So you are going to start delivering elearning in your organisation. In order to do this successfully, you will need to gather the right skills to develop engaging professional content that will deliver the learning objectives required. Let’s take a quick look at some of the people and skills you may need on your project. Often you will find people with multiple skills, or you may need various people with specific skills, but by working alongside such specialists will enable you to pick up skills that you can use on your own in the future. Learning Content Team Instructional designer

An instructional designer creates instructional material for learning. They often assess learner needs and determine goals and outcomes for learning

Subject matter expert

A subject matter expert is an expert in a particular area that learning materials are going to be created for. This could be the in-house CRM guru or the product manager for a technical product.

Graphic designer

The graphic designer is there to make the learning content look great. From creating templates to page layouts, styling diagrams and selecting images, a graphic designer will add polish to your course.

Flash Developer

At times you may need to add complex interactions and simulations. To do this you are probably going to need a flash developer. Flash content is typically developed in Adobe Flash and requires specialised skills.

Multimedia developer

If you are lucky your graphic designer or flash developer may be able to handle the additional elements that can be used in elearning content. However, if they are unable to, a multimedia developer will be able to assist you in creating such elements. If you are working with video the multimedia developer will provide you with the video and audio editing and signal processing skills, as well as encoding multimedia formats appropriately for playback.

Learning Management System (LMS) Team

LMS administrator

The LMS administrator is essentially the power user for the system. They will understand the configuration and setup options and how to map the LMS functionality to the organisation’s processes and learning needs. They will also understand how to set up and configure courses utilising all of the course tools.

LMS course manager

A LMS course manager may be involved in setting up courses, but more likely they are there to guide students through the learning content and assess non-automated assessment items and liaise with students who are having difficulty with the learning content.

Help Desk

Depending on the size of your organisation and IT environment, you may need to have a help desk person to deal with students’ technical issues.

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.

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?

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.

It is not often I get excited about software, but in one fell swoop Composica has solved a heap of the most irritating problems we face creating custom content for our clients.

We became so excited we are now an Australian reseller for Composica.

Centralised Project View

Having all the stakeholders being able to view and contribute to the project, in real time, through a browser, saves an enormous amount of time. No more sending files around to be edited and waiting for them to come back.

Simple Author Interface

Another brilliant aspect of Composica is the user interface; it borrows heavily from popular word processors, which makes it easy to understand.

Although it has a simple interface, Composica has a heap of serious functionality for developers. The properties of every element on the screen can be fully tweaked.

Look, it’s on the internet!

Okay, an obvious point, but not having to worry about purchasing licences for desktops is a real bonus from an admin point of view. Clients can just login to the site and they are ready to go … very, very handy when things need to be done quickly.

Accountability

One for the Project Managers. Composica has a built-in task list, and lets users annotate the work of others (the notes are not published with the content).

But is it an Authoring Tool?

Yep, it’s a great authoring tool, but as you may have guessed Composica is probably better described as as platform for  developing elearning content.

As I said, for me the most impressive feature of Composica is its groupware. Anything that enables a subject matter expert (SME), a flash developer, an instructional designer and a project manager to work on the same project simultaneously is a very good thing.

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You can read more about Composica here

I haven’t confirmed the stories, but they are from separate people all developing an awareness of an increase in managerial control of the education process. But the point is this – the University is being run by the administration for the administration rather than by the academics or students. Decisions about where resources go are based on administrative and financial imperatives, not educational imperatives. It is destroying student and teacher morale and the quality of the courses.

The first imperative of any organsation is self-perpetuation and – with any luck – growth. As the administration makes decisions about resources, it is no surprise to find out that the administration at this University has grown in size and stature. It is also no surprise that many other aspects of the University have been cut back to allow for that growth. But academics and students are a timid lot. If they complain about this creeping administration, if they reject it, they risk losing their work, their grants, all the resources the administration makes decisions about.

What about more “pure” forms of study? The benefits of this sort of education are obvious – but not easily measured. They are, essentially, positive economic externalities . A “critical mind” is not something tangible, neither is a “philosophical disposition” or “intellectual rigour”. Some things will never have a market value as such. But it’s clear most administrations like the one at the University don’t put much stock in these things either – if they did, would they deliberately hamper the publication of results or the taking on of students based on merit rather than economics? This is not the thinking of educators. So what is there to lose? Perhaps a more open, free-form system will actually help foster academic rigour in time?

This sort of system is quite possible to achieve with a combination of CRM, e-learning and assorted web services. This relieves academics of the need to do much administration beyond basic decisions about tutorial times, lecture times, locations, and so on. It gives providers of infrastructure the opportunity to offer it to a whole new market. It gives students choice over courses, over their education. It reduces the costs of admin to a negligible amount, certainly well below 20% of research funds.

We are hoping to begin a pilot project in this area as a closed beta. With any luck, the end result will be a non-profit web application for academics, students and providers of educational infrastructure. It will be open to all. Course materials uploaded will be released under the Creative Commons Attribution license and made freely available, and people will be able to share course materials between courses for true online collaboration. Moderated web conferences with video and audio will be cheap and easy to use (cents not dollars per hour is what we’re aiming at).Keep an eye on this blog for updates.

But without the students and academics, though, what is a University? Infrastructure. Labs. Lecture theatres. Car fleets. Buildings. Tutorial rooms. Most of this infrastructure could be provided by anyone. Probably more cheaply and more efficiently. Why not give academics and students choice over how they spend their grants, their public funds, their private industry support, and so on? Surely they know what sorts of labs they need, where their tutorials need to be, what sort of facilities are required to carry out a piece of research, and so on. A professional administrator is probably not as well equipped to make those sorts of decisions.

