Blending Corporate Training Smoothly

Article by Guest Blog Contributor Heather Johnson.

Corporate training is necessary for a variety of reasons, from focusing on a company’s critical needs to empowering employees to take control of their responsibilities and help improve business performance. Each organization follows its own methods to impart this training, both to new hires and existing personnel according to the needs of the company. E-learning programs, once considered the outcast in the training world, has gained in popularity for more reasons than one:

• The software and resources needed are cost effective.
• They can be designed and tailor-made to suit the needs of your organization.
• They can be altered and changed as the nature of jobs and responsibilities morph to adapt to changing expectations and policies.
• They can be implemented rapidly.
• These programs are standardized, which means employees across the board are provided with the same instructions in the same form of delivery. Your company is thus more cohesive as a unit.
• They allow trainers to cut back on travel costs and time.
• With the Internet and the Intranet offering the advantage of connectivity anywhere and everywhere, employees can train on the job or at home at their leisure.
• E-learning development can be outsourced leaving your staff free to handle other responsibilities.

In spite of all these advantages that e-learning offers, organizations have moved on to a newer form of training, one which blends traditional and e-learning methods and takes the best of both to impart training to corporate circles. In other words, it’s old wine in a new bottle. Blended training came into its own when people started realizing that one size does not fit all and that each company’s needs are different.

Blended training sought to maximize returns on training programs from the organization’s point of view – it followed the principle that training programs exist not to educate employees and make them experts in their jobs but to help improve their performance in such a way that the business is profitable and that the organization’s goals are met.

With more emphasis on increased performance and maximum returns at the lowest cost, organizations are turning to a mixture of media and tools to impart training. Depending on their size and turnover, they adopt a blend of electronic and human training methods – the electronic aspect ensures that there is an element of standardization while the human aspect ensures that the process is accountable and the returns measurable. Formal classes, PowerPoint presentations, seminars on the web, manuals and discs with study material, books, meetings, conferences, hands-on experiences and simulations are all adopted in varying degrees by organizations, all of whom are striving to find the optimal combination that provides the best impact.


Guest Blog Contributor By-line:

This article is contributed by Heather Johnson, who regularly writes on California teacher certification. She invites your questions and writing job opportunities at her personal email address: heatherjohnson2323 at gmail dot com.

Mobile Learning's Slow Birth

Imagine a birth taking 10 years. Can't imagine it? Neither can I, but that is how long it has taken mobile learning (m-learning) to finally begin to make a visible appearance. M-learning has been discussed for amost 10 years, yet is only now approaching actual deployment.

Why now? Simply because the portable devices needed to deploy m-learning are finally here. They include smart phones, ultra-portable computers, and iPods/iPhones. And the number of learners who have them grows every day. In fact, there are more people with two mobile devices than there are people with just one (i.e., a Blackberry + an iPod).

Increasing numbers of handhelds offer internet access (the "mobile web"), further unleashing learners from their desktop or laptop computers. Today, over half a billion mobile phones connect to the internet each day, bringing information to where it's needed or wanted - anytime, anywhere. In addition to text, this information is in the form of images, animations, games, movies, videos, music, even maps and location services. IBM's Institute for Business Value predicts that a billion people will be accessing the mobile internet by 2011 - only 3 years away! At that time, our mobile transactions and interactions will generate $80 billion for the web services industry.

OK, so how quickly can the training industry accept, adopt, and truly implement m-learning?

Very soon, I hope. First, we must begin with enterprise acceptance, including executives and IT professionals willing to support a mobile infrastructure. These individuals have already seen the value of being "unplugged" as desktop computers have converted to laptops and notebook computers. Mobility has already become a focus for IT departments. Adoption of enterprise mobility is all about increasing workforce productivity - certainly not a hard sell.

As learning professionals, the more we can demonstrate productivity gains from m-learning, the more likely companies will be to support m-learning implementations. And to do so sooner instead of later.

What technologies do the IT folks need in order to support enterprise mobility and m-learning? Wireless networks, mobile applications, middleware, devices, and security and management software. They are confused, however, over which wireless networks need to support specific kinds of enterprise mobility needs, especially where new technologies are involved. Plus executives want to know the pros, cons, and deployment issues associated with the many wireless network options. Organizations must also decide who should have access to them (the entire workforce, or just select groups) and how best to cost-effectively deploy and maintain these systems. Finally, what should they do when new mobile devices come to market (such as the iPhone)? Do they support those as well?

As a newborn, m-learning has been focusing on providing performance support and information to mobile workers. Unfortunately, there are those who believe that is not the same thing as "learning". In fact, it is learning - it is a learning intervention that is accessible at the exact time and place it is needed.

Time will tell how readily accepted and integrated m-learning will become in our careers and our lives. I am quite hopeful and excited about it. I believe we need to see the introduction of more mainstream tools that produce mobile output. As Ellen Wagner said in a recent eLearning Guild article, "We all acknowledge that mobile learning is a many-splendored thing that has the potential to truly rock our professional practice."

Training Is Useless Unless...

T&D magazine published an interesting article titled "Why (Most) Training Is Useless: Start Developing Skills; Stop WASTING Time." David H. Maister offered some compelling insights that I would like to share with you:

• True long-term changes in any organization need to begin with changes at the top - in managerial behavior.


• Training should not be used as a first (or stand-alone) step to long-term change, but as part of a process toward organizational change.


• Training is a waste of time and money if what is taught is never put into practice.


• Too often, companies will train people in new areas but then send them back to their original jobs - where little of what was taught ever gets implemented.


• "There is no point in offering skills training if there is no incentive for people to engage in the desired behavior."


