UK-based learning and talent analysts Elearnity have come up with a new service geared specifically to the UK and European e-learning market. Called Vendor Perspectives (slightly ironic as 'vendor' is very much a US expression, where we tend to say 'supplier') the service provides intelligence about available solutions to potential buyers in all the usual product and service categories, including custom content providers, authoring tools, learning management platforms, etc.
Vendors pay to be included, although this buys them no influence on the ratings they receive, which are calculated by Elearnity based on their own knowledge of the market and interviews with a selection of the vendor's clients. Customers get to see Summary Perspectives for free but must pay for 'Deep Perspectives' (is that a mixed metaphor?).
In principle, I like the idea, because it is really hard for potential customers to make sense of all the competing solutions available and objective advice is hard to come by. I know this service is already available in the USA from Brandon Hall, Bersin and others, but the European market is different and local suppliers may not get much of a look in.
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This week sees the release of my new book, Digital Learning Content: A Designer's Guide. The book is for anyone with an interest in helping others to learn. You may be a teacher, trainer, lecturer or coach. You may be a subject expert with knowledge you want to share or an experienced practitioner who wants to pass on their tips. You may already be a creator of learning content, looking to update their skills. Whatever your interest, this guide will help you to design learning materials that really make a difference.
Digital learning content takes a wide variety of forms, including tutorials, scenarios, podcasts, screencasts, videos, slideshows, quizzes and reference materials. The book provides you with fundamental principles that you can apply to any content creation activity as well as practical information relating to specific content types.
Here's the table of contents: - Making the most of this guide
- Coming to terms with content
- Building on sound foundations
- Determining roles and processes
- Working with subject experts
- Starting with some universal principles
- Exploiting the power of interactivity
- Working with the basic media elements
- Distributing your content
- Assembling your ...
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As I've just returned from a week walking in the sunshine of Almeria, I'm probably the last to comment on Apple's announcement of it's publishing platform for multimedia text books on the iPad. If you missed it, see iBook Author here.
Let's be absolutely clear, there is nothing whatsoever new about the idea of interactive multimedia books. As Managing Director of Publishing for Epic, back in the 1990s, I was involved in quite a few CD-ROM projects that mirrored quite closely was is envisioned for the iPad. True we were restricted to distributing on PCs via the offline medium of a laserdisc, but the creative product was almost identical. You may remember the wonderful interactive products that Dorling Kindersley produced back then, not to mention Encarta. And there's nothing stopping you from creating interactive multimedia 'books' now (I hesitate to keep using the term 'text books' because surely that's exactly what they're trying not to be) - you just set up a website. Last time I looked, HTML was quite capable of displaying pages of text, combined with pictures, video, animations, audio and games.
The difference is that iBooks Author creates a tightly formatted, ...
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The Blue Eskimo training and e-learning work and salary survey for 2011 makes interesting reading but leaves many important questions unanswered - at least for me. In total, 813 people from Blue Eskimo's client databases, predominantly UK-based, completed the survey. Blue Eskimo is a recruitment consultancy, so it is possible that this skews the results somewhat, because presumably only people interested in getting work will be on the database in the first place.
Participants were mostly from the private sector, with 32% working in IT training, 21% e-learning, and 20% soft skills training. Of these, 13% were designers and 27% trainers, with the rest in various management and sales roles. Some 80% were in permanent positions.
Some key findings: - Salaries were holding up well for permanent employees, although 60% had not received an increase in the past year.
- There was a definite downward shift in daily rates for contractors, with more people moving into the sub-£300-a-day bracket. This would not be surprising if most of these contractors were classroom trainers. With a lot of redundancies in L&D, supply of freelancers is bound to increase and that will affect rates.
- Some 80% work ...
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The recent release by Trivantis of Snap! Empower, a rapid Flash interaction builder, for the princely sum of $99, got me wondering if I have any idea any more of what an authoring tool is worth. Empower looks like it is much more powerful than Articulate Engage, which sells for four times as much, and almost certainly cost Trivantis much more to develop. So why the low price? Presumably Trivantis feels that there is a vast market of enthusiasts on the look out for Flash authoring tools - certainly way beyond the numbers employed in e-learning development - and they're a price sensitive lot who are only interested at hobbyist prices. They may be right - and the interest which is shown in free and low-cost tools on Jane Hart's C4LPT site bears this out - but does this really help us to determine what a tool is actually worth?
