, including phones, mobile internet devices (MIDs), and set top boxes. The Open Screen Project will address potential technology fragmentation by allowing the runtime technology to be updated seamlessly over the air on mobile devices. The consistent runtime environment will provide optimal performance across a variety of operating systems and devices, and ultimately provide the best experience to consumers.

To support the Open Screen Project along, Adobe is:

• Opening up the runtime to Flash Player so that anybody can develop a customized player. Specifically, it is going to open up the SWF and FLV/F4V specifications. In the past, developers had to sign agreements not to create derivative Flash players because Adobe wanted to avoid the fragmentation that Java experienced during its early years.
• Removing licensing fees for Flash on mobile devices. While Flash is free on PCs, cell phone makers and other device manufacturers must pay a royalty fee. Instances of Flash are on 500 million mobile devices already (expected to grow to one billion over the next 12 months). As of the next major release of Flash (and AIR) for devices in 2009, it will be free to device manufacturers.
• Publishing the APIs for porting Flash to other devices. This currently also incurs a royalty fee. Now, every device should come with a pre-installed Flash API.
• Publishing Adobe protocols for pushing content to devices like Flash Cast and AMF. Adobe will also work with wireless carriers on protocols for over-the-air software updating.

I would suggest that the primary implication for learning professionals is that this could be the basis for a common (if not open) platform to enable learning materials to be delivered via multiple channels. With the support of a range of hardware manufacturers, there seems to be little threat of vendor lock-in; maybe manufacturers have finally understood that wider customer access has the potential to generate higher revenues than forcing people to use proprietary communications solutions?

in any case, being able to create content for a ubiquitous, device-independent platform will make my life less complicated and I suspect the same goes for a lot of other people too.

FOGRA: I was meant to be presenting at this year's ILTA EDTech 2008 Conference on 'non-formal workplace learning', but had to cancel due travel commitments: best of luck to all attending and presenting - I'll be keeping up with activities on the ILTA website.

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E-Learning and the Economic Downturn: April Update

It's just over two months since I posted on Recession and the Challenge to E-learning. It's a subject that I said I would monitoring as the "Credit Crunch" became a downturn, which may or may not lead to a recession.

As a reminder, at the time I suggested that the appropriate social and economic innovations required to support e-learning were now sufficiently embedded (compared to 2001) to ensure the e-learning industry would certainly survive and maybe even thrive an economic downturn. I tempered this assertion by asking

will the positive economic, organisational, and social value of e-learning outweigh traditional human responses to recessionary times? What strategies can we use to ensure the survival of and even the growth of e-learning as an industry in these changing times?

Now read on...

Some preliminary evidence is now emerging which may indicate that the E-learning Industry is doing quite in the current economic climate. Electric News Net (ENN) has reported that SkillSoft and ThirdForce two of the largest Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) producers of e-learning content have posted profits for the last quarter and the year, respectively.

According to ENN,

e-learning firm SkillSoft posted another great set of quarterly results with revenues up by 34 percent and profits nearly quadrupling. Coming off the back of a third quarter where profits nearly trebled SkillSoft managed to perform even better in the fourth quarter as it posted profits of USD34.3 million, up from USD8.2 million for the same quarter the previous year.

SkillSoft say that the increase in revenue was down to:

• higher-than-planned rates of contract retention and renewal
• incremental revenues of USD4.6 million related to the amortisation of deferred revenue acquired by SkillSoft in the acquisition of NETg
• incremental revenues from NETg customer contracts which were renewed after acquisition

ThirdForce has seen its operating profit up by 160 per cent for 2007, while revenue increased by 35 per cent for the same period. Since acquiring MindLeaders, the US has become a key market for ThirdForce, and the company says it is targeting US companies in the sub-Fortune 1,000 sector. In the UK, ThirdForce is continuing to see growth in its core hospitality market, adding a number of multi-year contracts with major clients during 2007.

Analysis
At face value, these results look very positive, but these revenue reports are now a matter of history. Certainly in the case of ThirdForce, the results are based on performance before the current downturn really began to bite, and as such I don't know if the results can be interpreted in terms of how the organization is performing in 08H1. It will be interesting to see how their strategy of growing their presence in the sub-Fortune 1,000 marketspace, given the fact that both SkillSoft and ThirdForce are headquartered in the Euro Zone, and given the current Dollar weakness against the Euro.

