Last week I had the pleasure of giving a talk at one of the Institute of Social Studies‘ educational lunch sessions. In one and a half hours I talked about free software in general, about the things that make Moodle a great project (in this case mainly its philosophy and its license) and about how Moodle can be utilised best in tertiary education.
Corporate application training by Flickr user DiscoverDuPage, CC licensed
Last Tuesday I attended a lunch session at Bright Alley (an e-learning vendor in the Netherlands). The topic was application training and people from organisations like the Dutch police, Thieme Meulenhoff, ING and Getronics were attending.
I have a gripe with application training and have recently explored thoughts around three questions:
How come we find it acceptable that software requires any training at all? If software was properly designed, then in most cases it shouldn’t require a separate manual, let alone a separate piece of training. If software would be more forgiving of people making mistakes (e.g. unlimited undo) and if it would be more aware of what people were trying to do, then the software could help the user accomplish her tasks. Well designed software can make a big difference (also see my earlier post about how Nintendo does this in the Mario franchise).
Can’t we assume some basic computer literacy from our workers by now? A lot of software is best learnt by just trying it out. Learning by doing (and thus occasionally failing) will have a much longer lasting learning effect, than any other way. When somebody comes to work for a company you expect them to be able to do things like read a document and flush the toilet. I would have the same expectations from my employees when it comes to using a computer and, more importantly, how to learn to use new applications: they should already know how to do that.
What feasible alternatives to application training exist? When a new piece of software is implemented we automatically assume that this will require some formal training intervention (usually part of the change management process). This intervention used to be face to face training and is now moving towards a solution that is less time and place dependent: often e-learning. I barely see people explore other ways. Can’t we just experiment with creating great support websites, an infrastructure of superusers who are available on instant messenger or a set of downloadable PDF files with simple instructions integrated into the software application right where we need them?
I don’t mean to be naive and I do realise that sometimes application training can be the only or the right solution. If for example standardisation is extremely important to you, than e-learning can be a good solution: the delivery is the same for everybody and you can have well designed and validated assessments. What I want to bring across, is the fact that we currently have too much of a knee-jerk reaction creating formal training without looking at the problem of people using new software from a slightly more strategic level.
Anyway back to the session. I was there to see what other people’s thoughts were around these issues. The session started by explaining what project teams around the implementation of a new piece of software or functionality are looking for when it comes to training. Most of them are moving away from face-to-face training or one-to-one training at the workplace towards e-learning. This is mainly due to cost reasons (more so than for reasons of quality!), especially when audiences are very large. They also want to formalise and standardise the training process and need the training to be available as soon as the software/functionality goes live.
Bright Alley showed some examples of e-learning modules that they have created for customers like the Rabobank, KPMG, the national railways and ING. I had hoped that Bright Alley would have some well worn rapid development methodology for doing application training. But no. If they have one, they decided not to show it, focusing instead on the custom work they had done for their clients. Basically inventing the wheel again and again with an up to date set of tools. Some of their modules were quite creative, but I am sure that theirs isn’t the most cost efficient solution available.
The discussion after the demonstrations was fruitful. A couple of things were interesting to me:
More and more software/application/machine customers expect the vendor to deliver the training materials and take this into account when choosing a vendor. Especially when it comes to machines that require certification to be allowed to handle them. Vendors have to deliver the training and often also have to keep track of who has a license to operate. It makes sense to also look at available training materials when choosing a piece of software, but I do think that each company should keep their own responsibility when it comes to knowing who is certified and who isn’t.
The move from face to face towards e-learning and/or online facilitation does not always receive complete buy-in from the facilitators of the face to face sessions. Their argument is that you lose some of the social interactions that make face to face training work well. Is there a way to incorporate this social aspect into e-learning? Nobody seemed to have a very good answer to this. How do you create systems where people can encounter each other(‘s work) without losing the main advantage of e-learning: independence of time. It would be great to start experimenting with e-learning modules where participants leave virtual tracks which other participants then encounter and have to interact with. This will be a technological challenge: the whole SCORM object model does not fit the bill here and suddenly an extra server component is necessary. This will mainly be a challenge for instructional design though: how do you make these things work? A virtual learning environment like Moodle would be able to serve as a hub for this kind of activity and it should be possible to create a good design which also works without any facilitation.
