• SCORM 2.0 Content Authoring Standards & Services
• Engagement, Collaboration and Community in SCORM 2.0

1. Trying to take on too much by doing innovation by committee instead of codifying exemplars of best practice.
2. Working behind closed doors.
3. Losing the “vision.”

• Evolution - SCORM looks like relatively the same animal as before. It has the about the same scope and it solves very similar problems, but perhaps in new and innovative ways.
  
  
• Revolution - SCORM is a new beast entirely. It tackles new problems, increases the scope or completely changes the conceptual model.

There are at least two ideas I’ve had brewing that I’d like to write a white paper on, but I probably won’t have the gumption in me to finish both of them by myself by August 15. I’m posting them here in the hopes that you or someone you know might be interested in collaborating on a white paper topic through helping edit, research, add some other ideas and/or even to help write.

I think there are many people who feel a little nervous about the idea of writing a whole paper on their own. I’d feel a lot more comfortable myself if someone else thought I had a decent idea before I submitted it.

So if you’re interested in either of these ideas, let me know. I’m going to really try to draft up a brain dump on these topics by the beginning of next week, and we can take a stab at collaborating through Google Docs or the web 1.0 way of emailing Word Docs as an attachment.

My interests…

• Exposing a content authoring feature as a service to support subject matter experts and user-generated content, resulting in XML with media attachments packaged that can be “skinned” according to LMS-administered settings for organizational presentation rules.

  • DITA has a schema proposed for Learning and Training content.

  • Having E-Learning content that validates to the same schema helps with interoperability.

  • A standardized content authoring platform allows user-generated content to conform to organizational norms.

  • Separating out the “content” from the “presentation layer” allows organizations to control the presentation of interoperable content.

  • A market for LMS or service vendors opens up to compete on the strenth of the user-experience in authoring such content.

  • Services are already proposed to package content for SCORM “from the cloud.”

• Expose a service for tagging content (a la del.icio.us) and elevating the relevance of content (a la Digg/Pligg) to engage a community of learners to both assist in the metadata collection on content.

  • Metadata is still important, even if the implementation has been crap to this point.

  • Elevating the relevance of specific content over others in a repository helps with connecting to talent management systems, automated intelligent tutoring agents, etc.

  • Martin Ebner helped spark this specific idea and has agreed to help, but there’s room for a couple more collaborators if there’s interest on this topic.

But what about the audience? Don’t THEY have a responsibility to themselves as active participants, even in asynchronous learning?

I point this out because a friend of mine (IRL - “In Real Life”) directed me to a website another buddy of his put together to share his lessons learned from smoking meat — barbecuing for long periods of time using smoke (hence “smoking”).

Here’s the link, but what’s striking to me is what happens after the jump:

Gary explains his rationale for the pledge:

What’s that? Terms seem a bit harsh? Well, here’s why I insist that you follow the 5-Step program as written before going off on your own. The 5-Step program is not so much about cooking any particular meat as it is about learning fire and smoke control. Once you understand that, you have the skills to cook any kind of meat. But it’s been my experience, from both cooking and being a member of BBQ oriented mailing lists (listservs) for the past 8 years, that when newbies try to mix and match advice from different sources, disaster is just around the corner. I am by no means saying that my way with the WSM is the only way. But I’ve found, without a doubt, that if one follows all 5 steps straight through they gain a damn good understanding of how to use the WSM—and will have learned how to prepare four different meats and enjoyed five damn good meals in the process, which is hardly a high price to pay for keeping your ego in check and following orders at the very beginning. Once you have the basics down, it’s fairly easy to cook BBQ better than 99.9% of all BBQ restaurants, and you are invited, heck encouraged, to do whatever you want after that point. But for your first five cooks, follow the program exactly—or don’t start it at all, and spend years screwing around and trying to figure out what went wrong, like I did.

