Do you or your company have a training program? What about an e-training/e-learning program? There are unique benefits available to organizations who use online training courses to educate their workforce. Check out this quick Slideshare and learn how your company can benefit from an e-training program!
Smartphones: M-Learning’s Most Widely Known Tool is Unsafe—or is the User?
October 21st, 2011
M-learning is a rapidly increasing medium being used in the application of e-learning. I have used my mobile device to access many websites in search of information on the go. This is looking more and more like the norm for the future. But how safely are we accessing information on the web using mobile devices? And who is unsafe—the smartphone or is the user?
Mobile learning devices are becoming more popular every day. According to the article by The Chronicle of Higher Education, “by 2014 mobile internet usage is expected to outnumber computer internet usage.” And you’d think for e-learning, the quicker and easier use of access we have to information, the better. But then, what about for security purposes? Do you enter any kind of personal information on your mobile device, or pay bills? If you aren’t protecting yourself with anti-virus backups, or are carelessly surfing the internet, then you could be putting your information on your mobile device at risk.
Issues with the design of mobile devices can make it unsafe for the unaware user. The smaller screen of a mobile device can make search engine navigation difficult at times, as it will scale down what is trying to be viewed so it will fit the screen, making it too small to access the information desired. Some users mean to choose one website result while browsing the internet, but due to the scaled-down format of the site for mobile browsing, they accidently click an unsafe link above/underneath it. Another large security concern with mobile browsing is Bluetooth. Bluetooth is a great tool when used correctly. But is your Bluetooth activated on your mobile device when you are accessing the internet? Is it on when you are getting a coffee at your local café? Having Bluetooth enabled on your phone is one of the easiest ways someone can hack your mobile device. The only way to prevent hacking is to turn off your Bluetooth when not in use (i.e. turn it off when you exit your car).
So are these concerns reason for panic and alarm? No, but they are cause to be cautious. It’s not the mobile device’s problem if the device is being used unsafely; the user must be aware and cautious about internet usage and other security weak points. Your phone is not secure unless you make it secure, just like your computer. Download your software’s anti-virus, install regular updates, and keep your browsing safe. Then continue on the m-learning path as our society continues to see affordances from increasing technology that requires information on the go. M-learning is not worth giving up because it seems too risky, we just need to be responsible consumers of this technology.
Crowdsourcing: Useful or a Hindrance to the Overall Learning Process?
October 18th, 2011
Last week we were talking about social learning and communities of practice. Now let’s get a little deeper into that conversation and talk about how some communities of practice go about solving problems within the community. Crowdsourcing and crowdfunding are two unique ways of finding a solution to a proposed problem.
In crowdsourcing, a problem is proposed to an unknown group of problem solvers, who then tend to form online communities in which to collaborate and think up methods of how to best solve the proposed problem. It is then up to the problems proposer, or crowdsourcer, to pick the best solution. Sometimes there is a monetary reward for the solution, and sometimes the reward is the acknowledgement of creating the best solution. When all is said and done, the idea of the best solution to the problem is credited and owned by the crowdsourcer.
There are both pros and cons to this technique. On the pro side, crowdsourcing helps create new communities in an industry in an effort to try and solve a problem. This promotes the spreading of new and unique ideas and knowledge amongst communities, and really gets the thought process going along with facilitating conversation. People work towards a common goal, working together in order to achieve it. On the negative side, nothing is ever neat and clean cut. Crowdsourcing can create competition between communities, and sharing ideas and promoting solutions becomes secondary to the competition. When monetary rewards are promised, it becomes a type of mercenary for hire form of problem solving, pitting team against team and communities end up suffering as the conversation and knowledge are not shared with outside communities.
In e-learning, there is one common goal in the community: to help promote a new and unique way to go about the learning process using tools online. When we use the idea of crowdsourcing here, we are resorting to sharing ideas and knowledge for the benefit of (hopefully newly formed) communities to solve a problem. But what if a monetary reward is interjected as the prize for the best overall solution? We have now created a platform for possibly negative competition and communication, serving as a hindrance to finding the best solution (using everyone’s collaborative knowledge). So what do you think? Is crowdsourcing a viable technique to use in the industry? Let’s hear your response in the comments section.
Motivating the Learning Process with Social Media and Game Mechanic Rewards
October 13th, 2011
Why is it that in today’s society, video games and social media seem to be so “addictive”? Parents yell at children and adolescents to “get off that thing!” and the response is usually “Five more minutes!” Is it because of the potential positive reinforcement or rewards that can be gained from it? You share a point of view on social media and have your friends “like” it and reply back with their own positive feedback, letting you know that your POV is shared and acknowledged. You arrive at a destination, and immediately check in through social media to keep count of your activity and get a status reward. Play an Xbox game and place first on the leader board for your friends and teammates to cheer you on and praise you for playing a great round. Positive reinforcement can be derived from both social media and game mechanics, so why can’t that kind of reward be used with learning and e-learning? And can this learning be translated to the workplace?
