Technology used to create web pages

I think people are talking about technologies without looking into the using them and even more importantly, having learners access the pages created by them.

Presently HTML is king when it comes to a language used to create web pages. I think HTML's limitations has some advantages, specifically making it accessible to more people. for example this is a an easy way for SMEs to create web courses. Actually,
HTML by itself isn't used by SME's, but authoring tools that
create it does. Then, there are other tools like Google Docs,
FrontPage, & DreamWeaver that can easily edit what the authoring tool has
created (if there is a need for that).

XML is being used more often for display of content, and that is
fine. Likewise, it is being used more frequently for data storage, and
that too is good. However, simultaneous use of an XML document for both
display and for data storage seems extremely difficult and what would
be the point of doing this?

XSLT (style sheets and display for XML) is and will be very useful for what it is intended to do. I don't know what tools actually do the XSLT translation?
For example, browsers can display HTML and XML, and different parsers
can read/parse XML. If you use an XML parser, you still have to program
the interpretation and use of the parsed data, and that is fine because
now there is a more accessible file storage format. With XSLT, what
creates the output file?

LMS update - what they can can & can't do

Based on my last post I got some questions on that status of LMS's. Some of my information is a little dated, but here is what I can bring up-to-date.

1. Aspen: SumTotal has several LMS offerings including "Docent", "Voyager", and "Aspen". Of these, I have only seen that "Aspen" has the interactions and objectives support.
2. IBM: Yes, they keep changing names. The last time I saw things with their system was about 2 years ago. I think what I saw later became Lotus Learning Space, but this is conjecture.
3. Oracle: The Oracle iLearning, which is now "OLM" would be the most complete offering to look at from Oracle. I only recommend Oracle for companies that already have other Oracle financial systems already installed. As with any LMS, the cost of the LMS is only a small fraction of the total cost of ownership. The bulk of the cost is the integration of the LMS's database with any existing personnel system. If Oracle is already available at the organization, then adding their LMS is cost-effective. My experience with the other systems you mentioned that are now owned by Oracle is that their data support for the eLearning standards were minimal at best.

I have seen many other LMSs (including other "big" ones) that were purposely omitted from my list because they do not support for interactions and objectives. In some cases, delivering interactions even caused the LMSs to throw exceptions. Unfortunately this occurred on some well known brand-name LMSs.

As you observed, the "big" LMS vendors seem to have less to offer than some of the smaller ones. My experience has been that some of the smaller ones have much better technical support, better technical implementation, and better customer support. Among the big ones, Oracle impressed me, but that was at least 3 years ago. For those of you who would like to know my qualifications to make these statements, I work on the LMS integration for ReadyGo. We have an authoring tool that creates AICC or SCORM conformant packages. In the course of doing this, we have integrated with dozens and dozens of LMSs. What we have seen is that each LMS has their own interpretation of the specifications, especially with AICC. With SCORM, there are fewer interpretations, but there are still behaviors and limitations imposed in the LMS that can affect the learner experience. We have made ReadyGo open enough that it is possible for us to create "LMS-packs". These are analogous to printer drivers. When you go to generate (print) your course, you can choose what LMS or specification you want it to work with like you would choose a printer. This allows the course to report as much information as possible to the LMS without causing the LMS to interfere with the learning experience. For example, some LMSs are set up so that once the student completes the course, they are not allowed to take it again. When customers don't like the one-time-only use of courses, we can set up the LMS-pack so that the course never reports a completion status. Then, the LMS doesn't block the learner from re-using the content. The learning level of the student could be passed, for example, through the score. So that is why I feel that I can provide my opinions on LMSs.

My greatest frustration has been that most LMSs and, as a result, most authoring tools have gone for the minimum necessary to be able to put "SCORM Conformant" on their sales brochures. You can see this when the authoring tool only offers one "AICC" and/or one "SCORM" output option. Course developers have then had to rearrange their courses or just forget about tracking anything more than course completion. This has crippled the true capability of SCORM and AICC, and has resulted in "junk food" courseware as the norm.

SCORM and SCO's

Lots of LMS's and authoring tools limit their system by their limited reading of the SCORM specification and their limited implementation of SCO's. There is nothing in the SCORM specification that says that a SCO must be a single page of content. In fact, I believe it is a bad
design decision to make each page a SCO, but this appears to be the
group-think way of doing things. Here is my rationale: When you go from
SCO to SCO, the LMS has to close the previous SCO and then Launch the
next one. In some cases this means that the user must return to the
table of SCOs and manually launch the next one. That completely breaks
the learning flow.

Imagine that every time you want to see a new page of Google results you
have to go back to the start page, and re-input your search. That would
chunk your learning experience down into little pieces. And, we haven't
even addressed the delays most LMSs have in closing one SCO and
launching the next. I have seen delays as big as 20 seconds when going
from unit to unit, and this is on a DSL line.

If you want to see a tool that uses chapters or entire courses as a SCO,
you can take a look at the ReadyGo Web Course Builder.

One of the reasons that the "group-think" has gone with page=SCO is that
the majority of LMSs don't capture or report interactions and
objectives. This means that you can't get granularity of reporting
unless you have granularity of content. That is to find out if someone
answered a specific question correctly, you must use question=SCO.
Technically, it is easier to implement a single question on a web page,
but instructionally, I wonder if that isn't worse. In school, do
teachers hand out a single question, then pick it up, grade it, tell you
your grade, and then hand out the next one? I usually learned the
answers to one question by understanding another question on the test.
Since the objective should be training/teaching rather than measuring,
wouldn't it be better to use the pedagogical methods that have been
refined over centuries? Yes, we have new technologies available, and
these afford new opportunities, but it doesn't mean that we should
jettison older methods just because some 20-somethings with their cool
new iPods walking around with headphones believe they are the first to
ever do this, and thus anything the above-30s do must be trashed and
dis'-ed. (Does that stand for disregard, disparage, disagree, or all of
the above?)

Another tragedy of the minimalist LMS approach is that it becomes
impossible to use the LMS to carry out surveys and assessments. The
good news is that there are LMSs (Avilar, Oracle, MeridianKSI, IBM,
Aspen) that do capture and report interactions and objectives. So now,
there is hope that your LMS can be used to evaluate your course both
from the point of view of figuring out if the instructor is giving bad
questions and for the student to let you know their thoughts.

So, if you let a SCO be more than a single page, you can have the
summary as part of the SCO, and have the navigation/reusability, without
making compromises.

My rebuttle from an online article

In the 13-February-2007 issue of OnlineLearning News and Reviews, Dr.
Patti Shank discussed how the "best" authoring tools for certain
organizations may be tools that convert Microsoft Office content to
web-viewable format. I believe that this approach is part of the
natural inclination to avoid/delay change, because change requires
learning new ideas. It is like early cars that used reins to steer.
MS-Office is an excellent suite of tools to create/manage data specific
to those tools. Word is good for creating letters and documents to be
printed. PowerPoint is good for creating talking points that help a
live presenter. Excel is excellent for storing/manipulating tabular
data. However, we don't use Excel to give presentations, or PPT to
create printed documents, although we certainly could.

Likewise, using PPT and Word to create on-line documentation is a misuse
of these products. Most people have these tools, but yet, there are
almost no web sites that are built using these tools. So why should
users settle for web courses that are built using these tools? The
answer appears to be that course authors find it convenient to do so
(irrespective of the learners' needs.)

I actually see that in the future we will be using web courses as the
backup documentation when we give live presentations. There are
tremendous advantages to doing this. A properly structured web course
gives you links on each main content page to additional resources.
(PPT does not.) So, in the middle of the presentation, if an audience
member asks you a question, you can go to one of these links where you
may have a simulation, step-by-step layout, or in-depth article about
the question they have asked. Of course, you wouldn't read the in-depth
article, but it may have a table with statistics to back up your points.

In terms of visual display (the main reason people use PPT), through the
use of style sheets you can make this content format nicely for multiple
purposes. Ahead of time, you can create several style sheets that work
best in different delivery settings (e.g. laptop computer, PDA, visually
disabled). The end-users can click on different links to the same
content. Each link can use a different style sheet. So, users
following along on their own computer can choose their own content
layout. This is especially useful if you are giving the live
presentation to remote sites.

After the session, the complete web course is still available for the
audience to review. If they didn't understand one of your talking
points, they can look at the links to more data, and find how you've
explained the points in more depth. By giving multiple presentations of
the same material, you can then improve the chances that they'll be able
to catch your concepts. Further, the author can give tracked test
questions, and can find out directly if the learners are understanding
the concepts.

