Flash For Learning

I posted how much I was impressed with Doug Lynch from Wharton School of Business… thanks again to Elliot Masie for making these great videos available.

I admit it, I’ve been a big fan of Dan Pink since the book came out. Masie just posted the very well-produced video of his keynote at the Learning 2007 conference.

Interesting, INTERESTING brain dump from Elliott Masie on “Talent 2.0.”

One of the things Don Tapscott (Wikinomics) was very passionate about yesterday was about the future of talent management and retention. Elliott shared some pretty radical but insanely genius points that I’m sure he’s collected from a host of people over the conference.

What if your company had a hiring model where you weren’t trying to hold onto people for 30 years? What if you only tried to hold onto workers for three years and embraced the fact that your talent will leave… learn more… and come back — probably several times in the span of their careers? What if instead of hoarding all the big learning events for managers, your company made it a policy to on-board your workers with a very advanced set of skills and certifications that are transferable throughout your organization and others, like LEAN/Six Sigma, PMBOK, PMP, BABOK and so on? What if you profited from your workers wanting to leave, by contracting them out to your business partners, clients, competitors or even organizations in different verticals than your company’s? What if not only your organization was known for its products or its customer service… but that your model of employee development could become a profit center? What if your company kept up with what your alumni workers were doing and maintained relationships with them to return to your company as consultants, contractors or even clients?

The big thing is that no one really knows what’s going to work in the coming shifts in the demographics of the workforce. No one really knows how well the methods employed in learning and development work NOW. But there are ideas floating around that paint a picture. I’m going to be reading a lot more on this topic, because I find it fascinating, provocative and most of all, truthy.

You could hear a pin drop this entire Learning 2007 conference if you were trying to have conversations about LCMSs. In other words, no one was talking about it other than me. Lance Dublin, whom I admire a lot, led a session on implementation and lumped the LCMS and LMS in the same bucket, but everyone was talking LMSs. LCMSs? Nada, zilch, zip, nein!

So, by a nifty mistake, I ended up in a Learning Consortium meeting instead of the 10 Years of SCORM meeting I had planned to show up to. I sat with Judy Brown and Rovy Brannon from the ADL Academic Co-Lab at University of Wisconsin, and at 8:30 in the morning on the last day of the conference, it became a very intimate open discussion with Elliott Masie, instead of the guided activity to collect themes for the next year of the Consortium.

I addressed the elephant in the room and asked Elliott why no one was talking LCMSs this year when last year we were beaten over the head with it. His reply was honest and maybe a bit surprising.

Elliott told me that an LCMS purchase right now has about a 30-month lifespan, because the real shifts in the tools learning organizations will use will be in powerful Talent Management systems and powerful Content Systems (not solely learning content or authoring tools), because there is a shift more and more towards immediate knowledge, which means that the traditional e-learning as we do it will be supplemented more and more with our broad spectrum of documents (excel, word, powerpoint stuff within what we currently call a document management system). Elliott suggested this is because the search and retrieval features of document management will significantly improve.

Now, Elliott did tell me that it’s not a bad idea to turn on an LCMS because of the workflow benefits we can gain and the way in which it, as a tool, will support standard quality of content… but his caveat was that we should know going in that in three years or so it will probably be outmoded because of the leaps in both technology and the necessary shifts in talent management that will make the top-down management of content too time-taking and too laborious to do. In other words, “rapid” will get “rapid-er.”

So as “learning content” changes in its form, its authors are going to be spread throughout the organization. I think an LCMS is useful for the reasons Masie described, but in the planning for my organization, I need to organize the change management issues related to shifting our Instructional Designers into learning content producers and then, eventually, learning content specialists consulting with the rest of the organization which will do the authoring. That’s a very distinct set of change issues that is related but not necessarily coupled with change management dealing with the LCMS.