Today, video games are not like those of the past. Pac Man was all about advancing to the next level. Zelda was about completing the quest and saving the princess.The reward was knowing you beat a challenge. But today, most games are played online, and have their own unique social society. In some games, its not enough to know that you beat a challenge, you need everyone to know. Some games reward a character that the player creates, known as an avatar (a virtual representation of themselves), by giving them fancy items and apparel that they can show off to other people playing the game. Maybe a unique title that is rewarded to a player after achieving some redicuously hard goal. The point of the reward is the social status that it represents, just like in the corporate office. When you see a player with the title “Immortal”,you know they have done something crazy to achieve and deserve that title. You also know that because of their “social status” you wouldn’t dare trifle with them, the sound of their title alone is enough to make you and your character respect what they have done. Rewards in a video game are just like the social status rewards of the real world.
Who is the one person in your company that deserves the respect and acknowledgement of everyone at the office and even outside of it? That’s your CEO, President, Vice President, COO, etc. Titles such as these have been hard fought for and earned. The social status of their title represents, internally and externally, the person who has worked their way up the corporate ladder the most the reward they sought after. Everyone wants a reward. Whether in the real world, video game, or through studying. And since everything seems to be moving to a more and more digitally social experience and learning experience, why not apply this to a digital learning experience? Can we change a current LMS to incorporate an addictive reward system like found in social media and video games?
Want some more information on this topic? Check out this article on E-Learning learning by Karl Kapp. http://bit.ly/oP5LCh.
eLearning Analytics 101 Part II: Learner Centricity
August 16th, 2010
In the last article in this series, we introduced you to eLearning Analytics. We talked about the power of looking under the hood of your online courses and accessing mountains of data that can be readily available to you. If you haven’t yet heard of eLearning Analytics, or want to start with the basics, feel free to head back to review.
In the next few posts, I want to get you familiarized with some of the foundations of eLearning Analytics–in essence, a little about why and how this technology can change eLearning.
A quick note: many of the ideas put forth in the upcoming posts are not necessarily new. A lot of them come from the current web analytics industry. Particularly, I find Avinash Kaushik‘s ideas and writings about web analytics to be very enlightening and helpful, therefore much of what follows is adapted or translated from his work into what I think makes sense for education.
Learner Centricity
The learner should be at the center of eLearnign design, development, and evaluation. Learner centricity shouldn’t be a buzzword or a catchphrase. It should be a foundational principle for every eLearning developer, creator, designer, or stakeholder. To be learner-centric is to listen to the learner, hear his or her voice, and let that voice guide your entire eLearning process.
Many (I really want to say “most”) of us do not truly let the voice of the learner guide our process. Most of us don’t focus on the learner first. I’ve tried to define where focus is most often found, and these are the groups I’ve come up with: content-centric, technology-centric and organization-centric. You might find yourself or your organization in one (or all) of these mindsets.
Content-centric
When we’re content-centric, we proclaim content as king. We spend all our time producing, copying and pasting, and deploying content. We come dangerously close to believing that the content speaks for itself–that since it’s “out there,” it’s learnable. We give the student large portions of content to consume, and leave it up to that same student to process, retain, and apply all of that knowledge, essentially on their own.
Organization-centric
When we’re organization centric, we tend to rely solely on our culture, methodologies or processes or people to guide the process. We might rely on HPPO (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion). We might rely on committees to tell us how learners will react, or engineers to tell us how things should and can be done. Or the product manager, producer, or designer might own the entire experience. We ultimately think that we can somehow place ourselves in the mindset of the learner, designing courses to fit our individual preferences, biases, likes and dislikes, all the while foolishly thinking that our experiences then automatically apply to our learner’s.
Technology-centric
A technology-centric mindset involves bells and whistles that dress up content. It is a mindset that believes that as long as we present the content with the newest technologies, it will be more effective, and learners will learn it. Whatever’s new is what works. We might blindly follow the latest and greatest, thinking that newer and newer technology will always lead to better and better learning experiences.
Learner-centric
To be learner-centric is to place the learner at the center of everything you do. All other methods and means of designing, producing, or delivering education should be secondary to the voice of the learner. In the business and eCommerce world, this is called being customer-centric. To be fair, hearing and heeding the voice of the customer is a little easier than doing the same with the voice of the learner. Why? Because when we’re talking about customers, we want to maximize and optimize what they want. We want to understand what they’re looking for, and deliver it to them in the quickest, most efficient way possible. With education, it’s a little different. We’re delivering something to them, and in many cases, no matter how naive or optimistic we want to be, they might not want it. There is still, however, a fundamental need for listening to the learner. Let me explain.
To hear and heed the voice of the learner isn’t necessarily to give them the reins and let them dictate the entire process. To be learner-centric is much more about understanding your audience. To understand how they listen, what they like/dislike about your delivery, what they do/don’t respond to, and where they spend their time when left alone. To be metaphorical, it’s much more like building a canal and afterward observing where the water wants to go, then adapting the channels and waterways to optimize the flow.
