The eLearning Connection

In case you didn’t know, I’m a big fan of eLearning. I think it offers many advantages over traditional face-to-face learning environments. However, this doesn’t mean that every training you offer, or want to offer, needs to be given an online presence.

For example, I was working through the process of deciding what trainings would be best to move to an online setting for a small company. This didn’t mean that the traditional face-to-face sessions would stop, just that there would be another option that would allow the organization to reach more people. When I first arrived, the general consensus was that online training was a great way to provide many of the trainings they have been wanting to offer to their audience, but haven’t had time to work on. See my post on Quality eLearning Takes Time to understand why this may not have been the best approach.

So instead, we started talking about all of the things the organization does related to training. They were able to name off the trainings they provided most and commented on how it was eating up all of their time. Now we were getting somewhere… By investing time in creating an online version of a training that is delivered often, you are able to reach an even larger audience while freeing up some valuable time for you and your staff - once the training is created that is.

Unfortunately, after you have a couple of trainings in mind that you would like to take online you are still not out of the woods. There are a few things you need to map out ahead of time to ensure this training is the right training to make the transition. These things include:

1. What is the purpose of this training? In other words, what will the participants get out of it?
2. How will you know the training is successful? Use concrete numbers here. Not “X amount of people will have taken the training“, but instead something like “participants taking the training will increase sales by 30%” or “errors will be reduced by 25%“. See the difference? Knowing how many people participated in your training only tells you how much time was wasted unless you can show results. Tom Kuhlmann gives really good examples of what I’m talking about here in his Rapid eLearning Blog and eBook.
3. How will you measure the results. This is another key point. Many organizations define results without knowing how they are going to measure them. Measuring with a figure you aren’t going to receive for a year from now is a bad idea. Think of something relevant and readily available that you can use.

After working through these key steps you should know if this is really a training you should spend time taking online or not. If so, once finished, you should try the training with a small group of participants and follow up by measuring the results you decided upon in step two. If the results look good, offer to a larger group and repeat. If not, revise and experiment with another small group.

The good thing about creating trainings for an online environment is that they are easy to go back and edit at any time. If one particular part is shown not to work, you can quickly edit and republish. I will provide a concrete example of how I set up a training using this same process in a soon to come post.

I spend most of my time contracting out with various organizations who all have different needs. A common thread among them is their interest in moving a piece of what they do from a traditional to an online format. This may be as simple as posting some information on a website, or as complex as setting up their own learning management system (LMS). No matter what they are looking for however, one thing almost all of these organizations assume is that making the transition is less time consuming than what it actually is. Let me use a concrete example to show you what I mean.

I provide trainings on all sorts of instructional technology. One particular training that always has more of a demand than I can handle takes me anywhere from 2 to 6 hours to provide face to face. Although not always true, online trainings typically do not take as long for participants to sit through as their face-to-face counterparts . However, this doesn’t mean that I am saving as much time as it may appear. Let me explain…

For a simple overview of this software, it would probably take two hours to cover. This of course doesn’t count my travel time, setup, etc… To create a similar online training, I spent close to 50 hours laying it out, adding real life scenarios of how the software could be used, including interactive video tutorials and more.  When finished, I honestly wondered if this training was going to take much less time than the face to face training. Then I rolled it out to a select group of people to collect data (more on this in an upcoming post) and couldn’t believe my eyes when they finished in an average of 20 minutes! It took them 20 minutes to complete something I spent over 50 hours creating.

This goes back to some information I picked up in one of William Horton’s books that states the following:

For a moderately complex project done by a moderately experienced team, figures of 200 person-hours per instruction hour are common, though estimates often run from 100 to 600 hours. [Horton, Designing Web-Based Training, p. 45].

Just in case you need that restated, you could be looking at up to 600 hours of work to create 1 hour of online training! Now of course that is on the complex side of things, but an average of 200 hours is quite normal and even less than what I was heading towards for the training above. Also keep in mind that this is just for creating the training. Many assume that the most time consuming part is gathering the content, but content for me was not the issue as I am one of the most knowledgeable people you can find on this particular piece of software. It actually took me that long just to lay out and create the online training.