Similarly, a presence in the UK market would have at one time been viewed as a triple-bound low-risk revenue generator, but again, the current Sterling to Euro differential may mitigate against growth in that territory.

Dilemma
Consider the dilemma for both organizations: they both have substantial interests in territories with weakening currencies. Their sales and revenue numbers for 2008 - say arbitrarily $10M or €7.7M (at December 2007 exchange rates) - would have been agreed in 2007Q3, and strategies would have been put in place to meet those objectives. Now, even if the sales teams hit their targets numerically, they are struggling in a weakened Dollar situation where their $10M is now worth €6.3M - a substantial shortfall in revenue.

However, what's more interesting to me is that both organizations' customers intend to either renew or extend their current contracts with the two content providers. In my view, this indicates the increasingly positive reaction to and growing reliance upon e-learning as means of meeting employee training and development requirements. Is it trend that will be reflected across markets generally?

We'll see.

It's still early days, and no doubt I will be returning to this topic presently.

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An Introduction to Rapid E-Learning Authoring Tools

I've been having a little bit of fun over the last few days.

A friend of mine is developing a very cool tool that will enable courseware developers to easily convert their presentation content into neatly-formatted MS Word documents for distribution to learners. If, like me, you've spent extended periods of time creating manuals from other media formats, you'll appreciate the hard work and, to be honest, tedium involved in generating, formatting, proofing, and finally producing documentation to accompany ILT and WBT courseware.

However, it's a necessary task, and with much grumbling and gnashing of teeth, something I just get on with doing. So anyway, this little EXE file arrive in my inbox a few days ago with some installation and how to use instructions.

Top Tip
Kids - Don't go installing EXEs that arrive in your inbox unless you know exactly what they contain!

I went ahead and installed the program - still in early beta, remember and... it worked! It does exactly what every utility tool should do - simplifying or automating a repetitive, time-consuming, and error-prone activity: in my estimation, this app cuts production time by 80%.

I'll talk more about this program when it's released.

Now read on...

On 19th December last year I posted on a lecture I gave to the MSc in Education & Technology class in the National College of Ireland on the subject of Rapid E-Learning (REL) tools. In that post, I focused on the second part of the lecture, the lab or practical part of the lesson. Today, I'm revisiting this topic and discussing part one of the lecture: an introduction to REL authoring tools, with a particular focus on Techsmith Camtasia.

Quiet down now, and turn off your cellphones please! I've published a PDF of the Introduction to Rapid E-Learning Authoring Tools here if you'd like to download or view it online. The presentation covers:

• Authoring tools used in developing multimedia-based learning content
• How these tools are implemented to develop content using the Rapid e-Learning methodology / approach
• E-learning authoring tools
• Techsmith Camtasia
• Lab – creating a short learning object in Camtasia
  

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Top Ten Tools for E-learning in 2008

Jane Hart, founder of the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies (C4PT) site is compiling this year's list of Top 10 Tools for Learning. I think that it's a worthwhile exercise to contribute your list if you feel strongly, as I do, that the more exposure learning professionals have to the range of tools at our disposal, the more effectively we can develop effective learning solutions for our customers.

C4PT is a fantastic resource for those new to e-learning, as well as seasoned professionals looking to expand their content development toolkit. I recommend you drop over and have a look at what you can find there.

Michael's Top 10 Tools (in no particular order. Well, alphabetical.)

1. Audacity - I recommend this open source tools to subject matter experts who wish to create podcasts and / or software demos when using a Rapid E-Learning approach. It's easy to install and use and enables SMEs and training professionals to create high quality audio quickly and efficiently.

2. Adobe Acrobat Connect Enterprise - I could have picked any from the range of Adobe Flash-based content development tools, but I chose this application because of it's multifunctionality, and because it manifests what Flash, Presenter, Dreamweaver etc can do. Enables collaboration, content storage, management, distribution, and (a certain degree of) tracking. A powerful platform to enable learning professionals and organisations to distribute informational and training content effectively.

3. Adobe Captivate - A SERIOUS authoring tool for demos, simulations, evaluation, and scenarios-based learning

4. Blogs - The platform doesn't matter, but the concept of providing a means to create, share, and deliver content is the basis for a new way of learning.

5. Del.icio.us - Personal bookmarking at its best. If, like me you work on a number of machines in a number of locations, it is useful to access stored links and documents from a browser regardless of where you happen to be, once you have an internet connection.

