Fresh look at eLearning

Does anyone really believe that technical eLearning is being properly evaluated and selected ? Take a look at some of the rubbish material provided by big eLearning vendors and wonder aloud !

I have a concern that the more focussed the content (ie technical, or domain-specific) the less can a HR staffer, eLearning/Training buyer, or plain 'front-of-house obstacle' detect value in the product at all. So the easy thing to do is just invent a 'we don't like/use elearning' excuse.

Is it vaguely possible that they are just focusing on (a) price (b) volume of titles, or (c) their own job ?

My suggestion for making some progress here is that corporations should look afresh at the eLearning debate. It is not useful to just say 'we got no value from buying it before'. If you never put in place the proper evaluations, roll-out programs, and evaluation metrics - and never followed up by making employees feel good about doing some learning activities, just forget it. You should not have the job. Go fishing.

Don't make eLearning the explanation for your poor training processes, budget or unhappy job. Go and look at it again. Your competitors in Asia (and eventually Africa) use it in huge volumes - because they know that acquiring up-to-date skills is difficult. Particularly now that big corporations have rightsized their best (ie most knowledgeable rather than most compliant) people. And why have you lost so many jobs anyway ? Is it because your corporation just could not cut it with the right set of skills ?

Or are your top guys blaming somebody else for that too ?

Mobile tests

Ossidian has long offered randomized on-line tests and certificates for most of its eLearning modules. The user must (just like a regular exam) take the test questions in full and achieve the passing grade. Then the system will create a real-time pdf certificate to save or print.

That works pretty well for most users - since they now have something to show they achieved a pass on the materials their employer paid for !

But what about practice tests ? or even tests for people on the move ?

Now we are looking to move tests onto mobile devices - phones and PDAs. You could logon, access your chosen test and take it anywhere, anytime.

Media Cube

Ossidian is moving office between tomorrow May 3, and May 10.

We are moving to Media Cube a dedicated digital media complex associated with the Dublin-based IADT institute. Soon, this campus will also include the National Film Institute.

As soon as we have re-located, we will post some blogs concerning our plans for 2007/8.

Multimedia

Getting to use a range of multimedia in eLearning seems sometimes like the Holy Grail. Easy to describe, but difficult to do properly.

It's reasonably easy to add audio tracks, animations and suchlike. But there are real problems with video - what streaming technology to use. Not everyone wants the same solution and not every corporate firewall lets streamed video inbound.

A key issue in Ossidian's exploration of video technologies has been to make sure that everyone can get our content. But if you don't have fast broadband, then don't try to run video.

When you've experienced good video-based content, it is pretty hard to go back to plain old text.

Re-using SCOs

We have recently completed the pre-audio work on our latest module ('SS7 Fundamentals') - which is a technical module on telecom signaling. This was one of the first times we have tried re-using graphics, text and audio from our new content repository.

Up till now we built each new module from scratch. Obviously that took lots of work - but we could customize the content around the subject-matter. Now, having built nearly 500 tutorials, we have a great collection of artwork and re-useable text. We also have a huge repository of test questions that can be randomized for assessment purposes.

So what's the advantage of this new approach ? Well the first thing is we built our latest module in 50% of the time (and probably 25% of the cost). Secondly, we know the existing materials have been pre-tested and peer-reviewed - so that means the Q/A effort is much less. Thirdly, we now have visibility into our entire content repository as a library of re-usable SCOs - and that means we can roll our new (or custom) modules quite easily.

Anyone else got experience of this approach to technical eLearning ?

CBT/WBT - who likes it ?

We are noticing some interesting patterns in usage across our worldwide customer base. For example, in Europe and USA many of our on-line students seem to take courses outside work hours. But they do it in short bursts of activity.

In Asia (and particularly Cambodia, Thailand and Malaysia) we note that students do much longer periods of study in one session,but mostly during work hours. The same is true in Africa.

Why is this the case ? Is it that Anglo-American employers just give minimal learning time on-the-job ? Or is it that Asia/African employees are more hungry for technical learning ?