This post isn’t meant to scare anyone away from eLearning. In fact, you should embrace it. Not only has research shown that eLearning provides just as much, if not more, learning outcomes for participants, but it also has several additional benefits face-to-face training does not. For example, with online training you can:

• Extend your trainings to a larger audience
• Make them available 24/7 so that participants can take and re-take as much as they want.
  
• No travel (for you or your participants)
• Less time with similar results

If anything, I hope this post will help you have these conversations with your employer or client before they get in over their head or fund a low quality training, both of which are bad for everyone.

Through working with groups and agencies who are solely supported by grant funds to create e-learning solutions, we have discovered the existence of a graveyard full of incredible processes, products, and tools that are wasting away in boxes and on bookshelves. As e -learning tools have become more effective and cost efficient, there are significant benefits for your grant funded work.

1. “Fundability” is essential when applying for a highly competitive grant, because you can not accomplish your next great adventure without financial support. One attractive feature to set your project apart from the rest is to incorporate e-learning solutions. It is no longer cost prohibitive to develop and disseminate your findings and products on the web. The ability to do this well allows funding sources to see that your project has the potential to impact a large geographic area long after the funding is complete.

2. “Accessibility” to the benefits from the grant outcomes have typically been limited by how close you were to where the work was done or your connection with the people who did it. With e-learning solutions, people all across the globe can benefit from the efforts of your organization at anytime and at anyplace.

3. “Timelessness” is essential because once the funding is spent, projects are typically over and never seen again. However with e-learning solutions, the work accomplished through your project can be made available through web-based tools even after the funding is over. Extend the life of your project by finding a partner up front that will commit to hosting your work for you once the project is complete. Consider approaching colleges, universities, businesses, and other non-profit agencies as potential partners. The cost of hosting is relatively insignificant and the benefits for everyone are endless. If you are having trouble finding those partners, there are many no-cost solutions on the web that can accomplish this. Take time to dig through our blog to investigate a few that we have highlighted.

The possibilities are endless with the tools available to all of us. If you have a success story incorporating e-learning solutions in your grant funded work, take a minute to comment on this post.

If you haven’t taken the time to check out zoho.com yet, you need to stop whatever you are doing and visit their site right now. They offer almost any online collaboration tool you can imagine and the vast majority of them are all free. That’s right, free! Here’s just a small list of some of the web based services they offer:

• Zoho Writer - Word Processing application
• Zoho Sheets - Spreadsheet Application
• Zoho Show - Presentation tool similar to PowerPoint
• Zoho Wiki
• Zoho Planner
• Zoho Database and Reports

These are just a few of the options. Others include a customer relationship, project management, mail, and even an online meeting application. Not only does zoho offer several additional options than their competitors, but they are even working to overcome the biggest barrier with online services - their ability to work offline. Currently with the word processing application, you can choose to work offline, then sync up when you re-establish an internet connection. All applications also give you the ability to share with others in multiple ways.

Apart from a few useful tools for video conferencing, we’ve gave little attention to new useful applications that can make your life easier. The purpose of this short post is to bring attention to a new free web based application for collaboration.

Sosius is different from competitors in several ways. First, it’s web based, so no installation on servers or computers is necessary. Second, it’s free and is feature packed. Need I say more? According to the company’s website Sosius is

an online workspace accessible from any PC, that lets you create and collaborate. No software to buy and set up. Powerful and flexible yet easy to use. Your free account gives you 200 MB of online storage and you can collaborate with an unlimited number of other users.

Sosius offers more features than I care to mention in this post so you should check it out yourself at www.sosius.com

I made a post on another blog earlier this week about Universal Design for Learning and engagement. Although the post was focused more on learning in a classroom setting I can also see how it applies to eLearning. So I decided to go ahead and make a post here as well. We should all know by now that it is critical to keep your audience engaged if your goal is for them to retain the information you provide. Engagement must be often and relevant. Relevant simply means something related to what you are teaching. It should build on your audiences’ background knowledge on the subject. Research shows time and time again that relating content to background knowledge increases retention, so why shouldn’t your engagement pieces do the same?

