No elearning, thank you very much!

Our organisation has been asked to review and feedback on the new guidance for one particular area in which we are involved. I was particularly struck by the vehemence of its position with regards to elearning:

[1] The use of e-learning may offer a number of benefits to an organisation. However, in all but the smallest healthcare organisations such a small GP’s practice with a single stage [activity] plan, e-learning is not acceptable as the sole means of training staff. E-learning can only be used to support training delivered by a competent [specialist] safety adviser.

[2] E-learning is not acceptable as the sole means of training for the following reasons:

weelearning - we want you to have it

In his latest post on our weelearning website, Sam Burrough explains why we are encouraging everyone to pick up on our idea and go with it:

If you’re lucky enough to be heading to this week’s Learning Technologies Conference or Exhibition, one thing is guaranteed, you’re going to meet a lot of cool, interesting people. You may even end up down the pub with one or two of them, especially if you’re going to Curation Camp.
You’ll probably think to yourself, wistfully on the way home, “ah, I wish I could do that more often.” But you can’t because that’s it for another year, who knows when you’ll be able to afford to go again?

Spurred on by that very feeling some 18 months ago I looked up Sam on Twitter and dropped him a line. Suggesting out of the blue to some strange guy on the Internet that we meet up for a drink is not something I do very often, but I'm thankful I did on this occasion. Some eight or nine events later our little "learning technology social", is going pretty well.

So well in fact, we want to share the idea with you. weelearning has been such a success for our own personal learning that we want others to take the idea and benefit from it wherever you are. If you can get three learning geeks in a room, you can have your own weelearning event.

We're kinda busy launching our Big Idea this week, which just happens to coincide with Learning Technologies. Over the next couple of weeks we're going to outline how you can set up your own event and let you know just what we learned about crafting a community wee can all learn from.

UPDATE: I wrote that follow up article and you'll find it here: http://weelearning.co.uk/2013/03/how-to-run-your-own-learning-social-part-2/

One-minute paper

I was looking for something quite unrelated when I came across the concept of the "one minute paper". It's a very simple concept for quick and dirty feedback, seemingly used by people in the HE/FE sector.

It's not rocket science, just basics really, but it for some of our instructors I think it would be helpful, so I produced a form for them to riff on and wrote out some details for the wiki. Thought I'd share it and our template with you.

Firstly, some credits. I found the first mention on the website of Geoff Petty who is a teaching skills specialist my former boss had brought to my attention.

• http://www.geoffpetty.com/experiments.html < see Galzie link

And a bit of poking about online brought up a couple of other resources about the idea:

• http://www.maa.org/saum/maanotes49/87.html
• http://www.psy.gla.ac.uk/~steve/resources/tactics/minute.html

As a reflective tool, it's practically featherlight - asking for a couple of sentences isn't going to lead to any profound improvements in learning uptake; but from our perspective, every little matters and for learners who simply equate "presence in the classroom" with training - and we do see some of these - anything that encourages a little self-regard is to be welcomed.

Note, we tend to avoid using the language of school and education so we've called it "review" rather than paper. So, this is what I have written for colleagues, and you find links to the template below. Let me know if you find it useful.

Introducing the One Minute Review

The idea of the “one minute paper” as a feedback and reflective learning exercise originates in the FE/HE sector. It seeks to improve:

• feedback from delegates to tutors 
• reflective learning by delegates 

Delegates complete a short reflection and review exercise at the end of each session/day, typically just one or two questions. The questions should make them think about their learning and where they could be helped. Their answers should be brief, but contain enough information to inform the tutor.

