Wednesday, March 24, 2010 02:30 PM

Jim Farrell , Questionmark
Leigh Edwards, Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina

Although you can use traditional quizzes and tests to assess workers' knowledge of products, internal business processes, and software tools, many assessments do not reflect real-world situations. Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina sought efficient ways to measure knowledge and improve performance. Blue University wanted to track agents' product knowledge, awareness of company procedures, and software skills. Simulations provided via their learning portal would give them practice in processing customer inquiries and help agents understand how best to use the company's production systems.

Participants in this case-study session will see how to create the kinds of assessments that require learners to apply their knowledge instead of simply retrieving facts. You’ll learn to use scenarios that people encounter during their workdays, embed these scenarios within quiz or test questions, and take learners through the same processes they need to use on the job. You’ll see how Blue University is able to measure exactly what the person did correctly and incorrectly, and how the data collected from Flash is made available in post-test reports.

In this session, you will learn:

• How BCBSNC created an effective system for evaluating sales representatives’ knowledge of products, procedures, and software tools
• How to incorporate Flash and Captivate files within assessments
• The types of data can be collected from questions based on Flash-based simulations
• How post-assessment reports can be used in directing participants' future learning

Audience: Novice, intermediate, and advanced designers, developers, and others with a basic working knowledge of Adobe Flash and/or Captivate.

Wednesday, March 24, 2010 02:30 PM

Will Thalheimer, Work-Learning Research

Learning a software program is difficult work. Formal training approaches, whether classroom training or e-Learning, can only help learners get started down the long road to full competence. After the training’s done, learners still have to invest a considerable effort in learning the software. Unfortunately, such on-the-job learning is often left to chance or poorly administered, leading to user dissatisfaction, slow time to competence, and inadequate learning.

Participants in this session will learn a holistic approach to systems training, based on research and practical on-the-ground experience. You’ll examine on-the-job learning to find ways to improve learner satisfaction, increase competence, and speed time of learning. These ways include coaching, practice environments and strategies, learning plans, change management, and utilizing prompting mechanisms such as job aids. You’ll learn how to integrate formal training and informal on-the-job learning, how to provide realistic practice, utilize evaluation to drive improvement, and utilize research benchmarking to examine current practices and target them for improvement.

In this session, you will learn:

• How to utilize informal on-the-job learning to speed and improve how users learn to use software systems
• The most important considerations for moving from systems training to systems learning
• How to utilize learning plans to integrate the formal and informal
• How to create a coaching program to improve informal learning
• How to utilize a practice environment to boost learning and remembering

Audience: Intermediate and advanced designers, developers, and those responsible for managing systems training.

Wednesday, March 24, 2010 02:30 PM

Jérôme Beauguitte, Momindum

In this age of information overload, it has become essential to sort and organize relevant information in a dynamic format that turns it into "knowledge." Despite the fact that videos are the most effective and engaging form of knowledge sharing, the market underrates this support. Rich Media content creation and broadcast is an answer to adapting videos to learning materials. We struggle to provide an "instant access to relevant information" to learners. The overall objective is to excel at providing efficient and easy-to-use Rich Media solutions both for learners and knowledge providers so we can empower employees by offering them usable content in a working environment.

Participants in this session will learn what today’s technology has to offer to address these challenges. This session will help you prepare for a new generation of learners who demand instant and direct access to information and expertise. You’ll get insights as to how to manage enriched knowledge content as a sustainable part of your strategy.

In this session, you will learn:

• How Rich Media technology can provide just-in-time learning
• Ways to share informal knowledge like a pro
• The impact that Web 2.0 features have on learning and e-Learning
• The benefits of Web 2.0 combined with Rich Media
• Making interactive Rich Media content easily searchable

Audience: Novice and intermediate e-Learning managers, leaders, designers and developers.