Serious Games

A lot of game technology businesses have tools that could work for eLearning. But those businesses have really never been concerned with providing content for business applications or management issues.

Now content providers like Ossidian are seeking to provide more engaging learning experience. That has historically meant multimedia, simulations, and animations. Now comes the Serious Game idea. This is the application of gaming technology to eLearning - gaming engines and virtual reality spaces to provide an immersive and stimultaing learning environment.

The great thing here is that Serious Games can use reward principles to keep the user engaged in pursuit of goals. Reaching goals along the way can be rewarded in many ways - points, new levels, 'top scorer' lists to mention some.

The tech environment for building Serious Games is in its infancy. Who wants to download huge programs to a PC just to run some eLearning ! But web delivery is not yet good enough because the browser just is not able to do really serious graphics-intensive work. And that assumes the bandwith is even there to deliver the content.

We are looking at ways to promote Serious Games options in the Ossidian content library. We'll keep you posted.

Web 2.0

Here at Ossidian we are looking to improve the engagement of learners with each other. We are also researching ways to de-formalize some learning processes so that people can share ideas with each other.

Essentially this is to get away from the push model of learning that is so prevalent in the eLearning world.

Web 2.0 appears to offer ways for us to improve. Blogs. Mashups. Video. Bulletin boards. Maybe not much new under the sun, but lots of interesting stuff.

Take a look at the non-commercial Wikiversity. This is a really cool collaborative site based on the wiki idea. Maybe a little thin on good stuff, but it's growing fast.

Universities just will not collaborate

So does anyone think that Universities have an inflated sense of their own value ? It seems as if Internet-based learning is here to stay - but without really good content there is a risk of a devalued learning experience for many people. Surely, one might suppose, Universities have course content that can be transformed into the new medium ?

Well, you might have though so. But there are lots of problems here. Firstly, quality content is not easy to locate since lots of Unversity course materials are not packaged well for re-use.

Secondly, Universities generally want to guard 'intellectual property' very closely - even if it's not their own. Getting them to collaborate on co-development of eLearning is a nightmare because their common 'business' models don't allow them to think really creatively. Ownership is the chief criterion for decision-taking. And exercise of bureaucratic decision processes takes too much time - products have to be innovated, brought to market and changed within 3 months. Any longer and the ship has moved on.

Getting their hands on money ('research funding') is a primary goal of institutions. Sharing assets in a collaborative way is very low on their list. Universities really want all of the cake - they think they have good undergraduate teraching content, they think they are central to all R&D and they believe they can market/sell internationally. And they really do not understand co-financing at all !

Of course, the last point is crucial. The value of on-line diplomas/degrees has been severly diluted by the number of them available (and from disreputable sources in many cases). We suggest that Universities need to recognize that the key is to target co-produced and co-branded digital products at specific markets (and corporate training is the one most dear to our hearts !).

There are some good exceptions - MIT's OpenCourseWare is making vast swathes of course materials freely available oneline. And the Open University (UK) too. This is good news for people that want access to good content across a range of subjects. But bad news because commercial re-use is prohibited.

3GSM

We visited Barcelona, SPain last week to see what the collective 3G cellular community is doing in mobile content. Frankly there was a lot of hype about mobile TV, gaming and gambling - but very little outside those areas. There were even 'adult' booths that looked pretty cheesy among the high-tech.

We wanted to see people porting content to mobile devices - but we were disappointed. The supposed mass market in mobile gaming looks pretty far away (to our eyes) (a) the form factor is so small, and (b) the graphics and processor speeds are so poor. That will definitely change - but will anyone really want to play tiny Mario games with two thumbs more than one time ? And since mobile phones typically intercept only one key at a time, the gaming developers have a job to do to fool the eye!

We didn't see any decent examples of eBooks nor of eLearning. Looks like the networks are chasing some impossible SMS-replacement that remains elusive.