• Some business skills can be explained/taught but not effectively learned through mere discussion/lecture, such as being able to manage. You can learn a lot about management, but that doesn't mean you will be any good at doing it. "No amount of understanding, knowledge, or intelligence will help if you are unable to interact with people" and influence them. These kinds of skills need to be learned slowly and by doing/practicing them, not just learning about them.


• Training should only be scheduled on topics that can be applied immediately - not days, weeks, months, or years before it will applied.


• Training programs should have mandatory prereading and pretesting, with everyone coming to the session fully prepared.


• Work groups/departments should be trained together - and with the group's manager present. This way they can immediately begin to discuss how they plan to integrate the training's ideas into their practices.


• "If it's worth doing training, it's worth doing it in a way that's going to make a difference."

The "Value" of Learning?

Company business units all over are being expected to demonstrate and document their value to justify the investment their company is making to operate them. This includes training functions and departments. How on earth should we be expected to measure the value (ROI) of our efforts? What measures should we capture? What business result indicators should we focus on? We are training experts, not business analysts. But we are being asked to determine and measure business impacts that are extremely difficult to measure.

A Summer 2008 article published in Training Industry Quarterly gave me a few insights into this increasingly common dilemma. Some of the difficulties right out of the gate are that senior management is asking for measurements that aren’t necessarily practical for training divisions to measure. Their perspective is too “big picture” and conceptual, when what we are in fact able to measure is not. The business measures that we may be able to capture are on a much smaller scale, so we must first decide what business outcome(s) to measure and then get senior management to agree. In other words, “get them to align around some intermediate business impact parameters that are indeed measurable.”

The article goes on to offer a couple of good examples. At Halliburton, the leaders decided that the outcomes most important to them are employee engagement, customer satisfaction, and cash flow. Customer satisfaction and cash flow are relatively easy to measure. Why employee engagement? Halliburton has had evidence that employee engagement is critical to their financial and market performance. They have successfully measured it and they link leadership development programs to the impact they have on the employee engagement index.

The second example provided is from Sun Microsystems, where they discovered a link between mentoring programs and employee performance. A key step in their research was to relate mentoring to measurable performance improvement agreed to by Sun’s senior management. The metrics included rate of promotions and salary increases, as well as bonuses. They found that those who were mentored received more rapid pay raises and promotions – that they were higher performers than the control group. They also found that the mentees had similar superior performance. So Sun’s “senior managers were aligned around the business outcomes measurements based on compensation and promotion.”

Measuring the impact of learning on a business is not an exact science – nor is it the same across businesses or even industries. There is no prescribed way of doing it. You just need to figure out what is best to measure, get senior management’s agreement on it, measure it, then report on your findings. Easy, right?

So what skills do we need to be able to do this? First we need the ability to have a conversation about business impact - to understand it well enough to discuss it. We also need the ability to design a learning intervention experiment with control groups and statistical techniques. If these are not our strong skills, we need to align ourselves with people inside the organization (or outside) who can help us. The article mentions that CLO Institute offers a fully online CLO Certification program to teach some of these business skills that people who have come up through the training organization ranks may not have.

The bottom line is that training organizations are expected to change from being tactical/reactive to being more strategic. We all need to embrace this and learn how to move forward with it.

How to Spice Up a Presentation

By Heather Johnson (Guest blogger)

A friend had this to say of my brother – he’s the only guy I know who can sleep through his own team’s corporate presentation. Now I don’t know if this statement could be construed as derogatory to my brother or to the person who prepared and presented the presentation. Whatever the connotation, presentations are not the most entertaining films to view, especially on sonorous afternoons in air conditioned and darkened rooms that lull you to sleep. But the one you make can be the exception to the rule that presentations are boring; here are a few tips to spice up your presentation so that your audience is left asking for more:

• Preparation holds the key to a good presentation. Know your subject and know your audience. Make your presentation fit to their level of reasoning and understanding, make it seem like you’re showing them what they want to see, not what you want them to see.
• Interaction is the best way to get your audience involved. Ask and invite questions.
• Talk with enough confidence so you appear in control of and knowledgeable about the facts but don’t overdo it or you’ll come across as talking down to your listeners.
• The first blow is always the best and the hardest to recover from. The element of surprise lies in making a strong opening and getting your audience to sit straight with renewed interest.
• Be prepared to answer questions mid-slide and carry on from where you left off without breaking stride.
• It’s difficult, but being prepared to change tactics midway is an advantage when you sense your audience is not as attentive as you would like them to be.
• Short and sweet is the catchphrase for effective presentations – the shorter and more powerful the message, the more reach it has.
• Talk eloquently without the use of too many “ahs” and “ums” and “likes”.
• Use your hands to complement your words and slides – body language speaks a thousand words and wooden postures never helped liven a presentation.
• Balance your glance between your slides and audience as required.
• Dress appropriately.
• Modulate your voice according to the size and echo range of the room.
• Don’t throw in a joke just to get a few laughs; use humor that is relevant to the topic at hand.
• Know your slides thoroughly and never get them mixed up in the middle of a presentation.
• Try and make normal facts sound innovative and interesting by showing them from a different perspective.
• If you’re a beginner, there’s no shame in practicing in front of a mirror or recording yourself to provide your own feedback so you can improve and improvise as needed.
  

By-line:

This article is contributed by Heather Johnson, who regularly writes on the topic of college scholarship applications. She invites your questions and writing job opportunities at her personal email address: heatherjohnson2323 at gmail dot com.