The picture above is something I picked up from a Bob Pike Group training a couple years ago. You will see me mention things from their trainings quite often as I think almost everything they talk about relates to good instructional practices for live and web based training. It basically says this: In a 90 minute window of time we should chunk our content into 20 minute sections making sure to engage learners every 8 minutes or so. Simple, right? Let’s take a deeper look:

• 90 Minute Block - In general, whether we provide online training, teach a class, or anything else that involves holding a groups attention we should be sure to provide a break at least every 90 minutes. This has been the case time and time again. How do you think they came up with 90 minutes being the optimal time for block scheduling in some schools? I can assure you it wasn’t by accident
• 20 Minute Chunks - You must break your content up into chunks. No one can hold attention for 90 minutes straight. 20 minutes has been shown to be the optimal amount of time during classroom instruction to go over any section of content. I imagine online instruction is not much different.
• Engage every 8 Minutes - This is just a general rule of course, but it does have some research to back it up. Did you know that by the time most students graduate high school they have spent more time in front of a television than in a classroom? What happens about every 8 minutes when you are watching TV? If you guessed a commercial break you would be correct. So imagine how tough it is for some of us to hold attention for extended periods of time without some type of break in the action. This is where the engagement piece comes in. It doesn’t have to be complicated, in fact it can be as easy as having everyone take a stretch break while a quick video clip plays. I would recommend putting a bit more thought into it than that however. For example, in some web based trainings we create a scenario for participants to respond to. This allows them to quickly apply the knowledge they’ve learned while adding engagement to your training.

Hopefully this quick and easy strategy will help you design some of your lessons to be more engaging for your participants. If you happen upon this post and try it, I would love to see comments about how you made it work in your online trainings.

I just finished presenting from my home office along with colleague who was at a conference over 3 hours away. Though I enjoy engaging face to face with my audiences, I was not able to make the trip because of prior committments. In the past, I would have missed this opportunity to work with an incredible group of people and to share tools that can enhance their work.

To make this a reality, we used Skype to provide the connection into the session. My video was run from the computer to an LCD projector and the audio was run into the sound system. We were able to communicate with our audience as if we were standing next to each other. The participants were actively engaged and we were able to fulfill the objectives the conference coordinators set before us. This event highlights a few barriers that e-learning can overcome for your company, organization, or classroom.

Barrier 1: Distance. Many times we are limited by the availability of professionals in our geographic region. I have worked with a few agencies that were seeking the support of a service provider. Unfortunately, they were forced to select their 3rd and 4th option because their top choices did not have time to provide what they needed (or did not want to make the trip). E-learning solutions allow people to provide their skills to a much wider audience; minimize the barriers of time and distance; and maximize effectiveness.

Barrier 2: Finances. As travel costs increase and the price of a gallon of gasoline skyrockets, this will become the greatest hurdle to access support services and training to assist your staff. The use of e-learning as a communication tool minimizes or removes the costs that you would be required to spend to bring in the “expert from Harvard” to train your staff. No flight, no rental car, no overnight stay, and no meals (which is important if you are bringing in the championship eating all-stars to give a motivational speech) are required.

Barrier 3: Follow-up. The key to any effective professional development is follow-up. The research literature is very consistent in supporting that “one-shot, sit and get lessons do not change the way people work”. However, most training events are exactly that. We sit and listen to someone drag on and on about a topic while hoping that the fire alarm will go off or Jesus will come back. As supervisors, we have unrealistic expectations that our staff will go out and do what was talked about during the session. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way (yet we still do this over and over). E-learning technologies provide a realistic way for trainers to connect back with the participants to follow-up after the initial training. This let’s everyone know that the content matters and provides a venue for questions to be addressed as implementation ensues.