Even more than this, users can come back to your content and they don't
have to go through the entire presentation in order to get to the pages
of interest. This means that the content can be used as reference
material as they are trying to accomplish a task ("just-in-time"
learning). Course authors have been concentrating or the term "re-use"
only from the authoring side of things. We really should be considering
re-use from the learner side, as the purpose of the training is to
facilitate the end-user rather than the course author.

New mechanisms like XML are just the underlying technologies that in the
end will allow the kind of re-use and shifts that are mentioned above.
So rather than hanging on to our old tools trying to find convoluted
ways to use them in the changing environment, content developers would
be well-served to start thinking about how the new capabilities for
content delivery will modify how they do their tasks, and what tools are
really "best" for them, and more importantly, their audience.

Building an effective learning community

Here's a sampling of the ingredients one needs to build an effective learning community.

• A good story. You need to have the basic ingredient of a community, which is a common interest shared by many people. Start with a good set of content (courses, discussions, resources) so that people have a foundation upon which they can build and participate.



• Self-interest. There has to be a benefit for the participants, and that benefit has to be self-evident. Why should people cooperate and spend time working on the "community" when it distracts them from doing the 50 million other tasks that are assigned to them?



• Critical mass. The community will only be self-regenerating once you have enough people actively engaged. Getting to this point is terribly difficult, and maintaining the activity can be difficult. One trick Moser has found to be helpful is to cause controversy. "This gets people more interested. The hard part is finding controversial subjects that are not insulting. For example? Discuss why you think one approach to solving the problem is better than another."



• Ease of use. The slightest hurdle for people to participate either as contributors or as data receivers will turn people off from the experience. Stick to "best of breed" Web practices (e.g., easy navigation, fast download, staying away from heavy multimedia, using an effective search engine, and avoiding clutter). "You may need librarians and moderators to ensure that the site doesn't get cluttered with 15 versions of everyone's documents and that the discussions don't get hijacked by a few individuals."



• Culture. If there isn't a culture of sharing or of informal learning in your organization, you won't be able to create one just by using a social network software site. "People have to feel that there is no downside to participating in the activity. Management has to support it. (Good luck!) And management has to participate, also."



• Luck. This is by far the most important ingredient, says Moser. "You can have all the ingredients, but there is that intangible thing about luck that probably comprises 60 percent of the deciding factor as to whether the site will mushroom, die, or hobble along. But just because it hobbles along doesn't mean you should give up. Luck can come along at any time." A new person may join the organization and spice up the discussions, for example, prompting people to be drawn in. "Why is YouTube more popular than Yahoo! videos or Google videos? Mostly luck. There were many other video sites that were comparable and available at the same time. YouTube got lucky."

TRAINING IN AN ENGINEERING ENVIRONMENT

If your goal is to train engineers, my recommendation, as an engineer, is to stay away from the "more interactive" (also known as "more entertaining") approach that uses video, audio, and hot-zone mouse-overs. Contrary to what has been advertised, video and audio are actually very passive forms of training. We have seen that if you include an audio in a course (as an adjunct to slides), the learner often abandons the visual portion (since they are receiving audio) and drift to check their e-mails or other tasks they need to do. The result of this is that their focus on the learning is reduced, and eventually lost. Only 10% of material is learned through audio. Keep this in mind.

Engineers have been trained to be able to learn from visual content (primarily math and physics with lots of equations). We (engineers) are accustomed to both quick learning (by looking up a formula) and in-depth learning (understanding how the formula was derived). A video can provide an example of the concept, but will generally not provide fundamental engineering concepts.

True interactivity involves changing behaviors based on the student's response. The simple form of this is to provide the learner with multiple expositions of the same material accessed through links on a page. These expositions could include a step-by-step table, a link to a journal article, a formula derivation, a practical example of the implications of the formula, a quiz, a tracked test. The more complex form of interactivity (which is much more expensive) is a true-to-life simulation, such as Flight Simulator. People should really question what is interactive about a hot-zone mouse-over. If you are training people how to move a mouse, this is a good simulation; however, if the purpose is to teach some other concept, it becomes "eye-candy" (and can be very distracting). Every graphic, audio, video, hot-zone, or other non-text element should be carefully scrutinized and justified. Does it convey new information? Does the student's action relate to the content, or is their action simply a display control?

My recommendations: A good "book" layout will be most effective at training engineers. An instructionally sound "book" approach is more than a series of linked slides with a table of contents on the sidebar. Each "page" of content should include links to sub-pages with different expositions of the same material, since each learner will gain differently from each presentation. The material should be easily accessible, meaning that at any time when the employee is doing their job, they can use the "course" as reference material to look up the procedure or formula. If the course is designed as a one-time, linear set of content, you lose this possibility. If you can put a search engine on your site, and the content is properly searchable, you will create a re-usable resource that the engineers will quickly adopt as part of their "library" of knowledge.

Accessability (working with blind readers)

The main "new technologies" for improved accessibilities are the browser extensions such as blind readers. These work best when content is built in HTML because it is presented as text. When courseware is built in Flash or Java, while it has nice animation capabilities, it is NOT accessible to blind readers.

Many developers have added audio to their courses in order to satisfy the accessibility for visually impaired users. However, this can actually be a disservice. Blind users usually set their blind readers to speak at about 3 times the normal rate since they have to receive all data in a serial manner. If they have to depend on a narrator (often non-professional), the content is fed to them way too slowly. If, however, the content is built using HTML and following best practices (see http://www.readygo.com/index.htm?start_file=sup03/10sup03d.htm) a blind reader can then read this at whatever rate the user has established.

Following good web design practices has additional benefits for users without disabilities:
1. Content can be searched using a search engine, so that users can get to the content of interest more quickly.
2. The content can be delivered to different size screens (you don't have to established a fixed window size)
3. The content can be delivered to other devices such as PDAs and cell phones
4. The end-user can set their own preferred font size/color (through their browser configuration), and they are not forced to read the designer's preferred 8 point light gray font, when the smallest they are able to read is 16point. Also, if they have very high resolution monitors, an 8 point font can be tiny.
5. Content actually downloads faster.
6. Content is chunked in such a way that it can be re-used more easily.

The current move to deliver content as Flash-style movies is good for visual animation features, but is bad for accessibility. Also, for sighted users, the visual animations can serve as bad distractions when they are trying to read the content. A focus on the end-users experience (rather than boosting the designer's portfolio) generally results in more accessible and reusable content.

How to handle learners who don't like your course

A negative attitude from an audience is feedback that can be used to make a course better. If you get a negative reaction from your audience I recommend that you start with by trying to figure out why they have a negative attitude.

My guess is that their experience has been more tailored to the courseware authors' desires than to the learner's desires. That is, the course authors decided what would be
interesting for the learner, and presented this material. Since the
learners were required to take the training, they had no choice but to go
through the material as it was presented.

My suggestion would be to set up the training so that the learners can
choose when and how they view it. When you do a Google search, you get
to choose which links to follow. If you structure your content with
this in mind, you can make it more interesting (or at least less
annoying) to the employees. Most employees want to come in, get the
training as quickly as possible, and get out. So, break the content
down into 15-20 minute segments, and let the learner choose how they
want to see it.

For example, if you do a autoplaying slide show (PowerPoint converted to
the Web), the user has no control over the content. It is displayed at
the speed at which a presenter would narrate it. People can read 3
times faster (at least) than they speak. Also, PowerPoint slide format
(3 lines of text per page) are good as background material for a live
speaker. It is NOT a good format for self-paced learning. There is not
enough information simply in the slides. A good self-paced learning
format allows the employees with 20 years of experience, quickly review
and jump over the stuff they already know, and then they can go to the
"What's New" section. The new employee can go through all the pieces in
more detail. So give multiple tests in the course so that the employees
can evaluate themselves and re-review the material if they don't know
it. If they know the material, let them get done with the training in 5
minutes, if that is all they need.

My recommendation is to
only use multimedia (and other passive elements) when absolutely
necessary. This allows the learner to get through the material on their
time and on their schedule, and they start having a more positive
experience because THEY now have control over the learning session.

Why turning your training into one big video is not a good idea

Recently I have received quite a few calls from customers interested in
using video to do their web-based training. Typically, their concept is
to provide PowerPoint bullet slides alongside their video with
narration. They'd like a tool that can do this, synchronize everything,
and then give a test at the end of the session.

