Flash For Learning

Summary: If you want the all open source (for reals) SCORM 2.0 to address something in particular, get it in a white paper to LETSI by August 15.

LETSI, Learning Education Training Systems Interoperability, the international, nonprofit federation dedicated to improving individual and organizational learning, has taken on the task of developing the next generation of SCORM, the Sharable Content Object Reference Model. As part of this initiative, LETSI is soliciting White Papers from all stakeholders interested in shaping the future direction of SCORM and the implementation of learning systems technology.

Stakeholders in all parts of the education and training world are invited to submit White Papers concerning the technical and pedagogical requirements for future learning systems interoperability. The deadline for submission is August 15, 2008. The open solicitation was announced May 28th, 2008 at the SCORM Technical Working Group meeting, hosted by the Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative in Alexandria, VA.

The development of the next SCORM, the Sharable Content Object Reference Model, has been tasked to LETSI, a new international federation for Learning-Education-Training Systems Interoperability. LETSI’s goal is to advance innovation and adoption of learning technology across all market sectors and to support the use of open software standards in learning technology.

Open standards reduce life cycle costs and risks, and promote innovation. SCORM allows content developed in one system to be shared and fully functional within any other SCORM-conformant system. SCORM has been successfully used to develop sharable content in self-paced military training; automobile sales force training; healthcare professional re-certification; K-12 after-school tutoring in South Korea; and many other types of e-learning applications. Over the last decade, SCORM has become the de facto international software standard for learning systems interoperability.

SCORM 2.0 will include specifications and standards created and managed using open, transparent processes that are not encumbered by patents, licenses or restrictions that would impinge on its availability to the global LET community. LETSI will create an open source software community to support SCORM adopters and product developers. LETSI itself does not develop the component standards that go into SCORM.

“Given the demands for harmonization across international technical learning standards, Core SCORM will be based on unencumbered open standards to maximize market growth and global adoption and implementation.” — Paul Jesukiewicz, Deputy Director, Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative.

Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative (ADL), which has been the advocate and steward of the first ten years of SCORM’s development, will continue to support the SCORM community and will maintain the current version, SCORM 2004, 3rd Edition. LETSI was formed by the ADL and eleven other organizations to provide an international, balanced, open forum for SCORM development and to harmonize activity across the diverse communities that are investing in learning technology: public education, higher education, for-profit education, military training, professional development/certification, corporate training, and on-the-job performance support.

To accommodate these diverse market needs, SCORM 2.0 will have two components:

1. A general reference model, Core SCORM, based on widely adopted, accredited learning technology standards that support basic interoperability.
2. Additional components that support broadly applicable LET functionality and instructional capabilities based on specifications that are not yet standards.

SCORM 2.0 will have a modular, extensible architecture that will allow specific communities of practice to adapt and extend the model with functionality and innovations that are important for their particular situation (e.g., a new medical simulation standard or aviation-industry specific metadata). LETSI will play the leadership role in publicizing such extensions and will consider them for future inclusion in SCORM.

In mid-October, LETSI will host a 3-day SCORM 2.0 Workshop where participants will discuss alternative future learning technology solutions. The results will be incorporated in the next release of SCORM, which LETSI will announce at year’s end. It is expected that new products that are SCORM 2.0 conformant will begin to appear in late 2009.

LETSI is sponsored by a dozen organizations with commitments to SCORM and to the development of open learning technology standards. LETSI is organized as a program under the IEEE Industry Standards and Technology Organization. For more information about LETSI, please visit: http://www.letsi.org.

LETSI’s White Paper Solicitation is available here.

For more information about the white paper solicitation and the SCORM 2.0 Workshop, visit: http://www.letsi.org/SCORM2/

Anyone hear about Adobe’s Open Screen Project? Well, good news if this is the first you’re hearing about it:

Basically, what’s happened is that Adobe wants Flash on as many screens and devices as possible. To do that, they’re pretty much COMPLETELY OPENING UP THE PLATFORM. What does “completely opening up the platform” actually mean?

