Learning Conversations

Jane Hart has made a fantastic contribution to the learning professional's community with her ongoing top 100 tools list. During this week's Learning Trends conference she takes that list and pulls out the "25 Free Tools Every Learning Professional Should Have in their Toolbox".

The discussion that followed included the question: Is anyone worried about free tools that could go away?

A while back, I wrote a piece for Seb Scholler's blog about Free Stuff in a Commercial World, which discussed the need to understand the business model that was behind the free tools.

It's important to note that free tools fit into two broad camps:

• Closed source, but free to use - eg. Jing
• Open source - eg. Moodle et al

Tools that fit into either of those two groups can also be in two other groups:

• Solid business model or an active development community
• No obvious source of funding or active support

In the spirit of consultants all over the world, I've put together two grids that may help other learning professionals decide whether a particular free tool is right for them.

The first takes the ideas above and populates it with free tools (please note these are my current opinions only - I'm prepared to have them changed!)

Where would your favourite tools sit?

Of course, there's also longevity and reputation to consider - the longer a tool has been around the more likely it is to stay around. And the more people that think highly of the tool, the more likely it is to stay.

The second grid looks at the purpose for which you are considering the tool:

Basically, you need to consider how important the tool is to you. If it's going to take a long term investment in terms of time and data then you need to be pretty sure it's going to be around for a while.

Of course, this is exactly the analysis you'd need to do for any paid-for tool. It's not rocket science, just a matter of undertaking a process due diligence before you make your long term choices.

A few week's back I attended a course on Account and Customer Relationship Management. As said previously, this was the first formal training course I'd been on for five years. The announcement about the course arrived at a time when I needed some specific input. The objectives matched what I needed. So I signed up.

Most of my learning for the past five years has been informal and self-directed. For most of my professional work, I'm at a stage on Jay Cross's graph where that's the most efficient and effective mode of learning. But, with this new role of sales and account management that I'm moving into, I thought that I would be better served by a more formal and structured approach.

Republished by permission of Jay Cross. First published on Jay's Internettime blog.

Setting aside time to think and reflect is something I try to do anyway in the course of the day job - that's the beauty of my current work; I can manage my own time. But sometimes you need a kick to make you do that thinking, to make you engage fully with the new ideas. That's where having another person, like a trainer or a fellow trainee, can really help.

In a pre-planned face-to-face training session, however, much of what you do is dictated by the trainer, by the contents of the trainer's handbook, and by the needs of the other trainees.

That's fine, if all those things are aligned with your own particular training needs. However, in this case the match didn't quite work.

There were a few key nuggets which I brought away, but not enough to justify driving 200 miles, spending a night away and being away from the job for a day. Looking back at the stated objectives for the course, it still looks like one that should be useful, but the depth of the content, or its applicability to my own situation was just not quite right.

As I design learning solutions for clients, I am tending more and more to an approach that has managers working within a model that emphasises one-to-ones, feedback and coaching (as promoted by the Manager-Tools team). Managers know their teams and their needs far better than any external trainer, and frequent, planned, short coaching sessions can be far more effective than the blunt instrument that is a training course. The role of the learning & development team is to:

• provide expert resources that managers can use with their teams
• provide communication tools that allow communities of practice to develop
• support specific interventions that have clearly defined business needs
• support and encourage a management culture that has learning at its core

In this particular case, I feel I'd have been better off with a couple of hours of coaching, spread over a few weeks, than this one day splurge of training.

Oh, and though I now know what Transactional Analysis is, and even how to analyse transactions, I'm still not entirely sure what the point of it all is... can anyone enlighten me?

Much as I dislike questionnaires without a research-backing, sometimes they can be useful - just to get you started thinking.

My work takes me into lots of different organisations, and my research & reading has led me to look at a number of different theories of management - particularly the management of learning.

The following set of questions have no value judgements attached. They are simply to help you describe the current state of your organisation. You could use it in many ways, perhaps with senior managers, or even with a large group to provide evidence for management. But having the description is not enough. You then need to ask those managers "Why is this the case?" for each question. Look out for inconsistencies between the ideal and reality. Again, find out why.