Here are a few thoughts about why the above scenario is a bad way
to go about distance-based training:
1. Length of Video: If you go to YouTube, currently the most successful
on-line video site, you'll find that most of the popular videos are
shorter than 2 minutes. Occasionally, you'll find some that are close
to 5 minutes, but these are the exception. This is a strong lesson for
training. People's attention span to watching content on their
computers is 2-5 minutes. After 2 minutes, many people will drift away,
check their e-mail, work on the latest task their boss gave them, etc.
If you plan to give a 30 minute video, break it up into segments that
are no longer than 2-3 minutes.
2. Narration: Only 10% of the information we learn is via audio (statistic from some PBS documentary). But yet, many people are using PowerPoint presentations (which are clearly incomplete as a self-paced training material) augmented by narration.
They are leaning heavily on the audio to "complete" the skeleton/bullet
points provided by PowerPoint. Think about it...your slides that only
contain 20% of the information necessary for giving the complete
material are being "completed" by a mechanism that only gives 10%
retention. Further, our customers have observed that when courses have
audio, the learners drift away from the visuals (and start checking
e-mail etc.) since the content is being spoon-fed to them. Sometimes
having both audio and visuals is sensory overload, so the reader naturally blocks out one of them (usually the textual/visual content.) Further, in many settings, having audio turned on will distract co-workers, and using headphones is not allowed (e.g. nurses in an open area).
3. Delivery: Videos can be very fickle about whether they will play or
not. The student must have the correct version of the plug-in with the
right codecs (codes to display the video) installed on their computer.
If they don't, they won't see the video. We have seen the best results occur if you convert your video (.mpg) files to Macromedia/Adobe Flash files (.swf). Most people have Flash installed on their computers, and fewer IT departments will block them.
4. Synchronization: When delivering separate pieces of content from the web, synchronization is very difficult. Each multimedia element will download and arrive at a different time. If you need very tight synchronization, you need to embed all the synchronized content into a single file/stream. Unfortunately, this means a longer download time. Users get very impatient and will abandon content if it does not download within 20 seconds and start playing. If it is in one stream/file, you have just taken navigation control away from the reader. Good web sites provide multiple avenues to explore the material. A single "movie" narrows this to just one outlet.
5. Give your reader control: Successful web sites like Google provide the information to the reader so that they can select what to see next when they are ready. Recorded presentations provide the information sequenced as the narrator would like it, and delivered at the narrator's rate. We have seen learners fast forward over the content and just get to the mandatory test at the end. In cases where they couldn't fast-forward, they just walked away from their computers until the video was over, and then they took the test. That is, in neither case, did they watch the video, that was so expensively created.
5. You're not George Lucas: Video requires a good story, professional actors, and professional production; otherwise it looks like a home-made slide show. I have been at some companies that could afford very expensive video productions, and even the best productions bored me to death. Corporate training does not typically have good character development, striking cinematography, and award-winning musical accompaniment. People's expectations regarding video are very high, and unless you can meet those, your readers will disparage your effort.

My rule is that every bit of motion/animation must be justified: Does it add vital informational content or is it just decoration? If it is more "decoration" make sure your boss agrees that the it is necessary for improved return on investment.


So my recommendation is to break up the video into short segments hosted on separate web pages or preferably, avoid it entirely in exchange for more text-based content. Make startup of the video optional so that the user can play/replay when they want to. Place tests/quizzes and other content (especially printable articles) between the videos so that the user has something they can reference, and to force the user to really go through the content. Make test question content context sensitive to the material that is important; however, don't force the reader to watch the video, especially if they already know the material. Otherwise, you will quickly gain an enemy from the experienced users who have been required to take the course.

A bad way to go about creating distance-based training

Recently I have received quite a few calls from customers interested in
using video to do their web-based training. Typically, their concept is
to provide PowerPoint bullet slides alongside their video with
narration. They'd like a tool that can do this, synchronize everything,
and then give a test at the end of the session.

Here are a few thoughts about why the above scenario is a bad way
to go about distance-based training:
1. Length of Video: If you go to YouTube, currently the most successful
on-line video site, you'll find that most of the popular videos are
shorter than 2 minutes. Occasionally, you'll find some that are close
to 5 minutes, but these are the exception. This is a strong lesson for
training. People's attention span to watching content on their
computers is 2-5 minutes. After 2 minutes, many people will drift away,
check their e-mail, work on the latest task their boss gave them, etc.
If you plan to give a 30 minute video, break it up into segments that
are no longer than 2-3 minutes.
2. Narration: Only 10% of the information we learn is via audio
(statistic from some PBS documentary)

. But yet, many people are using
PowerPoint presentations (which are clearly incomplete as a self-paced
training material) augmented by narration.
They are leaning heavily on the audio to "complete" the skeleton/bullet
points provided by PowerPoint. Think about it...your slides that only
contain 20% of the information necessary for giving the complete
material are being "completed" by a mechanism that only gives 10%
retention. Further, our customers have observed that when courses have
audio, the learners drift away from the visuals (and start checking
e-mail etc.) since the content is being spoon-fed to them. Sometimes
having both audio and visuals is sensory overload, so the reader
naturally blocks out one of them (usually the textual/visual content.)
Further, in many settings, having audio turned on will distract
co-workers, and using headphones is not allowed (e.g. nurses in an open
area).
3. Delivery: Videos can be very fickle about whether they will play or
not. The student must have the correct version of the plug-in with the
right codecs (codes to display the video) installed on their computer.
If they don't, they won't see the video. We have seen the best results
occur if you convert your video (.mpg) files to Macromedia/Adobe Flash
files (.swf). Most people have Flash installed on their computers, and
fewer IT departments will block them.
4. Synchronization: When delivering separate pieces of content from the
web, synchronization is very difficult. Each multimedia element will
download and arrive at a different time. If you need very tight
synchronization, you need to embed all the synchronized content into a
single file/stream. Unfortunately, this means a longer download time.
Users get very impatient and will abandon content if it does not
download within 20 seconds and start playing. If it is in one
stream/file, you have just taken navigation control away from the
reader. Good web sites provide multiple avenues to explore the
material. A single "movie" narrows this to just one outlet.
5. Give your reader control: Successful web sites like Google provide
the information to the reader so that they can select what to see next
when they are ready. Recorded presentations provide the information
sequenced as the narrator would like it, and delivered at the narrator's
rate. We have seen learners fast forward over the content and just get
to the mandatory test at the end. In cases where they couldn't
fast-forward, they just walked away from their computers until the video
was over, and then they took the test. That is, in neither case, did
they watch the video, that was so expensively created.
5. You're not George Lucas: Video requires a good story, professional
actors, and professional production; otherwise it looks like a home-made
slide show. I have been at some companies that could afford very
expensive video productions, and even the best productions bored me to
death. Corporate training does not typically have good character
development, striking cinematography, and award-winning musical
accompaniment. People's expectations regarding video are very high, and
unless you can meet those, your readers will disparage your effort.

My rule is that every bit of motion/animation must be justified: Does it
add vital informational content (e.g. shows a trajectory) or is it just
decoration (your boss wants to be the star of his own video)? If it is
more "decoration" make sure your boss agrees that the it is necessary
for improved return on investment.

So my recommendation is to break up the video into short segments hosted
on separate web pages or preferably, avoid it entirely in exchange for
more text-based content. Make startup of the video optional so that the
user can play/replay when they want to. Place tests/quizzes and other
content (especially printable articles) between the videos so that the
user has something they can reference, and to force the user to really
go through the content. Make test question content context sensitive to
the material that is important; however, don't force the reader to watch
the video, especially if they already know the material. Otherwise, you
will quickly gain an enemy from the experienced users who have been
required to take the course.

More thougths on eLearning derailment

One source of the derailment of eLearning has been the prevalence of "solutions looking for problems", i.e. vendor and committee products designed to capture the market. The eLearning decision makers have been driven into purchasing expensive LMS systems without a clear concept of what they are to achieve and without a single course to deliver. I see it over and over where eLearning consumers tell us that they're not yet interested in purchasing an authoring system because they are implementing their LMS (usually a 2-3 year process). This is like building a highway system without ever having owned a car or truck. (A simple web site could actually meet all their initial needs.)

Many corporate issues can be solved by basic Web 1.0 techniques. Course content should be reachable at any time. It should be searchable. This way, when a worker needs to look up some definition, they can go to the "training" web site, do a search on the term, and see the multiple courses that relate to that content. Then, they can jump to the page(s) with the content. All this in a couple of minutes. If the course authors want tracking, that can easily be done without any fancy expensive LMS system.

From what I have seen, the approach that the analysts and much of the community encourage is what we could call a "Web 0.5" or a pre-web approach. This involves simulating the face-to-face training as closely as possible:
1. Content consists of presentation slides converted to some web-deliverable format without any consideration of instructional effectiveness.
2. Student sessions have a fixed start and a fixed finish, with a single test session (one question per page) at the end that can be passed or failed. Random access to the middle of the content is discouraged.
3. The objectives from the instructor's point of view are to deliver the material with the least possible change and to track (maybe) that the student has "completed" their training.