Financial Squeeze on Training Departments

An article in ASTD's May 2008 T&D magazine outlined a recent study by Expertus and TrainingIndustry.com about training budgets and effectiveness. Over 3/4 of the respondents reported pressure to reduce costs and do more with the same budget. In addition, while there is more pressure for training departments to report return-on-investment, only 20% of respondents use ROI measures.
Leadership training and other soft skills training is difficult to track in terms of quality, so many companies are still using volumed-based instead of value-based metrics. While you can do ROI on sales and manufacturing training, who should be blamed if sales performance goes down, especially in our current economy? It doesn't seem at all fair to blame training.

A surprising finding in this study was the breakdown of dollars allocated in the training budget:

• Delivery = 35%
• Content development = 26%
• Administration = 24%
• Technology = 16%

What does this show? That a lot of time and resources (MONEY) is being spent on things that don't teach anybody anything! Here are a couple of suggestions offered in the T&D article:

Improve your company's training website:

• Make it more effective and user-friendly to reduce telephone inquiries and increase class registrations and attendance/participation rates
• Make better use of the training website to market training programs

Create training that is specific to the organization's needs:

• Don't spend time and money creating and offering courses that no one wants or needs - and THEN determining their individual value based on how many people sign up (this is called the supply-oriented approach and is highly ineffective, inefficient, and costly!)
• Don't simply roll out a cafeteria-style curriculum filled with general offerings

Do You Want to Advertise on This Blog?

Several readers have indicated interest in advertising on this blog. I have received these inquiries via your Comments to specific blog postings. Unfortunately, I am never able to write back directly to the inquirers because your email addresses are blocked in comments.

If you are interested in advertising here, please email me directly at jsweeney@cramersweeney.com. Thank you!!

Too Busy to Read? Try Text2Go!

I am an information junky. My laptop is exhausted from all the web searches I do on a daily basis - looking for information I must have, simply want to know, or am looking up for someone else. Anytime I need an answer to something, I "Google it" and always find the answer. The internet is incredible, and I can't imagine how I ever grew up during the 70's and 80's without this resource - and with only the local library (and my father's incredible brain-bank of knowledge) to rely on.

Given the amount of information I find and want/need to read throughout a given week, I can't aways find the time to, well, actually read it all! Not enough hours in a day or a week to keep up. I'm sure you know what I'm talking about! Then I was fortunate enough to have a lovely email exchange with Mark Gladding, Director of a company in Australia called Tumbywood Software. They have an awesome and affordable product called Text2Go!

Here's how they describe Text2Go on their website: "Transfer information from the web to your iPod / MP3 Player, so you can listen to it on the go and utilize time that would otherwise be wasted. Make productive use of those times when you're commuting, out for a run or in the gym. Designed to help students, doctors, lawyers, academics and knowledge workers absorb large amounts of information." It's very easy to use - I highly recommend that you check it out.

IBM Takes Online Corporate Training to New Heights

By Susan Jacobs (Guest blogger)

In an effort to provide its employees with extensive online training via virtual worlds, IBM has just announced that it will soon set up a private area of Second Life that is solely devoted to company personnel.

This is actually the beginning of an unprecedented partnership with Linden Lab, offering an enterprise-class version of the popular virtual world to IBM employees. Users will be able to effortlessly cross over from the mainland Second Life into the private area devoted to the company.

With IBM putting so much stock into the future of online corporate training and revenue-building virtual worlds, small to medium-sized companies are likely to follow suit. Big Blue has a reported 5,000 employees already in Second Life and the company wholeheartedly believes that virtual worlds will only grow from here.

According to a press release from the company:

This [partnership] marks the first time a portion of the Second Life Grid will be deployed behind a corporate firewall, with the goal of creating a solution that businesses can quickly deploy to get work done in a new way.

This blog has already mentioned that virtual worlds could become as important as the Web itself. In fact, Linden Lab and IBM have been discussing this very subject for quite some time. According to a report from CIO, the two companies wish to "develop open-standards based technologies and methodologies to enhance the Internet's various virtual worlds and build interoperability between them."

This could very well lead to a massive network of different virtual worlds, all available to users who wish to seamlessly cross from one area to another. Indeed, it will also be a boon to professionals who are participating with online training and virtual boardroom meetings. It seems that every business professional in the world may have his/her own avatar before long.


By-line:

Susan Jacobs is a freelance writer as well as a regular contributor for CollegeDegree.com, a site helping students to learn more about distance learning colleges. Susan invites your questions, comments and freelancing job inquiries at her email address susan.jacobs45@gmail.com.

First-Hand Second Life Experience

I recently attended a Second Life meeting. There were definite pros and cons to the experience, and I was attentive to how the environment really would suit a synchronous e-learning course. Shortly after, I read a short article by Tom Werner in which he lists what he believes are the plusses and minuses to using Second Life. Here they are:

Plusses:

• Tom feels that the newness and novelty of the environment can get attendees charged, excited, and energized.
• You can find "pleasant" meeting locations in Second Life, such as a park or patio or nice deck. This has a positive effect on meeting attendees.
• While you are able to show PowerPoint slides in Second Life, Tom's experience must have been more positive than mine. For me, despite my high-speed internet connection, the entire environment (including the viewing of PowerPoint slides) was very slow and jumpy - almost not worth using. But the plus IS that you are supposed to be able to show slides in SL.
• When compared with teleconferences or web-conferencing tools, attendees seem to enjoy the experience of "meeting with" physical representations of other attendees, not just their voices.
• This is quoted straight from Tom: "There can be entertaining side activities in Second Life. Our avatars hopped into a nearby hot tub after the meeting." The meeting I attended certainly wasn't that fun!