• Removing restrictions on the use of the SWF and FLV/F4V specifications
• Publishing the device porting layer APIs for Adobe Flash Player
• Removing license fees – making next major releases of Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR for devices free
• Publishing the Adobe Flash Cast protocol and AMF protocol for robust data services

So what does this have to do with learning? I think it’s going to have a huge impact on creating all sorts of learning applications (content engines and assessment tools) that can play on lots of different devices. I think when you start rolling integrated content tools into your Learning Management Systems (if you really need to track the experience), the ability to throw in Flash Remoting via AMF becomes a VERY easy way to just track using methods that Flash developers know how to do — without the encumberance of necessary web services or JavaScript or whatever else. Adding to that — most organizations embrace Flash because it deploys the same regardless of browser… now imagine a world a few years from now where Flash deploys the same regardless of mobile device.

I’m glad I plunked down the cash for CS3….

A thought just occurred to me, and I hope it spurs some discussion from the Flash coders that are among us.

So OpenDocument Format is an approved ISO standard for Office-type documents, including spreadsheets. In fact, ISO is in the process of moving the standard forward to version 1.2, where it’s expected that tables will be supported in the presentations created in ODF.

Lots of us who build custom courses are using our own XML Schema to fill-in the content of Flash-based online courses. But… what if a bunch of us used the same format for our XML? A little over a year ago, some of us got together via the os-flash.org project for “Edumatic” and after a couple of very nice “how do you do?” emails, it plain died. I was reminded of its existence yesterday when I got my automated notice about my subscription to the newsgroup in my email.

But back then, we were talking about how do we even write the XML format so it’s the same. Well… we have an open standard that’s not only approved and maintained internationally… but it’s freaking FREE. So here’s my thinking:

There’s no shortage of tools that can create an ODF presentation (OpenOffice.org and NeoOffice on the Mac are but a few). But Google is supporting ODF, also with their online GoogleDocs application. So the authoring tools are there. We just need a common way to support them.

That’s where some Flash scripting and graphic/multimedia design moxy comes in. Imagine a workflow where anyone can author the learning content anywhere on free-to-use tools that are also easy to use (in other words, not much change management needed to do it). Then with a little scripting savvy, a developer simply takes the ODF export of the presentation, uses it to populate a course and makes the tweaks required (goal state: none) to put it into an LMS.

Now you have an incredibly fast way to take the abundance of content in your organization and put it into a digestible format for online learning in current systems.

So if you’ve read this far, the next question is… who’s interested? Because this is definitely not a one-man job.

“We’re still trying to figure out what the questions are.”

Accenture had an opportunity for Mobile Learning. The Business need they had was to increase the speed and ease of uptake of corporate required training by senior executives. They also needed to provide important information at the moment of need.

Fortunately, they have a receptive audience that would benefit from and use a mobile approach to training. Mobile devices for their senior executives are enabling technologies. Senior executives make up a large population of our mobile device users.

• January 2007 = 6,000; October 2007 = 14,000

The Future Scenario:

1. The SE receives email aobut required training on their mobile device just before heading to the airport.
2. SE selects the “myLearning mobile solution” option for this training from her mobile device.
3. myLearning automatically enrolls the SE in the course and the SE has access to the mobile training course
4. SE takes a 15-20 minute segment of training and successfully completes an assessment en route to the airport.

Obstacles:

• Flash not supported as it needs to on mobile
• LMS Communication issues
• Configuration issues with the broad span of devices that need to be supported (dozens with different OSs)

Accenture decided to pilot it with a 12-screen prototype, intentionally selecting 12 screens that would present a challenge porting from their E-Learning to mobile. The decision to do this rather than designing from the ground up was intentional, as SEs wanted an experience that was as close to traditional E-Learning as possible. Accenture started in-house with a live demo with a very small population, and then they went remote for a pilot. Both groups came back and said they’d use it (about 90% in each group) when asked — stating they had a “better than expected” experience with the prototype.