Wednesday, March 24, 2010 02:30 PM

Dana Willett and Samantha Penney, University of Southern Indiana

Creating professional development opportunities for faculty members who teach distance education courses can be challenging, especially when trying to achieve a balance between technology training and course development assistance. Further, distance education departments and professional development session leaders often miss a secondary mission of such workshops – the opportunity to market the services of their department to attendees and the university community at large. Complicating any small-group professional development series are the variety of backgrounds, interests, and needs of the individual session participants. We must synthesize a professional development institute for online faculty that provides sufficient and relevant technical training, useful and empowering course development assistance, and successful departmental marketing, while making such an experience engaging for a small group and interesting to the individual.

Participants in this case-study session will learn how a Summer Institute for Online Teaching and Learning developed a series of workshops. You’ll learn the programmatic arc of the institute and explore the marketing of the institute to potential attendees and the university as a whole.

In this session, you will learn:

• The factors to consider when developing a series of professional development workshops for online faculty
• How to address the challenges in creating small-group professional development sessions
• How to fold a marketing message into the professional development offering
• The arc of professional development, and how to reinforce the objectives of that philosophy in program execution

Audience: Intermediate designers, developers, and others who plan and deliver professional development workshops for faculty teaching with distance education technology.

Wednesday, March 24, 2010 02:30 PM

Clark Quinn, Quinnovation

The ongoing pace of new technology means we have the opportunity and the duty to think afresh about how we best meet the needs of our learners. These frameworks have been percolating, but now it's time to pull them together in a practical way to give you a suite of pragmatic yet powerful tools in your learning quiver. Most formal organizational learning is “event” based, despite the evidence that this is inefficient and ineffective and research on learning and performance suggests there are much more effective approaches. Distributed and situated cognition provide new ways to think about making learning solutions that really work. Our increasingly omnipresent digital life offers compelling new opportunities. When it matters, shouldn't you be thinking about the best solution, not just the familiar one?

In this session, we'll build from personal experience, empirical research, and conceptual frameworks to introduce and elaborate concepts including distributed cognition, spacing, mobile, augmented reality, and ubiquitous computing to start thinking in new ways about learning and learning opportunities. We'll explore distributing learning across time, space, and media to rethink the learning experience.

In this session, you will learn:

• What distributed cognition means for performance support
• How timing means better learning
• Why m-Learning is a powerful learning opportunity
• How you can make your learning more effective, efficient, and engaging

Audience: Intermediate and advanced designers, developers, and others who are willing to rethink design to encourage greater performance.

Wednesday, March 24, 2010 02:30 PM

Reuben Tozman, EdCetra Training

When e-Learning first surfaced, experts thought it provided just-in-time learning since it is available 24x7, so anybody can go through a course when they needed to. But then we built strict guidelines around who can access information and when, so instead of a just-in-time model, we have planned, pre-packaged learning materials available during business hours for select groups of individuals. Search engines like Bing and Google offer the closest thing we have seen to providing just–in-time information.

Session participants will get demonstrations of recent Web technology advances and a review of learning technology evolution moving from a talking-head model to distance education, to electronic distance education, to user-generated content, to Web 2.0, and finally to Web 3.0. You’ll see recent examples of projects underway around the world, such as OpenCyc (a database of facts, names, objects, and the relationships between them that can be mapped to other knowledge bases), and Autology (an application that pulls content for you on your desktop as you work) that point toward true just-in-time learning. You’ll see the technology supporting a new project underway at Library of Congress that allows teachers to dynamically build custom lesson plans. You’ll learn how to get started and the open source tools that are available in the marketplace.

In this session, you will learn:

• The evolutionary trends in technology-based training
• Examples of how Web technology is changing
• How new Web technology can support just-in-time learning
• How to apply current tools and technology to achieve just-in-time learning

Audience: Novice, intermediate, and advanced designers and developers interested in newer technologies.

Wednesday, March 24, 2010 02:30 PM

Diane Elkins and Tanya Coomes, Alcorn, Ward, & Partners, Inc.

