Workplace Communities

This blog entry is my notes on the Introduction to Workplace Communities webinar, presented by Mzinga.

Drivers:

• Removal of the intermediary - People support themselves and other


• Emergence of a more tech savvy consumer - stereotypes regarding tech users is being changed.


• Ubiquity of the web


• Talent shortages because of boomer retirements


• The first web natives "millennials" are the primary employment market

We need to rethink training, hiring, personnel development

Loss of knowledge of retirees

New cycle - Rethink retirement - career deceleration rather than retirement

Communities support the new cycle. Informal work environment

The difference between a top preforming partner vs. a new associate is so extreme that a tool is needed to allow the top performers to support/mentor the newer associates. Online communities support this.

Millennial Implications

Social networks help to recruit. They can spread the information very quickly if your company embraces these tools.

Millennials don't have the knowledge structure.

Deloitte youTube recruiting videos

Alumni and Community


Spans all generations

Keep in touch with the talent that has left the company. Summer associates, lateral moves, moves to in-house or government positions.

To bring back someone, it costs between 1/3 to 2/3s of new recruit.

Rehires more than 40% more productive.

Can be used for recruiting new personnel, new business.

Learning and development drivers
What we do as trainers, low effect on learning. Informal learning 87% - Formal learning 13% (Jay Cross - Informal Learning)

We are spending most of the training money for formal learning

Content development Traditional Courses and curriculumn outside of the relationship to real workflow and requires more time and expertise to develop.

Ace Hardware - Platform for hardware dealers to share and seek advice.

Increases sales resulted in 500% ROI in 6 months.
1/3 of Ace dealers use the site at least weekly.

Training is delivered through offical channels, learning often happens in spite of the offical channels. We have no clue of who knows what, how they learned it, or how to find the real experts.

TutorAuthor NG

TutorAuthor is a tool created by TutorPro for creating and editing online courses. It is used by TutorPro to create the TutorPro online courses available for the legal industry. They have created their newest Office 2007 courses in it and if you purchase TutorPro courses, you get TutorAuthor to allow you to edit the content if you desire.

I'm previewing the newest version of TutorAuthor (NG).

This new version allows you to create all types of online learning. Meets all of your online content creation needs, not just software simulation

More control of the the look and size and feel of the content. Buttons, text boxes, slides.

Everything is editable within TutorAuthor. Doesn't require you to jump back and forth to Powerpoint.

Everything is definable, text boxes can have multiple lines and turns into a scrollable box if necessary. Size, color, font are all modifiable. Even the event style can be edited. Yeah. The actions can use our convention of all anticipated actions (events) being bold and black.

Authoring uses a framestrip view.
Can publish directly to AICC and SCORM directly.
Can publish to Web Page or EXE
Can publish to text document formats to help in the creation of documentation.

Has Import/Export frames capabilities.

Frame designer allows you to add captured screens or create screens.

If you want to learn more about TutorAuthor NG, contact Robin Murphy

To sign up for a session, please respond to SupportUS@tutorpro.com indicating the date and time of the session you wish to attend and you will be sent the details for your session.

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Learning 2.0 - The Business Case

I attended a presentation on the business case for Learning 2.0 conducted by mzinga today. This was an interesting graphic that they presented. I really felt it caught the meaning.

Learning 2.0 has increased flexibility & learner empowerment.

Learning 2.0 is multi-dimensional and much lower technology skills required to be a learning developer.

Learning 2.0 presents the wisdom of the masses, not just the "anointed few". Learners create the structure and relationships between the content for themselves, rank and rate content.

My saying was that an elearning project is never completed, just delivered. Web 2.0 promotes this even more. Let users build courses. Video submissions of best practices. What about promotion for major roll-outs like Microsoft office 2007. Chrysler has a You Tube competition. Wikis, blogs can be used by learners to add content.

Traditional courseware has not had the impact on retention of learning that was hoped for. Learning 2.0 typically shorter, provides a point of need response. Will this have a better impact?

Can we adapt to putting learning content on devices that are available at all times? Should we convert existing courses? or use Learning 2.0 methods, podcasts, blogs, text messages so you can access learning where you are and when you have downtime.

We are social creatures and learning is social activity.
Highest retention - Teaching others
Biggest value from learning - Debriefs
Identify true subject matter experts

Gartner says "Enterprise social software will be the biggest new workplace technology success story of this decade."

Cultural drivers for Learning 2.0
Talent shortage (as boomers retire)
Millennials leave and breath technology-over 50% of workforce knows technology inside and out

Intel - Employee Wiki to share Intel information with other employees
20,000 articles in less than 2 years
200,000 page views per day
They have gotten 20,000 articles some from employees who may be retiring. Way to capture disappearing company product knowledge.
People like to share their knowledge.

Cisco - created an internal wiki to develop new business ideas
400 business ideas to date
10,000 employees then added their ideas
3 new markets opportunities developed - $3 billion that might not have been made
Employees empowered to help develop revenue. Employees have greater involvement, longer retention.

