Welcome to the Everything eLearning Blog
Welcome to the Everything eLearning Blog! Discover posts on a range of topics including ‘how-to’ product demonstrations, design, innovation and authoring along with ideas on how to create break-through eLearning content.
Be sure to subscribe to the blog and get email updates when new blogs are posted. We hope you find the Everything eLearning Blog interesting, informative, provocative, and sometimes, entertaining!
Peter Bray
Chief Marketing Officer
Crowdsourcing in Social Learning
Crowdsourcing, or collective intelligence, is vital in organizational social learning. Social learning in business settings is underpinned by several new business transformations, one of which is collaboration. Collaboration has the power to change business performance dramatically. At the center of the collaboration discussion is how well a business leverages it to deliver higher performance. Theory is one thing, but execution is another. And successful social business is all about successful execution.
I recently read some great advice about how a company called CEMEX has developed an application called Think n’ Build to effectively manage the process of Crowdsourcing - and has noticed tangible results. This is the process explained in 5 steps:
- The Challenge...
Creating Value in e-Learning Part 5: The Symptom
This is a guest blog post from Peter Sorenson, President of QUIZZICLE. Please see below for full bio.
When we visit a doctor because we are not feeling well, he or she begins by questioning us about our symptoms. Why? Because a sniffle, a headache or a sore throat are merely indicators that something is wrong - not the root cause of the illness itself.
As an...
Minimize eLearning Costs With a Comprehensive Plan & Powerful Authoring Tools
Your eLearning development strategy doesn’t have to push your financial limits or consume excessive time or energy, especially if you have cost-saving tips and multifunctional authoring tools in mind. Recently, The eLearning Guild conducted a survey, which captured eLearners’ techniques for reducing costs and creating content in the most efficient way, while still maintaining quality. Read our top 10 tips from the The eLearning Guild’s 75 Tips to Reduce eLearning Costs by Patti Shank here:
1. Develop once, use many times. See if there is overlap in your needs where you can develop courses together with people in the same business. This could work especially well for...
Training and eLearning in High Demand: How to Meet the Demand with a Successful eLearning Strategy
According to the e-Learning Council report on workforce demographics and training, a whopping 60% of future jobs will require training that only 20% of the current workforce possesses. In addition, it is estimated that by 2015, 40 million workers will work from home at least one day a week - a growth from 24 million.
The demand for online training and learning is higher than ever. How do we reach that demand and do so efficiently?
Learning 3.0 explores some suggestions for a successful eLearning strategy in their attention-grabbing titled blog, “Ten...
eLearning, Social Learning & Mobile Learning Trends from ASTD 201
ASTD (American Society for Training and Development), the world’s largest training and development professional association, held its annual international conference and expo last week, May 22-25 in Orlando, Florida. Attendees from more than 70 countries gathered to hear over 200 educational sessions from industry-leading experts and check out the latest learning and training products and services.
While at the ASTD International Conference and Expo, we noticed 3 main eLearning trends and strategies: engaging content creation, social learning and mLearning. Keep the following insights and advice in mind to leverage these concepts for your own eLearning applications.
Engaging Content
A demand for dynamic eLearning courses requires more interactive and engaging content for learners.
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Motivate by providing...
A Conversation with Elliott Masie – A Q&A Session
Elliott Masie, the highly praised futurist, analyst and researcher of the eLearning community, engaged in a lively and intriguing conversation with the 2011 LUC attendees on Wednesday May 11th. Attendees loved the opportunity to gain invaluable feedback from the world renowned learning guru. Masie began the session by encouraging the audience to “ask me anything”. Here are some of the best questions and answers from the session:
Q: Have you ever tried to learn in a style different than your own? What was the result?
Masie’s Answer: I am a skeptic that we only have one learning style. In fact, I think we have a whole range of styles. At various stages and stress levels of a task, an individual learns in different styles. Even the time of the day can impact learning. For example, I do not learn anything between 3:30pm and 9pm. This does not mean that we have to change the whole style of...
Create and Deploy Goal-Driven eLearning Material
Before starting an eLearning project, it’s important to determine a purpose and a goal for your coursework. Is your intention to create a simple, user-friendly course? Or, do you want an in-depth, feature-heavy advanced course? Depending on your audience, skill-set and authoring tool, you can use the same information to build many different courses, but it’s important to outline your plan before beginning development.
Step 1: Research.
In order to successfully deploy an eLearning course, the developer must research its target audience and what they want to get out of the course. In addition, the designer must realize their course creation abilities and how these skills align with the learners’ knowledge base. For example, do your learners want to expand their grasp of nuclear physics? If so, then the course...
The mLearning Market: $538 Million and Growing
Developers and consumers of eLearning are currently adapting to the rise of mobile eLearning, or mLearning. Distance learning is developing from the need to learn on the go on a 24-hour basis, and mobile devices are becoming a tool to receive this information. While mLearning is still in its early stages, solution providers like Trivantis have created learning management systems, such as CourseMill 6, that support educating from a mobile device.
According to a report by Ambient Insight in 2008, "the US market for Mobile Learning products and services is growing at a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 21.7% and revenues reached $538 million in 2007.” The report indicates that mLearning is essentially recession proof.
Whether mLearning is used because of distance, or because of its easy accessibility, it has numerous advantages and few disadvantages.
Courses can be...
Dynamic Lectora: Databases, iFrames, External Content and Session Variables
Peter Sorrenson did a great job on this presentation. This presentation was definitely geared more for the advanced Lectora User with some JavaScript background. Peter explained ways in which to access and work with the underlying Lectora objects in order to extend the Lectora application. He started with basic definitions for the terms used in his presentation (i.e., session variable, dynamic script injection, JavaScript object notation, iFrame, etc.). He gave a nice explanation and example of an external quiz object injected into an iFrame of a Lectora title. He presented his topic using real world examples along with an easy to understand communication flow. Peter has a great sense of humor that kept his presentation lively. If the E-Learning market slows down, he could always get a job as a comedian. Thank you Peter.
Bob Zybach
Bob is a...
LUC: Using Lectora for Enterprise Development of Courses – JavaScript, Remote Development, and More
Greg Gardner and Faith Powers from ICF International presented how they have managed the development of two large eLearning courses involving 15 people (with two Lectora developers) where team members are located in five different states. Their development cycle is similar to a software development process and included phases such as requirement gathering, design, implementation and test/QA cycles. They also came up with a naming convention for all objects and resources in Lectora so that each item can be identified where it is used (chapter, section, page, etc) just by looking at the name of the object. For example, the name of an image used on a page will contain some identifiable acronyms of chapter, section and page that the image is used on. They also have setup a versioning system so that the developers at different geographic locations can share, check in and out the data files.
They take...