When I think about this distinction, I think the LCMS isn’t such a big deal for my organization to handle… and the change around the roles, communication chains and workflow in our future are going to be much more difficult if we’re not very clear about the change we want to create and understand the impacts on all of us and the clients inside the company we serve…

Basic Approach:

• Conceptions of learning and human nature matter
• We tend to adopt one or more of three common sets of conceptions
• There are basic tensions and questions raised by these sets
• It’s worth struggling with these questions

Conceptions of Learning:

• Behaviorist
  • Selection of behavior by educator
  • Pursuit of individual satisfaction
• Cognitivist
  • Mental representations mediate
  • Active learning toward genuine understanding, like a scientist
• Sociocultural
  • Tools & systems beyond the lone thinker
  • Humans embedded in social applications

I’ll forego much of the discussion of Behaviorism and Cognitivism because they’re pretty well-known. Learning isn’t something that an individual does — it’s something that a whole system does. Reading uses a number of different tools. There are heuristics attached — teaching kids to read isn’t about putting something in the kid’s head that wasn’t there before — it’s about filling in the gap in the system that enables them to do something they weren’t able to do before.

People are essentially social, where others fill-in the gaps. People only function in environments where they have the tools to function — maps, communication tools, etc.

Does it matter if people “genuinely understand” as long as they get the behavior right? One answer belies a cognitive slant — that given the right information and the right environmental variables, it’s still up to the individual to be able to make the right decisions. The other answer is hard-nosed, “the result is all that matters” model of performance.

At a meta-level, we need to treat people as cognitivists… but as an organization, we need to be behaviorists. Over a long enough timespan, behaviorists believe that a dumb, rigid process selects and reinforces things naturally. In the case of intrinsic motivations, though, behaviorism can subvert the things that cognitivists nurture and take away the performance unless there is the motivation to follow it.

Can others choose the direction of learning, or should people explore? There’s no solid answer one way or the other on this. Which is why sociocultural approaches may make more sense in a corporate environment.

Do individuals learn, or does learning involve others, objects and tools? Instead of formal assessments, use authentic assessments where the assessment is built into the activity, like a simulation. We think of individuals as units that can be moved around an organization (or outside of it).

(Downtown) Judy Brown, former head of the ADL Academic Co-Lab is now a MASIE Fellow following her passion and bliss with mobile technology and learning. Slides are posted on the Learning 2007 Wiki.

.mobi

New domain names are available for mobile sites, starting at $7.99. The masie.mobi site was created with a wizard by mobisitegalore.

Industry status and directions

Most of us have mobile devices. We take them everywhere, they’re always on — they can be both incredibly private AND social. Mobile provides choices. When we define “mobile,” any one of us can be talking about laptops, micro pcs, cell phones, tablets, audio/video players, handhelds or pdas, wearable items (including usb drives or e-books) or even gaming devices.

Mobile growth has grown to more than 100 million handsets with touch screens to ship in 2008 (ABI Research). Global mobile phone use is hitting 3.25 BILLION (Reuters, July 27 2007). Over eighty percent of Americans over the age of FIVE have a mobile device.

America is still playing catch up with data speeds and connection process in cell phone use, but the demographics, speeds and prices are all suggesting that there is a huge opportunity in mobile devices as a platform. The adoption and the adopters are there. It’s a convergence of supply and demand. More and more of the workforce needs better access to learning when they’re away from the office. There’s volatile information that requires constant updating and delivery to staff and there’s pressure to maximize productivity and downtime.

Mobile users tend to focus more on the content of what they’re looking at on their mobile device, part in due to the private and personal connection to the device itself.