6. MindJet Mind Manager Pro - I built the framework for my Master's thesis in Mind Manager. A powerful intermediary in developing ideas, concepts, and course design.

7. Moodle - Already an institution in institutions! Martin Dougimas's erstwhile thesis project continues to meet the learning management requirements of a range of organisations. I just love the idea of framing Social Constructivism in such an useful environment.

8. PageRank - A technology that has its critics, but provides us with the ability to carry out a search in Google, MSN, Yahoo! etc safe in the knowledge that the returned results are not just an undifferentiated list of keyword hits, thus enhancing the relevance of the search.

9. Sony Vegas Video - Easier to use than Premiere, more powerful than MovieMaker; Vegas is my post-production "weapon of choice" for 90% of the video elements that appears in courseware developed in my organisation. Whether you're just "topping and tailing" a piece of video or creating the elements for a sophisticated soft skills course, Vegas is a must.

10. TextPad - I would have chosen pen and paper, but decided to keep this list digital; TextPad is an advanced text editor that enables users to create and edit text documents, XML, JavaScript and other interpreted content without the extraneous "bloat" of word-processing applications. I find it useful to develop content in this stripped-down environment before transferring to Word, PowerPoint, Blogger or some other application for final enhancement and publishing (this list was created in TextPad, for example).

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E-Learning and economic downturns...

I'm getting some interesting feedback from a variety of sources on my blog post Recession and the challenge to e-learning. Steve McKenzie over at Eduspaces has commented that he considers e-learning to be a "recession buster ...on balance costs for institutions and individuals can be saved."

I completely agree with Steve's assessment; the challenge as I see it, is for e-learning practitioners to address traditional/institutional ways of thinking in organizations about how to leverage the benefits of e-learning - break the habits of a lifetime in a sense.

Most decision makers (i.e. C-level executives) in organizations are from a generation that would not have extensively used e-learning during their formative years. In my experience, they become much more risk-averse during economic downturns and push back on what they see as innovation in tough times.

I'm reminded of a conversation I had with a VP about two years ago. I was working on a proposal to introduce an on-demand pre-classroom training module for a ILT course - a bit of blended learning to reduce the workload on instructors to ensure that learners were of an appropriate skill level to actually attend the course in question. His response to the proposal was along the lines of "it's all very well being leading edge, but we don't have to be bleeding edge."

Now, this was hardly an all-singing, all-dancing 3D PLE we were proposing here, just a little 30-minute Flash-based presentation. I think that the assertion this VP made represents that we, as learning professionals, have to be cognisant of more conservative attitudes that exist in the workplace, and we need to develop strategies to counter such lines of argument.

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Recession and the challenge to e-learning

A colleague in an area of business other than the learning industry asked me a few days ago; "Do you think that e-learning will survive a recession?"

My initial response to her was "there's no recession... yet!" Later, I reflected on the implications of the current economic slowdown (whether or not it turns into a recession) for the e-learning industry.

The dialectic I am presenting here can be summarised in the following manner: will the positive economic, organisational, and social value of e-learning outweigh traditional human responses to recessionary times? What strategies can we use to ensure the survival of and even the growth of e-learning as an industry in these changing times?

So what's changed in the e-learning industry since the last recession in 2001? I've outlined some discussion points below:

1. First of all: Traditional business practise
2. Developments in Infrastructure & Hardware
3. The E-learning Hype curve
4. Refinements in Content Development Methodologies
5. The Rise if the Read/Write Web
6. The Playstation Generation - Digital Natives in the workplace
   

Scroll down to find out more about each of these points.

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Traditional business practise
Historically, when a slowdown or company rationalisation occurs, the first against the wall are the folks in the PR, marketing, and training departments. Typically, individuals and organisations revert to previously-learned behaviours in tough times; this usually means going through the process of carrying out tried-and-tested, though not necessarily logical responses to the problems put in front of them. The rationale is as follows:

• Profits are down
• Revenue projections aren't great for the next 12/18 months
• We need to cut our costs
• We need to keep the guys that make the widgets (we need to have product to sell)
• We need to keep the managers of these people (or productivity will go down)
• We need to keep Human Resources in place to manage everyone obviously (it's just a coincidence that I - that is the decision-maker - work in HR!)
• What about those training people? High travel costs for the ILT guys, they pull people out of work for 3 days to go on courses. Large budgets spent on implementing and maintaining an LMS/LCMS, third-party e-learning libraries, custom courseware etc, but they do seem to add value to the organisation. And let's face it, they don't really improve the quality of our product, because they never convince us with their ROI metrics...