Until this paradigm can be replaced with a more web-like approach, we'll be stuck with federally mandated obsolescent specifications like SCORM, and ROI for eLearning will consist mostly of empire building by the managers who purchase these expensive systems.

Problem Looks for a Solution or is it a Solution looking for a Problem

I think that the best products out there are ones where the designer identifies a problem and comes up with a better solution. From here, sprouts a product that provides innovation. In the case of the "meeting of minds", I believe we are all seeing that the need is to produce and deliver effective training for little money. Within that need, there are many effective ways of doing it. I think that one really good way of solving the problem is to use web-based techniques, starting with Web 1.0 techniques. Of course, Web 1.0 requires a "design pattern" to be applied to training/education, but the approach should use the "best of breed" of both instruction and of web technologies.

I tend to rant about "Solution looking for a Problem" primarily when I see design rationale that was applied as follows.
A. I know how to do X (e.g. build a database)
B. I can deliver training from X (e.g. a database)
C. I can sell X for lots more money than other solutions out there (e.g. a simple web server)
Therefore, a solution based on X is the best solution to training needs. If you're going to use a database, it should be because of your storage/retrieval/reporting needs.

Unfortunately, from my experience, the database delivery systems (aka LMSs) are also the strongest voices in the creation of the specification such as AICC and SCORM. Perversely, before SCORM 2004, the course was the component that had to do all of the navigation, calculation of completion, etc. whereas the Database was just a "memory" for the browser. Restated, the multi-million dollar server/database system just stored results from the course, while the FREE browser the course was being served in had to do all the calculations. Even though the course author could specify mastery score to the LMS, I never saw an LMS that tied the mastery score to the student's score to come up with a "Completion" report. For that matter, I have rarely seen a decent report from an LMS that provides a breakdown of how each question was answered by each student, and whether there was a problem with a specific test question.

I feel the same way about PodCasts and Wikis. They are good tools (Podcasts for disseminating information, Wikis/Content Management Systems for collaborative documentation), but calling them pure training is definitely a stretch ("Solution looking for a Problem"). That's what annoys me so much about the "big" analysts pushing these as the future of elearning. I see most of these technologies as good resources, not training.

The thought behind ReadyGo's SCORM implementation

We realized early on that there was a difference between the specification (e.g. SCORM, AICC) and the "behavior" you want to experience. So we left our tool open to use different LMS-packs when the author creates the course. The author does need to contact us, but
we can produce a new behavior for $200-$500.

What does "behavior" mean? The combination of what the course reports
and what the server stores, and how the server acts based on the data is
what we call "behavior". For example, suppose your LMS forbids students
from retaking a course if they have completed it. In that case, if the
course reports the lesson status as "completed", the students will lose
access to it. To bypass this, the course could report "Passed" as the
status. Or, suppose your LMS overwrites previous status every time the
student retakes the test. In this case, the course has to check status
at the beginning of the course (not always possible), and would need to
ensure that it does not change the status from "completed" to
"incomplete" just because the student revisits the course.

By the way, in our current release of the ReadyGo authoring tool, we
have added a "custom" question type. You can use this to add your own
Flash or JavaScript. You hook up the results computed by your
Flash/JavaScript to the variables needed by ReadyGo, and the tool will
turn your custom interaction into a SCORM or AICC tracked element in the
test. Is this what you were looking for in your "I'd love to see" section?

ReadyGo has also pursued an alternative to LMS which is a
tracking/assessment engine. This uses basic web technologies to store
every test result every time the student responds. The data is stored
in Comma-Separated-

Variable text files (for portability). The web-based
reporting module has a group of reports. The look/feel is driven by
style sheets so that part is customizable. For users needing more
customization, we provide an Excel macro that will pull the results in,
and create the same reports. Since source code is provided, you can
then extend the reports using Excel as a simple database. If you have
dBase knowledge, of course, you can just pull the CSV files into your
database (first column = primary key), and you can create your own
queries. Since this module diverges from SCORM/AICC we can also do
things (easily for the author) like randomizing question and
answer/distratctor order. Also, the user can access all the course
content without needing to re-login every time. That is what I
previously alluded to regarding Web-technologies rather than
face-to-face-ported-to-web.

Canned Courses

I've seen many times when a company spend a large sum on canned courses and there is almost no usage. A statistic one of our customers gave us was it cost them $150 per module completed. Each course they purchased consisted of many modules, meaning that they got very poor return on investment.

I believe the problem is that many canned courses purchased as a block of courses are not pertinent to the employees. As an analogy, how many purchased PowerPoint presentations are you using? Why not? My answer would be that the benefit of PowerPoint based training is that you deliver content that is specific to your organization or outlook. Canned content cannot necessarily do that. This also applies to web based content.

If management continues to view employees as (using the Air Force term) "Line Replaceable Units" or "LRUs", they will get what they pay for.

Regarding "extracurricular" activities, it is an interesting irony that people are so interested in using video and podcasts for training but yet want to block youtube and iTunes using the corporate firewall. If the content is interesting, or the employee feels some gain from doing it, they will take the courses (or watch the videos). If management and trainers have to push it on the workers, the knowledge retention will be much lower. Likewise, any impediment to taking the training (e.g. having to go through 3 login screens, having trouble getting the plug-in to work, annoying coworkers with audio) further reduces the chances of course usage.

By making the courses available at off-hours, but simultaneously offering the employee more flexible schedules, you can raise total productivity. If we treat employees as LRU's (or another term I like: "chimp-erators") the employees will remain that way. I have experienced that in most companies there is a breakdown as follows:
20% of the workers are high achievers who do 80% of the work.
60% of the workers treat it as a "job" - they keep their head down hoping they won't be noticed or fired. This group accomplishes 20% of the work.
20% of the employees are either completely useless or spend all their time playing politics to move up the corporate ladder.

eLearning will be most effective on the top 20% since they are self-motivated, and they pull most of the load. I don't have the answer for the other 80%.

Moving from training to performance support

Course characteristics you can deploy to switch from "Training" to "Performance Support" might only entail:
1. Course design that invites the worker to jump into the middle of the
content (e.g. get away from linear presentation-style structure). Provide tables of contents so the user can get to any content in 3 clicks or less.

2. Content that is searchable (e.g. built in HTML/XML) rather than
Flash/Video. Put a search engine on your repository of course content,
and you now have a basic knowledge management system.
3. Testing throughout the content rather than just a final exam at the
end of a linear sequence.
4. Chunking the content into self-contained pieces (e.g a page with
sub-pages). Narration becomes somewhat less useful in this scenario.
5. Presentation of same content in different contexts (narrative, bullet
points, step-by-step printable procedure, video/animated procedure,
quiz, test, exercise).
6. Easy access: Move away from the LMS operations concept (Log in, take
a course, take a test, log out) to a web operations concept (Go to
company home page, search keyword, find/read page from course, possibly
take a test, read neighboring pages to get related information).
7. Move towards "courselets" or "Knowledge Pills" - courses should have
15 minutes of information rather than 15 hours.
8. Include a "what's new" section in any required course so that
experienced workers can skip the material they already know.

Who should have access to online training?

Arguments that people should not have access to knowledge outside their
field seem ironic in an "education" or "training" discussion arena. One
great feature of eLearning is that it is so cheap to provide this
access, especially once the content is created. Making excuses like "they
don't have the time" or "they don't have the mental abilities" is
insulting, short-sighted, and could be viewed as illegal. But then
again, perhaps CEOs of companies should be exempted from sexual
harassment rules (and code of conduct policies) because they don't have
the time to take training courses.

Often, the truck driver is the only face-to-face interaction the
customer has with the vendor. If the truck driver wants to maintain
his/her job, and potentially earn a tip, knowledge of good sales
techniques and an understanding of the product he/she is delivering is
essential. Likewise, the salesperson should understand the restrictions
the truck-driver is under in order to not make promises the company
cannot meet. The same holds for engineers with respect to marketing,
etc., etc., etc. I have experienced an untrained truck driver
delivering a product. The photographic paper he delivered was tossed
around during delivery. This didn't cause visible damage to the outside
of the product, but photographic paper is pressure-sensitive, and the
damage did not become apparent until pictures were developed. This cost
both the vendor and the customer lots of time and money.

What's really in the SCORM spec!

There is nothing in the SCORM spec that requires a FINAL assessment, or
any other kind of assessment. A course only needs to Initialize and
Finalize the session. It doesn't need to even report anything else.
That is why you will see tools that claim to be SCORM conformant, but
you author from Word, PowerPoint, Notepad, or MS-Paint.

