Educate: An E-Learning iPhone App with Potential

iKonstruct got in touch with me yesterday to let me know about the launch of Educate; an iPhone/iTouch app for teachers.

Here's what they say about Educate:

Featuring inbuilt lesson planning, student tracking, teaching strategies and eLearning tools, Educate provides teachers with a holistic approach to engaging students in 21st century learning environments.

While the iApp is not yet available via the iTunes Store, you can check out their website for more information about Educate in action.

According to their website, Educate's key features include:

	Lesson planning	Educate's inbuilt weekly planner keeps all your planning in one place. Personalize your weekly timetable and plan for individual lessons all from a single interface
	Effective teaching strategy implementation	Access easy to follow strategies for engaging students in your lessons. Choose from a variety of individual or collaborative activities directly aimed at improving learning outcomes.
	Student attendance and progress monitoring	Quickly and easily track student attendance or performance in all your classes via ready made scales. Update records as you teach and export to your PC, Mac or Learning Management System
	Collaboration with other Educate users	Use your Facebook account to connect with other Educate users to discuss pedagogical practice, suggest application features and seek support
	Engage with eLearning	Post content to your Moodle learning space, anytime, anywhere. Also, access critical tools such as a voice recorder for anecdotal notes, a camera that allows you to tag images and a stopwatch for time-critical tasks

This short video outlines the product's features.

(Alternatively the video is available on YouTube here)

I think that this app has a lot of potential for educators, and I’ll be following its progress with interest. I’ll certainly review it when it becomes available.

More on instructional design tomorrow.
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Launching from the Flash Platform

Adobe Flash has evolved considerably since Macromedia Flash was used to create animations and develop and run interactive Web-based content. According to the current developers, the Adobe Flash Platform is

an integrated set of technologies surrounded by an established ecosystem of support programs, business partners, and enthusiastic user communities. Together, they provide everything you need to create and deliver the most compelling applications, content, and video to the widest possible audience.

The Flash Platform combines tools, an open source framework, ubiquitous clients, and scalable servers (see Table 1).

Table 1 Components of the Flash Platform

Application Type	Technology
Runtime Environment	Flash Player
	Flash Professional
Authoring Tools	Flex
	Flash Catalyst
	Flash Media Server
Flash Server	BlazeDS
	LiveCycle DS

The environment enables content developers create applications and content from prototype to deployment in an integrated framework (see Figure 1).

Figure 1 The Flash Platform

In the context of Flash-based authoring tools like Adobe Captivate, the platform enables e-learning content authors to rapidly and efficiently design, develop and implement Web-based learning applications including:

• Screen recording and demos
• Software simulations
• Scenario-based training
• Presentations
• Quizzes
• Podcasts
• Screencasts

I have written about the pros and cons of Captivate in previous blog articles so I don’t intend to go over the same old ground again, but you can find out more by clicking here.

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References:

Adobe Website: http://www.adobe.com

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E-learning 101 - a very good primer

I blogged recently about how Internet search terms can lead you down some unusual highways and byways.

None more true than today: for some obscure reason I Googled "elearning" + "boat." Now while I'm a pretty good swimmer, but I hail from a land-locked county and never had any affinity for boats and whatnot. (I did watch The Cruel Sea recently, so maybe...). But I digest.

One of the search results was for the veritable How Stuff Works site's How E-learning Works page, and I have to say that it was a good an introduction to e-learning as I've seen (and better than some from people who should know more about the topic).

The article characterizes e-learning under the following topic headings:

• Introduction to How E-learning Works
• What is E-learning?
• Levels of e-learning
• The Psychology of Learning
• E-learning and Retention
• Self-paced
• Interactive & Motivating E-learning
• Benefits of E-learning
• E-learning Tips
• E-learning and College Courses
• E-learning Tools

Check out the site for an illuminating ten minutes' reading.
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Exciting new online comms and collaboration tools from Adobe

I had planned today to continue my series on organizational learning and e-learning ecosystems, but I have become aware of an interesting new hosted productivity and collaboration suite from Adobe called Acrobat.com, so I thought I'd discuss that today. Ryanair boss Michael O'Leary is known to respond with the acronym "IMFA" (It's My Airline) when others disagree with his decisions, so in the same spirit, IMFB.

