Informal reflections and comment on happenings in the corporate learning and e-learning world, from Europe's leading learning analyst.
See http://www.elearnity.com for up to date news, whitepapers and comment.
George Siemens is putting together a free virtual conference on corporate learning called Corporate Learning: Trends and Innovations and has asked me to present.
Here is the emerging wiki for the conference with speaker information.
Here is Tony Karrers' blog entry on the conference.
One of the reasons for the lack of front end activity was an investment in time at the back end on our IT infrastructure. The research knowledge centre is actually a Lotus Domino application, and we've recently upgraded our versions of Lotus Notes enabling us to do more creative stuff with the application and RSS feed.
Please email me if you have any suggestions on how to improve the EKC web interface or RSS feed.
Thanks, David
Have fixed a small problem in the RSS feed for the research knowledge centre. Hopefully now the published dates fields should be coming through correctly. Thanks to Mark Aberdour from Epic who pointed this out.
p.s. All the entries are set automatically to 9am GMT just in case you were wondering.
Sorry the blogs been so quiet - no activity for 6 weeks. We've been very busy with some client advisory projects as well as doing some background research activities. Hope to start bringing these to the daylight soon ...
must try harder!
Jane asked me to submit my top ten tools for her listing. Reading the others, I thought this was quite an interesting exercise and can give some helpful pointers for anyone on tools to make themselves more productive.
Here's my list:
Firefox: My window onto the web. Much preferred to IE and loads of open source innovation.
MindManager: Our most important business tool. I use it to mindmap pretty much everything - research, interviews, analysis. Anyone that's worked with Elearnity will recognise this!
Google: The definitive search tool for the web.
Bloglines: My other window onto the web, this time for tracking blogs and news mainly. Read a huge volume via this.
Yugma: Tried a lot of live collaboration tools and this is one of the simplest and best for small group collaboration. Works well and very flexible.
MyBlogLog/Google Analytics: Real time analytics on our blogs and research sites. Also couple this with Google Analytics.
Dreamweaver: Great basic tool for maintaining our web sites
Blogger: Basic blogging tool. Not fab but simple and does the job.
Linked In: Been using this for some time and network seems to be slowly expanding. Sure I can make more use of it and Facebook (if I only had the time)
Lotus Notes: Been using this as our core infrastructure for 11 years, and still struggling to find a platform that offers the same breadth of flexibility for collaborative applications including our research knowledge centre. Email sucks but less virus targetted than Outlook.
Jane's list is prettier though with the logos and links!
TrainingZone have just posted an article on the role of technology in informal learning which includes some input from me amongst others.
I've recently had a number of conversations with some corporate L&D leaders where we've been debating the ability of large organisations to effectively implement and manage enterprise LMSs. I say debate, but most of the time they have been lamenting their organisations inability to "do LMS things properly". That's not to say that they weren't serious about it - they were very earnest in their procurement processes with requirements documents and business cases coming out of their ears. In fact, to mix my metaphors, they were struggling to see the woods for the trees (or at least the printed ITT responses!).
This prompted me back to some research we did a couple of years ago, when we questioned the approaches and skills/expertise that many large organisations were applying to their enterprise LMS projects. (click here for the original article). In this we highlighted a number of common failings, many of which are still true today.
After reading Tony Kareer's recent post on "e-learning or learning? - more to it" and watching the recent David Weinberger video I remembered a recent conversation that David Wilson and I had regarding how we describe what we do to others.
We both agreed that using elearning to describe what we do (what ever that is? - As Wikipedia says "It is used interchangeably in so many contexts that it is critical to be clear what one means when one speaks of 'eLearning'.") does seem a somewhat limiting term as most people associate this with e-learning content and what we do does have a much wider context. However, when I explain to friends or people what we do is help large organisations utilise technology effectively to help their people learn (a bit of a mouthful!) I normally receive blank looks until I add that it involves elearning. This "tag" helps people gain an understanding at a very base level of what we do. A term I've favoured more recently has been "learning technology" (or educational technology) rather than elearning as this seems to suggest to me a much wider remit but even this seems to have a multitude of interpretations and there is even less awareness of the term.
One of the challenges of the area we work in is the diversity of activities this covers. One day you could be discussing blended learning and learning styles the next interoperability and rapid content development. David Weinberger may argue that I should not be concerned how we classify what we do as it should be down to others to "tag" our activities in whatever way suits them. Whilst I see the validity in this it still feels important to define your own role and help others get an appreciation of what you do.
