The eLearning Connection

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.