Most authoring tools only have the concept of a FINAL assessment,
whereas you can actually have multiple assessments, surveys, etc. in
your course, and SCORM allows this. Many LMSs only store the minimum
SCORM data (score, status, time), so the authoring tools don't feel
compelled to push beyond. These LMSs tend to report even less about
each student. "Beyond" means including what the correct answer is, what
the student answered on every question, how long they took, how many
times they answered it, what they answered each time, etc.; information
that is useful for the course developer to know if they wrote good
questions. This probably explains why these tools only produce SCORM
packages if (and only if) you include a final assessment (and nothing else).

ReadyGo WCB will produce the SCORM package whether you include zero, one, or five hundred assessments.

What is Intuitive?

More and more I am learning that the term "intuitive" is very loose.
What is intuitive to one person may be completely strange and unfamiliar
to another. This is especially true when instructional design and
software meet.

Something is "intuitive" if we have experience with something else that
is similar. If something is not "intuitive" then there is a real need
to have additional material to help it become "intuitive" to people.
The English language is very non-intuitive, but yet, native speakers
consider it completely intuitive. (For example, "gooder" would be the
natural extension of "good", but we use "better".)

Context-sensitive help is what I call a "Reference Manual" - you look up
details on a specific task. A tutorial is more of a "User's Manual" in
that it should offer procedural descriptions of the software's overall
functionality and approach. The "searchability" requirement can quickly
turn a well structured User's Manual into both a "User's Manual" and a
"Reference Manual". I find highly linear content like Video and Audio
distracting and uninformative, but then that is my learning style.

Training the Engineer

Engineers are trained to learn from visual content (primarily math and physics with lots of equations). "We (engineers) are accustomed to both quick learning (by looking up a formula) and in-depth learning (understanding how the formula was derived). A video can provide an example of the concept, but will generally not provide fundamental engineering concepts."

True interactivity involves changing behaviors based on the student's response. The simple form of this is to provide the learner with multiple expositions of the same material accessed through links on a page. These expositions could include a step-by-step table, a link to a journal article, a formula derivation, a practical example of the implications of the formula, a quiz, or a tracked test.

In addition every graphic, audio, video, hot-zone, or other non-text element should be carefully scrutinized and justified. "Does it convey new information? Does the student's action relate to the content, or is the student's action simply a display control?"

My recommendation? A good book layout will be most effective for training engineers. An instructionally sound book approach is more than a series of linked slides with a table of contents on the sidebar. Each page of content should include links to sub-pages with different expositions of the same material, since each learner will gain differently from each presentation. The material should be easily accessible, meaning that at any time when the employee is doing his job, he can use the 'course' as reference material to look up the procedure or formula.

If the course is designed as a one-time, linear set of content, you lose this possibility. But if you can put a search engine on your site, and the content is properly searchable, you will create a reusable resource that the engineers will quickly adopt as part of their "library" of knowledge.

Why I think eLearning is sterile

eLearning is currently sterile because a large percentage of the
practitioners and the "gurus"/analysts consider f2f (Face2Face) techniques as the
core for web instructional design. That is, if you can just bottle your
f2f presentation, and put it on the web (convert your PPT to Flash, add
narration, dancing pigs and flying bullets), you are now doing
"eLearning". It will take some time before the analysts stop looking in
the rear-view mirror when developing the advice they give their customers.

Trainers will need to see more examples of web based instruction (using
web techniques, rather than pre-Web methods) to start synthesizing what
will be successful for them.

Perhaps prototyping is a step in this direction. I recall having to
prototype presentation slides so that I could hand them to the graphics
department for creation. Is that the stage we're in for eLearning?
What changed the field for f2f presentations was that PowerPoint (such
as it is) was bundled into MS-Office 4.0, and now a large number of
office workers had this for free on their desktops. Unfortunately, as
the analysts have reported, MS has 85% (approx) of the eLearning market
simply through PPT, so they have no motivation to include a true
eLearning tool in their office suite. (I'd be happy to sell them
licensing for ReadyGo, so they can open up this field!)

So, until there is a major re-think of the "Office Suite" that also
includes web-site (and I don't mean "web-page") builders, and people
consider web training a subset of web-sites, eLearning will remain
stagnant, and will move in fits and starts. As it is now, the "graphic
designers" are responsible for implementation of web training (like it
was in the pre-Office 4.0 days for presentations), rather than the subject matter experts.

Thinkings on web delivery

I believe that infrastructure is of interest to the course creator. 90% of the LMSs I have dealt with impose their own limitations/constraints on the user experience. That is, they have their own instructional design assumptions (e.g. once a student "completes" a course, they are locked out from revisiting it), and these assumptions impede learning. The course creator is going to be straight-jacketed by the LMS implementation (often involving the student having to open 5 or 6 browser windows just to get to their content), and it is essential that they understand the experience.

The current thinking seems to be that first you buy an LMS (at costs of US$50K-$1M), and then you start developing courses. This is like building a railroad system before you have a single locomotive. When you think about it LMSs are a subset of web servers. I'm talking to more and more people who are now starting to host their courses OUTSIDE an LMS because it affords them so much more flexibility. Gee, what a concept! Just use a basic web server (that you can get for free) to host your content. Now, your learners will get much more of a web-experience rather than a f2f presentation shoe-horned into web delivery technology.

Why I have issues with audio

I have recived a number of comments on my postings about audio. I would like to make my postin clear. I am not against audio if used appropriately. My issue is with how many course authors use audio. I break the issue with audio into two groups 1) accessibility 2) instructional design

Issue #1 Accessibility:
1. Audio does not make a course accessible to blind readers. Blind people like their audio to be about 3 x faster then we speak.
2. Are your learners in cubes? If so, do they have speakers, do they have head phones - many employees can not listen to courses

My accessibilities issue is that many times audio makes a course less accessible

Issues #2 Instructional design
1. Because you give a good classroom course/presentation does not mean that voice annotating the same presentation will make it good.
2. In a classroom people are socially compelled to look like they are paying attention; at their desk they are not and may dive into their in basket if you play audio
3. Does the audio make the course boring? People only retain 10% of what they learn from audio.


Audio is fine in a course, but you need to defend why you have audio. If you put audio into a course because it will take less time to record audio then create a compelling eLearning course, you really should reconsider creating eLearning. Why should learners waist their time on a course you are too lazy to make compelling.

The difference between run-time reusability vs design-time (or assembly-time) reusability

As a test, ask a friend of yours for their favorite PowerPoint presentation. Now grab your favorite PowerPoint presentation. Now, open them both in PowerPoint (but not in the same file). Present one. Immediately when you finish the first, show the second. Now, do they look like 2 presentations that were pasted together, or do they look like one continuous course?

Instead, take the content from the two presentations, put them into a single PPT file, and make sure that they are consistent in:
1. Look and feel: backgrounds, fonts, navigation, structure
2. Style: Text style, location of test questions, parallel structure of notes
3. Navigation text: This doesn't really apply to PPT, but with web sites/web courses you need additional labels and texts ("next page", "previous page", "grade the test", etc.) These need to be consistent throughout a single course, or the student will be very distracted.

Once you make sure these are all consistent, you can serve the content, and it will look smoother.

The difference here is whether you do run-time reusability or you do With eLearning if all you do is modify the style sheets at assembly time, you are not really using the SCOs unchanged.

I am a proponent of design-time or assembly-time reusability, and as you can tell, I don't like run-time assembly. More than that, I am a proponent of being able to re-use components of a SCO such as graphics, multimedia, pages, page groupings, test pages, etc. Some of these are what SCORM 2004 calls "assets".

A good tool will let you copy/paste content modules from various sources so that you can create a unified course. For example, suppose you want to number the SCOs so that the user knows at all times where they are. If you number them before assembly, and then you change the assembly order, the numbering will be incorrect. If you use content from different authors, it is important to make sure all the "stock" texts, navigation images, tables-of-contents, etc. are consistent. This is nearly impossible if you limit yourself to run-time re-usability.

In the web course process, there is the publish step. This is comparable to the print step with documents. During the publication step, you assemble your course for delivery. The way SCORM is designed, the publish step is more like grabbing multiple documents that have already been printed, and staple them together in a new order just prior to delivery. As opposed to printed documents that are linear, web courses are multidimensional with a "web" of interconnections. SCORM forbids the interconnections between SCOs. However, this does not prevent the author from giving the student clues about the interconnections between SCOs. For example, with the ReadyGo tool, if you choose to make each chapter of your course a SCO, the tool still builds a table of contents for the entire course that shows the other chapters but doesn't let you jump to them through the course. Within the chapter, the student is allowed to navigate anywhere.