We talked about software that will allow you to clone an application (like Certivator). This could be an alternative for keeping up and maintaining a practise or sandbox server as it can deliver a real experience for the learner in a fake environment.
Finally a topic that is very dear to my heart: the maintainability of e-learning and the way that updates to the e-learning modules are organised. This was a problem for all attendees. The software changes faster than the training department or the e-learning vendor can produce the e-learning modules (another reason to try and do something else than training). How do you combat this? Bright Alley has a maintenance contract in the form of a “strippenkaart” which will allow them to update the materials without having to go through the whole contracting and procurement process again. But not every client is willing to buy one of these “strippenkaarten”.
When buying application training (or any other form of e-learning), I think it is important to always do a couple of things to make maintenance easier:
Look at the total life cycle of the training module and include regular (once every 3-6 months?) updates in your budget for the course.
Design the module with maintenance in mind. Make sure that everything is modular, so that it is relatively easy to swap out a piece that has become irrelevant and include that new update to the software instead.
Ask the vendor to only use industry-standard technology to create the module and don’t allow them to use a homegrown authoring environment.
Make sure you don’t only own the published module, but also the source files and a style guide. This make it easier to create new materials using the same styles or to adapt old materials.
What are your thoughts? Is application training a necessary evil, or can we come up with an interesting and scalable alternative?
In the current economic climate many learning designers and developers have been or will be asked to cut costs. At the same time, they will not want to deliver less learning or less quality of learning. How is this possible? Only by changing the paradigm.
A little while ago I had a small involvement in a project of the Dutch Judicial Institutions Service (Dienst Justitiële Inrichtingen). They had gotten the challenge to build a prison which would cut the costs of running it on a day to day basis by 30% without losing quality of life for prisoners/staff, care and security.
The project group managed this successfully (actually increasing quality of life) by doing three things:
Make very effective use of brand new technology (a lot of RFID and GPS based technologies were used).
Make intelligent use of group dynamics by putting six people in one cell (standard in the Netherland is one person in a cell) and actually use this to increase the independence and self-reliance of the prisoners.
An internal “economy” (based on reward points) that stimulates correct behaviour.
Basically they broke down existing prison paradigms and reconceptualised the way a prison should work.
Back to learning design and development: To me it is clear that you cannot cut costs and at the same time continue your learning design and development in the same way as you’ll always done. This would always lead to either less development or to downgrading the quality of the development.
Instead you will have to reconceptualise what it is that you are doing. However unlikely this might sound in the current climate, right now is actually the time to try and maximise the use of new technology and to be extremely smart in your design: this is the moment where you really need to apply your brain.
So here is the challenge to all of you: What will you do radically differently now that you will have to do a better job with less means? I hope to post some of my ideas in the near future.
I have been a moderator inside the Dutch Moodle user community for quite a while now. It doesn’t require a lot of work from me: everybody is completely civil and all I occasionally do is make sure that no questions stay unanswered.
Very soon I will be responsible for moderating a group of learning professionals inside a large multinational company. The community is brand new and is currently in a start up phase. I decided to spend some time this weekend reading Patrick O’Keefe’s Managing Online Forums: Everything You Need to Know to Create and Run Successful Community Discussion Boards, to see whether I could get some advice that would be useful for that new task.
His community forums are out in the open and probably require a different kind of maintenance than an internal corporate network. He spends a lot of time talking about how to develop guidelines for members and staff (he includes useful templates) and about how to ban members. His advice is eminently practical, but it isn’t the type of information I am looking for.