Minuses:

• Attendees should learn and practice how to navigate in the SL environment (not that easy to do) before attending meetings or e-classes. Any meeting or e-learning experience can be affected by newbies.
• If your meeting is for sharing and discussing information, SL isn't worth it. Just "keep it simple" by using the tools you (and everyone else) already know. You'll save everyone time.
• In addition to the SL environment being very sluggish and jumpy, another gripe I have about SL is this: Why would I be interested in "meeting" with people whose avatars look nothing at all like the real people, nor do they use the same name? No, it's not my lack of imagination. It's my complete lack of desire to be forced to remember/recognize two different faces/bodies and two different names for every one hot-blooded person. Seriously, my life is already complicated enough.

As Tom mentions, it's still a good idea for me and my associates to keep our noses in SL and other such tools and environments because it is important to follow their progress. Like fine wines, they can only continue to get better with time.

Today's Instructional Designer

In the last several years, a great deal has changed in the training industry, including our work environment, our education, tools, and learners. As a result, instructional designers need to change in order to keep up. Back "in the day," we developed training materials primarily for traditional instructor-led classroom settings and "pushed" learning out to learners. Now with the Internet, hand-held technologies, and an ever-growing multitude of training development software tools, we need to figure out our new roles. At the same time, we need to continue to champion, and occasionally defend, the real "VALUE" of instructional design to organizations. In a recent edition of Learning Solutions e-magazine (a publication of The eLearning Guild), Reuben Tozman wrote on this topic. The quoted text below is from Tozman's article.

Let's face it, we cannot keep operating the way we did 10 years ago. We certainly can't ignore rapid e-learning, m-learning, wikis, blogs, podcasting, virtual worlds, social networking, and other knowledge dissemination methods and tools. Instead of being responsible only for "pushing" information to our learners, we need to understand all of the ways in which learners can now "pull" information for themselves. At the same time, we can't get so caught up in the excitement of new tools ourselves that we lose our focus on the true learning results we need to ensure for our learners. We need to make sure that people can access our learning programs whenever they need them, and these learning programs must still be properly structured "to deliver the most effective learning experience possible." The bottom line: we cannot lose focus on the merits of true instructional design, no matter what the development tool or delivery medium!

With so many "easy-to-use" authoring tools available today, instructional designers are often expected to do it all (design and development). And my experience is that many IDs enjoy this new-found variety in their roles. Tozman fears, however, that our value as designers will diminish if we allow this to happen. He states, "This is because an instructional designer is supposed to avoid having to stuff material into a predefined box."

I believe that if we are good at instructional design, we have a technical aptitude, and our jobs and workloads offer the time and opportunity for both design and development, why not? Some of our instructional designers, in fact, welcome the variety of switching from straight ID work to occasional development tasks. (I do not mean that these people also do programming or heavy Flash work. That is something left completely to our programmers and experienced Flash developers!) Tozman's concern, however, is "the expectation, and the standard, for the instructional designer to have those skills." I do agree with that statement.

As an instructional designer who owns and runs an instructional design (ILT and e-learning) business and who also employs instructional designers and course developers, I happen to place a high value on someone who can straddle the line. I would never expect an instructional designer to do programming or to build a high-end, Flash-based e-learning course him/herself from the bottom up. But it certainly is nice to have IDs who have enough skills and technical knowledge to take some of the basic (and templated) development work off the plates of the developers and programmers. Plus, it's nice to know that everyone can then speak the same language and collaborate and communicate more clearly and effectively. It is also extremely helpful for client relations and communication.

Tozman states, "The skill that an instructional designer possesses....is the ability to systematically break down content so that it is applicable to learners and their learning styles. This is our value....Instructional designers merge a good understanding of psychology, learning theory, communication theory, and business acumen in order to be effective and valuable in their jobs." Tozman believes that to protect that value and those skills (not undermine them and water them down), IDs must keep their distance from technology. My counter-point is this: If IDs have an understanding of psychology, learning theory, communication theory, business acument - and much more, to be sure - aren't they even more effective and valuable in their jobs with some technical knowledge as well? I believe this to be the case.

2008 Trends to Shape E-Learning

In a recent article by Bill Brandon, editor of The eLearning Guild's Learning Solutions e-Magazine, I read that we shouldn't expect any huge changes this year in how we create or deliver e-learning. If anything, we will see small, gradual, and incremental changes brought on by industry and economic factors.

Brandon described several larger trends that will most likely affect the e-learning industry, such as the current/upcoming recession, increases in the availability of broadband and WiFi, and more mobile devices with 3G (wide-area cellular phone networks) and WiFi. These trends certainly point to the likelihood of continued growth in e-learning and m-learning across organizations.

With increased bandwidth and the ability to compress video files comes the increased use of video in both e-learning and m-learning, which I certainly noticed throughout 2007. Brandon hopes that 2008 will be "the year that video becomes a practical alternative to the ubiquitous PowerPoint bullet slide."

We can also expect to continue seeing a steady rise in enterprise social networking. You have all probably heard of Facebook. And many corporate employees read blogs (thank you for reading this one!!), use wikis, listen to podcasts, and have LinkedIn accounts (I do, too). We also utilize SharePoint here at my company to transfer large project files back and forth with our clients. Organizations already use social networks to share knowledge across departments, provide an avenue for "informal" self-directed learners, allow employees to stay connected and work collaboratively, etc.

Brandon made another interesting point that as technology continues to improve (always connected, more options, greater sophistication, better interfaces - like the iPhone and iPod touch, more engaging visual and audio elements) , user expectations will continue to rise. The limitations and frustrations experienced by e-learners who expect "more" will drive further advancements and innovation in e-learning creation and implementation. This will keep all of us e-learning professionals on our toes!!

Make Wishes / Grant Wishes

I have to share a wonderful, new website with all of you. This is not a corporate training/e-learning site, and you will quickly see that it's a bit off-topic from my usual posts. But bear with me - it'll be worth it.