When you are planning training and events for your staff and clientèle, the options have grown quite a bit. Most importantly, “Keep the main thing, the main thing”! Great technology and poor content is still poor content.

Just yesterday a colleague and I did a presentation on the 5 steps to success when using video conferencing as a consultative tool. I figured it would make for a logical post on our blog. Before actually getting into the steps however, I need to explain the graphic above as it will likely be the most important takeaway from this post.

For a consultation to be successful you basically need three things to occur. First you need to make sure that you develop an effective intervention for whatever it is your client is needing you to do. This may be a new marketing plan, a new piece of technology, or a new behavior intervention for a student (or teacher) you are trying to help control in a classroom setting. Secondly, you need to know that the intervention is being implemented appropriately. I can’t tell you how many times the never ending argument starts by putting the blame for an intervention not working on an inappropriate intervention by the consultant. The consultant then fires back saying “the intervention is fine, you’re just not implementing in correctly.” This is where the final piece of the diagram comes in: measured outcomes. By identifying the outcome you hope to accomplish beforehand, the task of creating an appropriate intervention and implementing it correctly increases ten fold. Having said that, here are the five steps to success:

1. Obtain Appropriate Permissions First -
   More often than not there is a higher power that needs to allow the use of video conferencing as a consultative tool. Some departments have strict policies in place that do not allow the type of technology used for this type of support. In addition, there are often privacy and ethical issues to consider. For example, are you videoing this intervention, do all parties being videoed know the situation? If so, will that change things?
2. Practice Makes Perfect -
   Never, I repeat never, start using video conferencing technology in place of face to face consultation without doing a few practice runs first. Technology doesn’t always work right and if it can happen it will happen, especially when you need it to not happen the most. Be prepared for this with a back up plan and knowledge about how to fix whatever problems you may encounter
3. Define the behavior and setting you need to develop the intervention for -
   This rule was developed for more of an educational setting, but I can see how it would apply for almost any other area as well. If the point of the consultation is to provide a solution to a problem, you need to clearly define what that problem is and where it occurs the most. Choose one setting and stick to that setting. Otherwise your data will not pan out later. There are too many external influences to consider.
4. Collect Baseline Data -
   You know the problem and the setting, now collect the measurable data you decided upon before you implement any intervention. Make sure the problem really exists. This data can most always be collected using a simple webcam and internet connection in the setting you choose to observe.
5. Develop Intervention and Collect More Data -
   You have your baseline data… Now develop your intervention. You can demonstrate this intervention through video conferencing until you are confident those who are implementing your intervention can do it right. Take a sales rep for example. Have them role play with a colleague in front of the webcam the intervention you’ve developed until you are satisfied. Then you can be sure that if it doesn’t work, it’s the intervention that’s the problem, not the implementation. Then, as the step says, collect more data. If the data isn’t looking good, it’s back to the drawing board (see graphic and top of page and start at step 1 again).

That’s it. Now you’re on your way to moving part of your consulting online. In our experience, we usually meet face-to-face at first, then move a large portion of our work online. In one example still in progress, we had to travel 2 hours one-way to meet the client. Had we continued face-to-face meetings, we would have only been able to fit them in once every couple of months. Instead, during the primary visit, a webcam was installed. We can now meet and observe around 3 times a week and the data we are getting is unbelievable (look for it in a later post).

A client and I were having a discussion the other day about where the majority of his time was spent. The idea was that after we nailed this down, we could then figure out how to make at least part of this time consuming task virtual. Turns out the majority of his time was spent nowhere… Well, I guess he was somewhere, but nowhere that actually provided any added value to his business. You see, this particular client spent most of his time traveling. He was either on the road going to a meeting, training, evaluation, observation or some other off site related business obligation. Regardless of what it was he needed to be doing, the longest part of it was the travel involved.

Long story short, we decided that diving into the world of video conferencing may be worth a shot. With video conferencing (done right anyway), he could attend any meeting from any where in the world with just his laptop, a web cam and an internet connection. Providing the other party had the same technology, he could also have the same experience for evaluations, observations, and maybe even parts of his trainings. Sounds great right? It is, but before you run to Office Max to pick up your own web cam or invest in several thousand dollars worth of video conferencing equipment, you should read this post. It not only gives pointers, but explains how to get started with little or no costs involved (except for your web cam and computer of course).

