flynn084

Most of my experience has been in adult learning and performance.  Recently I’ve been working with a startup that provides content and tools to teens and is sold through high schools.  The first course is fairly well defined and is based on a couple of books/workbooks that have been used offline. What’s been interesting to me is that it’s been hard to find just the right person to help them with designing interactive exercises and writing content in order to bring this to life online.  Actually, the first interesting question is: What do you call this role? When we’ve called it either an instructional designer or writer we often find ourselves talking to people who have a hard time envisioning the online interactions.  I’m currently calling it an interactive writer, but I’m sure there’s a common term for this in the industry. The second challenge has been that we want to find someone who can write for today’s teen audience.  The style and voice of ...

There has been fantastic comments around Learning Management System Easy of Use .  This post was based on an inquiry that I received from someone who manages their current LMS implementation that is based on Moodle with some customization.  They do customer training around products that the company sells.  They are doing a combination of virtual classroom training (via WebEx) and self-paced eLearning.  And the person who asked the question tells me: My managers have asked me to find alternatives to Moodle that are more user friendly and that are easier to update and manage. Well two days later I’m told: You will get a kick out of this though.  My supervisors told me to research LMS possibilities and narrow it down it down to about 3-5 and report back in a week and present the pros and cons of the top ones I found.  And it’s not like I have all day each day to work this either, I have little pockets of time between now and then as normally I am ...

I’ll have more coming on this topic, but today someone asked me how to approach is going through an LMS selection because the general feeling was that the existing LMS was too hard for users to use.  In this case, it’s customer training around products that the company sells.  They are doing a combination of virtual classroom training (via WebEx) and self-paced eLearning.  They currently use Moodle as an LMS with some customizations.  However, the resource who did the customizations is no longer with the company.  And the person who asked the question tells me: My managers have asked me to find alternatives to Moodle that are more user friendly and that are easier to update and manage. I’ve discussed many times about dissatisfaction with LMS: LMS Satisfaction Features and Barriers   LMS Dissatisfaction on the Rise and even a bit about the disconnect between an LMS and what things most users want / need: Do You WANT an LMS? Does a...

I received an interesting question from someone who is working on providing content to a remote sales force of about 40 people on topics such as selling process, products and selling skills.  They currently provide some podcasts and video casts, but would like to track the new content that is being developed now.  It seems like this should be an obvious question.  You can put the audio or video inside a SCORM course and load it into an LMS.  Given the small audience and limited scope, likely a Rapid Learning Management System would make a lot of sense if that was the direction.  I’d have to think a bit more to have a specific suggestion on the course authoring tool for this, but should be easy enough to do this. However, in this case the sales force is used to accessing this as MP3 and MP4 files available for download into their iPods, iPhones, etc.  They are not used to connecting via an LMS.  Likely the sales force is not going to be happy about...

I was just reading a post - Top 5 tips to gain buy in for learning with social media .  The tips were many of the usual suspects (click on the link for details): Build a solid measurable plan Do your research and put it to the test Choose your words carefully Blitz the stigma Educate the decision makers This is good stuff, but it also got me to thinking that this might be way more complicated than it really needs to be.  Instead, one of the things that I Learned about Learning in 2009 and was an important eLearning Predictions for 2010 was to “Be a Jack”.  What does this mean? I detailed it in Selling Learning Communities – Not Everyone Will or Wants a Group Hug .  Go listen to Jack and how he describes what he does.  And the key in selling social learning / learning communities was the simple explanation of what they are in a value proposition.  Here’s what Be a Jack sounds like: If I can bring together outside experts and/...

Great post by Tim Kastelle - Filtering, Crowdsourcing and Innovation .  He’s talking primarily about Innovation pipelines based on crowdsourcing.  His diagram:   Show a fairly common model for how things can be filtered.  This is similar to the model that we used on Project Greenlight – the scriptwriting and director contest by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck.  Anyone (hopefully everyone) could submit their script / movie.  From there, we had smaller and smaller batches of people reviewing until it got down to the core team looking at the top few submissions.  This caught my eye because it’s a bit different than the model we are using on Browse My Stuff that powers sites like eLearning Learning .  In Curator Editor Research Opportunities on eLearning Learning , I described the flow that it uses: In this case, the input is curated content although it can come from virtually anywhere.  It then relies on social signals from everyone t...

I had a great conversation last week that sparked an early stage idea for what I think would be a wonderful way for learning and development organizations to leverage SharePoint better.  HP Web 2.0 for Marketing – Social Learning Experience The concept is probably easiest to understand by considering what HP did around their course on Web 2.0 for Marketing.  You can find more on this by going to the LearnTrends – SharePoint in Corporate Learning Recordings . The basic concept was that HP’s learning organization wanted to help their marketing professionals get up to speed on the implications of Web 2.0 for HP’s marketing efforts.  Of course, that’s an interesting learning problem in that the answer around “implications” is not defined.  The L&D organization created a social learning experience that brought together 60 marketing professionals from across the organization.  They established a goal of having the group produce a summary of what they foun...