I’m often stunned by how few people use RSS readers - Ecampus staff included.

From the very talented Instructional Designers at commoncraft.com

Much of our growth over the last 12  months has been driven by companies moving to Ecampus from other Australian LMS vendors, whereas in the preceding years the majority of sales where typically driven by companies adopting their first elearning solution.

Working with these companies has been great experience; however, on numerous occasions our clients have run into problems when trying to get their existing data out of their old LMS… They can’t.

One way vendors prevent their clients from moving to ‘greener pastures’ is to ‘lock in’ their data so that the cost of migration makes changing vendors unappealing.

So what methods do some LMS vendors use to lock in your data?

1. SCORM ‘Enhancements’

• Exporting learning content and testing it in the ADL test suite for SCORM compliance.
• Creating some sample student assessment data and then trying to export it in a meaningful format (including student answers and text).
• Exporting student progress and completion data for learning modules undertaken.

SCORM is a universal interoperability standard used for developing elearning content. Love it or hate it, vendors and their clients need to deal with it. Content developed in LMS is often promised to be SCORM compliant when exported (designed to give the content owner some comfort that what they are developing does not have to stay tethered to that LMS forever). The reality is that this content is often useless once exported as it references ‘enhanced’ features and functionality that are native to the LMS, and as such will not be supported when exported to run in another LMS. Worse still is when the content is in a proprietary format that cannot be exported.

2. Student’s results data

Some LMS’ give users the ability to export reports and other data in Microsoft Excel or similar formats. However, often these exports do not provide all the information required to migrate systems and maintain accurate compliance records. For example, you may be able to download a report on student completion status for a course, but you will not be able to export a list of the questions answered and their subsequent responses. Essentially, that training data is locked in the LMS.

3. Student learning data

If student assessments incorporate short answer text answers, forum and text chat responses, they need to be kept in training records. Often this data is not available other than in the LMS system.

Protecting against vendor lock in

The best way to protect against vendor lock in is when purchasing a solution. You need to ask yourself if you were to no longer work with this vendor, what information would you need to take with you and then test the system to ensure that data is available.

Ecampus and your data

Customers of Ecampus can access their data in several ways. Data can be exported from the system by system administrators via a complete MySQL database dump. This essentially provides you with the complete database - every record collected.

All learning content can be exported in SCORM compliant (and verified) format and third-party learning content can be downloaded in the format in which it was uploaded. Ecampus’ XML API also provides access to user records and course data, and individual course level student assessment data can be downloaded in Microsoft Excel or CSV format.

Elearning Update

Elearning 2.0

To get a sense of eLearning 2.0, it’s helpful to have some sense of what Web 2.0 is. Probably the most cited article on this is from Tim O’Reilly called “What is Web 2.o?”

Emerging E-Learning Technology: Podcasts

One of the emerging technologies associated with E-Learning today is incorporating the use of podcasts into E-Learning course delivery.

Pros And Cons - Pros And Cons Of E-Learning

E-learning has shown its great advantages through its accessibility to all students irrespective of their residence.

Concept Design Tools

Designers of digital products and services like ourselves can dramatically improve our work by generating more concepts early in our projects. This article tries to make concept design easier to learn by illustrating three simple tools for generating concepts.

Choosing The Right Content-Authoring Tool For Your E-Learning Needs

There are several hundred e-Learning tools out in the marketplace today. Selecting the proper course-authoring tool for developing your company’s online training content is no small undertaking.

Define your objectives.

The first step in developing an e-learning strategy is to define the objectives of the intiative. What knowledge do you need to transfer to your students? Determine what time frame you would like to develop your initiative in and you cost restraints. And ask yourself, how you will track the learner’s progress.

Who are your end users?

Think about who will be using the course. If the learner is older and less tech savvy, you may need to accommodate for additional support. If the learner is young, you may want to produce a course with animation.

What tools to use?

There is an abundance of e-learning tools to choose from and it can be overwhelming. You will need to decide what features you require and how you will use the application.

If you plan on creating a course with interaction and multimedia you may need to purchase a high end elearning tool. However, if it is a simple text based course there is no need to spend additional money on a fancy application.

Internally or externally develop.

You must determine whether you will develop content internally or engage an outside source to develop the content for you.

Engaging a professional content development company may seem expensive at first but could save you a lot of time and money in the long run, with a better final product.

Technical support.

Consideration must be given to support for the end user. This decision will be based on the quantity and capabilities of the end user. There are several options for support. You may choose a help desk or supply support files. However, don’t forget, even in this day and age, there are people unfamiliar with computers. Even the simplest computing tasks may need to be explained.