I think the statement speaks for itself, but I’ll share my analysis anyway: You have a subject matter expert here, sharing lessons learned through lots of trial and error. There’s context, there’s relevance, there’s humor and personality — it’s good learning.

Thoughts?

I’ve been compiling them over the past couple of days, but if you have a question, PLEASE leave it as a comment on this thread or twitter me (mrch0mp3rs) today.

Here’s some of my questions:

• A bedrock of the arguments presented in Free Agent Nation and A Whole New Mind seems to be an enabling force in Johnny Bunko: that as a nation “…we create greater wealth, deliver more and better goods and services, and positively kick butt on innovation.” (Reason Magazine, 2001) I think there are lot of people who would agree with that statement.But in the context of a large disparity of wealth so large that by just one measure, “top executives averaged $10.8 million in total compensation, over 364 times the pay of the average American worker, a calculation based on data from an Associated Press survey of 386 Fortune 500 companies…” (Fair Economy, 2007), can that same wealth generated by the US as a nation also be disabling for US workers? If so, how can American workers (knowledge workers or otherwise) mitigate or reconcile the lessons from Johnny Bunko?
• The lessons expressed (and certainly the story) in Johnny Bunko focuses mainly on knowledge workers. There are a lot of “blue collar” workers in the GenX/GenY/Millenial audience that Johnny Bunko is written for. For people working a retail, manufacturing job, how can these lessons be actualized? And if these aren’t the lessons for hands-on or front-line workers, then what lessons should these people adopt?
• Your books all address the GenX/GenY/Millenial audience as they are entering or already are in the workforce. The secondary audience seems to be everyone else, which in the corporate but non-tech company world, is a demographic that Millenials by and large reports to. There is a wealth of information about how GenX/GenY prefers to work, what they value, etc. There is little information for my managers on how to manage me. If Johnny Bunko can teach me about how to approach my career, what can managers learn about how to manage me?
• Online learning has opened the doors to a broader population of students, but the business of online education is in decline, as stock prices for American Intercontinental University and University of Phoenix are in steep decline and have been for the past year or two. Where online universities are booming are in the traditional brick and mortar universities which establish online programs, such as Pepperdine’s doctoral programs in Education. At the same time that the knowledge is being released for free, like MIT, Berkeley and Harvard classes shared via iTunes; the college textbook industry is consolidating, concentrating in print which runs up the cost of college texts while at the same time placing DRM on the online “courses” they publish for the online portals of institutions. Do you think there is a danger to innovation by the concentration of “official” media and by the restriction of its use?

Second, there’s SO MUCH I want to write about concerning IMS and their passive aggressive overtures towards open licensing with Creative Commons and the on-again/off-again romance with SCORM (right now it’s off again), but there’s a lot of drama and it keeps changing, so I can’t really write to it without sounding like a guy with way too much time on his hands. And it has never been my intention to be the “Comic Book Guy” of the E-Learning world. So I’m sorry to Philip and others for being silent on this subject — there’s a lot of marrow to boil out of this stew yet.

Third, I hope you’ve been enjoying the ActionScript 3.0 stuff I’ve been tossing up here. There’s more coming.

There are a couple of peers blogging who are fairly regular readers (and when the FFL discussion list is active, they also chime in), so I make it a point to follow what they do. One of those guys is Philip Hutchinson who I think writes very well in all things meta concerning E-Learning. Philip’s most recent post to Pipwerks is his take on choosing authoring tools for E-Learning, and I can’t find a single thing I disagree with in his post.

Most eLearning tools do not promote the creation of effective courses, do not promote web standards, and do not promote accessibility; they merely make cookie-cutter course development easier for technically inexperienced course developers.