Check out Wish Upon a Hero at www.wishuponahero.com. At this website, "No wish is too large, no hero is too small. Wish Upon a Hero is an online community of people helping people." Simply register for FREE, browse wishes already posted, post new wishes (anything at all, as long as they're "clean") for yourself and/or loved ones, and become a HERO by granting other people's wishes. It's that simple - and extremely effective in helping people. Over 4,000 wishes have already been granted in just a few short months!!

Members of the website have been forming local area forums all over the United States, and there are Wish Upon a Hero members now from all over the world. The website has been reported about in various newspapers, TV news programs, and radio programs. Be sure to share it with your friends, family, and co-workers.

Creative Training Delivery

When we think about today's most innovative learning methods, we often think about modern multimedia, such as game-based learning, simulations, and virtual reality. In ASTD's latest issue of T&D magazine, Paul Harris highlights several "terrific training ideas". I thought I'd share them with you:

1. "Laughing and learning" - Many business people are left brained, while most improvisational comedians use both sides of their brain. By learning how to use the whole brain (or at least tap into the right side occasionally), we can create more engaging ways to present information and break out of the PowerPoint mold. (Here at CramerSweeney, we are fortunate to have the resources of our own internal creative staff of art directors and multimedia/graphic designers!) Training is greatly improved by inserting some fun into it and emphasizing facts/information in creative ways - all with the goal of encouraging greater learning retention. (Take a look at a fun quiz that we created for our own website: Go to http://www.cramersweeney.com/, then click on the Smart Marketing IQ box in the lower left corner.)

In this article, Harris mentions that improv-based training helps businesses enhance how "people adapt to changing environments, process information, work in teams, and collaborate across functional and geographic boundaries...The methods address an ever-evolving range of client situations and needs." Improv games teach workers more flexible responses to situations.

2. "Hit me with knowledge" - Harvard law professor Charles R. Nesson says, "Poker is a great game for learning how to size up things for yourself, get intorisk management, and channel aggression. A student who can hold his own at a poker table, I have no worries about when they enter the real world."

My 14-year-old son loves poker. I suppose I should be encouraging him to play more often - and let him teach me Texas Hold 'Em! Nesson has even formed the Global Poker Strategic Thinking Society (GPSTS) among some Ivy Leagues, to promote poker as a learning tool. He also belives that poker skills can really help high school kids with math. Poker teaches you numeracy, probability, risk assessment, and subtleties vs. complexities.

3. "No, you first" - How can we increase socially responsible behavior on our roads? London and other Western European cities tried something new on their roadways. They removed traffic lights and signs so that no one would have right of way. You would expect chaos to ensue. Lo and behold, by making sure no one had the right of way, accidents dropped 44%! Drivers and pedestrians suddenly began relying on eye contact with each other rather than signs. Imagine roads with no signs telling traffic to stop, yield, or merge, and no lines on the roads to guide traffic - these are called "naked roads." These naked roads actually dramatically improved harmony on the roadway. Now everyone looks out for each other!

4. "Point-of-need learning" - Knowledge (more than training) is increasingly becoming the answer to what workers really need on the job. Learning content providers will need to become capability providers. Instead of providing customers with proprietary content/training, companies will be teaching skill transfer capability - as 80% of learning happens on the job, not in the classroom. It's all about bringing training to people's workspaces.

5. "A virtual community blossoms" - As I have written in previous blogs and Harris reports in T&D, virtual 3D worlds "have emerged as a bona fide educational tool." Organizations have begun using Second Life (a popular virtual environment) as a "place of engagement" - for employees and instructors to interact in formal or informal settings, and public or private spaces; role play; access resources; and engage in collaborative learning.

Virtual Worlds to Become as Important as the Web

Computerworld's Heather Havernstein provided (in the 1/9/08 issue) a synposis of a Forrester Research report which states that "within five years the 3D Internet will become as important to companies as the Web is today." Within five years? I am a bit skeptical about the strength of that statement, but I have a healthy wait-and-see attitude.

The Forrester report is titled "Getting Work Done in Virtual Worlds." It discusses the effect virtual worlds will have on remote collaboration, training, and building and sharing 3D models. While today's collaboration tools do not allow people to see gestures or emotions, avatars in a virtual environment can be directed to show these expressions. The report also says, "In a virtual meeting room, you can see who is present, who is multi-tasking, who has raised a hand, or who has been away from their keyboard so long that their avatar has fallen asleep." Professionals who can find specific value in virtual meetings are surgeons, architects, engineers, and product designers who use CAD or visualization systems to create projects. Examples cited in the Computerworld article include:

• Duke University and Virtual Heroes are creating a high-fidelity 3D virtual environment to train teamwork and communication skills to health care workers
• University of Maryland and the I-95 Corridor Coalition built a virtual world simulation of highway emergencies
• Princeton University is using a 3D virtual world to manage distributed teams of a large-scale astrophysics project

Immersive Education - Online Learning Worlds

I read an interesting article in The Chronicle of Higher Education / Information Technology, by Andrea Foaster and dated 12/21/07. Harvard University has devoted itself to a multimillion-dollar non-profit project to build virtual-reality software exclusively for education in fantasy spaces like Second Life. Using interactive 3D graphics, web cameras, web-based telephony, and other digital media, the goal is to build 3D interactive lessons that will grab attention but without the violence and titillation used in many of today's online games. Backers of this project include Boston College, Harvard U., Amherst College, Columbia U, MIT, Sweden's Royal Inst. of Technology, Japan's U of Aizu, the Asraeli Assoc. of Grid Technologies, NASA, Sun Microsystems, the City of Bostm, and the New Media Consortium.

