Next Generation Content Authoring - From LearnX, Sydney

LearnX 2010 in Sydney, Australia was a special occasion for Raptivity because of the Best e-learning tool award. Here, I also had the opportunity to deliver a session on the next generation content authoring. The goal was to outline the various aspects trainers and educators need to consider while designing their training material for next generation learners.

Content authoring has moved way beyond creation of simple textual pages and assessments. Today, learners are exposed to variety of high-end digital experiences and they expect the same in their learning. Learning interactions such as learning games, branching simulations, virtual worlds and social interactions are becoming key elements to keep learners motivated and engaged in the training material.  Here is a recap of the key points in the session.

courtesy australiaphotos.co.uk

1.    Next Generation Learning
The new generation of tech-savvy learners has grown up with mobility, net browsing, games and social networking. These learners have a low attention span. Yet, they are prepared to interact, and they expect great experiences.


2.    Types of Interactive Elements for Next Generation Learning
There are five types of interactive elements that I highlight for this discussion, that characterize the next generation learning. They are: games, simulations, 3D artifacts, social interactions and active learning. Examples of games would include mini games, word games, TV game shows and strategy games. Simulations could include software simulations, branching scenarios or exploration exercises in an immersive experience. 3D artifacts include virtual worlds and 3D navigational objects. Examples of social interactions that can aid in learning include polls, discussions, chat and collaboration. Finally, scenario-based learning and activity-based learning round out the active learning repertoire.

3.    Tools for Creating Training Material
Raptivity, YawnBuster and TeemingPod are examples of tools that allow you to create interactive learning quickly and easily.

Soon I plan to post a quick look-up table for locating some great examples and  templates for such interactive elements cited above.

7 Fun Ways to Get Participation and Collaboration Going in Classrooms

Yes, I hear you. Preparing to teach a class is hard enough. Who has the time to add fun activities? Well, you do - given these no-frills group activities that only take minutes to build, whether you use a board, a flip chart or an interactive software like YawnBuster.

Show of Hands
Conducting a quick poll is a perfect icebreaker in the beginning of a class. Start with a question like 'How many of you know that..' or 'Who wants to ...' and watch the hands go up.

Brainstorm
Invite ideas, and get your learners' creative juices flowing. You can combine brainstorming with a poll - first get all the ideas out there, and then have people vote on them. Or you can have them prioritize those ideas collaboratively. See an example here.

Express Brainstorm
Add excitement to brainstorming by creating teams, by limiting the time for ideation, and by assigning a score. Check out this example.

T-chart
Whenever you have two sides to an issue (as in a debate) or two aspects to compare (as in pros and cons), use a T-chart and have learners come up with bullet points on either side. It encourages thinking and creates a useful visual comparison. Here is a T-chart built in a class.

Mind Map
Ideas are understood better when learners understand their relationships. Mind-map is a powerful graphical technique for representing relationships. Introduce ideas and ask the learners to help build a mind-map. For a mind-map building example, click here.

Parking Lot
Get distracted by too many questions? Create a parking lot and park the questions away. At the end of the class, answer each question. Want to see how it works? Click here.

Key Takeaways
Every now and then during your presentation, ask your learners to summarize  their understanding and write down a line of two on an online memo pad for everyone to see. At the end of the class, your key takeaways are ready! Click here for an example that shows how key takeaways are collected.

To get a free white paper titled 'Adding Fun to Learning with YawnBuster' click here.

Korea's Gigabit Internet to boost eLearning and mLearning

In my blog on the interactivity technology and its applications, I reviewed the famed ubiquitous city (U-city) project in Seoul that promises several new experiences in the day-to-day lives of citizens. That was a while back.

In a recent article, New York Times reports that home internet may get even faster in South Korea. South Korea already boasts of the world's fastest internet connection (Hong Kong and Japan rank #2 and #3, respectively.) That said, the government wants to do more. By 2012 end, every South Korean home will enjoy one gigabit per second connectivity - ten times faster than what it is currently.

The gigabit internet will create new possibilities for e-learning and m-learning. The use of video and other rich media will become easier, interactive experiences will download and play faster and learning will get better.

Harbinger Knowledge Products has introduced a Korean version of  Raptivity, the e-learning interactivity building software. It will be interesting to see the kind of video usage in interactions - given the high speed connections content authors can take for granted.

Avatars in eLearning: Best Practices

Avatars are interactive animated pedagogical agents. Avatars personalize a course, add  variety to learning, especially in long modules on complex subjects. A life-like ‘human’ interface makes the learning experience more ‘real’. An avatar doubles as a learning assistant (learning aid) that guides the learning by either answering questions, or guiding the learners, linking to external content and so forth. Research has shown improvement in learning outcomes when avatars are used.