Benefits for students:

• opportunity for reflection on topics 
• chance to seek help

Benefits for tutors:

• feedback on how the day went 
• chance to correct misapprehension 
• “lightweight” - not another large burden on their time 

Benefits for organisation 

• demonstrate learner has voice 
• tool for guiding ongoing development and improvement of course 

Process for use

1. Tell learners about the process during the course opening, 
1. issue first form at that point so they can see it 
2. point out it can be anon if they prefer 
3. stress that no names will be mentioned even if they do give them so it's a chance to ask questions they don't feel comfortable asking in front of everyone else 
2. at end of day ask learners to spend a couple of minutes (one per question); if necessary use the moment to recap everything covered over the day (this in itself can be a good activity to do anyway) 
1. don't collect the forms directly yourself 
2. use a tray or envelope 
3. quickly review the comments 
1. look for any trends that tell you if anything has not panned out the way you expect, for example 
1. lots of people giving the same answer suggests a point may not have been as clear as you thought 
2. any wildly off topic points raised may suggest somebody has made an error of comprehension 
3. a broad spread of mainly on topic comments suggests natural diversity 
2. if there are any points to answer the next day, make plans to do so 
4. unless instructed otherwise, you can shred the feedback forms 
5. remember to forward any significant reports back to whoever checks your quality so that plans can be made to rectify any larger problems that need fixing. 

Things to remember in responding

• Don't identify the person who raised the question - fine if they do, but you should have promised anonymity so don't compromise it 
• Don't take their responses personally - individuals learn in different ways and what may seem perfectly obvious to you, and indeed many other students, may not always appear so to everyone 
• Don't go tweaking the course based on every comment - sometime people attend the wrong course for them - they're at fault; not necessarily the course itself.

Download forms

• One minute review in PDF
• One minute review in Word 2007

A simple language learning resource

I stumbled across this - not exactly sure how or why. I would sooo love something like this for Japanese*.

It's wonderfully simple: each blog post is written in an accessible way, tagged as to what element of language is the key point and a short quiz to test comprehension is appended.

The quiz doesn't feedback to an LMS; the results aren't in-depth, but the user/learner gets some quick and easy practice of reading, a chance to flex their knowledge and some basic feedback to judge their performance. MCQs and cloze are used.

Not complicated for learners to use or for the provider to set up, and perfectly usable in mobile format (or if not, could be made to be quite easily).

This particular system is Drupal but I'm looking for something similar now for Wordpress**

Learn English Blog from English Language Centres (curiously abbreviated to EC!?)

Useful. Wonderful.

* That's your queue to tell me about one.
** Ditto.

mylearningworx - a reflection on the launch event

Last week I was pleased to attend the launch of mylearningworx, a new site that offers individuals the chance to both make a course and take a course. If your passion is to teach people about local history or some craft or hobby, their platform allows you to quickly and easily pull a course together and sell it to others who want to learn.

While most elearning to date has been in either the mass market of formal K-12 education or in custom products for large wealthy companies, there aren't that many folk really addressing the "long tail" of online formal learning. There are a couple of players - Lynda.com is a video based elearning platform focusing largely on software and programming, and there are quite a few in languages (I even wrote about one, JapanesePod101.com for e.learning age some years ago - not much in that in itself but the editor of that magazine is one of the directors of mylearningworx!) but I'm not conscious of any companies going after the individual learning market in quite this way.

Instead, arguably the market leaders in the consumer space are two collossal on-demand informal resources, Wikipedia and YouTube, supplemented by Google's Search to find everything else (actually, usually unearthing the content at these two sites also, hence their predominance).

Undaunted, mylearningwork is aspiring to be an eBay of learning - not the seller itself but the facilitator of a marketplace - for which they will take a cut. And good luck to 'em. They've got a sound product, some great people behind it and they are striking out in a field with, as far as I can tell, few competitors.

Before I bore you with my impressions, let me tell you you can get easier reads from Craig Taylor, who wrote a short summary of his day before most of us got home, and weelearner Gill Chester, who presented a "track" at the worxshop, and has taken a rather creative angle in her summary written/assembled for the mylearningworx.com blog.

So, my thoughts. What I liked about it:

• It is easy to use and the feature set is developing. They are working on integration with Mozilla's Popcorn Maker video tool and that genuinely has the capacity to amplify the value of video, as well as possibly put something of a "seal" on some of the added value in the educators courses and not leave them open for use on somewhere like YouTube.
• It already has a small but potentially committed community of course authors - though they will need to get more on there quickly
• The company clearly "get" that their success rests on how lots of small producers take to it and by running events like the "worxshop" they are showing a commitment to fostering that community. It helps that they are all nice folks too.
• They don't call it an "LMS" anywhere on their site. Good.