Keep asking "Why is this the case?" or "Why not?" until you get to the root of the issue. "Five Whys" is a common technique used to analyse issues...

• ... in educational contexts
• ... in health contexts
• ... in general management contexts

What questions would you add?

If anyone is around Cromford in Derbyshire on 15th November 2008, then you might be interested in a concert I'm organising.

It features Lee Myers, a superb classical guitarist, playing a very accessible collection of pieces.

It's a fund-raising event for Lee and his family as they prepare to move to South America to support the growing church there.

Tickets cost £8. With only 60 seats available I'd prefer to have the money in advance (I can take Paypal payments) as I've a feeling demand will not meet supply.

The venue is the historic Gothic Warehouse, part of the Cromford Mills complex - a World Heritage site.

For further information or to request a ticket please contact me using the form on this site.

Supported by:

Next week I shall be attending my first formal "course" as a learner for over five years!

Normally I spurn such courses, but this one (on Account and Customer Relationship Management) comes at a time when I need some concentrated input & guidance. Most of the learning I've done over the past few years has been self-directed; based around the serendipitous discoveries made via reading other people's blogs, or through extensive internet research to meet particular needs.

Anyway, the course I'm going on comes with a little bit of pre-work. Part of it makes you think about the characteristics of successful & unsuccessful client relationships (I like to be in control!). The other part is a questionnaire about whether you have Parent, Adult or Child characteristics, very similar to this one (pdf).

By long-past background I'm a science teacher, and by recent-background I'm an educational researcher (although that may be stretching it a bit). So, whenever I see tools like these questionnaires I'm looking for evidence that shows the results will be meaningful, and for evidence that the questions have been carefully thought through.

In this case, I'm afraid I can't find either. To be honest, if the questions aren't carefully thought through, then how can the results be meaningful. This means being totally unambiguous in the language used.

A couple of examples:

People nowadays should attend church more often.

I'm a Christian, so you'd probably expect me to say "yes". However, "attending church" isn't going to make anyone a better person; it's deeper than that. So, do I say "no"? But does that mean I'm saying people shouldn't attend church?

On the same lines:

The ceremony of baptism is much more than a symbolic ritual - it is essential for the spiritual welfare of the individual.

I really don't like these two part questions. What if you agree with one part, but disagree with the second? That's what I call bad question design.

Anyway, I did the questionnaire. Whether the results have any meaning at all remains to be seen. Or is the whole Parent, Adult, Child thing another case of psychological pseudo-science?

As well as trying to organise my toolkit, I've also been taking a look back over some of the articles I've written that have played a key part in developing my thinking.

I'm bringing these back into the light of day via a separate page on this site: Key Articles.

I've started to organise my Diigo bookmarks a bit better, so that I can use them to publish a list of the tools I use.

Initialy I was going to publish them as a Mind Map, or Concept Map - but that would just be a static diagram, that would be hard to navigate and to maintain.

So I've gone with Diigo, as it's a tool I use already to maintain my bookmarks. Now I can put it to further use.

I've organised them into:

• Web-based tools
• Windows tools
• Mac OSX tools

I'm only listing applications that I use frequently, not the ones that I just try out for a bit.

The recent additions to the list will always be available on the Toolkit page on this site.

The complete list is available on Diigo.

Except where otherwise noted, this content is
licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Often a potential client will specify that they want their elearning to be "SCORM compliant". When asked why they want this, and to what level of compliance, often the answer is a blank look.

What is SCORM?

SCORM stands for Shareable Content Object Reference Model. Its history is based firmly in the US Department of Defense's need for learning materials to be able to "work" in many different platforms.

The DoD, and now ADL (Advanced Distributed Learning), looked at the range of different specifications and standards available for learning materials (each one known as a "book") and brought them together in the reference model now known as SCORM.