Although some people have celebrated the dropping of the "e" from elearning to me this just seems to muddy the waters. Yes, most people agree the learning is the most important element, but this is such a broad "tag" that it does very little to define our roles. I think maybe time will tell on an universally accepted term but I'm still waiting .......
I was reading an article in People Management recently from a HR columnist entitled “Don’t rule out chalk and talk learning methods in favour of flexible approaches”. The article basically argued that due to the growth in remote home and mobile working, e-learning was now seen as the “modern means of learning” and we should not forget the importance of face to face learning. In the first few weeks outside of a corporate learning department the thing that strikes me is that this could not be more further from the truth.
The pace of change in society and in technology is incredibly rapid and with this the way how individuals learn is constantly evolving. E-learning though still seems to be a form of "black magic" for many learning professionals and they seem to view it with anything from mystical wonder to outright contempt. They seem too blinkered to recognise the benefits it offers in terms of flexibility and accessibility and the fact that for some learners they may even prefer it to face to face learning (Oh No!). Don’t get me wrong there are many organisations that are well down the road of utilising technology to help their people learn but these still seem to be in the minority.
It disappoints me to see so few learning professionals grasping the opportunities available to them, especially when you consider that learning is a process driven by the need to continually develop. When you look at last year’s National Training Award winners how many use technology? – I’d estimate it to be less than 20%. Face to face learning is incredibly important but to rely on it as the dominant choice in all circumstances is misguided, just as doing the same with e-learning is.
Life is very busy at the Thomson Corporation these days. Not only have they just completed the sale of their NETg subsidiary to SkillSoft for $270 million, but they have also announced they are selling Higher Education assets of Thomson Learning to a couple of venture funds for $7.75 billion. This now leaves them better funded to pursue growth in "better aligned" to their core operating model. Currently that means acquiring Reuters.
All this is very interesting for Thomson, but shows another big player significantly exiting the learning market place. I remember maybe 10 years ago speculating with Peter Rothstein, then head of Lotus's LearningSpace business, that the big publishers/information companies had a significant potential to engage in and shape the emergent e-learning industry. The sentiment was proved to be right, but the reality wasn't. Certainly the publishers came to the market. But then they floundered, and largely they have gone south.
What does this say about the ability of large companies to make money from the learning industry? Not sure it is a positive message. If large owners of learning content assets such as the educational publishers struggle, then what hope is there for smaller providers? Personally, I think their strategies for developing the market were flawed and therefore likely to struggle, but its still an indictment of the learning market that they couldn't make enough money to stay around!
I'd just like to welcome Adrian Jones, who's just joined Elearnity as Principal Analyst, (see press release here), and will be leading our research and advisory activities for e-learning and related areas, and will also be contributing to this Blog.
Adrian has been one of the leading corporate advocates for e-learning in the UK during his last six years at B&Q, and has won many related awards for his e-learning work at B&Q. Under Adrian’s leadership, B&Q became one of the earliest adopters of enterprise e-learning, e-assessment and learning management systems and a leading corporate reference for e-learning. Here's what Barry Sampson, Adrian's colleague at B&Q had to say about him.
So welcome Adrian, and I look forward to your contributions to the Blog as well as to Elearnity's research and analysis!
I was talking with Jay Cross at HRD last week, and I was asking him about real research into the investment and efficacy of formal versus informal learning. I am particularly interested in pulling apart the 20% of 20% argument that Jay (and now a lot of followers) are advocating about formal learning. I.e. is 20% of corporate learning really formal? And is the impact of this only 20% effective?
Does anyone have specific research (i.e. not anecdotal) on this?
I am not trying to decry the value of informal learning story, but I would, like Jay, like to see some substance underpinning it that can be interpreted and impact corporate strategies. At the moment it is in danger of becoming the latest fad that gets lots of powerpoint airplay, and then disappears into obscurity with the arrival of the next one. I want to make sure we are still holding the baby, long after the bath water has long since disappeared!
I'm currently at Elliot Masie's LMS 2007 event in Las Vegas. A typical Elliot event with lots of Elliot facilitated discussion with his Masie Fellows, and somtimes with the audience. Overall I'm not sure the format works for me. The interaction is good, but the discussions are often a bit superficial to carry the attention of the audience for prolongued periods.
