Flash For Learning

I’m beginning to love the challenges of this new job.� I hope the love affair lasts.

There’s a couple of things I’m digging about the new job.� One is that the more strategic role I have in the� new job’s� Learning Center provides me with the opportunity to blog professionally again.� When I’m thinking through some of the issues I’m working through (content life cycle strategy, repository management, rapid learning development, aligning learning objectives to business performance goals, etc), it helps a lot to have a place to journal.� Hopefully, my sharing helps other learning, training and performance peers (and peeps, yo) that are in the same spot as me, or even further down the long tail.

So yesterday I was assigned as the “designer” on two courses currently in the last throes of review.� What that means in this scenario is that I have to review the content as both an ISD and as a technical reviewer, making sure that the content works as intended.� We don’t have a process defined for this kind of review.� We don’t have specific criteria defined to base a review on.� We don’t have a format in which feedback from such a review should be in.� We don’t have post-review actions defined.� It’s not like this team has never reviewed courses for delivery before.� It’s just not a clean and consistent (or necessarily understood) methodology for producing consistent quality training.

Guess who’s job it is to set the process in place and get the stakeholders in such a process to take ownership of it? :)� I love it.� It’s a good challenge.� It’s a good place to see impact, both positive and negative, of what I’m bringing to the table.� I think it will be pretty validating (or a really powerful gut-check, but let’s be optimistic).

Admittedly, I was never interested much in process, or quality measures and things like that.� But I never understood the impact of QA like I do right now.� So, I’m going to start with what I know and rely on the better practices I saw at CTC (and specifically ADL, which has probably the strongest quality process I’ve ever seen).� The first thing I can do with minimal buy-in necessary is on the tech side.� I need to define a consistent methodology for tracking bugs and defects in these projects that can be shared, archived and searched quickly and easily.� So I’m going to evaluate BugZilla on my own this weekend, and if anyone has ideas on other tools that can be pretty much off-the-shelf, please comment on this post.� I can certainly build my own php/mysql bug tracking solution that will be adequate enough, but it’d sure save me some time if I didn’t have to build it.

Basically, what I need is to be able to track each page/screen of a content object, as well as global issues relating to the content object as a whole.� The range of issues can be technical (e.g. content not initializing the SCORM API) to grammatical issues to instructional (e.g. the branching of a given scenario needs to be redefined).� I also need to be able to organize people either around a tool, or customize the tool use around the QA team’s roles.

A must is a way to integrate into content so that each page can launch a contextually relevant feedback form, so any reviewer can enter and view tickets related to the current screen.

Someone has to own up to the lowly fate of the open-source project I launched with Alan Schultz at MAX 2005, and that somene will have to be me. I failed the project. I failed the community that might have been interested in it. I’m a very bad man.

Actually, I’m a very busy man. Since the launch of the SCORM 1.2/2004 API Wrapper last year, I’ve moved from PA to Chicago, and switched jobs in Chicago already. That’s less than a year, actually. So if you wouldn’t mind cutting me a little bit of slack, I’d appreciate it.

It’s not just me that let us all down, either. Alan left CTC not long after I did, and he hasn’t returned to the world of E-Learning since then. I don’t think he’s going to — he’s got a sweet gig. We also didn’t garner a lot of support in the open-source developer community to find champions to pick up the cause. So in the last couple of months, when developers are desperately looking for answers about working with SCORM and Flash, I’ve had a few comments on the blog, and they all seem to indicate that there are some interoperability issues with SCORM 2004, which will likely never be addressed by me. Mea culpa.

So what should you do if you’re in a jam and looking for one API wrapper that just… works? Talk to Mike Rustici of Rustici Software about the http://www.scorm.com/products/scormdriver.aspxSCORM Driver. It’s, with no doubt, exactly what I was hoping to accomplish by the SCORM 1.2/2004 API Wrapper. Except his is easy to use… and it just works.

I’ve been absent from this site for a while, even after I promised I would be more active. My apologies. My professional life got a bit bizarre right around the same time I joined Edumatic. Basically, I started having insane workloads that compelled me to put in well over 80 hours a week for about 12 weeks in a row, so much suffered. One of the results of such a workload is that I’m now in a new job (a manufacturing and tool supply company) as their E-Learning Strategist. Increased responsibilities, but a bit more time to work on things. I’m optomisitic that my quantity and quality of writing on this site will improve.

Since I’ve been so deep in the technical development of E-Learning content for the past six years, I’ve really neglected the Instructional Design considerations. And while there are a lot of us who are building content without the benefit of dedicated ISDs (or even without any formal background in Education, Job Performance or Training), I think most developers would agree that when someone with vision and real knowledge takes the time to think and plan learning content before building it, everyone involved ends up the better for it. So, there’s my shout out to the ISD crowd, and thus I’ll begin my discussion on strategy.

I’ve been reading a few books on ISD to get my gut instincts more attuned to the instructional direction we as a community of practice is heading:

• Bonk and Graham’s Handbook of Blended Learning: Global Perspectives, Local Designs
• Aldrich’s Learning by Doing: A Comprehensive Guide to Simulations, Computer Games and Pedagogy in E-Learning and other Educational Experiences
• Quinn’s Engaging Learning
• Rosenberg’s Beyond E-Learning

I’m on board with the “blended learning” approach (I guess that’s what we’re calling it). I’ve always been. I’m sure it would come as a shock to some that as tech-nerdy as I am, I’m pretty anti-computer when it comes to education and training because so much (especially SCORM) has been focused on individualized job performance training that it’s taken all the upper levels of Bloom’s taxonomy out of the picture. For the past four years, the bulk of what I’ve developed has been at Level 1 or 0 on a scale for 5 for interactivity (and I tie levels of interactivity to the rubric Bloom uses).

So basing my thoughts here roughly on Bloom and on Engaging Learning, here’s what I’m thinking:

• Level 0 Activities
• I call them Presentation activities.
• I would tie them in Bloom’s world to Knowledge.
• Level 1 Activities
• I call them Exploration activities.
• I would tie them in Bloom’s world to Comprehension.
• Level 2 Activities
• I call them Decision activities.
• I would tie them in Bloom’s world to Application.
• Level 3 Activities
• I call them Condition activities (I need to come up with a better word).
• I would tie them in Bloom’s world to Analysis.
• Level 4 Activities
• I call them Integration activities.
• I would tie them in Bloom’s world to Synthesis.
• Level 5 Activities (this extends the model in Quinn’s Engaging Learning)
• I call them Contribution activities.
• I would tie them to Bloom’s Evaluation.

If anyone’s interested, I’ll post more and expand on how I’m envisioning this model for interactivity.