Learning Together: The eLearning Guild Annual Conference

Boston, Massachusetts is known for rapid weather changes. In fact, extreme weather in the spring, around the time of the Boston Marathon, is certainly not news. This year was no exception, as The eLearning Guild’s 2007 Annual Gathering and Learning Management Colloquium convened April 10 to 13. But although conditions outside the Sheraton Hotel in Back Bay daily seemed to go from sun to drizzle to snow and back again, the nearly 1,000 participants hardly noticed. We were busy.

This year’s Meeting had the benefit of a compact venue for both the collocated events and the Expo. Participants didn’t have to run a marathon of their own from one session to the next. The result was a conference in which participants and presenters were able to have much more focus, where energy levels were high, and where there was plenty of time for networking. In this summary of the event, I’d like to share with you some of my impressions of the attendees, the program, and the learning.

The attendees: Who was there?

It’s the people who come to an event like this that multiply the value of the experience. No matter what we learn from the speakers, the networking and exchange between members are critical to the success of a conference.

Karen Hyder, The eLearning Guild’s Online Events Moderator and Speaker Coach, offers her personal observation about being in the same place as a thousand participants, an observation that most of the participants to whom I spoke would have seconded:

“It felt great. The Guild’s Annual Gathering serves as an important balance to my normally remote and online work world. By spending time learning about what others are doing, and contributing what I’ve learned over the past year, I feel invigorated — ready to tackle this year’s projects with new eyes and, in many cases, with new tools. I met with people whom I’ve wanted to meet and talk to, but we never had the time. More than eye contact and body language, I like to feel the learners’ energy. As effective as I feel I am working and teaching virtually, ‘Ain’t nothing like the real thing!

Who came?

The conference attendees, speakers, and vendors came, literally, from around the world. In all, representatives from 18 countries attended. Job titles included everything from Chief Technical Officer and Chief Learning Officer, down to entry-level practitioners.

It was interesting to see how many of the “A-List” e-Learning bloggers attended the entire conference. Most of these were speakers, but not all. I’ve included links to some of their Weblogs in the sidebar. The bloggers even organized a “beer and blogs” informal event on Wednesday night — something we will probably see more of at future conferences.

Has the audience changed?

The audience at this year’s event broadened from the intermediate level developers and designers who traditionally attend Guild events. The program attracted more managers than ever before, as well as more practitioners new to e-Learning. Over lunch both days, I met many instructional designers who are responsible for evolving their organizations’ learning strategies from classroom delivery to online, informal, and integrated (blended) approaches.

What excited this audience?

The buzz in the hall on the breaks seemed to revolve around these themes:

• Certain tool updates (for example, Captivate 2, Flash 9)
• Panel discussions (rapid e-Learning tools, current technologies and practices)
• Personal Learning Environments (PLEs)
• Integration of Web 2.0 tools into e-Learning solutions
• Peter de Jager’s keynote on change

You can get a pretty good idea of the specific topics that generated a lot of interest by reading the Weblogs in the sidebar. In addition, there was a great deal of traffic through the Expo area. One change in the Expo this year was the number of companies offering off-the-shelf courseware. It seemed to me that more attendees were spending more time engaged with the vendors than in previous years. In part this was due to the layout of the exhibits area, but it was also due to the larger number of decision-makers attending

The program

Content is king, and that’s true for conferences as well as for Web sites. If, as Peter Drucker famously said, “Learning is a lifelong process of keeping abreast of change,” there was plenty for participants to process.

There was a total of 132 learning activities to choose from, counting all the concurrent sessions, the Learning Management Colloquium sessions, pre-conference workshops, and the general sessions. In addition, 85 “Breakfast Links” topics and two excellent lunches expanded informal learning and networking opportunities. And of course, there were dinner groups and session breaks for anyone with a strong drive to meet all of the other 999 attendees.

Although there were three tracks (instructional design; development, programming and tools; and tactical and project management) plus another track appropriate for all participants, the sessions fell into several major themes:

• Introductory content for designers and managers new to technology-assisted learning;
• More advanced theory and practice for designers who have some experience either in synchronous applications (the “virtual classroom” or “Webinars”) or in asynchronous applications (self-paced e-Learning);
• Specific tutorials for developers in such areas as ActionScript, LMS implementation, and video; • Conceptual sessions on new technologies and pedagogies, such as games and simulations, RSS, blogs and wikis, and social software;
• Focused sessions for managers on such topics as project management, budgets, metrics and return on investment (ROI), and strategic orientation of e-Learning to business outcomes.

The eLearning Guild’s role

Of course, as the Conference hosts, The eLearning Guild staff was heavily involved in every part of the event. On Easter Sunday, two days before the first keynote, staffers began loading 1000 conference bags with over 70,000 pages of vendor materials and delegate packs. Thousands of copies of session handouts arrived in the breakout rooms by Tuesday night. Registration and the Information Desk began operation at 4 P.M. on Monday and continued daily through Thursday. Staff set up the e-Mail network, operated a “lost-and-found” service for the cell phones and laptops that went astray, and offered directions to session rooms. For the staff, each day started at 6 A.M. and ended around 9 P.M.

But as Steve Wexler, The Guild’s director of research and emerging technologies, said, “The annual conference was a beautiful encapsulation of what makes eLearning Guild research — and the Guild itself — work so well: A gathering of people who are passionate about e-Learning, who are willing to share their loves and loathings, trials and triumphs. The energy from so many members, speakers, and vendors was palpable and the depth and breadth of information we exchanged was stunning. I felt privileged to share the latest version of the Guild’s online interactive analytics and survey data with these members because it is in fact members’ willingness to contribute to the survey data that makes everything we do possible.”

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