Avatar by Melissa Clark

Clearly, the benefits of using avatars in e-learning seem to be overwhelming. One should expect to find them everywhere. Why, then, do several course designers avoid using avatars?

Here are the top 4 reasons, according to Janhavi Padture, Director - Learning Solutions at Harbinger Knowledge Products.

1. Avatars be distracting or even annoying if not used properly or when used excessively
2. They do not mimic human-like natural expressions, movements or lip synchronization
3. Sometimes an avatar simply does not fit in the user experience
4. Avatars are Often expensive to build and difficult to customize!

Hmmm. Those are the pros and cons. Is there a list of best practices for using avatars in e-learning? Sure enough, here is what Janhavi recommends.

1. Give course authors (and possibly learners) the ability to customize the avatar.
2. Make the avatar instructionally relevant – it should fulfill the interactivity needs of a learner.
3. It should augment content, not be the content.
4. Avatar should support 2-way interaction. It is not just a video or a cartoon. It responds to the learner's needs and provides helpful guidance.
5. Wherever it makes sense, allow learners to turn off avatars if they want to. For example, if a learner is revisiting a 'How to’ instructions page, this will help.
6. Last but not the least, avatar should be used for a specific purpose, such as online guide, answering FAQ, explaining a process, guiding learners during branching scenarios, etc.

In addition, the ability to build some level of intelligence into the avatar is a nice to have.

Do you use avatars in e-learning? What tools do you use? Why don't we see enough of them? Do you agree with the adoption problems we have cited? Should an avatar act as a presenter - a talking head, or animated narrator? Do students develop a relationship with avatar? Or is it just a gimmick?

Next Generation Audience Response Systems for Teachers and Trainers

Audience Response Systems (ARS) establish interactivity between presenters and their audience. Traditionally ARS consist of  several units of wireless hardware (a clicker pad which looks like a remote control) used by the audience, and it is combined with a presentation software used by the presenter.

Among the several well-known benefits of ARS, the most important one is that it creates an interactive and fun learning environment. Presenters can gain and retain audience attention, help increase knowledge retention, and confirm audience understanding of material presented. This is done in several ways: polling anonymously, tracking individual responses, displaying polling results immediately and so forth. Some presenters gather data or even take attendance using ARS.

According to Wikipedia, audience response systems may present some difficulties in both their deployment and use.

1. The per-unit purchase price of ARS devices
2. The maintenance and repair of devices when owned by a central unit or organization
3. The configuration, troubleshooting and support of the related presentation software
4. The reliability and performance of the devices

One can further state that the next generation should support some, if not all, of the following requirements.

1. Must work in a webinar / online meeting environment where people are not in the same location. Increasingly, meetings and classes take place in this mode. Clickers are no good for webinars.
2. Must avoid the need for purpose-built special hardware even when the audience is physically in same room (refer to my earlier post on Microsoft Mouse Mischief)
3. Should provide the option of using  generic reliable hardware such as computers, tablets or even smart phones as participation devices
4. Should work with popular presentation software such as PowerPoint
5. Must allow free text entry (apart from selecting from multiple choices)
6. Must make it possible for the presentation software to share with everybody the result of participation instantly, thus fostering interaction 

Any other thoughts on the next generation audience response systems?

Content Authoring with Video Interactions

Trainers have long known the importance of video in all types of training. Digital video has now become so commonplace that nearly everyone knows how to shoot video using a camera or a smart phone, upload it to Youtube and share it with others. It is high time these two trends converged. Content authoring needs to embrace digital video.

The newly announced version 8.0 of  Elicitus, a leading desktop authoring tool for trainers, educators, subject matter experts and other e-learning creators worldwide, makes this happen.

Creating great courses with Elicitus requires no programming. Even users with no page design experience can create visually appealing courses with Elicitus. Videos can now be added to topic pages and customize the size of the video. Various types of video such as AVI, MPG and SWF are supported.

Users can easily import existing PowerPoint® presentations directly into Elicitus with great accuracy. What is more, Raptivity interactions are easily inserted in the courses and tracked. On the output side, Elicitus allows you to choose from many form factors to suit the needs to diverse screens such as iPad, smart phones, laptops and so forth.

A 14-day free trial is available on the Elicitus web site.

mLearning marches ahead: new trends in mobile learning

Robert Gadd has written an insightful post on emerging trends in enterprise mobile learning for 2011. His predictions are backed by his long experience with mobile learning. They ring true, given the telltale signs of some of the changes he discusses.

His predictions are, in brief:

• mLearning projects get bigger, 
• device diversity is the "new normal", 
• apps trump browser-delivered content, 
• authoring tools evolve to deal with mobility,
• tablets explode, 
• private social networks support business centric social interactions, 
• mobile device/os vendors consolidate, 
• new experts provide consulting on mLearning and 
• new features exploit technology capabilities inherent in devices.