If you design your SCOs so that the primary objective is re-usability, then you'll find that you're making them smaller and smaller, and more generic. You can entirely avoid the navigation issues by making each SCO a single-page object. You can also make tests so that each test is a separate SCO. (With many LMSs you must do this if you want to find out if a student understood a specific data item because they only store the score for each SCO.) However, I feel that these steps are bad for the end-user. When going from SCO to SCO, the LMS must close the current session and open a new session. The best turn-around I've seen for this is in the 5-10 second range. Typical delays are around 20 seconds. Any delay between pages of content will cause the learner to drift off the subject (and often they go check their e-mail or instant messages). So, the more granular your courses are (for re-usability) the slower the delivery and the more disjointed it will be for the learner. Now, if there are any visual disparities between the SCOs, these further disrupt the learning process.

So, yes, you can re-use SCOs at run-time. You will probably win some awards for your ability to use the SCORM, and you'll feel proud of yourself for creative re-use of content. But what about the learner's experience. Shouldn't that be the highest priority? If you alienate enough employees (with learning experiences that they dread), what's the point of re-usability?

What really is re-usability in eLearning

Someone who used to work at ADL labs pointed out to me that re-usability
should really go beyond just SCORM courses. You should be able to take
the same content and serve it without tracking. Or you should be able
to print out the content for those users who learn better from paper.
Also, you may want to re-use the content for people with visual
disabilities. So, it shouldn't just be about re-assembling 20 SCOs 50
ways to create 50 courses.

How can this be accomplished? I see 2 approaches:
1. At the tool level. Use a tool that contains your content. SCORM
courses are one of many different outputs that the tool can produce. It
could also produce, printable versions, AICC courses, non-trackable
versions, etc. You can copy paste between different courses or from
other sources and re-arrange content prior to course assembly.
2. Using XML/XSLT - but here, you're post-processing the course files,
basically passing them through another program to produce different
output. (That could get really tricky with the tracking scripts.)

I see run-time re-usability primarily for different delivery platforms.
You should be able to specify a different style sheet (at run time) so
that an end-user on a PDA can get an optimal format for them, and a
person with visual disabilities should get a good layout for their
needs. This is possible if you specify a style-sheet at run-time,
something the SCORM discourages.

Furthermore, re-usability should be from the learner's point of view.
Will the learner come back to the course and re-use it as a resource
(like a textbook)? Or has the content been designed for a one-time
event, like a face-to-face presentation? A learner may remember that a
certain procedure or fact was described in a course they took, but
they'll only re-use it if they can get to it quickly. 3 screens worth
of gateways just to get to the start of the course, followed by some
enforced navigation sequence will deter the user from using the content
as a resource.

Instructional design resource

I just found a great eLearning blog: http://blog.cathy-moore.com/ Cathy is an Instructional Designer who has spent a lot of time figuring out the fine points of moving training to the web and showcasing how to effectively communicate asynchronously.

Views on Face-to-Face (F2F) videos:

If your objective is to tape the face-to-face (F2F) presentations, and then deliver these as "eLearning", you will be quite disappointed in the results when it comes to learner retention. Although many people believe it to be "active" and "animated", video training is an extremely passive form of training, and results in very low knowledge retention. Further, people can read and ingest information about 3 times as quickly as is spoken. This means that unless the presenter is attractive, professional, and smooth, the viewers will quickly disengage. We have seen that videos that last more than about 2 minutes are abandoned quickly - this is even true for YouTube. Our customers have told us that they have also seen this behavior, and have found lower student satisfaction with video based courses than with simple text-and-picture based courses. We have also seen that because videos require plug-ins, many learners are unable to see them. An IT person usually has to be dispatched to install the plug-in software. By the time the learner then gets around to seeing the video, it can be 3 or 4 days later; by which time, they have lost interest in the courseware.

If you want to offer your employees self-paced training, consider creating more web-like content. This means that the content has tables of contents so that the student can establish their own navigation path that takes them to the material of interest. This becomes very "active" learning because the student is in control of the experience. If you provide them a self-propelled presentation or a linear slide show, you take control away from the learner. This usually results in the learner losing interest in the content.

Where does XML fit into eLearning?

XML can be used as a display language when combined with style sheets.
You can then embed scripts to provide some level of dynamic/interactive
content. This would be like saying PostScript can be used to define how
a page is rendered. You can embed pictures so that they appear on the page.

XML is really designed as a data storage format. As such, people
typically put all the data into one file. This is similar to having a
Word document that has all the content in one document. However, when
viewing pages on the web, you should really have a "web" of documents.
If you save a Word document in web format, you get one long document.
You can have internal links that take you from one place in the document
to another, but you are still looking at one long page. Web sites
consist of collections of files, with each page of content consisting of
a separate (or several) files. These files could be built using XML, or
you could save some time by building them in HTML, which is
fundamentally a display language rather than a data storage format.
Please convey this in your white-paper so that people will get away from
saying that "XML" is the solution. XML is a tool. Good content
organization, layout, and functionality, also known as "instructional
design", is the solution.

What is broken in eLearning implementation?

I see that eLearning and CBT are earning a bad reputation, not because the approach is fundamentally flawed, but because the implementations have catered to the lowest common denominator. This breaks down into two major parts, both of which are fundamentally driven by the customer desire for quick fixes.

1. LMS side: Customers want an LMS that shows the training department has enterprise-level clout. Beyond that, the customers are only now starting to think about what the user experience (operational concept) will be and what, if any, detailed reporting and tracking is needed. 95% of the LMSs I have seen only provide a report of who has completed the course. There is no consideration of tracking how many times an individual answered a particular question. This kind of tracking is very important to discover if there is a problem with the question or content or to see if students are just guessing at answers to get the "completion certificate". Many LMSs have been happy to provide this minimal set of back-end capabilities while focusing on the pretty front-end "virtual campus" interface (and on a strong sales department). This results in systems costing many hundreds of thousands of dollars that provide empire building but little else.

2. Course Authoring: If your course consists of converted PowerPoint slides with a single final test at the end, chances are your students will skip over the slides, take the test, and be done with it, without actually learning anything or proving that they know the content. Generally, presentation slides require a live instructor to complete the content and ensure that the students spend the time on the material. If you take away the instructor, presentation slides provide maybe 20% of the training. Visual animations such as flying bullets only add distraction; but that is what many course authors are including because, "gee, look how cool this is!"

In order to use CBT/eLearning effectively, the course owner must follow the entire sequence that the students experience. This means designing the course to match the delivery environment, providing multiple expositions of the same material, asking test questions on the same material multiple times in the session (and requiring completion of the multiple tests), and most importantly, reviewing the results of the training by seeing how each question was answered. Otherwise, it is like a high school that hands out the textbooks at the beginning of the year, and just looks at the scores from a self-administered test after the student has "graduated". "Quick and easy" solutions will lead, in the long term to a backlash against eLearning. Throwing new technologies (podcasts, wikis, game shows, and blogs) will not solve the problem if the content and approach are not sound, well thought out, and properly monitored.

Views on video in eLearning

If the reader's objective is to tape face-to-face presentations, and then deliver these as "e-learning," I predicts that the reader will be disappointed with the outcome.

Although many people believe video to be 'active' and 'animated,' in reality it is an extremely passive form of training and results in very low knowledge retention. Furthermore, people can read and ingest information about three times more quickly than when hearing information in spoken format. This means that unless the presenter is attractive, professional and smooth, the viewers will quickly disengage. We have found that videos that last more than about two minutes are abandoned quickly; this is even true for YouTube.

If you want to offer employees self-paced training, I suggest that you create Web-like content in lieu of video. This means that the content has tables of contents so that students can establish their own navigation path that takes them to material of interest. This becomes very 'active' learning because the students are in control of the experience."

eLearning theory and Rapid eLearning Tools:

Theory has to do with figuring out the best course layout (and I don't just mean
graphic design - I mean content organization), the best element types (tables,
do-it-offline exercises, bullet point presentations, etc.) and the best delivery
distribution (face-to-face versus self-paced) for the various learner environments.
For Rapid eLearning tools, have they adopted a "PPT conversion" paradigm, a
"web content and organization" paradigm, a "CBT visually stimulating" approach,
or a "we call ourselves 'rapid' so we can sell more copies of the same old thing" approach.

Once again, it is important to choose the right tool for the job.

For "standards", here is the issue. The standards provide a collection
of data that you can store. It has names like "score", "session_time",
"interaction.score", "interaction.correct_answer", and
"interaction.student_response". You need to understand what you can use
each of these for in the context of what the Learning Management System
or Tracking Engine will store and report. What use is it to capture
every student_response to a question if you can never find this
information out? Therefore, you would need to understand how to use
these variables and the delivery platforms in order to actually get
useful information about the performance of your content (in addition to
the performance of the learners.)