So we know that video conferencing allows you to virtually transmit yourself (both audio and video) to anywhere in the world through an internet connection. That’s great, but how do you do it? Well, first you will need a computer with internet access (sorry, I can’t help you there) and a fairly good web cam (check back for upcoming post on web cam ratings). Once you have this, it’s just a matter of finding the right software to serve your needs. I personally use Skype, which offers high quality voice and video transfer for free. For this to work however, you will need to make sure the person you are conferencing with also has Skype installed. By default, Skype will let you conference call with up to 9 people, but only video conference with one person. There are extensions available that allow you to add up to four people (three and yourself) to a video conference call, but these extensions are created by external users and are not supported by Skype itself. If you need more than that, you will probably need to look elsewhere for a solution. And just as a side note, Skype allows you to purchase Skype In (receive a phone number that anyone in the world can use to call you from any phone) and Skype Out (you can call any land line phone in the world for low rates - free to the US and Canada). You can receive both for less than $70/year. Sounds better than those $150+/month bills your getting now huh? If the person your talking to has Skype however, you can talk through it for free instead.

Another similar video conferencing option that allows up to 4 participants is SightSpeed. You can purchase the business version of this for $189.95/year for one user. There’s also a personal edition available. Why pay when you can get the same thing through Skype for free? Sometimes you get what you pay for when it comes to support. SightSpeed offers excellent support that may come in handy if you are using this technology for important business meetings or transactions.

Other notables you may want to try that are free:

• ooVoo - According to the site, ooVoo is - the next evolution in online communication — a remarkably easy way to have a face-to-face video conversation with friends, family or colleagues, no matter where they are in the world. Give it some time and I say ooVoo will replace Skype for my video conferencing needs.
• Any instant messenger service such as Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger, or Paltalk (allows up to 10 video conference participants at once and has some other nifty conference room features).

This should be plenty to get you started. Keep in mind that the success of using video conferencing relies on planning ahead. For example, if video conferencing fails in the middle of a meeting, you should have a backup plan. If you’re using video conferencing for something like observations, know what data you need to collect ahead of time and how you are going to collect it. For example, one of our consultants is using Skype for providing support to educators in classrooms. He observes for 15 minute intervals 3 days a week. He starts by gathering baseline data on specific behaviors. He then teaches the educators the interventions through Skype’s video conferencing feature. Next, it’s back to the 15 minute interval observations to determine if the intervention works. He can instantly determine if the issue is the intervention, the person implementing the intervention, or some outside factor when evaluating progress. Success rates are nearing 98%… Can you imagine how different things would be if he just sat down, turned on the web cam and said “Okay, let’s see what’s going on today” without having planned ahead the exact data he needed to collect? Plan your work and then work your plan!

I’ve spent the last month or so delving through enough information on e-learning practices and options to make most people go insane. I considered myself well versed to start with, but it seems that at least once a week there is a new technology or method for e-learning available. In one of the books I just finished, the authors report the minimum cost you’re looking at to provide an e-learning solution is in the “thousands”.  That’s just nuts. Sure, if you’re going to hire an e-learning consultant and buy an expensive commercial e-learning application you’re looking at thousands, but there are several ways you can get the benefit of e-learning without the cost (sometimes it’s free!). Here are a few examples:

• Blogs
• Wikis
• Open source learning management systems (LMS)
• PowerPoint published as an html document
• Instant Messaging and Whiteboard software
• Video Conferencing
• Remote desktop solutions like GoToMyPC or GoToMeeting

If you’re new to e-learning , you may want to take time and Google search to get the basics.  Keep in mind that these are only a few of the options that are available to everyone.  We will begin expanding on them in the upcoming months so that you will have a resource guide on where to look, what to look for, and which ones we think are best.