• Outcome: tea and sympathetic chat, and the Training team get their pink slips / P45s.

Sadly, I reckon that this will be strategy undertaken by a significant number of organisations over the next year or so. However....

...and it's a big however.

Let's look at the evidence for factors that have changed in the e-learning industry since 2001 and the recession following the Dot-Com crash.

Infrastructure & Hardware
More-or-less general availability of high-speed internet access just wasn't there in 2001. To take the example of the company I worked for at the time, our high-quality courseware was developed in Authorware and Director and delivered to customers on CD-ROM for distribution via their intranet or accessed directly from the disk. Our on-line courseware was a 'lite' version of the CD material - not out of choice, but because of the limited functionality that could be provided to a user via a 56k connection.

Over-compressed images, poor animation, and very poor audio - hardly the immersive learning solution that e-learning flattered to promise at the time. Assuming the learner could access the content successfully, the chances were that the PC (for it was always a PC) that they were using to view their content was processing and displaying the date at a rate that we wouldn't find acceptable on a PDA now (screen-size excluded). Pentium or pre-Pentium processors, 8-bit sound cards, 16 colours, 800x600 pixel displays. And so on.

In short, we could see the potential, but our imaginations exceeded the available technology.

The e-learning hype curve
This brings me neatly to the e-learning hype curve (see Figure 1). Kevin Kruse described 2001 as the year that

...brought the harsh, steep slope of unfulfilled promises. Several high-profile providers shut their doors while many more announced large-scale layoffs in the face of missed revenue targets and crashing stock prices. E-learning advocates retreated to the more defensible ground of "blended learning. This year [went] down as the Trough of Despair.

Figure 1. The E-learning Hype Cycle

I would suggest through familiarisation and use, learners expectations are more reasonable about what can be achieved (and perhaps more importantly how it can be achieved through digitally mediated delivery). Given this environment, organisations are now more willing to invest in e-learning as part of their overall training strategy. But is it perceived as a necessity or a luxury?

I can't answer that question right now. I suspect that I will be able to answer it 12 months from now, because there will be evidence as to whether decision makers consider e-learning to be a core requirement that effectively meets organisations' training needs.

Content development methodologies
This kind of ties in with this month's Learning Circuits Big Question about instructional design. Without going into the history of this too much, the development of (relatively) easy-to-use authoring tools like Captivate, Articulate (and a whole raft of others), Rapid E-Learning development methodology and the disintermediation principle means that e-learning has fewer up-front costs associated with it than at the turn of the century.

Similarly, if it's done correctly at the outset, ongoing maintenance and support costs are lower than they ever have been. By developing content with smaller, more flexible teams, the value proposition of e-learning has been enhanced, and the total cost of ownership has been significantly reduced. Outside of e-learning, the take-up of podcasting and streamed media on sites like Blogger and YouTube demonstrates that this ease-of-use of tools and technologies has extended into the community at large.

The Read/Write Web
Who would have thought in 2000 that blogging, social networking, wikis and podcasts would be as big a part of life as they are now? At the start of the century, the Web (and e-learning) could at best be described as a half-duplex medium; it was pretty much all one-way traffic. The development of information platforms has facilitated knowledge-sharing, folksonomies, social interaction, and, key to all this, reciprocity.

We now live in a multiplex world of many voices and ideas, mediated by the internet. At the forefront in using these web technologies is the e-learning industry. By using these tools to develop content I feel we can demonstrate quite effectively that e-learning has a value now that it did not have a decade ago. I would assert that this is particularly true if you take a social-constructivist approach to learning. By the way, I'm happy to entertain debates about the role of formal as opposed to non-formal and informal learning in this environment.

The Playstation Generation
Concomitant with the read/write web is the Playstation generation that have grown up over the last number of years. In his seminal essay Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants (2001), Marc Prensky declares:

...students have changed radically. Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach.

Today’s students have not just changed incrementally from those of the past, nor simply changed their slang, clothes, body adornments, or styles, as has happened between generations previously. A really big discontinuity has taken place. One might even call it a “singularity” – an event which changes things so fundamentally that there is absolutely no going back. This so-called “singularity” is the arrival and rapid dissemination of digital technology in the last decades of the 20th century.