SCORM 1.2 (with which I'm most familiar) brings together:

• The IMS content packaging specification - which describes a way of collecting together learning resources into one file (a simple zip package), accompanied by an XML file (called imsmanifest.xml) that describes the structure of the resources. It's this that allows a learning management system (LMS) to upload one file build a navigation structure for learners and track their usage of the navigation.
• The IEEE Learning Object Metadata standard - which specifies a way of describing the content of the learning object in a machine-readable format. It's this that allows teachers/learners to search for specific learning objects inside the LMS.
• The AICC run-time specification - which describes how the learning resources should communicate with the host LMS. It's this that allows learning resources to display the user's name, or the LMS to take final scores from quizzes built in to the resources.

SCORM 2004 builds on 1.2 by tightening up on what it means to be conformant with SCORM, and also adding in a book known as "Sequencing and Navigation". This new book allows designers to programme different routes through the materials based on user behaviour.

The benefits of SCORM

In theory...

1. Designers should be able to create materials independently of the host LMS's in-built authoring tools
2. Content is not locked into the host LMS. It can be ported to another LMS with no loss of functionality
3. Learning materials can come from many suppliers and will just "work" in the host LMS
4. Learners will be able to find materials from a catalogue that is populated by the metadata

The reality

Different content suppliers, authoring tools and LMS's have different interpretations of what SCORM means. There is a lowest common denominator (the IMS content packaging specification), but if you want to be sure of interoperability, then you need to stick with that, and that only.

SCORM-packaged learning content knows nothing about the functionality available in your LMS. So, if you're using an LMS that has collaborative features like forums and wikis, or functions like polls, surveys and sophisticated assessments, all of that will have to be handled outside of the SCORMed content. If you make use of that LMS functionality, you can almost guarantee that the rich information it contains will not be exportable to another LMS.

SCORM is just about delivering content, tracking its use and providing an overall pass/fail score. It's a model that works for Defence training. Whether it works in other contexts is debatable.

The SCORM run-time (and now the Sequencing and Navigation book) are extremely complex to make work well. Often you find run-time information will only get passed between the package and the LMS if you use a particular browser. Very few of the data calls are compulsory in the specification, so you can't guarantee the data you're expecting is going to be available.

The tracking and score information that comes via the SCORM run-time is of extremely limited use. Yes, it can tell you that someone went into a particular piece of learning, whether they viewed all or some of it, and how long they spent doing so. But a) does it tell you whether they've learnt anything, and b) who is going to be doing the checking up to make sure everyone spent the requisite 10 minutes?

There are some examples of extremely sophisticated SCORM-based simulations, which work well with a particular LMS, provide useful information to managers, and offer a valid learning experience for learners. Such examples are difficult to come across though.

A simple alternative for interoperability

I would always argue that a content management system (CMS) is the best place for content to sit. It's much more learner-friendly.

Yes, the content is "locked into" the CMS's database, but if you choose the right CMS there will be an export function or the ability to create one.

If you really need to make sure you can move your content around from one system to another, then there is a simple answer...

• Create your learning materials are a mini-website - any authoring tool will do this
• Package them into a simple zip file - nothing complicated. Just add them to a compressed folder in Windows, Create Archive on Mac OSX, or tell your authoring tool to zip up the output (Articulate can certainly do this)
• Upload your zip file to your LMS and unzip it there. Moodle can certainly do this. It's so simple I expect other LMS's should be able to?
• Create a link to the home page of your mini website from within the LMS. Again, this is built into Moodle. Do other LMS do this as well?

if your LMS can't handle simple zip files without the content packaging imsmanifest.xml file, then you can use the manifest maker extension for Dreamweaver, or the open-source Reload editor, which is slightly more complex to use but very powerful.

In Conclusion

If you're tempted to specify SCORM as a requirement for your elearning project, make sure you understand clearly which bits of SCORM are important to you, and why.

Further reading

Click2Learn's Brief Introduction to SCORM 1.2

ADL's The SCORM 1.2 Run-Time

Blog post: The King is dead, long live the King

Blog post: Looking for a learner support system

Except where otherwise noted, this content is
licensed under a Creative Commons License.

I've long been an advocate for separating content from courses, but Cathy Moore's comment on yesterday's post has stimulated me to be a bit more explicit about this.