Ace Hardware - Platform for dealers to share & seek information. Find rarely requested items, merchandising display strategies, business customer sales leads
Increased 500% ROI in 6 months

Are these training, or knowledge management, or online support. Yes!

The Next Evolution of eLearning - 2008

During the panel discussion, here's some of the questions and responses.

Where do creative ideas for eLearning come from?
Dr. Michael Allen: Although you have a lot of information, it's not effective to just put the information into a course. "Knowledge is nice, but skills are power." Some people have an innate ability, but what about for the rest of us. Look at four critical components: CCAF Context, Challenge, Activity, Feedback

• What do you want them to be doing when they end the training. Start with the activity, the performance they should be able to do.
• What are the challenges to apply these skills?
• Not interesting to solve boring activities. Put the learning in an appropriate context.
• Effective feedback in intrinsic feedback. I can see the effect of what I did. I know why what I did has an impact.

Feedback, Challenge and Activity all fit within the context.
Putting learners at risk and providing them with the help they need.

Virtual Classrooms - How would you make them more effective and learning oriented.
Jennifer Hofman, InSync
What works in online classroom environments and what doesn't work.
Only 30% of learners, learn well in an auditory environment.
Participants need to be active part of the communication.

• Break out rooms - small group work online, let participants build the content by using their expertize
• Synchronized web browsing or online courses, and then bring them back to share their knowledge
• Bring back the skills you learned for classroom.
• Slides make us talk and don't lead us into activities.
• Participant guides provide a way of taking notes, building on information. Not just print out of the slides.
• Learn to fully utilize the virtual classroom software
• Help the learner become fluent in the capability of being a student.
• How do you judge the body language over the bandwidth? Experience
• Practice, observing best practices, take as many online courses as you can, to learn best practices, what works, what doesn't work.
• Use the same standards that you would for face-to-face classes
• Teach managers how to support learning via virtual classrooms.
• Spend time to learn how to utilize the virtual classroom.
• Informative vs. learning - learning requires constant activity. She says every 3-5 minutes. I'd say ever 1-2 minutes. Otherwise the learner is doing other activities.
• My suggestion: Have your learners create blog entries while they are listening. Evaluate the blog entries. I'm doing that at this time.

Where are we going in the eLearning space? Brent Schlenker - The eLearning Guild

Social networks, RSS, blogs, wikis are the technologies that are beginning to actually being used in learning. Become mainstream for learning. Empowering learners.

• Anyone can go out and talk about company and learning. Does this need to be secured, limited?
• Two types of learners. Personalities that know how to go out and find out what they want, others need to be handheld, walked through. Goal to design courses for both types of learners.
• Mobile devices - location based learning, GPS or bar coding. Make suggestions for learning based on location.
• Failures - in the process of trying new technologies, failures will occur. Trying to move a new empowered technology into an organization that doesn't support empowerment.
• Five ables for new content: searchable, linkable, taggable, feedability, bloggable,
• Not everyone will use each technology. Can't be mandated, must build from a personal desire. New associates who are experienced using these technologies may use these tools, while older partners may not. If you make it available, they will come.
• Use the coolness of the new technology to hook learners.

Free online learning webinar

Do you want to stay current with what's happening regarding online learning, check out the free Online eLearning Summit scheduled for January 23, 2007. Sorry for the late notice, I'm been neglecting my blog lately.

http://presentations.inxpo.com/Shows/ZiffDavisEnterprise/VTS/01-23-08/Website/program.htm

The kickoff event is a panel intitled "The Next Evolution in eLearning - 2008 and Beyond". One of my favorite experts in the industry, Dr. Michael Allen of Allen Interactions (the father of Authorware) is one of the speakers.

Other sessions of interest include "Delivering Effective Software Rollout Training with out Travel". I imagine this will be on using WebEx to deliver distance learning as one of the sponsors of the summit is WebEx. And one of my new areas of interest is covered in the "Emerging Trends in Collaborative Learning" session that includes wikis, virtual worlds and blogs.

Hope to see you there!

Is learning a new language one of your resolutions?

Web 2.0 tools are fantastic for help in learning a language. Do you want to find a native language buddy to practice writing in the new language? Want to get help with punctuation? Want to listen to movies or music in a different language? Want to practise speaking and listening? Do you want to download a free textbook for learning. You can do all this and more to help you reach your New Year's resolution.

Here are some sites to check out:

www.italki.com
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Spanish/Contents
http://babelfish.altavista.com/
http://english.hanban.edu.cn/market/HanBanE/412360.htm

Happy New Year!

What did you learn about learning in 2007?

From Tony Karrer and other's I learned about eLearning 2.0 tools. I've been concentrating on WBT and LMS for years. I was more concerned with EOD for Authorware and what tools I would be using to replace it. I was also disappointed in the elearning I was creating and that many companies seem to equate converted Powerpoints with eLearning.

Using Web 2.0 tools in learning is really exciting to me. In the Forum for the Future, I explored some of these tools and how we could use them within our firm. We've identified two projects for wikis (in support of training) and are looking at how we can use eLearning 2.0 for actually providing learning activity to our learners.