Managing Roaming Agreements

We are getting a lot of requests around the topic of Roaming Agreements. These are the formal agreements between network operators (all types of cellular networks including CDMA, GSM etc) and emergent networks such VoIP and wVoIP.

The processes of negotiating and formalizing the agreements are well-established - and the weaker (ie the smaller) party often has difficulties since they may not have lots of experienced negotiators.

Watch our home page for developments in this area. www.ossidian.com

Next-Generation Networks (NGN)

We have launched a new section on www.ossidian.com called 'NGN Insider'.

This is designed to carry up-to-date news items on All-IP, IMS, SIP, SIGTRAN, VoIP, MPLS and all the technologies that will go into networks of the future. The emphasis is on technology and standards advances.

Please let us know (info@ossidian.com) if you spot any items that should be linked on here.

Tool time

Having tried out all the eLearning authoring tools we could find, both open source and commercial, we have come to the conclusion that most of them miss the point.

Adding layers of complexity and features seems to be the end-goal. Do these guys not understand that's what went wrong with word-processing software years ago. "Feature creep" we called it. Even the so-called learning standards people have headed down the tracks of complexity - just try understanding wher Scorm is headed.

Challenge - Take a blank piece of paper and write down on it the basic functions you need in an authoring tool. I guarantee you don't need to turn it over and keep on writing. Unless you have some pretty weird requirements.

All the efforat the tool side goes into making things look engaging (so far as the tool believes !) - very little goes into forming the content. Well maybe that's not the business of authoring tool makers - but we think it should be. There's too much really poor content out there. Even such content which should be great - like some of the freely available content from MIT - can look pretty mundane when you print it out.

Here at Ossidian we think differently. We think the content should be great, not the tools we use to make it.

Off-line learning !

Our 'Introduction to Datacommunications' eLearning module has been one of our best sellers for over a year now.

In fact many of our customers have asked for additional study materials to supplement the eLearning. So we have written this 160-page book that can be downloaded as an eBook (and printed) - or even ordered as a good old-fashioned book.

The benefit of the eLearning is that it is structured to provide just the right amount of content to ensure the topic is covered. The on-line experience also allows us to test the student's progress after every tutorial - and to provide a certification test at the end.

With the (e)book as a supplementary product, the student can re-visit and revise - even when no computer is available.

Aggregating content

Here at Ossidian we often have to justify our eLearning products against the tons of free stuff that's out there on the Web.

Well it's certainly possible for everyone in an organization to go around with Google - check out all the possible Wikipedia entries, freebie tutorials and whitepapers. But does every corporation want its employees wasting time searching for their own answers ?

Our justification for eLearning is that it structures content properly for learning. We never pretend that we are the only source. We never promise that you won't find the information elsewhere. But we certainly do promise that we sift and sort the relevant facts and present them in a manner that makes it easy to learn.

That is not something that everyone is good at. And we don't think every employee should be burdened with doing her/her own academic-level research to get job-related training.

Corporate training - lazy minds

Do you recognize this corporation ?

"Delivering training (and specifically eLearning) in our telecommunications environment is difficult - not least because annual budgets obscure reality. Employee development programs should not be one-time projects - they should be long-term processes that engage people at all levels. The laziest minds are at the top of our busines - there is no meaningful engagement with anything other than stock price and options valuations. Since no-one at the top has any real knowledge of the business, it is impossible to entice them to devote time and effort to personal development issues".

Rather than pay for meaningful, quality content, most telecom corporates (and I mean the biggest of them) appear to have downgraded training (and eLearning) to the fringes of the training function on the edge of the HR department ! Who (I mean) is serious in these operations about employee development ? Lipservice to whatever is the buzzword flavor-of-the-month-idea. No commitment or budget process to drive real technical training down through the organization.

So you, the poor eLearning Manager, have probably inherited a Skillsoft or Netg license - thousands of 'courses' for thousands of employees. 2 cents per course. Easier to do nothing, of course, than to make a business case for change ?