Anyway, that's not the point of the post. Yesterday's keynote discussion was with Malcolm Gladwell which was (for me) quite thought provoking and interesting - both at a personal level, and also thinking about the implications for the learning market.
Here are my mindmap notes (there was no presentation slides).
We've just announced the results of our recent research into Learning Content Management which you might find interesting.
We believe the research strong indicates that large organisations need coherent strategies for producing and managing learning content that are geared to the needs and structure of their business ... and that, currently, they generally don't have them.
A copy of the exec paper can be downloaded from here.
I'm interested in your comments ...
There is a very interesting discussion about whether the BBC is stifling innovation on TechCrunch, and follows some typically bold comments from TechCrunch commentator Michael Arrington on "dissolving the BBC". Separately, but relevant to the discussion, the BBC has also decided to suspend BBC Jam, its online education service.
I think this is a very interesting and valid discussion. The trouble is it tends to descend into the pro/anti BBC factions, which potentially obscures the central point of the discussion - is the remit of the BBC in the digital age sufficiently clear or robust? Where should and shouldn't the BBC be allowed to invest in producing services, and how does that impact the independent market in those areas?
In the case of Jam, the BBC has a well established pedigree and role in the children's educational content market in the UK. But does that mean it should be providing it as a service at the UK tax payers' expense, I'm less convinced. I know the BBC claims to have a process (referred to by someone on the video) for vetting whether it should be engaging in different market spaces, but who is this accountable to? Seemingly not to independent regulation, or to the tax payer? Largely it seems to be accountable to itself, and that is what causes concern. In this sense, Jam is definitely the thin end of a rapidly growing wedge.
My personal view is that this is a complex not a simple issue. Services like Jam can add a lot of value in the market, often to parts of the market that have limited choice in reality. That can be a boon, but it also comes at a heavy price - collectively to those funding the BBC, but also in stifling innovation, often in markets where that innovation is desperately needed. I'm sure it impacts venture capital investment in competitive organisations, but it also helps to validate a market space that may spawn better solutions.
Let's keep the debate about the issue of remit and market impact, not about whether paid advertising is nice to watch ... I'm sure we all have a similar answer to that!
DAVID
What proportion of corporate LMS projects fail because of issues with the way they are implemented or run, rather than inadequacies in the underlying LMS application?
This is a key question we have been exploring for some time in our LMS research and it seems to me to really challenge some of the vendor market messaging, and the corporate mindset on LMS procurement. Our historic research tends to point to the view that many LMS projects fail (or at least fail to meet their original expectations) because of poor ... insert your choice of ... implementation, customisation, integration, support, operations, administration, etc. In other words, poor service.
Many of the "lessons learnt" from our roundtables relate more to the services around the LMS, than the LMS itself. These can include: poor architecture design and performance, problematic HR integration, excess customisation and failure to upgrade, no change management inside L&D, lack of long term direction, poor expectation management. These are all largely indicative of "service" failure rather than application failure.
Sure, application choice has an impact on how these services are performed, and how difficult it is to achieve the outcome. I'm not saying it isn't important, just that it is not the only thing that is important. Maybe choosing the best implementation partner is more important than choosing the best application? And surely even choosing the LMS is itself a service proposition (clarifying strategy, building the business case, understanding requirements, shortlisting potential products, planning, negotiating the contract etc.).
We have doing quite a lot of thinking about the service proposition of LMS, but I would be interested in your thoughts on the matter.
DAVID
We're seeing a lot of renewed vendor activity at the moment which seems to reflect quite overt optimism and aspiration for the market. (Something slightly lacking for a few years after the dot com bubble).
Some of the patterns we're seeing include:
I've been playing around with MyBlogLog in the background as a potential tool to add a bit more identity to who's been accessing the blog. Let me know what you think.
DAVID
A few weeks ago I put a question out to the Moodle community regarding the appropriateness and usage of Moodle in the corporate learning environment. I have to say, so far I have underwhelmed by the level of response and interest, with only a few prviate responses so far.
Elearnity is very interested in the potential for open source learning solutions in a corporate context, but frankly, we currently are skeptical at the degree of corporate fit and focus they have today. We know of some organisations who have been doing some successful work with Moodle in particular in the corporate arena, but would be keen to here from many more.
I am also happy to provide a summary of our research view to people making a good contribution to me/us. Happy to start a discussion here, or for more sensitive inputs please email me directly.
DAVID