Now read on...

Aligning with their stated aim to become a major force in so-called webtop software, Adobe released two new products on Monday: Acrobat.com and Acrobat 9. Product manager Erik Larson has stated that Acrobat.com is another big step towards bringing more desktop-like experiences to the Web.

It is [Adobe's] intent to blur a lot of the lines of the past.

Acrobat.com is a combination of three online services:

• Adobe ConnectNow (a "lite" version of Acrobat Connect 7 for web conferencing and desktop collaboration)
• Adobe Buzzword (and online word processor)
• Adobe Share (online file sharing)

In my view, this represents a serious attempt by Adobe to compete with many of Google's Web 2.0 tools like Google Docs, YouTube and Picasa, as well as solutions like Microsoft Office Live Workspace, WebEx, and GoTo Meeting, usually associated with organizational collaboration.

Buzzword
Buzzword is the default word processor in the suite. it enables multiple collaborators to edit and comment documents. As well as providing a pretty nice WYSIWYG editor, tabs along the bottom of the UI represent the people who have accessed the document most recently, as well as their status (author, reviewer, etc.).

Uniquely for a web-based word processor, Buzzword paginates documents, supports a range of fonts, and lets you generate a pretty good equivalent to a PDF document. However, this is still in beta, so you will likely encounter some frustrations if you are used to creating documents in a desktop environment (i.e. during cut-and-paste operations) and there is no easy way to export a document to a blog or other Web publishing system other than via the previously mentioned cut-and-paste.

However, I have found this to be the case in similar apps such as Windows Live Writer (which I'm using to create this post); the software is still buggy - I'm happy to live with this in a beta app, though some might not be.

Adobe Share
This is a file-sharing application that focuses on document sharing.
You get one gigabyte of free storage, and it enables you to embed a Flash preview of your documents into any Web page (quite similar to FlashPaper). Adobe say that this enables anyone to download and print a PDF of the file (though I have yet to test this myself). I guess that you could describe this tool as 'Flickr on steroids', given Share's facility to make available a range of document types in an environment that those familiar with that tool can easily appreciate.

ConnectNow
I love ConnectNow. I've long been an advocate of online communication and collaboration tools as a powerful solution to the challenges organizations face, particularly if employees work in distributed teams, as well as for hosting training and non-formal learning interventions. I have to declare an interest here: the organization I work for relies heavily on Adobe Connect Pro (currently version 6) for training and informational purposes and I think that it's a great system, not least because it uses the Flash plug-in, so no large player downloads or quirky clients to be installed.



Even in it's cut-down form, making this functionality publicly available is going to be very popular (no more excuses not to talk to the relations in New Zealand!).
ConnectNow allows up to three people have free online meetings, with

• screen sharing
• desktop video
• voice conferencing
• IM-type chat
• white-boarding

Note that significant portions of Connect's functionality have been removed, including the recording facility, as well as the asynchronous meeting playback facility. You can also forget about hosting your on-demand e-learning content on the system, because that's been excised too, though that doesn't mean that you can't use the tool for synchronous learning, such as small-group online mentoring and so on.

Interestingly, ConnectNow (kind of) replicates Connect Pro's ability to integrate with telephone conferencing system via a fee-based toll line (currently only available in some territories like the US, UK, Germany etc). Now that the Flex-based UI uses Adobe Flash 9 rather than Flash 6, the screen looks great - a small thing, but it's attractiveness will certainly enhance users' enjoyment of the product.

Other commentators have suggested that the business model is clearly pay-for-what-you-use:

while right now the service is just a free beta, restrictions on things like file space and number of users will presumably be addressed by monthly subscriptions – moving Adobe from a licensor of desktop software to a web-based software-as-a-service company. We’ve already seen that with Photoshop Express, and with Acrobat.com, Adobe now has all of their major applications available in a Web-based version too.

I would assert that while this may be the plan at the moment, the ubiquity of other free-to-use applications (not to mention the competition in this increasingly hot marketspace) will force Adobe to either make these tools available gratis or include so many extra features to entice paying users that Acrobat.com will becomes a professional-level hosted solution, which presumably is not the consumer market that Adobe are attempting to dominate.