Examples

• Mobile Pandemic Flu Preparation - http://publichealthgames.com/
• Colorado State University -
• DMRTI - Open site with multiple examples and checklists
• Mayo Clinic InTouch
  • $2.99 a month
  • First aid tips
  • Watch health videos
  • Find the closest emergency room
• myfoodPhone
• Bones In Motion
• SkynetMD
• http://podclass.co.uk/ - partnered with Apple to reward course participation with iTunes store credits
• Language and Culture on iPod
• Homewood Suites - Video iPods deployed for training
• iPods in baseball
  • Pitchers review batters videos in the dugout (this is happening now!)
  • “It’s a good way to refresh yourself on how you got guys out.”
• Audio tours for portable digital players (http://podtrip.com/)
  • Museum tours
  • Download to iPod
  • Receive discount (even for colonial Williamsburg)
• Montclair State University - Campus Connect
  • All incoming students
  • GPS-enabled phone
  • Part of their tuition/fees
  • Bundled with tools for mobile learning, safety, community, campus navigation
• PSP with video-enabled.
• Questionmark Perception - assessment tools to develop mobile assessments
• Augmented Reality Scientific Role Play Environments
  • Game Engine decoupled from Game Content
  • Desktop PC-based AR content editor
  • Significant collaboration, teamwork and inquiry-based learning
• Assessment and Learning in Practice Settings (ALPS)
  • 9000 students
  • 16 subjects
  • Assess competencies
  • Encourage reflection
  • Capture evidence of achievement

“Developing competence and confidence in a practice setting is vital for students training for a career in health and social care because there is a wide range of general and specific skills that can only be developed in the clinic, hospital or workplace.” - Rob Arnsten

• Collaboration - coaching and mentoring via mobile — particularly for sales
• C-Shock Mobile Game (helps international students cope with culture shock and to get accustomed to UK university life) > onboarding game

We’re seeing a convergence of devices, network, applications and lifestyle(s).

Hardware

iPhone is influencing innovation in all hardware makers. Bug Labs is an open source, web-enabled, modular software + hardware platform coming Q4 2007 — with GPS ssystem, camera, motion sensor and LCD screen.

The top Japanese Smartphone Features: 1. mobile wallet 2. MANGA on mobile 3. mobile check-in at airports 4. mobile keys for doors 5. mobile employee badges 6. mobile cinema tickets 7. mobile transport passes …

Tiny movie projectors can fit into a phone now. Texas Instruments has a working prototype that beams DVD-quality video onto a screen or a wall. Motorola is beginning to build this into their nextGen phones.

The constraint is the battery — and they are also improving.

Tools

Check out what you have at http://mr.dev.mobi/ which tells you what you need to do in an emulation to adjust your content for mobile devices.

There are lots of authoring tools. Captivate publishes to Flash Lite (mobile Flash). Camtasia exports to quicktime for iPod use.

Zirada (gotzapp.com) allows you to build applications in a non-wizard way (like an actual authoring tool). Looks a lot like Lectora.

Hot Lava Learning Mobile Author supports both JavaScript (SCORM???) and Blackberry. It acts as a player that can send data back to your LMS.

iWriter allows you to build support sites ported directly onto the iPod via the Notes.

studycell.com allows you to create flashcards online, and then downlaod them to your mobile device

Alternatives to Mobisite Galore are Mob5 and Winksite (focused more on collaboration). MobiSiteGalore is the only one that allows you to download the files that it generates.

Future

• Cell Phone as a guide
• For additional information - graphical codes where you use your camera to transpose a black and white graphic into text that is over 4000 characters long. (Quick Response Codes)

Management considerations

Opportunities

Look for opportunities Focus on user’s context and needs Build content in modular formats Assess readiness Begin with pilot initiatives

Resources

“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

Doug Lynch (The University of Pennsylvania - The Wharton School of Business) was one of the keynote speakers at Sunday night’s kickoff to the Learning 2007 conference, and he was quite obviously the smartest man in the room — so naturally, I flocked to his session this morning.

“Thomas Jefferson once observed the increasing strength of evidence for Isaac Newton’s theory of gravitation that Newton ‘indulged in reason and experimentation, and error fled before them.’”

Newton developed theories, and some of them have held up. LET professionals have also held up theories, and some of them work, if you don’t sweat that some parts hold up better than others. But people talking about principles as “facts” aren’t facts — they’re just assertions.

There are no scholarly writings on ROI on Google Research. None. People have been able to demonstrate the economic returns on learning, but there is more than what can be demonstrated in these studies. Zagat ratings are coming out now for health care, so there’s evidence to support the “effectiveness” of the quality of health care, but it may not be all the evidence you want.