So much of learning right now is a jump-through-the-hoop, industrialized, assembly line approach where a learner is subjected to a pounding of content and technology. We use a one-size-fits-all, cookie cutter approach to learning. We struggle to understand what works and what doesn’t, and we wonder why our canals don’t work and water seems to be flowing everywhere but where it needs to go. This is important, because often learning influences future learning, learning influences performance, and learning very often influences organizational revenue. If you provide learning, you automatically have a vested interest in knowing that learning has occurred.
eLearning analytics can help us bring the learner back to the table. We use eLearning analytics as a tool to try and hear the voice of the learner. Based on what we learn from them, we can in turn better understand how to help them learn what they need to know.
eLearning Analytics 101 Part I: What is it?
July 29th, 2010
Under the Hood
Image from www.currybet.net
Let’s say you own a small grocery store. You want to find out more about your customers that frequent and shop at your location. So, you begin trying to measure certain behaviors that you think will give you more information about who buys items and who doesn’t. You might impose a quick survey on customers that enter your store, or you could follow someone around as they make shopping choices. You could write down what they pick up, how long they examine a can of green beans, and how often they decide against buying something. How much more effort would that require on your part? Would the data and analysis be worth the cost?
Now let’s switch gears: you are a classroom teacher. You want to find out more about how your students are studying and learning the material. You want to find out what makes a successful student in your class. So, similarly, you could develop some intensive research methods to understand student behaviors that lead to success. You could sit behind a student and watch them read material. You could follow them home and see how long they study their textbooks. You could record how long it takes them to read a chapter. You could give them surveys throughout the class to see how confident they are in the material they’ve learned.
Of course, neither of these situations are practical and might sound silly. Neither a grocery store owner nor a classroom teacher have the resources to carry out these methods, the time to execute them, or the ability to measure and observe at a basic level more than one student at a time.
Now let’s switch gears once more. You’re invested in online learning. You want to understand how learners are using your course. You want to find out how successful students achieved their success. You want to find out what works and what doesn’t. What if you could take this information, analyze it, and make meaningful changes to your course to positively affect learning outcomes for your students?
You can. I’m not talking about a new LMS (Learning Management System) that enslaves your organization or another authoring tool that requires a steeper learning curve. What I’m talking about, essentially, is putting your ear to the ground and listening. I’m talking about opening the hood to all of the data that is already available to you and bringing it together in a meaningful, actionable way. I’m talking about eLearning Analytics.
What is eLearning Analytics?
Image from www.users.csbsju.edu
eLearning Analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of internet data for purposes of understanding and optimizing online learning content. I’ll admit I’m plagiarizing a little with that statement—it comes from Wikipedia’s entry on Web analytics. Truth is, no history or definition of eLearning Analytics would be complete without at least a summarized look at the history of Web analytics.
Let me sum up Web analytics’ history as quickly as I can: much like the grocery store owner, people who began selling things on the internet wanted to know more about their customers. They saw that money could be made, but they had no idea as to the potential revenue they were missing out on. How many people get confused while checking out and quit? How many people can’t find what they want? How many people simply aren’t interested in what you’re selling? So folks decided to start looking under the hood.
As a citizen of the internet, whether you browse or “surf,” you are revealing quite a bit about yourself. Not necessarily personal information (that’s another topic), but simple things like who your internet service provider is, what browser you use, your connection speed, things of that nature. People started to aggregate these bite sized pieces of information over time, so you ended up with a log or history of requests for web pages made by people’s computers.
Then folks started to realize that you can calculate a lot based on those logs. They saw that you could estimate how long someone spent on a page, how long their overall visit to your site lasted, and much much more. Eventually, people started manipulating and analyzing all of this information and acting on it. They thought, “Well, if we can make the experience better, maybe we can sell more stuff.” They were right. Companies that effectively used this technology started seeing results. Other companies then said “Hey, maybe we can help others do this.” The Web analytics industry was born.
Why eLearning Analytics?
You might be wondering, “So others can make more money by analyzing and optimizing their online shopping carts. So what? What’s that got to do with education?”
I hope that the answer to what this has to do with education is already apparent to you. What if, instead of using Web analytics to measure and report and solve for revenue, we used it to solve for educational outcomes? For learning objectives? For increased performance? For better learning experiences? What if we could understand, even at a basic level, how learners are using our online courses, how effective the content is, and even how learners feel after they were finished?
With eLearning Analytics, you can.
In the next article, we’ll dive a little deeper. How do we gather the data? What do we look for? What is important?
If you’ve been looking for this sort of thing for a long time and can’t wait any longer, I’d love to talk to you more about what my company offers. However, this series of articles is meant to be purely educational. I think this topic is important enough that it doesn’t need to be hidden behind a sales pitch. I think if we do this right, we change online learning. We break out of page turning, boring, almost completely ineffective online courses. We stop jumping through hoops and we start to see what online learning really can do.