If academics could set up their own courses, take on students, provide tutorials and provide course materials online, then they would be independent of the administration. If each student could decide where to spend the funding he or she gets, then each student could choose the courses that suited them. Then academics and students would have a direct economic relationship; both are probably best informed about how to conduct that relationship, not a third party such as a University administrator.

Then a University, for example, would have to compete with everyone else who could provide similar infrastructure. Why not have tutorials at a conference centre? Why not use private labs? Why not organise lectures in private lecture theatres? Why not even rent the University’s own infrastructure occasionally? Then the business-minded University administration will be exposed to the rigours of “competition”. They would no longer have a regular stream of oligopoly rents gleaned from well intentioned government spending. Rather, the academics and students decide how to allocate those funds. Probably, in all likelihood, more would go to actual education and less to administration.

All sounds good, doesn’t it? But academics are specialists in teaching and their subject areas, not in business or administration. True. Academics want to spend their time doing research and teaching, not organising the intricacies of their courses as going business concerns. Most have a preference for face-to-face teaching, not staring at 200 X 200 pixel images of their students moving at 5 frames per second. What happens to a sense of collegiality when everything starts to turn into a business? Where do academics find their students? How do students find courses? Will students have too much power to influence the educational process if they have the power to decide the financial fate of an academic? Is there a risk that the most pandering of the academics will do the best under these circumstances and the more rigorous will be put out of business?

In the another post I suggested that employers value transparent assessments of prospective employee skills. For some, it is about status – “we have 3 PHDs on staff” – but to most businesses, they want results. If someone has a track record of results, then the employer feels safe employing them. Particularly if a respected expert can vouch for those results. Academics have a role to play here – they are filters, they give recommendations. Students will pay to be recommended, to have their work assessed by experts. Particularly ones of their own choosing. It’s up to others to judge the verisimilitude of those assessments. Any intelligent employer, for example, will cast a critical eye over them. To some extent this will encourage rigour; no student wants to do a course that doesn’t give them credibility with an employer, no academic wants to be seen to be too “soft”. Perhaps student, academic and employer interests will balance each other out to produce a reasonable educational result.

technorati tags:mobile, learning, PDAs, TAFE, elearning

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The solution to this miasma of browser quirks and hacking? Some people call them “RIAs”, or rich internet applications. You can do things in them that you can do in normal applications such as Word or on your desktop. Drag things around. Click on windows. Play videos. Record your voice. Show presentations. That sort of stuff. They run on remote servers, and you access them via your browser.

The whole notion of web-based apps really took off when people started taking a combination of html, the document object model, css, javascript and XMLHttpRequest, to create things such as Gmail and flickr. Of course, people had been doing this stuff since Microsoft originally put the XMLHttp activeX object into IE 5, and even before that using iFrames and other hacks, but circumstances contrived to make Gmail and other apps like it a minor buzz point; and so Tim O’Reilly coined the phrase “web 2.0″, a load of colourful logos were created, another coined the phrase ajax (“Asynchronous JavaScript + XML”, a word which is also the name of a household cleanser) and, with a general increase in jargon, controversy arose about the possibility of a new internet bubble.

But as more students, customers, colleagues, etc, have faster and faster internet connections web applications start to make more and more sense. Particularly when people want to collaborate over the ‘net. Indeed, some of the most useful applications simply wouldn’t make sense as anything else except server-based web apps: search engines, online collaboration software of most kinds, ecommerce sites, and so on. Indeed, the discussion is over bar the protestations of a few. Web apps are the future. No-one wants to support multiple code bases for Macs, Windows, Linux and so on (they’d rather support multiple browsers ). No-one wants to deal with boxes of software anymore. Punters don’t want to worry about upgrades, software installs and all that. And, for e-Learning, the punters are used to learning things from the internet and socialising using everything from mobile phones to internet forums. For web-based e-Learning, indeed for most applications, the web application is a given.

But programming web applications still makes grown men weep. Really great projects such as the dojo toolkit and prototype help a lot, but they are still in a nascent form. Dojo, for example, is really wonderful, with some AOP and some handy use of the functional programming possibilities of javascript and all sorts of other cool stuff – but it is still only approaching version 0.4. Google, of course, is in on the act with GWT, which actually tries the abstract the whole “ajax” hack behind a java library. Microsoft has it’s own thing: Atlas, all built around it’s ASP.NET platform. The problem is, no matter how good they are, they can’t expand the web application much beyond the limitations of the browser and the hackology inherent in it.

There is, of course Java web start as an alternative to all this javascript hackology. But that requires a large plugin to work and it just doesn’t work a lot of the time. How many people have had bad experiences trying to get applets to run? Quite a few. Although there is talk of making it smaller. And Adobe’s Flex, and the Apollo project, which makes use of the cross-browser Flash plugin, which I’ve written about before. And possibly something by Microsoft called XAML. And so the list goes on. In other words, there are a lot of buzzwords …

… and with buzzwords comes the traditional sound of buzzing, which addles the brain and makes programmers wish they were born in Age of Reason were Everything Just Worked. But … it doesn’t.

What does this mean for the typical e-Learning site? Major redevelopment. Why bother? Because as I’ve posted about before, as multimedia becomes more common on web sites we’ll need more sophisticated applications to make the most of it. Plus, a better UI is a better user experience, and by extension a better educational experience.