Digital eLearning content V. books

eLearning has been promoted as a replacement for classroom training. As a consequence, it has also been viewed as a technological replacement for paper.

However it is not easy to spend time reading a computer screen - although new virtual ink technologies such as Sony's may help resolve that problem. Fact is, most people like the feel of a book and it is very easy to move around in a book - stop, start, go back and forward. And portability is a real problem too. So is the need for electric power - even if the charge on a notebook were to last.

So I suggest that the best use of eLearning is to complement the classroom and the book. Use the technology to access really good learning material quickly and cheaply - but choose the right medium to communicate different styles of coaching and learning.

Fraud Management and Wireless Forensics

There has been a trend, by both the defence and the protectution in courts, to verify or supplement evidence given in court, using Call Data Records which can provide a history of the locatation of mobile phones. Similarily, we see computers being seized in evidence re emails and website usage and regularily read about emails being used in this or that case.

It seems difficult enough to keep one's own IT systems secure from "malware" but consider a telco's (mobile/ISP/fixed network operator) position whereby all subsribers' data, at least in Ireland, has to be held for three years and, when required to do so by the law enforcement agency, the net operator must search for and release as required: subscriber details, CDRs, emails, usernames, email addresses etc. while guarenteeing the data's security, integrity and authenticity. The same network operator may also be required to provide expert witnesses to face challenges re the above in court.

Sometimes it seems difficult enough to set up an email account or a new mobile phone but consider the also the law enforcement agency officer tasked with the job of assessing what data may be relevant, what is technically or logistically possible to gather as evidence within the IT domain. If you catch a suspected child pornographer, terrorist or fraudster what should he or she be looking for on the suspects' phone, PC or smart cards. Also, what do the lawyers, judiciary envolved in these cases need to know.

Finally, what privacy laws exist to protect Joe Citizen?

On the one hand there are via databases new tools available to track and help convict criminals. On the other hand there is the potential for privacy to be intentionally or mistakenly invaded, for data to fall into the wrong hands, for identity theft.

But it's not just cops and robbers who are effected by these new issues. Anyone can get drawn into it, take for example, the case of a retailer whose premises' security cameras (CCTV) just happened to be pointed to the position of an alleged offence. The law enforcement agency may require the retailer to provide tapes/DVDs re this or that camera over any extended period in or around the alleged offence. This may cost the retailer a day or two to gather depending on the request.

The point I make is that regardless of one's views re being tracked, the fact is everybody is any time they go out, use their phone, write an email, surf the web, or buy anything with plastic. But why should one group, pay to enforce the law while other sectors aren't obliged to do so? A cost of doing business? Perhaps.

eLearning telecom security

Here at Ossidian we are considering developing new courseware modules on security and forensics. Seems like the crossover between telecom and financial services has so many potential vulnerabilities that lots of people need to be trained up.

Business managers and technical security people need to be able to communicate clearly and effectively. Unfortunately they don't speak the same language - or have the same goals in life.

The tech folks need to be taught business and communication skills. The business managers need enough technical grounding to be able to make budget cases to their bosses.

eLearning seems to be an ideal way to get such information out to everyone quickly. If you can use a browser then you can do a 15-minute tutorial and take a self-test. Painless ?

Who owns elearning ?

So Blackboard is claiming ownership of the 'lms' idea ! Great move - why can't patent office people take a look around them. There is so much prior art on the idea of web-based and computer-based learning, going back decades, that it is impossible to imagine how this filing got through.

The problem for open-source developers is that institutions and corporates may feel exposed in implementing infrastructure that may get them drawn into legal battles in the future. Even if they are not responsible.

Perhaps only the commerical lms vendors can afford to defend patent suits and/or pay up if it goes against them. But it seems ridiculous that educational processes can be patented by one US corporation. Smells a little like the genome patents ?

Testing your knowledge

How do you measure what you have achieved with eLearning ? Do you expect your students to take a classroom test, or do you just put it up there and assume that because the content is available that people will use it ?