Measuring success.

Finally, indentify how you will measure if the initiative was successful. Was one of the objectives to decrease the cost in training? If so, make calculations on return on investment. Calculate how much your current method of training costs and compare with total cost of the e-learning initiative

1. No Overall Aim. Make sure students understand why they are taking the course and what they’ll get out of it. 2. Vague planning. Decide what you want students to learn and how they’ll learn it. Vague aims will not usually suffice. Find out the technical options. The course must be defined in those terms. The first slide will contain this video in this format, we’ll use this font, we’ll use pictures here, video there, and so on. Write it all down. Discuss it with colleagues. Test your ideas on prospective students. Don’t be afraid to ask developers to explain things.

3. Poorly designed content.

Many elearning modules are bland. They have too much text. Elearning should be interactive. It should look good. Video, animation, sound and good design can really help. Before you start, find out about what the technology offers. How can you use it? For instance, how will you use forums? Quizzes? Audio? Animation? Video? Drag and drop?

4. Hard to use. The course doesn’t work on student computers. Lack of testing.

The course and the LMS must be easy to use. If it is not user friendly then people will avoid using it. Make it easy to enrol, take the course and review results. Test the course on typical student computers. Consider bandwidth, browser versions, firewalls, operating systems, and so on. For instance, will student internet connections be fast enough to watch video playback?

6. Inadequate tracking of enrolments and results.

Who has enrolled? Who has completed the course? Who is failing? These sorts of questions are answered by tracking student interaction with the course. You can only get answers based on the information gathered. So when you test your course with typical students, test the reports being generated too. Make sure that all the information you need is being recorded. Make sure that the system records what you want before real students start taking your course.

7. Stakeholders not consulted.

Every stakeholder needs to be aware of the aims of the elearning program. Where possible, involve all stakeholders in appropriate parts the project. For instance, make sure adminstrative staff are happy with the reports generated by the LMS.

8. Poor support.

Good support means a support desk, an online forum and FAQs. Without access to support, learners will become despondent if they encounter a problem. When you solve problems, add the solution to a FAQ or a forum. Prefereably one students and staff can search.

9. Poor workflow integration.

The most important step is to integrate the elearning program with business processes. Make sure the way it integrates is supported by all management.

10. Forgetting business aims.

For example, does the course improve efficiency and reduce expenses? Does it reduce training contact time? Ask these sorts of questions. Can these things be quantified financially? Does the course represent a good return on investment?

There’s nothing more fascinating for an e-learning course designer than watching users interact with the courses online. From where they click, their mouse movements, scrolling and so on, you can tell you a lot about what is good and what is bad about the course and the user interface surrounding it.

The problem for e-learning, of course, is that you can’t sit there and watch students interact with your courses. They’re usually on a browser far away, and it’s hard to work out what they’re doing. “Usability testing” under these circumstances is difficult.

People are trying to remedy the situation, of course.

There are some commercial companies that take these techniques and use them for business analytics and marketing. Crazyegg, of instance, take a visual approach to showing where users have clicked, what sites they have been referred from, and so on. It’s a nice, user friendly way to see what bits of your course generate interest and so on. Here’s one view Crazy Egg provide - a “heatmap”. The brighter the colour, the more clicks the user has made in the area.

Clicktale take another approach. They actually track user movements so you can watch “playback” of the user’s session. Scrolling, mouse movement and so on. The orange block moves around the screen to show where the user is moving the mouse. A very handy technique - it means you can really “see” what students are up to and improve things where necessary.

Back in 2001, a MIT project called “Cheese” did something along the lines in a marginally more primitive way using embedded script in the browser. Another open source, free way of doing something similar is by using something such as UsaProxy. Richard Atterer and Albrecht Schmidt, the creators of the software, put it this way:

We have implemented a special proxy server which sits transparently between server and client. It gathers detailed usage information (e.g. key presses, mouse movements), including information on the objects on the page which were involved in an interaction.

This allows you to share sessions with users, log mouse movements and so on. The basic idea and some of the techniques can be easily adapted for e-learning and course usability testing. Once presented as a report, a “movie” of user activity or a heatmap, or even just watched “live”, this sort information is a great way to see how your e-learning project is going.

Very occasionally in life you come across something that can really make your life easier. I had one of those moments today when I saw this. This will really increase the quality of life for a select few… including me.

Kudos to the Connections & Conversations posse for drawing our attention to this.

• Jen

I picked this up from Learn Me Happy .

“If you don’t ‘get’ Web 2.0, or know someone else that doesn’t ‘get’ it, you or they should watch this video, to the end.” - Barry Sampson