I agree. Most of the authoring tools I’ve seen port right to Flash. I love Flash. It’s done me and my family well for many years now. But it’s not the most open of formats. It’s also not the most flexible of formats. It’s just about impossible to do anything with the published Flash content that any of the popular E-Learning tools on the market. And if you ever want to talk about reusability, there’s just about no easy-bake oven method available to make published Flash content look like something other than what it was published as unless you know a lot about the underlying code in the compiled file. Sure, the textual content of tools like Articulate is all extracted into XML, and theoretically you could use that XML as a basis to reformat content in a different medium, but again that work is highly prohibitive — as are any of the alternatives that actually work with web standards (at least the ones that might be released in the market today).

Philip writes more…

…not being tied to a particular tool or proprietary format means that practically anyone with general web development experience will be able to make edits to your course or even create new courses using your system. Millions of people around the world work with HTML, and hundreds of thousands work with JavaScript. I’m willing to bet that the number of people familiar with proprietary eLearning development tools is much smaller, probably numbering in the thousands. It’s a niche.

Okay, here’s where we part ways a little bit, I guess. Philip is absolutely correct that the shear number of “web developers” of which “E-Leanring developers” might be a subset in that they mingle in some of the same technologies is about, maybe, a 10,000:1 ratio. I’m not disputing that working with web standards wouldn’t significantly improve the likelihood of making revisions and edits faster and cheaper, let alone the opportunities for re-use.

I’d argue, though, that one of the reasons why authoring tools like Articulate, Captivate, Raptivity, Lectora, FlashForm, Adobe Presenter (we can go on) are so popular is specifically because, as Philip also writes…

…They’re geared towards users with little or no development expertise. Yes, they’re geared towards the PowerPoint crowd.

Couple that fact that learning, education and training budgets are smaller than just about every other department, at least in corporate America — and that’s if budgets for training even exist, and the likelihood of attracting and maintaining (or even contracting) qualified talent to work with tools from scratch make it prohibitive to work with what I call low-level authoring tools like Flash (as a tool) or Dreamweaver (as a tool) or even Textpad to produce standards-compliant HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

The trick is that these people will use a great authoring tool if it’s easy to use, and the use of any authoring tool is likely to be a trap in and of itself, because the designers and the engineers of a tool have their own assumptions about the nuances like class and id names in CSS — it’s still going to be difficult to translate this into reuse. And if you’re not talking about reusability, now that you’re going with CSS and JavaScript, you now have to contend with possibly making sure it presents and functions correctly across browsers, which was one of the biggest strengths for Flash-based platforms from jump.

And we’re still talking about single authors using tools, which works great if you’re a one-person army building E-Learning. But I know on my team, we’re already running into some pretty glaring issues of source portability with tools like Articulate, where we want to collaborate and have multiple people authoring — but have issues of losing our audio or embedded media paths, versioning, etc. If we want to discuss collaborative authoring, none of your big, popular authoring tools really cut the mustard (though I’m curious what Adobe and maybe Articulate has cooking in this regard).

So What’s the Answer?

Well, there is no one right answer at the moment for weening off the PowerPoint-to-Flash model, but I’ve heard about some interesting things from Eduworks. Robby Robson has been heavily involved with standards organizations from before I got into E-Learning and has brought up some interesting ideas in conversations over the last year that make me think they’re thinking about solutions for standards-based content development in the E-Learning realm.

There’s also a nifty open-source project called eXe that amazingly runs on both Mac, Linux and Windows, and purports to publish content as standards-compliant HTML, CSS and JavaScript. I don’t know if I’d say it’s ready for primetime, but it’s promising that there’s an open source tool that runs on all platforms and may get to being as user-friendly as any other given authoring tool.

My point is that Philip is absolutely correct that if we keep using the same authoring tools, we’re going to eventually be limited by design implications inherent in the technical constraints of the tools that we choose to use. The more flexible a tool is, the greater skill is needed to wield it.

But no matter what, to get to making it easier to edit or adapt learning content, we need to get out of published Flash to do that — and, oh by the way, we need to make the experience collaborative to take advantage of efficiencies that can be gained by having multiple contributors to projects and integrating QA into the workflow.