 Of course, I did leave with some things I thought could be worked on:

• not sure about the name of the site - yeah,I know, it's a small thing, but the other instances I can think of of the use of "my" are My Little Pony and various primary coloured My First [insert item here] neither of which are necessarily aspirational. Come on, www.superlearnr.com is free!
• The concept of the "mini-MOOC" sounded more like responding to a buzzword than a genuine description of what the courses look like at this point, but I could be wrong. Without Ivy League or Russell Group sized marketing budgets, and sitting behind a paywall, however, I'm not sure courses are ever likely to be that massive and they aren't really that open and the feature set seems more applicable to solo study course than large scale synchronous study and collaboration, but there is time for that to develop I guess.
• It seems to be pitching in two directions - it wants to be a site used by consumers ("create a course on flyfishing") and they want it to be a low-cost training system for businesses, albeit under a slightly different brand, "the Foundry". This confusion might dilute or confuse their message. But equally it might not.

In my opinion it's this second market where I think they stand the best chance. There are 10s, possibly 100s of thousands of small companies that will never be in a position to set up an LMS or speak to an e-learning company (or even know such things exist) but who will at some point need to develop staff or prove compliance with something or other. "The Foundry" could help them do it. One-man-band training companies have a fair shot at a larger market and transitioning out of expensive, one-at-a-time ILT, and having endured some truly dreadful fire safety compliance training this year I would welcome the chance to avoid it again by doing some short, sharp elearning and an assessment.

The other marketplace I can see is the community education sector, and in some of their suggested course titles I think the mylearningworx team see this too. From my involvement in the local community education partnership I know that local authority funding for these programmes, which used to be quite considerable, have been slashed or, as in the case of the Bristol area one, stopped altogether. Facing restrictions like that it's inevitable that at least some of the education programmes will do the same as the corporate sector and look to elearning as a potentially low-cost alternative. Mylearningworx could deliver on that need.

Will I be authoring a course and selling it? Well, actually that's a distinct possibility. I've run a couple of  courses in the past of which I can be fairly proud and have often wondered if I could re-use those materials again. Mylearningworx is probably the best platform yet for doing something with it, so maybe I will. I look forward with interest to the launch of The Foundry, which I believe should take place at, or in time for, Learning Technologies next month.

Dan experienced 'creating a Tin Can API statement'

I've just read up on Tin Can API. I've been meaning to do it for ages and I'm kinda pleased that, as it turns out, Tin Can does pretty much what I had assumed it would do - but it does it better than I could have imagined and way more besides.

I'm also excited because I've also just generated my first Tin Can statement:

{
"id": "09888f33-2285-4c84-8ffa-18db65173171",
"actor": {
"name": "Dan",
"mbox": "mailto:danroddy@hotmail.com",
"objectType": "Agent"
},
"verb": {
"id": "http://adlnet.gov/expapi/verbs/experienced",
"display": {
"en-UK": "experienced"
}
},
"timestamp": "2012-10-24T14:46:34.354Z",
"stored": "2012-10-24T14:46:35.219Z",
"object": {
"id": "http://www.example.com/tincan/activities/EYuHWRLR",
"definition": {
"name": {
"en-UK": "creating an Experience API statement"
},
"description": {
"en-UK": "Completing the Tin Can Api test generator on the Rustici website"
}
},
"objectType": "Activity"
}
}

This genuinely changes everything, it really does.

Something for everyone

All the LMS loving tracky types can love it because it does everything they need it to. Social learning types should be delighted as this reaches out and allows individuals to say what they learnt rather than only rewarding pre-ordained learning experiences. ILT luddites can feel good about themselves and come in from the cold and report on all the little parts of their courses. And ROI hounds should be cock-a-hoop at the notion of being able to track learning back in to the workplace in the form of results.