Phase 1: Prototype

• Goals
  • Develop small prototype
  • Test with SE
  • Refine future scenario
• Key Research
  • Audience reaction
  • Insight on mobile technology
  • User interaction design considerations and trade-offs
• Content Interaction Definition
  • Ten minutes of content from existing ethics course
  • Simple text and graphics
  • Two types of interactions: multiple choice and fill-in-the-blank

Phase 2: Field Testing

• Goals
  • Develop a full Ethics course on a mobile device (no LMS interaction)
  • Test with a broader audience
• Key Research
  • Audience reaction and insight use of mobile devices
  • user interaction and design considerations
  • Preliminary infrastructure research

Phase 3: Infrastructure (including LMS integration for the first time)

• Goals
  • Develop LMS integration for mobile training delivery
  • Create a seamless experience from notification and enrollment on through to completion
• Key Research
  • Enrollment and completion communication to the LMS

Phase 4: Rollout

• Goals
  • Expand Accenture’s mobile learning asset catalog
  • Increase the richness of the user experience
• Key Research
  • Determine how to make the user experience better

Effective Design

Elements of effective designa nd usability of a mobile learning solution:

• Refreshable content
• Appropriate chunking of focused content
• Concise writing
• Effective and logical navigation
• Simple graphics

Good morning. I just logged into Google Reader and read up on a New York Times article discussing how iPods are being used in one middle school to help bilingual students with limited English skills to sharpen vocabulary and grammar.

One district is even giving out 300 iPods in its schools a part of an experiment to revitalize its underfunded (and one can assume underperforming) urban school system. The funniest part for me (big cynic that I am) is that the district mentioned would seem to be using No Child Left Behind as a rationale for going to this measure, as under NCLB four of the twelve schools in the district have been identified as needing improvement, and the schools argue that it’s largely because not enough bilingual students can pass the state reading and math tests.

At the Games, Learning and Society conference, there was much discussion of co-opting entertainment mediums for educational purposes. James Gee, in his opening keynote, talked about how Pokemon, YuGiOh and Magic have these insanely intricate rules as card games that employ the kind of technical wizardry, lateral-thinking skills and mastery of process to properly execute a custom deck — and these skills are being adopted by six year-olds — but schools struggle to get kids to comprehend knowledge about physical science and mathematics that aren’t nearly as technically complicated as the games kids are playing. Gee posited that the solution was for schools to start subverting these entertainment mediums because they’re teaching more complex and engaging skills than the traditional curriculum.

The iPod use in this article isn’t nearly as complex, but I like that someone is ditching the rules of established paradigm to actually solve a problem. I hope it proves effective as part of a larger strategy.

So I’ve dabbled with the podcasting thing before, both here and on my family blog. Last week, since some friends of mine are heading into Chicago to attend a music festival with me, I began a podcast where I put on an hour-long radio show featuring music. The subject matter is pretty contained: I don’t talk tech, I don’t wax politic (at least not overtly) — I only talk about the music being played and any anecdotes related to the song, both historical and personal, since I’m kind of a music buff. If you’re curious, you can check it out. I can share how I put it together in comments or offline.

I emailed all of my friends and acquaintences. Maybe 200+ people (I have a lot of actual friends). And of that number, only six people seem to have signed up. Instead of handling the feed myself as I would have using podPress for WordPress, I signed up for FeedBurner, which provides stats on my podcast — who’s signing up via email vs. iTunes vs. Other, how many clicks back to the site have there been, how many downloads of the .mp3 files, etc. But 6 out of 200 is only 3%. I would have thought I’d get better results.

Then a friend of mine called me up yesterday, about a week after I first launched the podcast. She didn’t know what the whole podcasting thing was about, and was confused. So I made my friends a video on how to add my podcast to iTunes, now perhaps better understanding that while most of my oldest friends own iPods… they may never have downloaded a podcast. It might sound weird to this audience, but just think of it as an adoption challenge I didn’t see coming.

I sent the video to my friends, and the numbers the next day? They went DOWN.

Maybe it’s just a bad podcast. Don’t know. But as long as I have my six regular listeners, I’ll keep doing it.