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Applying the e-learning curve in the corporate environment

In applying the concept of the conventional learning curve to the context of modalities of corporate learning, we find that the curve provides an appropriate structure for illustrating where how these modalities are used. For example, in the lower part of the 'S' bend of the learning curve - representing a new hire for example - we can say that a knowledge worker is still a not consumer of corporate resources, rather than a contributor to an organization.

These earliest stages can also be considered the “off-the-job training” segment meaning they are also the most expensive to the sponsoring organization.

Dillon & Hallett, p.18

As learners move up the curve, they move out of the classroom and into an on-the-job learning environment. As they approach higher levels of expertise, learners require more one-on-one or individualized approaches to learning. Because each worker has a unique set of knowledge and skill gaps separating him/her from the highest levels of expertise, it will take the mentoring intelligence of a live expert to detect and redress those gaps.

Over time, and as they acquire expertise through experiential learning knowledge workers will exhaust the list of colleagues upon whom they can rely for coaching and will need to rely upon their their own skills, knowledge and expertise to improve their performance.

Dillon & Hallett note that

one of the recent maturational leaps for e-learning has been the recognition that no one form of learning technology is capable of addressing the diverse range of learning modality requirements found in the modern workplace.

(p.18)

The authors labelled this "leap of recognition" as “the blended solution." I would suggest that this use of terminology reflects the time that the white paper was authored (2001): a more appropriate use of language would be to call each modality a learning delivery channel. Learning delivery channels can include different technologies - virtual classrooms, EPSS, software simulations, online collaboration, self-paced e-learning, knowledge management - they are much more than this: for example mentoring is a learning delivery channel, such activities can can be undertaken in a face-to-face or an online environment using video conferencing.

As Don Morrison says:

I find it difficult to give 'blended learning' the same respect I give, say, blended whiskey which is produced by the highly skilful blending of between 20 and 50 different ‘single’ malt and grain whiskies—of differing ages and from different regions and distilleries—to create a new brand with its own unique character. The greater the number of component whiskies, the greater the consistency of the resulting blend. If one of the contributing distilleries goes out of business, the blenders can achieve the same end result by adjusting the blend of the other single whiskies. If only such art, science, and commerce lay behind blended learning.

(The search for the holy recipe, pp.1-2)

The key to leveraging this leap of recognition is to enable knowledge workers to access learning content through the most relevant learning delivery channnel for their skill level. This can be illustrated by positioning the learning delivery channels along the learning-curve model. The picture that is formed by this allocation of technologies along the curve is what Dillon & Hallett call the “E-Learning Curve” (see Figure 1).

Figure 1 Dillon & Hallet's E-Learning Curve

The analogies to the conventional learning curve are apparent. Early in the learning process, workers using the conventional model of corporate training practices had to go off-the-job to attend classroom-based instruction. Knowledge workers in the e-learning 'ecosystem' learn from hours-long modules of Web-based training curricula. In this phase of the learning process, users of both conventional training and e-learning are removed from their job context.

As learners progress along the curve of the model, the allocation of learning delivery channels becomes more heavily influenced by e-learning modalities. With Web-based training (as with its instructor-led counterpart) the domains of usage are relatively limited. The only time it makes sense to pull workers off their jobs for training is limited precisely to those times when no alternative is available or resource-efficient. Off-the-job forms of training make good business sense only when workers are at the bottom of the learning curve and are not yet equipped to perform tasks at any acceptable level of competence.

More...

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References:

Dillon, P. & Hallett, C. (2001, October). Powering the leap to maturity: The eLearning ecosystem. Cisco Systems white paper.

Morrison, D., (2003) The search for the holy recipe. [Internet] Available from: http://www.morrisonco.com/downloads/blended_learning_holy_recipe.pdf Accessed 14 May 2008.

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Informal learning in action: Rapping about Web design coding on YouTube

A programmer friend of mine sent me a link to the YouTube video below. In it, the presenter Charles Lewis who goes by the nom de rap The Poetic Prophet (AKA The SEO Rapper) raps about the fundamentals of design coding for HTML websites and coding for search engine optimization.

You have to be impressed by a guy who can

• Rhyme about web standards
• Align with most of Gagne's Events of Instruction

Very informal, highly informative learning. I think it's fantastic.



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