The main benefits as I would summarising them if I was making the case would be:

• Freedom from the tyranny of the walled garden LMS
• ability to account for non-online activity
• able to take control of your own learning via personal learning repositories
• builds tracking in to tools we recognise

I really am struggling to get a handle on how different things could be, and I'll tell you why I think this is so important. Buried away at the end of the description is the fact that the Tin Can API, or Experience API as it is also known, is based on common designed approach to the feeds you get on the social networking sites, but open and independent. That's it - this ties in to one of the most basic, and influential elements of the modern web and doesn't subvert it or lock it away - it sets it free. Brilliant.

Crucially however, it can't be a bolt on. I don't think that is going to work. Trying to retro fit this to an old school LMS isn't going to work. It would be like fitting four-wheel-drive to a Honda Fireblade* - sure it would work, but all the time you're going to be thinking "it was never designed for this". I really think that it will require a root and branch rethink of how we go about tracking and storing the results of our learning.

But do we want to track it?

My answer to this trope is simple - if we can, why don't we? The difference with this system is that we can build that tracking in to familiar feeling tools that we are comfortable with. Okay, so for now it's early adopters that use bookmarklets and phone apps to seamlessly join up our online and offline selves, but this has the usecase, this has the capacity to be the killer app for self tracking. Oh gosh, I am soooooo excited by this.

What can we do with it?

Question is, where does this go in the normal run of things? It's an obvious tool for CPD and some enterprising professional bodies should be all over this as a way of tracking it (doubt somehow that the CIPD will be early adopters, but maybe the LPI could get up on it?). Will we see it being co-opted by LinkedIn as yet another feature they draw in? Would we get this to work with Mozilla's badges? I can see all sorts of ways this could go.

Please let me know if you have spotted this going in any interesting ways. I'm off to comb the Learning 2012 and DevLearn conversation streams for bits now...

UPDATE: here's a great article by Gary Wise that does a more thorough job of explaining what Experience API can do.

* Okay - two things wrong with this statement. One, I doubt four wheel drive would work with this class defining road-going race bike and, two, most LMSs are not that well made or thought out. They are like 80s era Skodas (shoddy) or 90s American sports cars (great at one thing).

eBooks - a potted guide to what I wanted to know

A great session at weelearning recently left me fired up and thinking about ebooks like I've never considered before.

What's the problem with ebooks?

I've had a number of ebook readers on my Android phones but have always been bamboozled by their boasts about compatibility with dozens of formats. In the absence of a simple choice, such as you have with  as with audio's MP3 format, I've never known which was the one to turn to, and as a consequence I've never thought of publishing ebooks as something I should really bother with. Stick it in a PDF and be done with it was my internal line, even if I'd never explicitly rationalised it as such.

Wikipedia's airy breeze of impartiality on the topic doesn't really help - it lists more formats than even the most comprehensive ebook apps claim to handle and by the time you realise it's including HTML in the list you start to wonder what exactly constitutes an "ebook".

Which was nearly the starting point for Zak Mensah's talk, but that he took it one step further and asked "what is a book?" He explored a couple of options, including the delightfully simple "anything that takes more than an hour to read" but since that rules out The Gruffalo, and no-one should rule out the Gruffalo, I think that you might usefully say "a book is whatever you damn well want it to be."

Sadly, this appears to be the case with ebooks too, or at least, ebook formats, as every man and his dog* appears to have approached the knotty problem of on-line publishing with the same answer - "what is needed is a new format!" So most major readers have their own formats (Kindle, Sony, etc) which line up against a handful of open formats of various ages and reaches.

Choosing your format for digital publishing

I'm not going to rehash everything. Zak was fairly impartial, but being a solution providing kind a guy I need hard answers. Thankfully the tech-agony-Uncle at the Guardian has done a great job of providing a summary of the state of the ebook world in late 2011 and I'm happy to report that not much has changed by mid 2012, so that all holds true now. His answer, in summary, is ePub is probably best, then mobi and PDF. Or the proprietary format tied to your Apple or Amazon reader if you are the kind of person who wants an easy life and can't done faffing about about with conversion.

If conversion is your thing, then the only real option I could find, prompted by Zak's initial recommendation I should add, is Calibre. The consensus seems to be if you are a serious consumer of digital books then Calibre is the tool for you to manage your library from multiple sources devices. Provided, that is, that they are already in ebook formats.