2008 e-Learning Predictions

This is the time of year when bloggers and organizations publish their predictions for the upcoming year. In his "eLearning Technology" blog, Tony Karrer offers his top predictions for 2008. Let me talk about a few of them now.

In my last post, I talked about how employees will be expected to become more competent and self-managed learners. This is where eLearning 2.0 comes in to play. Karrer predicts an increase in pressure to understand and apply eLearning 2.0. He also points out that mobile learning in 2007 continued to disappoint and that it has yet to take flight. Despite the fact that so many mobile devices today offer Internet access, large adoption of m-learning still won't be here in 2008.

Karrer predicts that companies will increase their attention toward ROI and metrics when it comes to corporate training and worker performance. The large LMS players will continue to add functionality, but most likely additional functions that we do not want or need. "Serious games" will continue to be talked about, but most of us will never get to build one, buy one, or participate in one.

Industry experts should hold frequent, targeted virtual discussions, as opposed to large, multi-topic virtual conferences. Finally, Karrer believes that "knowledge worker skills" will be a huge topic for 2008 but won't really take off until 2009.

Future Trends in Training

I recently attended an ASTD webcast titled "Future Trends in Training & Development". The speakers, Marc Rosenberg and Pat McLagan, had the following main points to make:

Learning will become less course-centric and more knowledge-centric. Instead of asking what courses they can take on a particular subject, learners will ask what knowledge is available on a particular subject. Learners will continue to become more independent and "self-taught" as it becomes increasingly easy and convenient for them to find information and knowledge at their fingertips - and right in their workplace. The web (specifically Web 2.0) is changing the internet experience from static information and transactions to dynamic collaborations, offering more interactive and personable experiences. As a result, learning will be revolutionized.

In today's workplaces, people need to think, analyze, and solve problems - not just do routine work and tasks. Therefore, it is becoming paramount that employees know where to look for validated knowledge, instead of trying to remember everything. As job responsibilities continue to require more cognitive and relational thinking and the work itself becomes a continuous and accelerated learning process, the development of personal learning skills becomes critical for both employee and company success.

What we can expect in the future, then, is more learners managing their own learning, and learning professionals supporting learners' efforts. This is referred to as professional and competent self-managed learning.

Learners must learn to:

• Draw insight from information and extract learning from experience
• Evaluate information quality (validate the information)
• Become competent with a variety of learning resources
• Use analytical, systemic, and creative thinking
• Consciously manage their own learning
• Help others learn

As learning professionals, we must learn to:

• Help link organizational needs and learner priorities
• Help accelerate the learning that organizations and individuals need
• Ensure that individuals and managers have the learning capabilities and mental models they need
• Make accelerated learning resources accessible; create knowledge management systems
• Become a guide and facilitator of the new learning process

The Outsourcing Institute Survey

For those of us whose livelihood relies on the outsourcing of others, I was very interested to find the "Top 10 Drivers Behind Today's Outsourcing Decisions (in alphabetical order)". And they are:

• Accelerate reengineering benefits


• Access to world class capabilities


• Cash infusion


• Free resources for other purposes


• Function difficult to manage or out of control


• Improve company focus


• Make capital funds available


• Reduce operating costs


• Reduce risk


• Resources not available internally

E-Learning: Where Are We Now and Where Are We Headed?

According to a recent report by Global Industry Analysts Inc., “eLearning: A Global Strategic Business Report,” e-learning is on the rise, and demand for it is expected to exceed $52.6 billion by 2010 worldwide. The study said e-learning solutions are being incorporated in a large variety of informational and training applications at many corporations. E-learning is now the method companies use second-most often to deploy learning and development, according to the study.

The study also found the U.S. e-learning market is the world’s largest, as its 2007 revenues are expected to exceed $17.5 billion. Further, the U.S. corporate e-learning market share is more than 60 percent. Europe’s share (less than 15 percent) is the second-largest. The Japanese market is not as large, but because of globalization, Asia is predicted to experience a faster uptake — the study said its compound annual growth rate likely will range between 25 percent and 30 percent through 2010.

In regard to e-learning providers, the market is very fragmented, according to the study. It contains many key and niche players, and not all of them are online companies. Additionally, there has been a great deal of consolidation within the e-learning solutions markets — the study found many smaller companies merge with or are acquired by larger ones in a effort to expand offerings and remain viable.

The Global Industry Analysts Inc. report also reviews trends and issues in the e-learning market, as well as drivers, challenges, standards, product development, etc. It’s geared toward major geographic markets around the world, including Asia, Europe and the United States.

New CramerSweeney Website!

I cordially invite you to check out our brand new website for our family of CramerSweeney companies! We have had a lot of fun conceptualizing and creating it. Go ahead, spend some time exploring all the pages and links. In fact, we are still putting many finishing touches throughout the site (I just couldn't wait to announce it!), so be sure to come back frequently! I promise you won't be disappointed. ~ Jenna
www.cramersweeney.com

Immersive Learning Simulations (a.k.a. GAMES!)

Immersive Learning Simulations, also known as games, offer a competitive advantage in the emerging global market place, according to findings presented in the Guild Research 360 Report on Immersive Learning Simulations by The eLearning Guild. While it may be difficult for us conservative corporate-types to merge gaming and learning (and working) in our minds, let's face it, games can be a serious and highly effective (and enjoyable!) learning tool!

According to The eLearning Guild's report abstract, the report findings "validate the effectiveness of simulations, scenarios, and immersive learning simulations as viable and necessary in advancing the performance and skills of our current and future workforce facing the challenge of global competition." The survey also found a major increase in serious game-related learning projects being created by today's organizations.