What size font works best for eLearning?

If a course designer has established a 10 pt font, they are on their way to serious frustration. The concept of a fixed-size font is related to printed material, so it should go along with establishing a paper size for eLearning. How many points are there on the end-users screens?

Good web practice dictates that you should use a relative size font. The base font size should be the end-user's choice. In MS-IE, you can go under Tools, and find the button for "Size". In Firefox and other Mozilla browsers, the learners can select their base font size much more freely. Why does this matter? For accessibility. A 10 pt font may be fine on an 800x600 pixel screen, but it is too large for a PDA, and it is too small if the end-user has visual disabilities or they have a 1600x1200 19-inch screen. Instead, the font size should be specified as a percentage of the end-user's default (e.g. 100%, 80%, 120%, etc.)

With web pages, it is also important to select:
1. Acceptable combinations of foreground and background color (if there is not enough contrast, the font will be illegible).
2. Acceptable foreground colors: Keep in mind that in many cases the end user may turn off images and background images (like on a Blackberry). If you choose a white foreground font with a dark background image, the text will be invisible because the PDA or other rendering device will provide a white background. (So use dark colors.)
3. Relative font sizes, font families, text decoration, etc. for different elements of the page, e.g. Heading, summary section, test question, test answer, test distractor, Outline numbering, ... I recommend that a read-through of the Cascading Style Sheets specification be made before going much further with this exercise.
4. Define navigation graphics (forward, back, glossary, test, try-this)
5. Define navigation texts ("next", "back", "Grade the Test", "Submit Survey Responses").
etc.

It would be worthwhile to review a complete web-based eLearning course (not a PowerPoint presentation displayed through the web) to see all the different kinds of elements that will be used. Otherwise, the specification of a 10 point sans-serif font for "eLearning" is like saying, "I want to use blue paper for Word documents."

ADA 508 conformant courses

If you stick to web standards, like W3C HTML, your content becomes ADA 508 conformant if you follow some simple rules. Beyond that, the benefit of W3C HTML is that your content becomes searchable, deliverable on multiple platforms (e.g. PDAs), deliverable without a lot of plug-ins, and faster to download.

Most plug-in based content is inaccessible to blind
readers. 508 should be about making the content accessible to everyone
at the same time, not about certain pages accessible to blind people
with 3 other pages accessible to hearing impaired only. Also, one of the
best features of Sesame Street (and other shows including my favorite,
"Between the Lions") is that they can offer repetition of presentation
of material without requiring a live instructor. Web based training can
also offer this (if the reader is interested in the topic).

Moving from a trainer to eLearning. Do you try to replace the trainer?

I guess the question is whether the avatar is a good enough replacement
for a live instructor that learners.
1. Can you interrupt it?
2. Can you ask it a question?
3. Can it understand the real reason for the question? Usually people
ask a question that shows a symptom of their misunderstanding, rather
than the fundamental reason for the question. If only the symptom is
answered, the fundamental misunderstanding usually remains.
4. Can it answer your question?

With electronically delivered training the different learning needs
pose challenges and offer possibilities, especially when you remove the
live instructor. I have never believed that a pre-recorded instructor
was a good substitute, however I see many trainers and content
developers sticking to the old paradigms. That is, "lets see how close
we can get to instructor-based training while delivering remotely":
1. Record the instructor on video or audio.
2. Expect that the course will only be accessed once (so provide only
linear navigation)
3. Provide only the instructor's presentation (both what they gave as
material, and only showing their answers to the questions posed during
video taping).
4. If they can't record the instructor, drop back to an avatar.
5. Remain in PPT "instructional design" which means breaking the content
so that it fits 3 points per slide, rather than organizing content to
coherent chunks with natural divisions. Here the fundamental issue is that the trainer is trying to replace the form of face-to-face instruction while delivering electronically.

These short-cuts result in courses with low value and low attention
retention. Some solutions:
1. If you record a video or audio, keep it under 2 minutes. If it is
longer than that, the user will "float" away to check e-mail or play
freecell. Make sure the video downloads and plays in less than 20
seconds. Justify its value: Does it show a process or is it just a
talking head? If a talking head, are there any visual queues that are
absolutely essential that could not be given with lower bandwidth
requirements (e.g. "this is important"). If audio doesn't match the
text, the user will have to follow one or the other, resulting in
cognitive overload.
2. Make the course following web practices: lots of navigation, let the
user choose their path, let the user reach any content within 3 logical
clicks, make it easy to get back to the content when the user needs to
look something up. Many LMSs block the student from viewing content
after they have completed the course. This would remove re-usability
for the end-user.
3. Show the same material in multiple forms. This is where the web (and
creativity) can really shine. Provide a screen snapshot animation, a
broken down step-by-step procedure, a longer article, a try-this
example, a quiz, a tracked test, links to other sites (vendors,
SecondLife, FaceBook, Wikipedia). Users will naturally gravitate to the
presentation forms that are easiest for them. (Don't try to control the
user's navigation...you will just lose them.)
4. People can read much faster than spoken language. People can also
understand content narrated much faster than we normally speak. Audio
content speed should be adjustable. It is amazing to watch a blind
person using a blind reader. They often set the audio to go really
quickly. Keep in mind that audio delivery is very linear, so it needs
to be sped up for people who can only access from audio.
5. Use the multiple navigation abilities (links to drill-downs) to break
the content based on what will give the best organization for learning,
rather than what will fit on one slide without scroll bars. Remember
scroll bars? They work fine if vertical. Horizontal scrolling,
however, should be avoided.

What is important for eLearning design?

I keep running into people who
completely discount other people's ideas and abilities simply because
there are a few typos or spelling mistakes in their presentations. (I'm
not referring to Phil as guilty of this, but because he illustrated that
this can be an issue.) I see this as a symptom that also affects course
design. These same people will spend hours agonizing as to whether
their bullet points should do a flip as they fly into the page, and will
choose visually animated content any day over solidly instructionally
designed material.

Yesterday, I was talking to someone (with very strong graphic arts and
engineering capabilities), and they mentioned that they had yet to see
an eLearning course that they found really interesting. It dawned on me
that indeed, eLearning courses will only be as interesting as the content.
Adding visual stimulation is the kind of window-dressing/ distraction that
the "analysts" seem to push to compensate for poorly designed or even just
run-of-the-mill content.

I'd like to get people to move towards the idea that if your content is
average (and 99.9% of content falls into that category), the best way to
compensate is to give the student the ability to control their session.
It is more important to have students who use the content and are not
immediately repulsed.

For example, I have seen PPT presentations that were shipped out with
mandatory (but extremely boring) content. The company didn't want to
spend the extra day of work to port it into a more web-friendly
structure (and I don't mean Flash) because they thought it was a waste
of time. I watched how the audience viewed the content:
1. They opened the PPT (it was a PowerPoint Slide Show)
2. They clicked the "Next" button on every page until they got to the
certification piece. Average time on each page was probably 5 seconds.
3. They completed the certification and closed out.

My observations:
1. When you multiply 5 seconds/page times 20 pages times 1000 employees,
you realize that a lot of time was wasted.
2. If the content was more "friendly" it would have a link to jump
straight to a "What's New" summary, and a link to the "Certification".
This would actually result in employees spending useful time on what is
"new", and then jumping to the certification page, rather than
dismissing every page as quickly as possible (without reading them).
3. The flying bullets only slowed the students down from getting back to
their other daily tasks.

What type of course do people want to create?

I believe that IS the primary market in eLearning. Here's what I mean.
Much of the training community seems to still be at the Web 0.5 stage
e.g Web .5 is the technology we used before the web.
Most SME's (subject matter experts) like to give presentations, but now they are realizing that because of financial pressures, they must adopt the new tools. However, and
this is ironic, trainers don't want to learn new tools and approaches. So
the number 1 solution is to outsource. The number 2 solution is to use pre-web
technology e.g. PowerPoint. The end products tend to reflect
the Web 0.5 approach because anything that is Web 1.0 or later is "too
different".

Thoughts on assembling a course for use at delivery time

At McDonalds you can re-use fried potatoes (french fries) and Soda
with any other meal. And the result is a McDonalds "Happy" Meal. This
is "food", but I wouldn't call it nutrition or fine cuisine.

Using Spaghetti Sauce as a trackable re-usable object could make sense;
however what is the point of tracking spaghetti sauce when you want to
track that the user ate pizza, or that the user had a balanced meal?
Or, we could put the spaghetti sauce into an LCMS (Linguine Cannelloni
Management System) and have the LCMS re-use the spaghetti sauce
automatically for us - put it with lobster, put it with ice cream, put
it with peanut butter.