The two (smallish) chapters that were more interesting to me were: Creating a Good Environment and Keeping It Interesting. Both chapters have some useful tips like:
Always personally welcome new users.
Don’t link users to general (unhelpful) sites when they ask a question. Instead take some time and link to the page they really need.
Members will get a sense of ownership of the community: do not make drastic changes without getting them involved in advance.
Share your successes: when you reach a milestone (like a certain amount of posts in the community), make an announcement and thank your users for their support.
If you have enough resources you could run a newsletter as something to add value to the community and keep people involved.
O’Keefe writes about a couple of games you can play in the forums. Survivor and Who Want to be a Millionaire? are explained in detail.
You could start a member of the month program or hold yearly award ceremonies.
All of this advice is very sensible, but doesn’t reach the depth that I had hoped for. The questions I would have like to seen answered are:
What steps should you take to grow a community out of little or nothing?
What is the right balance between seeding a community with (staff) posts and waiting for the wider community to create some content?
What is the right moment to close out a discussion?
What are the critical factors that make a community successful? Does it work very well for a particular group of users? How should your approach be different inside a sports based community in comparison to being inside a tech based community?
Can any topic be central to a community? Where do you do draw the lines of being in scope and being off topic?
It would have been nice if he had tried to tackle these questions too. Do you have any answers to these questions? I would love to hear them in the comments.
Let me finish by quoting O’Keefe on whether it is important to be an expert in the subject of the community:
Have a passion for the community. If you have it, you can succeed. If you have passion for the subject, but no passion for the community or for running the community, you really don’t have very much at all and you’re in for a struggle.
I will be attending the 2009 UK Moodlemoot in Leicestershire on April 7th and 8th. The conference schedule has been finalised and I have taken a look at it. I plan to attend the following sessions:
Keynote presentation by Martin Dougiamas. I wonder what Martin will talk about this time. Moodle 2.0?
Moodle in the Boardroom, examples of Moodle in the Corporate Sector by Ray Lawrence & Gavin Henrick. In the last months I have been very focussed on how to make Moodle work in the corporate world. I have spent a lot of time at a large multinational company implementing Moodle and building its use. I look forward to the perspective of these two senior Moodle partners.
Moving to Moodle: challenges and opportunities at an institutional level by Jacqui Nicol. I don’t know Jacqui, but she works at the Robert Gordon University which is the Best Modern University in the UK (according to The Times Good University Guide 2009) and to me it is always interesting to hear about larger roll outs.
Informal Learning and Moodle by Miles Berry. Miles has been one of the most focal Moodle enthusiasts in the UK for years now. His perspective as a head of an independent prep school and as website manager of Open Source Schools is always fresh.
10 things to like about Moodle by Hans de Zwart. Unfortunately I don’t think I can get out of attending this session. I have given myself an impossible title as I have no idea about the audience. We’ll see where it gets me.
New Frontiers – Moodle and OLPC by Martín Langhoff. I have been following the OLPC project for years now and am interested to hear what has been happening with the plans to run Moodle on the XS.
Into the Third Dimension with SLOODLE by Daniel Livingstone (while some of my colleagues take notes at the session on Moodle and Mahara). I have never seen a live demo of Sloodle (Moodle integrated into Second Life), so it will be good to finally decide how much value that 3rd dimension adds.
Moodle Makeover – finessing your Moodle courses by Ian Wild. I thought Ian’s book (reviewed here) was excellent, so I look forward to meeting him and having a chat. You can never have enough ideas on how to make your Moodle courses even better. Hopefully I will see some inspiring ideas.
OLPC School Server internals — and building a generic small zero-configuration school server for a million schools out there by Martín Langhoff. Martín is one of those brilliant überprogrammers who likes to talk in conceptual frameworks and thinks faster than he can speak. I wouldn’t miss this for anything.
I will make sure to blog about my experiences at the end of each day, but I would also like you to participate. Are there any questions I should ask during these sessions? Is there anything you have been wanting to know about Moodle? Do any of these titles inspire you?