Highlights of the findings from the survey on simulations, scenarios, and serious games include:

• Of those members who have created immersive learning simulations (ILS) that have been in place long enough to measure, 82% believe they have received a modest or very good return on investment.
• Of those members that have created immersive learning simulations, 97% believe that immersive learning simulations are better than other forms of rich skill practice.
• In the next 12 months, 50% of respondents plan to "do more" mini games, 72% plan to "do more" simulations and scenarios, and 36% plan to "do more" immersive learning.
• Learning professionals crave more information and help: 95% want great examples, 92% want resources for getting started, and 80% want ammunition to help sell ILS to their organization.
• Affinity toward learning "games" differs significantly between men and women (more so than other learning modalities).
• Many people work in organizations where the word "game" is filtered from browser searches.
• 71% of those surveyed either totally or somewhat agree that the concept of a learning game is great, but that the term is a problem, and 83% of those surveyed believe the industry should reject the moniker "serious game" and adopt a better term.

Mobile Learning

We were recently awarded another m-learning project here at CramerSweeney Instructional Design (hooray!!), and I am always extremely interested to see how many other organizations are with us on the m-learning pioneering front. Fortunately, the eLearning Guild recently published a new report on m-learning called "Guild Research 360 Report on Mobile Learning." Here is what their survey findings reveal (extracted from an abstract of the full report):

• 66% of Guild members are at least researching m-learning initiatives and 9% have actually implemented m-learning in their organizations.
• 44.8% of Guild members plan to do more m-learning in the next 12 months.
• The U.S. and Canada lag behind other countries in both current implementation and plans for m-learning. (That's NOT good!) 24% of Guild members in other countries have either implemented or are designing m-learning offerings vs. only 14% in the U.S. and Canada. Plus 57% of International members plan to do more m-learning in the next 12 months vs. 41% for the U.S. and Canada.
• The top 3 barriers to the adoption of m-learning are concerns over content created for traditional media not working on hand-held devices, the lack of a standard for mobile delivery, and concern that screens are too small.
• The iPhone (and products coming out that are now influenced by the iPhone) is expected to allay the concerns over compatibility and screen size and have a significant impact on the adoption of m-learning, as many learning activities developed for the web will work with little or no change on this new crop of portable devices.
• Members who have implemented m-learning report a 52% improvement in user performance and an 83% increase in making learning available to users.
• Of members who have implemented m-learning and who are able to evaluate return on investment, 88% report a positive ROI !!

Thank you, eLearning Guild, for these eye-opening survey results!

Video Games at Work? You betcha!

Here at CramerSweeney, we just added a basketball net, a ping pong table, and some other fun toys for our employees. In the near future, in fact, we are going to be adding a Wii. (I can't wait!) We want our folks to get out from behind their desks, move around, get some blood flowing to their brains, socialize, and yes... PLAY! (Hey, I want to get out from behind my own desk and play, too!)

Research shows that creating a fun office atmosphere increases productivity, boosts employee morale and solidarity, and also is a great recruiting tool that helps attract a younger workforce. As gaming at work is growing in acceptance, more and more companies are designating office areas for the sole purposes of gaming, playing, relaxing, socializing, and regenerating. In fact, at some companies, game rooms are the norm - especially at game development companies!

As an owner of CramerSweeney, I spend a great deal of my time here at our beautiful office - and love it. We want our employees to enjoy being here, too!~

Gamers Get the Jobs!

A few months back, I wrote about how I had long believed that playing video games for hours each week (as most kids do) couldn't be a good thing. The information I discovered and wrote about back then changed my mind. Now here is more rather surprising information about the benefits of gaming. This appeared in the Toronto Globe & Mail (7/14/07).

"Companies are placing greater value on workers who are well-versed in internet games," states an associate with IBM's Institute for Business Value. "Businesses are becoming internationally distributed, the pace of change is quicker, and there is additional data to handle, which are all challenges that internet gamers have to meet to help their virtual teams succeed. The leadership characteristics that make individuals successful in gaming make them successful in heading business groups as well." Such qualities include:

• Being able to bring a large number of people together in a highly sophisticated network for the purpose of attaining a goal
• Self-direction and interest in acquiring new skills and espousing new roles
• Openness in taking risks and learning from mistakes
• Collaboration skills and the ability to influence other people on the team
• Ability to locate strengths and drawbacks in the company
• Excellent communication skills

I can't help but wonder if my company's job postings should now include: "High proficiency and several years of experience playing video games."

Mini-Games!

ASTD's T&D magazine published a recent article called "Engaging Mini-Games Find Niche in Training". (Mini-games are also called micro games or casual games.) These are immersive learning simulations (ILSs) normally created in Adobe Flash and which last from 5-20 minutes. According to some industry statistics, 45% of respondents have deployed ILS/mini-games to their associates, and 48% more plan to use them more in the next year.

Who's doing this? Cisco Systems, Miller Brewing Company (one of our clients), and Canadian Standards Association were each highlighted in this article. Mini-games work really well in both e-learning and m-learning environments (PDAs and mobile phones, for example), as long the interface is simple and the graphics are clean.

Immersive Learning Solutions (ILS)

The eLearning Guild's recent research on Immersive Learning Simulations (ILS) reports that in the next 12 months there will be a:

• 72% growth in simulation and scenario-based learning, and
• 37% growth in e-learning games

Although the use of ILS is on the rise, there are still a number of barriers that prevent organizations from using games in e-learning - from a perceived difficulty in building this type of interacivity, to questions about the costs to build ILS, to the appropriateness of using "games" for e-learning. Of course, no one believes that corporate training games and ILS will be a passing fad.