So here are some questions to help deconstruct ROI:

• What level of sophistication do you need in terms of understanding evidence of impact?
• What tools do you use to gather evidence of impact?
• What tools do you use to analyze performance / learning?
• Do you use any methods to evaluate implementation in addition to the intervention? If so, how?

What forms of evidence do you need to determine if what we do impacts business goals?

ROI has a very narrow meaning to CLOs, Finance people and Economists. As a learning profession, we throw around the term ROI, when we should really be talking about “Impact.” The person hearing you when you use the term “ROI” is thinking something completely different.

A problem with our world:

Man is naturally metaphysical and arrogant and is thus capable of believing that the ideal creations of his mind, which express his feelings, are identical with reality. From this, it follows that the experimental method is not really natural to him (Claud Bernard, 1865).

If you want to find out what is going on, you need to look at what is going on (Yogi Berra)

Learning is loosely coupled. What LET professionals do is a messy business. We have norms in our world

Kirkpatrick’s Four Levels

• Reaction of student
• Learning
• Behavior
• Results

So… what are some underlying assumptions about ROI?

Ratio of Net Benefits: ( Benefits - Costs ) / Costs

Let’s deconstruct benefits (or profit). What goes into calculating the benefits of training?

• Sales?
• Income?
• Stock Price?

The idea behind ROI is that it is a number that is monetized. You define it, you measure the costs and the benefits and then you monetize it. Are these things easy to do? No, they’re not. Stock price is a net-present value of what the company is doing today and it’s speculation on how it will do in the future. Stock price also gets at some other things that are going on — like a company’s performance in relation to the rest of the market.

For you to say that you have impact, you need to have control of everything that’s going on. To use ROI as a measure of learning’s impact, you’d have to control the entire market and factor non-related issues out — everything from competitive advantages, the cost of raw materials, fuel costs… you get the idea. And even if you could factor those things out… you still have to factor out all the human-factors to filter down to just Learning’s impact on an organization.

The relationship of Learning departments and HR departments probably is a better indicator of Learning’s Impact on an organization. Generally, the quality of your students is an indicator of their future performance.

A few definitions:

Evidence:

1. Ground for belief; testimony or facts lending to prove or disprove any conclusion
2. Information, whether in the form of personal testimony, the language of documents, or the production of material objects, that is given in a legal investigation, to establish the fact or point in question

Empiricism:

1. Practice founded upon experiment and observation

It might be interesting to look at both when looking for the impact of learning on an organization. Gather the evidence. Be skeptical. If the evidence negates your hypothesis (or the goal of the learning project), go down the trail of questions as to why? Research it. Embrace the situation and question if the training was actually bad, or if maybe it’s an implementation issue. We are all academics as LET professionals. We research. We question. We need to apply it when it comes to organizational impact.

General Principles for Research

1. Pose significant questions that can be investigated empirically
2. Link research to relevant theory
3. use methods that permit direct investigation of the question
4. Provide a coherent and explicit chain of reasoning
5. Replicate and generalize across studies
6. Disclose research to encourage professional scrutiny and debate

Stop thinking of Learning as a solo-artist. Learning in an organization is part of the symphony that lends to performance.

There’s no magic number, calculation, bullet to prove your impact on performance. Build the case with a preponderance of evidence to get to Impact.

Impact: there’s no “definition” of impact, because it’s contextual to the organization. But one way to think of it is a preponderance of evidence and empirical study that make the case for what you’re doing in relation to the organization’s business goals. It’s not something that can be monetized, but it is something that an organization can “define” for itself. Reach for the available metrics — sales numbers are there, and you can measure them pre and post. How can you measure Leadership? You can’t.

One of my favorite non-fiction titles of the last three years is “A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future” by Dan Pink. It’s like the quickest read you’ll ever go through and you won’t put it down once you start it. It’s provocative.

Pink uses the brain as a metaphor for the economy. Left-brain vs. Right-brain is mostly a myth, but each half does handle tasks differently. Left-brain activities used to matter a lot, but their value has decreased as emerging markets have grown more efficient and effective at the logic-based tasks. What has been undervalued and what provides a better, more competitive opportunity is in the creative, big-picture, holistic skills that are hard to outsource and hard to automate. Empathy as a business model, as an example. To survive in the economy today, you need to go where others can’t — Design.