As Philip suggests, moving towards web standards should make all this much easier to do, but it will be the authoring tool, and not the technologies themselves, that will get corporate learning, education and training to jump to it.

Here’s my not-so-scientific report:

E-Learning is by far more popular in searches, though the volume of searches definitely has dropped from 2004 (which we can discuss by itself ad nauseum as far as reasons why people are searching less for E-Learning). But in 2007, in particular, the notion of “Performance Support” has gained much more buzz in news references. Now, this can mean a lot of things, but the fact that E-Learning never makes a blip in the news probably says something, too.

As we make E-Learning smaller and more granular… are we naturally evolving a model of instruction to something more like Performance Support?

By the way — as an interesting post-script to this, the top 10 regions, in order, who are literally looking for Performance Support, are…

1. South Korea
2. India
3. Singapore
4. Australia
5. Taiwan
6. United Kingdom
7. Canada
8. United States
9. Netherlands
10. China

Anyone want to take a stab at how employee productivity by nation matches up with this ranking for a search?

With learning content so similar in every technical way to web content, the same rules apply, but as with everything in our trade, it’s got a little bit of a twist to it.

Keep reading for an example of real action items from a cursory review of existing content being modified for a new version of the learning content. So no context is really needed here. I’m revising a course I built last year for the same internal client. Here’s the notes I took down of the high-level changes that need to be addressed.

It goes on and on for about 20+ rows, I won’t retype it all… you can view it here if you really want to. Of the changes spelled out, I’ve identified about three of them as “Critical” — these are the ones that will take the most time to produce, require the most “design” to get the message right, have the highest potential to need more rework because the presentation of the information can be so subjective and they have the most ambiguity. To the client and the project manager, these represent maybe 20% of the changes I need to make, but they’ll probably take about 400% of the time it will take me for all the other changes combined.

See, each change is equally weighted to the client, the subject matter expert and/or the project manager. But on the design and production side of things, we know that there are some tasks that take considerably more resources than others. The degree to which project managers “get it right” weighs heavily on their understanding of what things take more or less effort than others.

There’s another side to it, though. That 20% I’m talking about — a lot of it is playing right into my weak spots, which is visual design. I know a lot of graphic designers who dabble in Flash enough to be dangerous, and I know that many more technically brilliant people who can’t make something pretty enough for them to look at themselves (you know who you are). I’m a jack of both trades but a master of none, which is where I’ll bet a lot of you readers are, too.

I guess I’m not sure what this all means, but it occurred to me on the train this morning that as tensions ride high in project management of learning technology projects, one of the core reasons has to be how each team member weighs the level of effort on a given task — and that’s probably a good place to start having conversations about developing and designing E-Learning with your team. In other words, what does it take to build x? Because there’s nothing to technically building a simple click activity for a timeline… but if you want it to look right, consistent with the interface and the content — it may take a level of effort far beyond the basics of slapping the pieces together or using Articulate Engage. You may draft out the interface for about five hours for a 30-second piece of content, and only the last draft you make is useful.

And… it still might not be “right.”

If you’ve downloaded the Plug-in Technology Example, which demonstrates the code and the activity you can employ to create both Flash and Director-based content objects — that’s the handiwork that Kraig and I worked on in our first months of working together. Kraig, who worked on the Director team for Macromedia, is a pretty nifty dude and he took his experience working with SCORM to a whole other level by creating a full-fledged library for use with Lingo (or any other language) to easily access whatever he wanted through SCORM.

Then… Kraig got really crafty and started on a path of hardcore Sequencing and Navigation strategies back when it was even more obtuse than it is now (before 2nd Edition of SCORM 2004). He also built this content engine in Director that uses XML to populate it… much like a lot of Flash developers do to create E-Learning. Except Kraig’s doing with with Director.

So for those of you still down with Director (which Adobe is still developing), check this article out. It’s also a good read for those of you looking to construct your own template engine with Flash, at least from an architectural perspective.