Time was an authoring tool cost at very least $1K and often much more. Popular tools such as Captivate, Articulate and Trivantis' own Lectora still do. If you're a serious graphic designer, you'll pay $3K for Creative Suite; and audio and video engineers pay similar prices for their software. These tools are expensive because they cost a lot to develop and the ...
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I'm finding it hard to regain my focus after the holidays. It only takes a couple of weeks for me to shift my attention almost entirely to matters other than learning technology, so I shouldn't have much trouble retiring when the time comes. So, this post acts as a way for me to re-focus on the issues that need addressing in 2012. In the Western world at least, we will continue to feel the effects of the worst squeeze in my lifetime. That means lots more job losses, constrained budgets and a lot of defensive decision-making. I don't think I'm being negative in saying this, just realistic. This comes at a time when the nature of work itself is changing, as Lynda Gratton describes in her book The shift: the future of work is already here. I will return to this book in future posts, but for now here are two short extracts: Our assumptions that general skills will be valuable has to be questioned. It seems clear to me that in a joined-up world where potentially 5 billion people have access to the worldwide Cloud, the age of the generalist is over. Instead, my prediction for the future is that you will need what I call ‘serial mastery’ to add real value. Our assumptions about the ...
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 Throughout my book The New Learning Architect I take time out to look at real-life examples of learning architects in action. In this final profile, we look at the work of a learning architect who has worked within what is very much a top-down learning environment and on a very large scale. Dick’s work at learndirect helped to ensure 2.8 million people across the UK were able to make a start on their learning journey.Delivering the UK’s largest online learning serviceDick Moore was Director of Technology at learndirect over nine years. Operated by Ufi Ltd, learndirect’s mission is to transform skills, productivity and individual lives by providing the best of online learning. As an adult learning provider delivering widespread access to online training, learndirect has become one of the leading contributors to the UK government's skills agenda. Since 2000 it has used technology to enable more than 2.8 million adults to gain the skills they, their employers and the economy need, helping them on their way into further training or employment. Over Dick’s nine years at learndirect, he had to completely re-engineer the offer. With 500K enrolments per year, a significant ...
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With most learning media, there is an expectation of how it should look and behave based on the mass media. We can benchmark what we do against 1000s of everyday examples. We can model our learning videos on what we see on TV and on YouTube. We can model podcasts on what we hear on the radio. We have endless examples from print media and the World Wide Web on which to model our text-based materials. And even when it comes to learning sims, we can relate what we see to our experiences with video games. But when we think about page/screen-based, tutorial e-learning, there really are no mass media parallels, unless of course you count business presentations, and in most cases they set a very poor example. So, our stakeholders have no standards by which to judge what we produce and no common vocabulary with which to engage with us. As designers, we don't have that steady stream of everyday examples to give us inspiration. E-learning has no counterpart in the mass media and I believe this explains to some extent why we don't always achieve the standards we would like to see, even after 30 years of trying.  Link to original post
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Some fantastic progress has been made recently in realising the concept of massively scalable education. You've probably already heard plenty about the Khan Academy, which has contributed to the maths education of millions, as well as the free online courses being run by faculty at Stanford University. An Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, led by Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun, attracted some 160,000 enquiries, of which 25,000 or more have made it through to its conclusion. If you are not familiar with these projects, you can see Khan, Norvig and Thrun discussing the implications of their work in Reinventing Education - 45 minutes of very watchable YouTube video (thanks to Seb Schmoller for alerting me to this).
Interested as I am in all this, my work is not in education, it is in training. There is, of course, an overlap. Both aim to impart knowledge and foster cognitive skills. But in a training context this is very rarely the endgame. The goal is typically to develop competence, the ability to do a job. And while you can do a reasonable job of measuring knowledge and some cognitive skills using a computer-gradable, online assessment, the ...
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