Today’s students – K through college – represent the first generations to grow up with this new technology. They have spent their entire lives surrounded by and using computers, videogames, digital music players, video cams, cell phones, and all the other toys and tools of the digital age. Today’s average college graduates have spent less than 5,000 hours of their lives reading, but over 10,000 hours playing video games (not to mention 20,000 hours watching TV). Computer games, email, the Internet, cell phones and instant messaging are integral parts of their lives.

Extending from this, there is a generation of workers who are comfortable with and practised in the concepts and use of e-learning - take a look at the resources available on www.skoool.ie, an initiative for second-level students in Ireland. I was involved in the development of the first iteration of this site, and it's changed a lot (for the better) since we took those first steps creating it 8 years ago. Similarly in third-level education, there have been significant developments in on-line learning, and I think that it's fair to say that it has become quite embedded in the pedagogy employed by universities: tools like Moodle enable students to upload coursework, take tests, build their own knowledgebases and wikis, and have on-line discussions through a single point of access.

This generation is in the workplace right now. It will expect to learn new skills as their careers develop using the tools that they have always learned on in the past: that is, by using e-learning.

Conclusion
I've left loads of stuff out here; this is a blog entry, not an essay. But consider other factors including transport costs and training in the era of $100 a barrel oil and the value of virtual classrooms; the ROI of e-learning as opposed to traditional methods; even the impact of traditional ways of teaching on the environment ("e-learning" becomes "eco-learning" anyone?).

I may well return to this topic again. But at this point I want to put the question out there: how do you think e-learning will fare in the next 18 months, particularly if there are tough times ahead?


References:

Kruse, K. (2002) The State of e-Learning: Looking at History with the Technology Hype Cycle. [Internet] Available from: http://www.e-learningguru.com/articles/hype1_1.htm [Accessed 12th February 2008]

Prensky, M. (2001) Digital Natives, Digital Immigrats. [Internet] Available from: http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/
Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Natives,%20Digital%20
Immigrants%20-%20Part1.pdf [Accessed 14th February 2008]

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Non-formal learning in action: Information Sessions

As discussed in my last blog entry, learner intention - specifically deliberative learning (where the worker schedules time to learn) is a key definer of non-formal learning. As such, the development of an educationally sound theoretical framework, pedagogical approach and instructional design process (are essential in create a learning environment (both synchronous and asynchronous) conducive to the requirements of knowledge workers. At the same time, the content model must make effective use of available technologies, with the express purpose of countering the effects of cognitive overload (learners had consistently remarked on an imbalance of text to other media types – occasionally too much, but also, interestingly, in some instances not enough text on-screen to elucidate the topic, with the presenter “talking to, or around” the content where textual reinforcement would have assisted the participants understand the concepts being discussed (see Table 1).

I have developed the Information Sessions according to well-established learner-centric instructional principles. Specifically, they use a Constructivist theoretical model and a fusion of the ARCS Model and a Systems Design approach to the instructional design of content. A modality of Gagné’s Assumption is used as the basis for the Information Session structure, and the actual presentation format adheres to Gagné’s Events of Instruction (1-5, 7). Content is developed according Rapid eLearning principles. Information Session presenters are guided by the production team through the content creation process.

Table 1 Information Sessions High-level Typology

Function	Approach
Theoretical Framework	Social-Constructivist Model
High level ISD Process	ADDIE & RIO/RLO Model
Strategy	Based on Blooms Taxonomy of Educational Objectives
Structure	Based on Gagné’s Conditions of Learning
Content	Uses a multimedia mix of text, slides, images, animation, Flash and video demonstrations
Delivery	The events are hosted as live Subject Matter Expert (SME)-led events, presented in the following format
Synchronous	Asynchronous
Live audience at Information Session location	On-demand post live event
Synchronously streamed on the web	DVD-ROMs available to KWs. Each DVD-ROM contains one series of 10±2 Information Sessions

An important aspect of Information Sessions is the simultaneous use of face-to-face presentation with synchronous Web delivery, as well as post-event asynchronous distribution of content via the Web and on DVD-ROM, ensuring the widest-possible distribution of content and ensuring just-in-time access to knowledge and domain expertise across an organisation.

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