Design as a Competency

Utility + Significance = Consumption

In a world where there is incredible abundance, utility is everywhere and easy to satisfy. So to differentiate, you have to focus on significance, of which one component is Design. Charter schools are now teaching kids through Design, smuggling in math, science and history. At a larger level, you see a merger of art, design and business training. Pink states in his book (and in person) that the MFA is the new MBA. There are lots of joint programs in the academic arena between elite MBA programs collaborating with leading MFA programs at different schools (Pink).

If Pink is right… what impact does this have on learning, education and training? What would you do differently than what you (we) are already doing as a learning/education/training implementer?

Activity: Walk around for a week with a notebook and pen and journal all the experiences of great design you encounter — and all the experiences you have with bad design.

Story as a Competency

Facts still matter, but the ability to put facts in context is becoming more valuable than pulling information together quickly. When facts are free, the story becomes a market differentiator.

Meaning

In the last 50 years, the US GDP has tripled, but according to empirical studies, satisfaction has remained stagnant. This leads to the “Democratization of Self-Visualization.”

Activity: Picture yourself at 90. Set aside a half-hour to picture yourself at age 90, and reflect on your accomplishments.

Symphony

We tend in business to focus on “focus,” but there’s a growing need for people to see “the big picture.” Bosses don’t always know who the “star performers” are, but peers always do. Cognitive testing of star performers show there is only one competency that is correlated to performance — and that is the ability to see the big picture.

Even dyslexics overdevelop abilities to compensate for their inability to transpose the written word.

Empathy

Empathy is interesting because it’s hard to outsource or automate, so it provides an opportunity for competitive advantage. Customer Service is an area that can propel growth because it allows for a company to compete on the strength of empathy. Empathy can also be used to solve problems of Design, by putting yourself in someone else’s shoes and try and work with your products.

Activity: Take 20 pictures, put it into 20 slides, at 20 seconds each, automated to convey new ideas very quickly - a pecha-kucha (from Japan and spreading now)

Pink’s pecha-kucha is about Manga and its use in the business world (in Japan). Pink’s new book is a Manga on career productivity. The question he’s looking to answer

• 1980s - What color is your parachute?
• 1990s - Who moved my Cheese?
• 2000s - New kind of workers, Pink’s book answers: “WTF?”

Brilliant!!! Brilliant!!!

Projects Underway:

• LETSI - Beyond SCORM
  • Natural Evolution
  • From ADL
  • Adoption since 1997 has been enormous
  • Things were not designed back then to scale the way they need to now
  • Truly Global stewardship of SCORM
  • Taking over the responsibilities from ADL to be able to scale that support up
  • Charter, Governance, Infrastructure in the works now
  • Big things to emerge in 2008
  • Masie Consortium has given $10K to support LETSI, representing 250+ commercial organizations
  • Tom King is Masie’s delegate to LETSI.
• 3D Learning Project
  • Masie has paid to develop custom Second Life objects (islands, rooms, etc)
  • The “Compuserve” of virtual worlds
  • Not ready for corporate life, but there is a lot of innovation
  • Only Consortium members can come on to the Masie Island
  • Assets can be reused for free by any of the Consortium members
  • Interests in using Second Life as a narrative-based learning environment
  • Common thread — many of the people in organizations whose job is to research nextGen stuff has to do it from home, because nextGen stuff (Second Life, Facebook, Twitter) is blocked from corporate firewall.
• Voice of the Learner Survey
  • Looking for 10,000+ participation
  • Quick beta in November
  • Will aggregate member data for the member itself (separately) — for free.
  • The goal is that this happens every year.
  • Question this should answer: How is Learner Preference changing?
• Mobile Learning Project (iPhone+)
  • Judy Brown and Tom King
• Coaching & Mentoring
  • Stretch Assignments (Critical element in development)
  • Little scalability
• Performance Support
  • Interface issues
• Visual Front End of LMS