Let's put ourselves in the position of the learner (always a good idea for a designer to do).

Now, this learner may be a novice in the subject, or may be fairly experienced. Since online learning is often intended for large audiences, we can almost guarantee there'll be a mixture of prior experience.

With the typical elearning course, the learner would be pointed to the start of the course, and given a sequential set of activities to do, supported by in-built resources.

The learner works through the course, and perhaps finds a couple of useful bits of information. That assumes they haven't fallen asleep or switched off. (BTW - Do you know anyone that has completed one of these typical page-turner courses. I certainly haven't!)

The next day, the learner needs or decides to put the ideas into practice. Now where were those useful bits of information? Probably embedded in page 17 of 32. But there's no way of finding it without walking through the whole course.

In a couple of months time, the learner, who is, by now reasonably confident in the subject, realises they need to find out about one particular aspect. They're sure the information is in one of their elearning courses, somewhere. But the only thing the LMS search engine can report on is the metadata attached to the course. It can't search inside the course itself.

So how is the learner expected to be able to find information outside the course?

The answer's simple. You have two options:

1. Build your course inside your information system, usually known as a content management system (CMS). This is how w3schools works. Each page in the tutorials is built within the CMS, and is thus searchable and individually addressable. You can work through sequentially, use the menu to jump to specific pages, or use the search engine to find specific information.
2. Build your courses separately from your information. Keep the information in the CMS, and build courses in your LMS.

Implications of separating course and content

1. You can't create an information resource and call it a course.
2. You may realise that simply creating materials for people to read is not always the best learning approach
3. You may start designing-in activities that require people to use the content, perhaps even while interacting with each other
4. You may realise that your learning management system (LMS) is not adequate as it's simply designed to deliver content in a sequence, and has no concept of activities.
5. You will need to ensure that learners can jump between course and content relatively seamlessly. This means providing mutual links from course to content and vice versa.

Implications of not separating course and content

1. Your information will be locked away inside courses
2. Your information will have far less impact
3. If you try to duplicate content inside both courses and an information system then you will end up with one version that is out-of-date
4. Your learners will only find information if they manage to get to the page in the course that it's on

Recommendations

1. If you have a CMS available, then use it as much as you can
2. If you haven't got a CMS, then get one. There are hundreds. But which one you choose will depend on your precise needs.
3. If your subject matter expert (SME) gives you a powerpoint to turn into a course, tell them to put it on the CMS first
4. Don't allow your course designers to embed information in their courses
5. Use your LMS to take people through learning activities
6. Get an LMS that provides flexibility in the activities you choose. Eg. Moodle

Further reading

Learning materials and content management systems
Looking for a learner support system

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licensed under a Creative Commons License.

... that assumes your clients are asking you to create some learning materials.

I know I've said in the past that Content is (not) King any more, and it's the platform that's the important thing. But we still need to provide centrally generated support for learners. That support usually takes the form of chunks of content which learners have to work through, often in a fixed order.

For a long time, I've worked with Moodle (a widely-used, open-source course management system). Moodle is built around the twin concepts of Activities and Resources.

Activities are things that learners do.

Resources are the things that learners use to help them do the Activities.

Tom Kuhlmann again hits the nail on the head in his recent post about Why Unlocking Your Course Navigation Will Create Better Learning. Read down, as there's a huge amount of useful advice in the article. But the bit that struck me was:

... Essentially, the course content is like the reference manual. The goal isn’t to get them to read all of the content. Instead, the goal is to get them to DO something. The content only supports the DOING.

Considering this, don’t design your course to navigate through content. Instead, create an environment where the learner has to demonstrate understanding of the content by doing something. By focusing on the desired action rather than the content, the learner’s better prepared to learn. The content is just a resource to help them gain understanding. When you lock access to the content, you’re actually hindering the learning process.

This fits very closely with Cathy Moore's Action Mapping approach to designing learning materials. It creates materials that are focussed on what you want people to be able to do. Which, in the workplace, is probably the most important thing we might want to change.