Elliott Masie: The Voice of the Learner Survey

Just received an e-mail from The Masie Center about a new initiative to be completed by thousands of employees around the world, gathering information about Learner Preferences for Learning Methods.

If you're interested in taking part, click here:

Voice of the Learner Survey
http://www.masieweb.com/learners

The results of this survey will be distributed without charge and available within several weeks on The MASIE Center website.

What ever happened to Kevin Kruse?

Where is Kevin Kruse these days?
Just this morning I was searching for some info on managing e-learning implementations and one of the results returned was a document authored by the E-Learning Guru entitled Technology-Based Training: The Art and Science of Design, Development, and Delivery. It started me thinking about the role he has played in my (and I dare say many others) development as an e-learning professional.
As far back as 1998, when I first started working for an Irish e-learning start-up called Prometheus, right through to about 2006, Kevin's E-Learning Guru website was required reading if you wanted to keep up with the latest and greatest innovations, processes, developments, and technologies used in the e-learning industry.
So anyway, I'm there reading the PDF, and I decide to drop over to to K's website to see what's new, only to find that the most recent post is dated December 16th 2006, and that his e-learning news section is currently not available. One search on the Web later, the most recent dialogue I could find with Kevin was an interview on Kineo's website.
Where are you Kevin?
Get back in touch; we miss you!

It's Employee Learning Week at the ASTD...

...find out more here:

Rapid Elearning: Strategies to get SMEs up to speed on e-learning authoring tools

I had a fantastic time discussing the benefits (and otherise) of Rapid E-Learning with the National College of Ireland's Higher Diploma in Computing & Education students last week. I'll get back to the lecture proper in another post; today I want to talk about the Lab we carried out in the second part of the lecture.
One of the key aspects of developing content using a rapid e-learning apporach is for learning professionals to manage the disintermediation of the producer role to the SME.

What is disintermediation? Ted Cocheau defines it in his seminal article Rapid E-Learning: Disintemdiate or Die:

Wikipedia has the following definition: “In economics, disintermediation is the removal of intermediaries in a supply chain: cutting out the middle man” (schitt aus dem Zwischenhandler). Shopping on the Internet is a great example—rather than driving to a store (the middleman) and paying the additional profit to the merchant, you can now purchase goods online directly from the producer.

What does that mean for training and learning? In the learning process, the subject matter expert (SME) is the source of the knowledge—the producer. Instructional designers are the middlemen who extract that knowledge from the SME, develop it into courseware, and finally make it available to the learner—the consumer. Disintermediation enables SMEs to make their valuable knowledge more directly available to learners by eliminating the intermediate designers and the courseware development process. It reduces the time and cost significantly, is much more scalable to deal with the tidal wave of new knowledge (by eliminating the courseware bottleneck), and is more authentic (coming directly from the source). This is the only answer in a world where speed is king, knowledge is exploding, and budgets are not keeping pace.

So the challenge for my lecture last week was: "How do I give rookie learning specialists a taste of the rapid e-learning approach?" I had to take into account such elements as their relative lack of experience in the e-learning industry, that they had only 9 weeks experience using multimedia apps like Flash and Dreamweaver, a similar introduction-level set of skills using LMSs, and were just beginning to come to grips with the core concepts of learning theory, starting as they were right at the beginning with behaviourism and cognitivism, and moving forward from there into constructivism, applied, active, holistic and more modern interpretations about how humans learn.

The first section of the lecture was a presentation; this component provided context for the students. To reinforce this, I set a practial exercise using the rapid e-learning approach - in essence, they would become the SMEs, using the authoring tool I chose (Adobe Captivate 3):

The Task

• Create a learning object using Captivate
• Objective: develop a demonstration to instruct a learner how to format and print a document in Microsoft Word
• Guidelines:
• Your demo must contain the following elements
• Onscreen text
• Animation
• Interactivity
• Transport controls and progress bar
• Format
• The published file must be a Shockwave Flash (SWF) file
• SWF must play back in a browser such as IE or Mozilla

Task Breakdown

• Capture your content
• Launch MS Word (your target application) and enter some text in a Word doc. Save the file.
• Launch Captivate
• Select Software Simulation >> Application >> OK
• Select your Word doc from the drop-down list
• Set record mode to demonstration
• Click on Record
• Record your demo
• Change the layout from Portrait to Landscape
• Change the paper size from A4 to US Letter
• Preview and “print” the document
• When you’re done, end and save your Captivate file

Edit Your Content

• In Captivate, open your recording
• Click on the Edit tab
• Your demo is displayed
• Select the first slide
• Select Insert >> Blank Slide
• A new slide will appear in position #2
• Drag and drop it above the first slide
• Select Insert >> Text Caption
• Enter some introduction text outlining the objectives of the lesson and position the text on the page
• Review your captured demo, editing out any extraneous slides
• Add a conclusion slide at the end of the demo
• Save your demonstration

Tip: You can preview your demo at any time by selecting File >> Preview >> [option] from the list

Publishing your content

• Select Project >> Resize Project
• In the Size panel chose Width: 1024 Height: 768
• In the If New Size is Smaller pane, select the Rescale radio button and check the checkbox
• Click on Finish and click on OK on the warning dialog
• Click on File >> Publish
• Select Flash (SWF) as the output option
• Give your project a name and save location
• Check Export HTML and Flash 8 as the output options
• Review the information in the Project Information pane
• Choose a look and feel for the demo
• Click on the Preferences button
• Choose options from the tabs
• When done, click on Publish

Some Things To Try Yourself

• Add some audio to your demo
• Try adding narration to your demo
• Try adding sound effects to give learners feedback
• Questions
• Add in a progress test half-way through the demo
• Add a lesson test at the end of the demo
• Interactivity
• Add in Back and Next buttons
• Create branching – what happens is a learner give a wrong answer to a test question?
• Publish Options
• Try generating a lesson plan
• Try creating a CD-based version of your demo

The purpose of this approach is to introduce new tools and ways of working to SMEs who may feel initially overwhelmed at the thought of transferring their skills and knowledge (in a format suitable for e-learning). By introducing a rapid e-learning approach through an application they are familiar with (in this case MS Word), as well as a task they are comfortable carrying out (i.e. printing a document), the SME is introduced to the e-learning authoring tool in a manageable fashion. You can begin to orient them to use the tool in a context that does not have the cognitive load of carrying out a more complex task, such as they will probably have to undertake when creating content "for real."