Second Life + Wiimote

Imagine this. You are tasked with learning how to perform surgery, apply pesticides, or operate a nuclear power plant. And the learning tools provided to you are: Second Life and a remote control from a Wii (a popular video game system introduced several months ago). In other words, the Wiimote would be used during the training as a virtual scalpel!

Real-world simulations using these tools is being studied at MIT, where they believe that the Wii's motion-sensitive controller is "one of the most significant technology breakthroughs in the history of computer science" and the key to building training simulators within the virtual world of Second Life. Of course, the Wiimote is just an input device and does not teach anything in and of itself. The success of virtual training programs depends on how good the training scenario is.

The Wiimote's advantage is that it's a "human-centric" device, so the user knows untuitively what to do with it when they pick up it (like with a bat or a wand). The Wiimote provides the ability to easily integrate a wide range of psychomotor activities with simulations played on standard computer platforms - this will change the ways in which people interact with computers. See the full article in Wired magazine (7/27/07).

More on Second Life - It's NOT a Game

I came across an extremely informative article on MoneyCNN.com (written by Fortune magazine senior writer David Kirkpatrick) about the metaverse Second Life and the world of 3D online experiences - which really has become a phenomenon! The article was written earlier this year, so all of the numbers in the article (and quoted below) are outdated (too low now) - but you will get the idea!! Some interesting highlights include:

IBM's $10M: Last November, IBM CEO Sam Palmisano announced that it just started a $10 million project to help building out the "3-D Internet" exemplified by Second Life. Palmisano calls 3-D realms such as Second Life the "next phase of the Internet's evolution" and says they may have "the same level of impact" as the first web explosion.

All User-Driven: Although Linden Lab (the San Francisco company) created Second Life, everything is created by users, for users. The entire virtual world of Second Life is hatched completely by the users.

Text to Voice: As a highly social medium, you will see lots of other avatars all over Second Life. Text chat is ubiquitous, and voice conversation is coming (although no one has announced when).

3-D Net: Huge corporations like IBM see the "ability to use Second Life as a platform for a whole new Net - this one in 3-D and even more social than the original - with huge opportunities to sell products and services."

Big-Name Investors: Many big names have invested in Second Life already because they see it (like Microsoft or eBay) as "a venue in which thousands of ancillary businesses can sprout." Linden Lab's backers "include some of the world's smartest, richest, and most successful tech entrepreneurs." Some include a former columnist for Fortune magazine, the creator of Lotus 1-2-3 (the spreadsheet application that helped begin the PC software revolution - and I used to teach it to clients in corporate training classrooms!!), the founder of eBay, CEO of Amazon, and Microsoft's chief technology architect and inventor of Lotus Notes. These are some heavy-hitters in technology innovation, and they think Second Life may be next!! At least one man's prediction is this: "In two years, I think Second Life will be huge, probably as large as the entire gaming community is today."

Inception/Infancy/Linden Dollars: Second Life opened in June 2003. There was nothing there, nowhere to go, nobody to see. About 1,000 people kept visiting regularly and dreaming up cities, jungles, games, clubs, and all kinds of crazy avatars. Second Life was relaunched in January 2004 with greater focus on user creativity and in-world entrepreneurship. Linden also began allowing people to exchange real dollars ($) with Linden dollars (L). This allowed Second Life to become a real economy where residents can build, own, or sell their digital creations. In fact, about $600,000 is spent daily in Second Life, for an annual GDP of about $220 million!

Virtual Land: Linden's new business model focused on the sale of virtual land - and Linden Lab began generating serious revenue (that now grow at least 10% every month). They have sold 3,500 private islands, each equivalent to 16 acres in the real world. As the population increases, Linden simply creates more digital real estate! Each island costs $1,675 to purchase and $295/month to maintain. Some buyers subdivide their land and rent or sell it at a profit. IBM is one of the biggest landowners with over 24 islands!

Entrepreneurs Welcome! Any resident can become an entrepreneur. Wanna be a nightclub owner, jewelry maker, landscaper, pet manufacturer (huh?), store owner, beach owner, builder, ski champion? If you can dream it, you can do it - and make money at it. Take a look at one kinda famous Second Life resident, whose avatar is known as Anche Chung: She claims "to have accumulated a real-world net worth of more than $1 million in Second Life real estate. She now employs 30 people in China who build things and otherwise improve the land she buys and develops for resale." Something very nice happened to another Second Lifer who "developed a gambling game called Tringo, a cross between Tetris and Bingo. It becamse so popular that it has been licensed for Nintendo's Game Boy Advance!!

How to Make Money? Big companies like Nike, Sony, Toyota, Sun, and others have operations in Second Life. Some sell virtual clothing and other merchandise for avatars; some even move real product. There are about 65 virtual companies that have sprung up (been created) inside Second Life to serve real-world business customers. About 350 people work full-time for these virtual companies, and there are at least $10 million worth of such projects underway.

Where IS This Headed? This field of metaverses will become very competitive. We are in the earliest days of exploration, and no one knows exactly where we'll all end up. IBM's VP of technical strategy says, "Today virtual worlds are where video and VCRs were in the early 1980s, or where the web was in 1993."

So I say, hold on tight. This is guaranteed to be a very exciting ride!!

Virtual Worlds for Learning

Virtual worlds can be viewed across a continuum (as described by Tony Driscoll):

1. Metaverse (such as Second Life) - For commerce and collaboration
2. Intraverse - Where organizations try to extend their learning and collaboration technologies into the 3rd dimension. They want to do all the things that their LMS and collaboration software can do but extend it into the 3D realm.
3. Interverse - To leverage the power of 3D for community and co