One approach is to put the content into a library and wait for students to come along. But you are only as good as you last access - so unless you have a promotional program to build loyalty, then volumes may disappoint you. That applies equally in in-house corporate eLearning progams as much as commercial eLearning portals.

Another approach is to tie the eLearning to something else. That could be a dedicated website of reference learning. Or it could be more eLearning ! But for me the optimal strategy is to follow the eLearning with a test (hopefully randomized) - and possibly even precede the learning with different one. That can serve multiple objectives :-

• the student gets to see whether their knowledge has progressed, and
• the manager gets to measure the worth of the program

Plus, if the test can be taken more than one time, the student can seek to improve their performance.

Just who buys employee training ?

It seems as if senior management (and I include HR management too) ignore the importance of employee training. I mean they pay lipservice to the concept - but they don't get down and dirty with what is really required.

And the first things to go in any cost reduction plan often include training.

The best corporations empower individuals to plan their own needs and some even devolve the training budget down to individuals. That means everyone can purchase some basic training every year - whether it is technical, business or personal skills.

Too many organizations, living in the twentieth-century or before(!), still hand the budget to a 'training manager' who may not, and probably does not, have any functional or operational knowledge of the business. Even worse, as training goes on-line, how can such managers evaluate whether specific eLearning content meets the needs of their people ? They should not be expected to do so - how can they possibly go to line managers and ask for people to be taken off jobs to 'evaluate training products or services' ?

One way forward is to take the focus off annual, corporate (or departmental) budgets. Things that are seen as purely a cost are usually not valued like things that are seen as 'strategic'. If bookkeepers are forever looking for the elusive 'return on investment' then the point has been lost.

So give everyone a few dollars/yen/euro/pounds (or whatever) and let them purchase what they think they need. It does not have to be a large sum of money - but it will make everyone aware the organization cares.

Authoring tools - LMS integration

There are lots of tools for creating on-line learning. But just how good are any of them for integrating different sources of information ? And just what is involved technically in harnessing the Web to provide useful learning content ?

Simple is best
Our experience here at Ossidian shows that the simplest approach works best. We tried all the leading authoring tools and eventually concluded that it was cheaper, quicker and easier to author in a basic Word Processing package such as Open Office or Word. Then everything can be assembled together with graphics using Macromedia Flash. This produces minimal filesizes and quick on-line response - and, real importantly, there are lots of Flash developers around.

Reload is a great free tool for creating and maintaining Scorm manifests (and packaging the results).

But Scorm ...
Well Scorm is not really that difficult, is it ? Standard Javascript wrappers are available free, and integration with server-side LMS is well-proven. In our own technology (all open source using PHP, Apache, Linux and MySQL) we wrote the basic code in 2 weeks - and all the Scorm javascript is created dynamically by PHP. To get a basic Scorm system running - you don't need all the functions and weird metatags that the standard contains. There are only 4 or 5 key functions needs to start off and provide tracking and scoring.

Anyway, the authoring tools really don't need to optimize for Scorm. As long as you are passing the tracking and scoring data out of your SCOs - then the LMS work is pretty easy.

Have you heard of Web 2.0 yet ?

Collaboration is the new Web paradigm - and since elearning (and CBT) is not everyone's preferred way of acquiring new skills, the Web 2.0 model needs to be taken on board quickly.

The WWW has terrabytes of useful information on just about any topic. But finding the right information and assembling it into meaningful chunks is not easy. That is why eLearning - ie structured on-line content - can be so accessible and effective.

Unfortunately, force-feeding people with information does not oftenwork. They may not need the particular topic today. Or they may be focussed on something else. People just don't want to have irrelevant information stuffed down their throat !

So anything that makes it easier to collaborate with other people must be good. Learning has to evolve under the influence of new tools. These will include better ways of linking up with other learners, better ways of structuring information feeds, and better information-sifting tools.

The purpose of this blog is to provoke some comments on how corporations can add 'unstructured' web-based sources as a new learning tool.