If we require that a SFO cannot lead to another SFO (e.g. the wine
course preparing your mouth for the artichoke course), then we shouldn't
be breaking the objects down so small simply so we can put them into the
blender (LCMS) to re-use them. I don't agree with making each SFO
primarily for the purpose of reusability. I should expand my kitchen so
that what it delivers is complete courses (pun intended) rather than
just building blocks reassembled (because it is easier to let the
blender reassemble the meal). If I want to re-use the components, I
should have the tools that let me blend them correctly before they leave
the kitchen.

In SCO language, what I'm trying to say is that I think the idea of
having an LCMS assemble a course for us at delivery time is a bad
solution. Yes, you should be able to re-use components, but this should
be done while you, the instructional designer, assemble the course for
the specific purpose. If you start mixing and matching content from
different authors simply because SCORM says you can, you will end up
with really bad courses that look disjointed. But this goes contrary to
a common perception that SCORM is about authoring based on reusable
components. I think SCORM should be about having the option of reusing
your courses in different delivery mechanisms.

To blend the idea of a multi-navigation course with a consistent
look and feel, the best solution I see is to make a larger SCO. For
granularity of tracking, the LMSs/courses need to use the interactions
and objectives groups. Then, you can serve a complete course (meal) as
a SCO, and provide sensible instruction with complete tracking so that
you know what each learner answered on every question. We need to have
final objectives that go beyond just creating a SCORM conformant package.

SCORM does not allow for dynamically generated content because of loss of interoperability/portability, but I have seen that you can fool it if your dynamically generated content is an "asset", e.g remote web page or remote graphic. What frightens me is
that there is a SCORM "group think" mentality that has taken over where
the concept of dynamically generated content (at delivery time) has
been replaced with the concept of an LCMS that organizes the chunks
mechanically. The two concepts are quite opposite and should not be
confused. One is a coherent approach that can provide up-to-date
variable content. The other is a solution looking for a problem to
solve based on people who want to use "big iron", resulting in
disjointed ransom note courses.

Implementing AICC

AICC is actually an easier task to implement than SCORM. Here are the
components you would need:
1. Your database to create a unique session identifier for each
student. Frankly, you could just use the student ID. It all depends on
how detailed you want to be in your reporting.
2. When the student is ready for the courses, you need to create a
launch page - that is a dynamically created web page with a list of the
courses available to the user with URLs pointing to those courses. The
URLs have to include the session identifiers.
3. On your server you need an application that can catch and parse the
data coming from the course. Most AICC courses never use or ask for
previous history data, so you may be able to get away with not providing
the getParam response. The tricky part of this application is that it
has to organize the incoming data (by SessionID, perhaps) and store it
for reports later. When this application receives an exitAU message, it
should end the session (and ideally store the elapsed time, although I
haven't yet seen an LMS that does this.)

For a low price, I can provide a basic catcher routine, but you'd still
need to do a lot of work to store the data. We use this internally to test AICC
courses to ensure that they're reporting the information we intend them
to report.

Alternatively, contact me directly, and I will give you the e-mail
address for someone I know who created an AICC-based LMS. They may
resell it to you for your development. The price would end up being
lower in the long run than developing it yourself.

LMS Recommendations

The "back end" is where most LMS problems -- and costs -- tend to be concentrated. Unfortunately, few customers get to see and play with the "back end" of their LMS until after they've paid for and begun using the system in earnest.

With this in mind, I recommend doing the following to save yourself time, money and headaches:

• Determine whether the LMS provides a way for you to export data and produce your own reports. "We have heard of LMSs that have data stored in such a confused manner that it's impossible to retrieve them from the database," says Moser. Worsening the problem, he says, is the fact that some LMSs charge $25,000 for every custom report that a customer needs. ("This is for a single-event report, not for programming a report that you can re-run. So, it is essential that you are able to get the data out of the LMS (in case the LMS goes broke or doesn't have a canned report that meets your needs).")



• If you are looking at a learning content management system (LCMS), or an LMS with authoring capabilities, will you be able to take your courses and serve them outside the LMS? "Once again, if the LMS goes broke, gets bought, or does an upgrade that you don't want to pay for, it is essential that you be able to take YOUR content and host it elsewhere."



• What kind of support does the LMS vendor provide? "We have seen many (some of the best known ones fall into this category) where you are routed to a customer support agent who barely knows how to spell 'AICC.' They can waste weeks of your time giving you the run-around. When negotiating the contract, I recommend a clause that if you don't get a satisfactory support response within two days, you have direct access to the product developers/engineers, rather than being stuck with tech support. If you don't get this support, the LMS should pay a penalty."



• Be wary of contracts that include off-the-shelf content. "As a thought experiment, consider how many off-the-shelf PowerPoint presentations you currently use internally. How many off-the-shelf face-to-face training courses do you use? Your e-learning needs will end up being about the same -- that is, you will need to develop most of your own training. The extra cost for a library of stock courses might be an inefficient use of resources."

What is a reusable SCO?

If your project requires that you show a SCO is reusable, then your
instructor has made the same interpretation about SCORM as so many other
people. The end result is spending a lot of time creating chunks of
information that when combined may look like a ransom note.

The most reusable SCO would be a page that says "Welcome". Insert an
LMSInitialize(

), and and LMSFinish() on the page. Now you can use this
for every course you have. You can even give the user a score for it.
This is how the tools that claim to create SCORM from Word work. Your
page can now be served from the ADLnet SCORM 1.2 Self-test, and it will
be conformant. However, instructionally, I believe it will be useless.

How about if you argue that re-usability is not a worthwhile objective
when it requires poor instructional design. I believe that
graphics/multimedia, and even items like glossaries (what SCORM now
calls "Assets") should be re-usable. However, I believe that
restructuring a trackable unit so that it is re-usable is a bad idea,
and a waste of time. For example, ask your instructor to re-use your
project requirement to teach people about the re-usability of PDF
content, or PostScript content, or AICC content, or photocopy content.

SCORM - the issue of shareable content

Perhaps we should develop the SFORM specification (Shareable Food Object
Reusability Model). A SFO is the smallest trackable (something you
order from a waiter) unit that you can re-use. OK, so now you serve the
end-user some pepper. Follow it up as the next course with some salt.
The next SFO will be the fish. And so on. This is a highly re-usable
and since you can put it on paper, metal, or porcelain plates, it is
highly interoperable.

If we think of side-dishes, perhaps a SFO makes more sense. But
remember, that under the SFORM specification, the LMS is responsible for
navigation from one SFO to the next. One SFO cannot access another SFO
while it is still open. So the pairing of a good wine with a complex
dish becomes contrary to the specification.

If instead we restrict the "re-usability" part of the SFORM to assets,
it makes a heck of a lot more sense. Serve water with every course of
the meal. A salt shaker (glossary) is provided with each course.
Interoperability means you can serve this meal on a boat, an airplane,
at home, or in a restaurant.

In terms of a "repository", it can be as simple as a folder on a hard
drive containing graphics - if you have a tool to preview each, they
become easily reusable. The course designer has to be intimately
familiar with any object they plan to re-use, or they will produce
unusable content. This whole process needs to be about the learner, NOT
the developer; however, the SCORM specification readers tend to be
developers focusing on their own short-term needs. If the development
tools that these people have are difficult to use (e.g. using Notepad to
create HTML pages), then SCORM takes on the common meaning: I need to do
everything to avoid having to create new content - so I will create very
generic material that I can reinsert into every course. For example:

----------------------------------------------------------
Emergency Exit Manual
---------------------
Welcome to this vehicle. In case of a fire, accident, flood, snowstorm,
heat wave, or other emergency, please place your head between your
knees, or crawl to the nearest exit, or wait for a rescuer, or update
your last will and testament. Our
pilot/captain/conductor/autopilot/director/engineer has been
specifically trained on how to use this
boat/plane/car/bicycle/submarine. Thank you for
flying/riding/driving/jumping/shopping with us.

Test: Have you have been properly prepared? a. yes b. no c. all of the
above.
----------------------------------------------------------

If on the other hand, the developer has a tool that makes it easy to
create and repackage content (e.g. an authoring tool like ReadyGo -
equivalent to PPT for presentation), SCORM takes on much more of a
meaning about interoperability. Reusability is done upstream, during
content assembly/packaging. It takes less than a minute for the
software to repackage an entire course and create the necessary manifest
files. Now the barrier to reusing portions of one course in another
course are much lower, and it becomes easier and more cost-effective to
create coherent, instructionally sound courses driven by learner needs
rather than by developer limitations.

Why isn't "interoperability" part of the name "SCORM"?