Flash For Learning

I just had my eyes checked for the first time in six years, and it turns out that while my short-distance vision deteriorated very slightly, my long distance vision has significantly gotten worse. I’m 35, and I DON’T WANT TO BE old enough for bifocals, so I bought two different pairs of glasses. My short-distance lenses make my computer work and reading a lot clearer, and my long-distance lenses keep me from squinting while watching tv, movies or video games (they also make sure I can actually see oncoming traffic when I make left turns — at least that’s the plan).

My wife thinks me insane, as do most of my peers. I call my new short-distance lenses my TACTICAL lenses, and my long-distance lenses my STRATEGIC lenses. I do this to honor my academic advisor and mentor, Dr. Michael Straebel from University of Wisconsin. In the second class I took for my Master’s degree, he introduced the notion of postmodernism with the example of looking at a situation with different sets of lenses. It’s with this inspiration and in this context that I offer the following story.

Lots of organizations in the last 10-20 years solve problems by looking at the immediacy of issues. The brushfires. The low-hanging fruit. Even your GTD methodology (of which I’m a big fan) is often subverted into breaking everything down into tasks and priorties. This keeps things very much afloat, but it belies a lot of the issues that fester underneath the surface. Back in 2005, I attended a Knowledge Management conference focused on eGov — it was a really fascinating conference that highlighted just how very real Knowledge Management concerns were for US Government. The part of the government that regulates the Nuclear Industry was about to face a demographic shift, where the vast majority of their organization was working beyond their retirement age and were now starting to literally die off. In the early 90s, US Gov laid off a bunch of the younger workers (tactic) because they were not productive enough. The older veteran workers were able to do 3-4 times what the younger, novice employees could do. It was cheaper to pay the older employees more and keep them working.

Now, that workforce is literally dying off — and there’s no one to replace them, thus the major cause for concern. What does it mean if no one knows how Nuclear Power Plants are run? Hopefully, we’ll never find out, but it’s now a very real risk as the immediate cost savings US Gov enjoyed in the 90s may cost millions (or billions) more because of the lack of (strategy) investment in succession planning.

This is not an isolated example, and all I need to do is ask the following questions to highlight my point:

• With all the focus on maintenance for SCORM over the past couple of years (tactical), where’s the vision for E-Learning standards going forward (strategic)?
• In organizations where we spend significant time and money onboarding talent (tactical), what’s the plan for keeping the talent there and getting that return on the investment in recruitment and onboarding (strategic)?
• For all the buzz about what we can do to combine social media and mobile with learning, education and training (tactical) — who’s painting the picture of what it should look like if it’s right (strategic)?
• By being divisive and getting into legal squabbles about who owns what part of SCORM (tactical), what’s the long term ramifications of alienating the very people who will evolve E-Learning standards (strategic)?

I’ve been struggling with getting a handle on balancing the tactical and the strategic in a lot of different areas, all personal to me… and what I’m finding is that it can’t be an either/or set of priorities — they both have to coexist at the same time. You ignore tactical realities or strategic planning only at your peril — it really is “pay me now” or “pay me later.”

I didn’t need new glasses to figure this out, but it was an interesting reminder, when I put on my STRATEGIC lenses, and could see things walking on the streets of Chicago that I hadn’t seen before, like the Art in windows of galleries in Wicker Park. That’s when it occurred to me — I probably could’ve avoided my car accident last year if only I had better distance vision.

There’s a lot you need a vision for, and you don’t think about it until it’s too late.

Have you looked at the Stock Market lately? You don’t have to be in the United States to appreciate the situation. We’re in for a bumpy ride. It may not be the end-of-days scenario that noted economists, politicos and pundits predict, but it’s obvious to me here in Chicago that the market is going to be turbulent, which is undoubtedly going to affect what people, organizations and governments spend money on — and that’s going to affect corporate, academic and government budgets… and as far as it impacts corporate budgets, it’s definitely going to impact me and my work. Here’s how I see it rolling.

How solid are those plans for upgrading your LMS? Chances are you won’t unless there are technical reasons that make it an imperative. It might have been difficult last year to make the business case to upgrade a piece of enterprise software last year when the market was still good, but this year with the coffers tightening, dropping another couple hundred thousand (or a couple of million depending on your scale) is just not likely. Big ticket items like LMSs and LCMSs are probably going to be on=hold for acquisition unless you can show without a doubt how what you buy will a) save the organization a ton of cash in other ways, thus reducing costs overall; and/or b) improve productivity in measurable ways, thus reducing your operating costs overall.

In fact, let’s make that the common theme for this post. See, when budgets are just the “normal” kind of tight for learning, education and training, you have the opportunity for doing small Research and Development projects (not like there’s lots of official time for those, but you can fly some pet projects under the radar until you’re ready to show them off). When there’s a promise that next month will be another record breaking milestone, you can get that expansion or that new acquisition through a little easier. But when times get tight, you need to really be concerned about the bottom line — but you also need to focus on infrastructure. You want to be able to do more with less — but you also don’t want the people or the services you rely on to get destroyed in the process of running lean.

Your budget was probably set in stone (concrete, maybe?) before the start of this year. Use it to train your people in a variety of needed skills so that an Instructional Designer or a Content Developer can do a lot more than they could before. Use it to upgrade the authoring tools you use. Use it develop those reusable templates you’re going to need next year.

If your organization hasn’t gone mobile yet, you’re likely not going to in the next two years. Keep reading what other organizations are doing with mobile, because discussing and designing the future is very important — but not as important as being able to squeeze the most value you can right now.

If I was to weigh in on how we’d spend what money we have this year, I’d advise the following:

Definitely

• Transition our main authoring tool to something collaborative.
• Upgrade our simulation capturing tool to make sure it’s as robust and stable as it can be.
• Invent or Acquire a means to manage media assets, learning objectives, competencies and how content maps to and with these things.
• Pick up some media software (Flash, maybe something for digital video)
• Code for custom E-Learning content (for those custom jobs or content upgrades from years ago that all of the sudden just stop working)
• Train the tech savvy on Flash, HTML and JavaScript; train the Instructional Design-savvy on Graphic Design principles. Train everyone on curriculum development, project management and personal productivity skills, because when organizations make due with less, that usually means people who do — do more.

Maybe

• Upgrade hardware to mobile equipment to go to where the internal client is
• Push out collaborative authoring tools to Subject Matter Experts.

I’d welcome any questions or input on this topic, because I think we’re going to see a shift similar to what the commercial sector saw in 2002 and 2003 when the dot-com bubble burst. For government, this will be the first time in a very long time experiencing this. For you folks in the acaedmic sector, this is old hat to you

“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