In his prediction concerning authoring tools he points out the possibility of authoring tools providing 'publish to HTML5' option. Gadd follows this up with another post titled New mlearning Authoring Offerings - Wave #1 where he discusses two leading tools that have already provided HTML5 capability.

Celebrating 5 years of Raptivity : Form is Temporary, Class is Timeless

In the game of cricket, they say a player's form is temporary, but the class is timeless. Likewise, when a product stands the test of time, it deepens your belief in the innovation and quality underlying it.

Five years is a long time in the software industry. As we celebrate 5 successful and growing years of Raptivity, the world's first and leading rapid interactivity building tool for eLearning creators, it gives me and the team at Harbinger Group immense joy and a sense of fulfillment.

At the same time, Raptivity's growing customer base and growing sales charts imbue us with a sense of expectancy towards the future.

Raptivity started as an innovative solution to the eLearning developers dilemma - how to create interesting and engaging content without spending the time and money for programming interactivity. 

As we developed the solution and patented the key invention that underpins its working, we realized that the market not only loved the concept, but they were hungry for more and more ready-made interactive templates. So we developed games, simulations, exercises, 3D elements, visuals, job aids, presentation aids and dozens of other interaction models. The Raptivity library today boasts of 249 such interactions, the largest anywhere in the world.

At the same time we realized our customers needed flexibility and features. So we added SCORM tracking, unicode compliance, accessibility, advanced editing, voice-over recording and loads of other features. Raptivity's ground-breaking enhancements continue unabated, with support for HTML5 and mobile publishing for smart-phones, tablets and so on.

The biggest reward for us has been the overwhelming acceptance by our user community, now spread in 57 countries at the last count, the 57th being Nepal. The product has made eLearning interactivity quick and easy for thousands of instructional designers, subject matter experts, course creators, trainers and educators in corporations, government and education.  Every time we receive an email from a customer how much they appreciate the product, or our customer support - it is a moment of celebration for us.

Raptivity has brought many accolades to Harbinger Group. The list consists of over a couple of dozen international awards including Red Herring Global 100, Deloitte Asia Pacific Fast 500 (three years in a row), eLearning Guild (Platinum and Gold), LearnX Australia (Platinum and Gold), Software Satisfaction Award (UK) and several others.

Last but not the least, the young and talented team working on Raptivity (and our other innovative brands such as Elicitus, Raptivity Presenter, YawnBuster, SiteJazzer, TeemingPod) deserves a mention. Their sincere and hard work has made this dream come into reality. The most beautiful pieces of architecture are built one brick at a time, and they know this better than anyone else.

Business wire and several other publications cover this milestone here.

Interesting Business Scenarios Found while Going Down the e-learning Path

Over several years of working with clients in corporate, educational and government organizations, we have noticed that some business scenarios come up time and again, when it comes to e-learning content development. Here is a short list for you to review, and perhaps you can identify with one or more.

1. We have lots of course material in PowerPoint and would like to use it for e-learning, without necessarily converting it all to Flash.
2. I have just rolled out in-house e-learning development, and my content authors must get up to speed fast. They are new to technology, and they get overwhelmed by too many options.
3. My team has learned their tools, but they need to churn out courses faster.
4. My authors only understand Spanish (or Chinese, or Arabic).

Elicitus Express, a lightweight content authoring tool, helps overcome these dilemmas. The web site offers a 14-day free trial. You can check it out here.   There is also a product called Elicitus Studio where one can author content around Raptivity interactions - without spending a lot of money on an authoring tool.

Celebrating the iPad Anniversary : Are You Migrating e-Learning to iPad?

It's been a year since the revolutionary iPad was first announced. Several organizations have realized the importance of delivering training through the iPad. Yet, the best practices are not widely shared, and many 'e-learning to iPad' projects continue to be explorations into the unknown. One question about elearning migration to iPad concerns the choice between a native iPad app versus the browser. In this post, I draw on the experience of working on several mobile learning projects and technology products at Harbinger Group to offer a thought.

For delivering e-learning content, there appear to be two ways to go. One, build a native iPad app for delivering an engaging learning experience that fully leverages the iPad's device capabilities. Two, use the browser to deliver content and reduce development costs. Which way to go? After nearly a year of working through several iPad projects, the emerging consensus here seems to be a creative combination of both approaches. Static content can be delivered through browser, with minor modifications to suit the screen size. That part is a no-brainer. Even much of the interactive content can  be delivered using HTML5, through the browser. Only some parts of the course - where you either need to use unique device capabilities or you need to create a unique user experience - lend themselves to app development.

So, in a course migration project you may choose to develop an app that contains HTML elements. These, in turn display pages that contain HTML5 interactions. This helps you save development costs and make the most of the iPad, while re-using the interactive HTML e-learning content that plays on the laptops.

Any readers would like to offer additional insights and best practices? Any real-life examples?