We should remember here though that Guardian techy guy is talking about consumer books. And what do consumer ebooks tend to be? Out-of-copyright classics,  softcore porn novels and celebrity biogs**, none of which make great use of visuals, which for any self-respecting designer of learning material should be an important part of your thinking.  So heed this quote from a good 2011 article on making ebooks by Smashing Magazine:

Unfortunately, EPUB 3.0 doesn’t support illustrated books, so we can expect to see some fragmentation as Apple and other vendors innovate around these limitation.

It's not really just EPUB; consider the black and white screens of the regular Kindle and the fluid rendering of text you can see a clear bias toward text only content.

A quick conversion in Calibre proves the point. I took a PDF of an excellent little guide to learning communities by Kineo - a great example of layout and design contributing to the overall perception of the content - and ran it through Calibre. Here's how they looked on my phone.

On the left the converted EPUB format is all over the shop. Calibre has tried its best, but the footer info has been picked up and is included in the body. Tables are removed, all the structure implied by colours and typefaces is lost. By comparison on the right, the original PDF version, scaled as you might expect for A4 paper is quite readable on my phone (though I should say it has a larger than average 4.3" screen). These screen shots have been shrunk to fit on the blog page which doesn't do their on-screen clarity justice. What you don't see here is the fact that the author, made more prominent by the way books are classified, has been picked up in the EPUB version as the file name and all sorts. Scrubby.

I'm not knocking Calibre, but it's not a publishing tool. It didn't like Word format as an input which would mean you'd need to use something else to get it there. Word to PDF to Calibre to whatever-format-you-want isn't quite the solution I am looking for.

So what do I take this all to mean?

I've done you a disservice if you've stuck by me through all of this post, because only now am I going to address the most important question for the learning designer: do I need to think about ebooks? And my answer has to be: no, probably not. It's simply not going to be worth it in nearly all instances.

You have a choice of writing your material in formats that work with different readers, or choosing the best. If your learners are predominantly accessing the content via a PC then the colour, paginated, predictably printable PDF is probably your best bet. In fact, any reader with a large color screen, so that include iPads and innumerable Android me-toos, will make a decent fist of reading PDFs. So you have covered by far the largest group of readers there.

At the other extreme, dedicated ebook readers, though increasingly numerous, are not as common as you would want them to be, unless you are creating training for librarians, so probably do not justify the exercise in creation. Where people do have them, they tend to be tied in to a specific publishing eco-system - iBooks or Amazon (and Google Play? Yeah, in Eric Schmidt's dreams) which is just another irritating barrier.

When you take in to consideration that very many of the readers out there are black and white, it imposes an additional limitation on your design. If you were in the lucky position of being able to furnish your readers with dedicated readers as part of your training package, then perhaps, but for the price of some of the colour screen readers you could just get a cheap Android tablet and be done with it. At least the recipient would be able to browse the internet, watch a few videos and play Angry Birds when they weren't reading.

So that leaves mobile phone users, by far the biggest mobile sector. As we saw above, many smartphones (now 50% of the market and only growing) will do a respectable job of reading PDFs, though will happily take most other formats you choose throw their way. Old-school 'feature' phones are not for reading. End of story.

PDF FTW

So for me for the time being trusty old PDF is the best choice for publishing "ebooks" for learning. Some people don't like them - Jakob Nielsen still stands by his 2003 advice, but he's looking at it from a general web user's perspective and I think PDF is mature as a format and our technology  has made it much easier to use than back then.

For me, PDF wins because:

1. It's easy to author - Word does it out of the box.
2. It takes all your lovely images and words and delivers them to your learners pretty much exactly as you intended.
3. It's supported by PC, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS and paper
4. PDF readers are no longer the resource hogs they once were - some browsers read them natively even (yea, Chrome!)
5. It's easy to share and distribute.
6. It's far more sophisticated than we give it credit for - embedded video anyone?

Still, that's just my opinion. I'd like to know yours if you care to share.

* "dog" in this instance meaning "international media publishing conglomerate".
** Non-porn and serious political variants of the latter two do exist, but they are barely touched by the great book reading public.