More companies are decreasing their training budgets and putting greater and greater emphasis on developing all aspects of e-Learning courses in-house. But without the funds to turn to the experts, how can an e-Learning development team record audio and video like a pro? It’s actually quite easy! Tools, many of them free or very inexpensive, are now available to record studio-quality audio and video. It is all a matter of learning some of the basic tricks of the pros.

Participants in this session will see and hear first-hand how it is done. You’ll walk away with all the tips and secrets you need to get the perfect audio or video recording for your next course. You’ll hear examples of audio captured using free tools, hear the source files, and learn each step of the audio process so you can apply the concepts to your next e-Learning course. You’ll walk through the video process too, from planning to editing, identifying each element of a sample video and discussing how to implement the process in your own environment.

In this session, you will learn:

• How to get a good recording the first time
• How to edit audio clips and improve audio quality
• How to plan a video shoot and record the video
• How to do basic video editing using Windows Movie Maker, and use the right file types and compression options
• The basic DOs and DONTs of working with audio and video

Audience: Intermediate and advanced designers and developers.

Wednesday, March 24, 2010 02:30 PM

Vanessa Goodrum, The Poynter Institute / News University

News University (NewsU), with an online course catalog of more than 60 self-guided courses (not including archived Webinars) and a robust audience outside the U.S., wanted to expand their offerings to people interested in journalism in other languages. Partnered with an organization that supports international journalists and their craft to translate the existing courses, the challenge was how to work with the content in order to not only translate the words but make sure that the content (video, audio, images) were also culturally sensitive. Hence the “localization” label rather than the “translation” label.

Participants in this case-study session will learn how NewsU worked with an outside organization and outside personnel to localize the content. They first sent the content to a localization expert to modify the course in English for cultural sensitivities. After approval, and ensuring the learning objectives remained intact, the content was then sent to a translator for the actual language translation. Simultaneously, NewsU rebuilt their entire course framework in a Drupal platform to make the localization more efficient. You’ll learn what NewsU did, what worked, and what didn't.

In this session, you will learn:

• How a Drupal framework enabled more efficient translation of content
• How a small organization was able to extend its reach to a worldwide audience in multiple languages
• How to translate content, not only into another language but into another culture
• What NOT to do when you want to translate your content into another language

Audience: Novice and intermediate designers, developers, and others.

Wednesday, March 24, 2010 02:30 PM

Rich Mesch, Performance Development Group

Although the benefits of virtual worlds for business are becoming clearer, organizations are still struggling with how to convince stakeholders of their value and how to put together an implementation strategy. What should (or shouldn’t) you try to use virtual worlds for and how can you implement one successfully? This session will focus on the realities of implementing a virtual world platform inside a corporation, and why, though they may seem exotic now, they may soon be as common a tool as your telephone.

Session participants will learn what virtual worlds do and don’t do effectively. You’ll learn how businesses are using virtual worlds right now and the differences between consumer-level and corporate-level virtual worlds. You’ll get an overview of virtual world programs and learn best practices for implementing them. You’ll learn that the potential uses for virtual worlds are just starting to be identified, and common mistakes and misconceptions, including some things virtual worlds can do that most people never take advantage of.

In this session, you will learn:

• How to differentiate common myths from fact on the effective uses of virtual worlds
• The limitations and opportunities of implementing virtual worlds
• Emerging best practices in using virtual worlds in corporate environments
• The differences between consumer and corporate virtual worlds
• A strategy for communicating the value of virtual worlds to stakeholders
• What businesses are most commonly using virtual world platforms to do

Audience: Novice and intermediate designers, developers, and others curious about the application of virtual worlds in training.

Wednesday, March 24, 2010 02:30 PM

Elizabeth Israel, F5 Networks

It is oftentimes difficult to make a decision on which tool to select without having an unbiased person showing their strengths and weaknesses. There are many rapid e-Learning tools available in the marketplace, but Articulate and Captivate seem to have the greatest marketshare. This session will focus on which tool works best for which type of learning. Seeing examples of what can be done in Articulate versus what can be done in Captivate, along with the pros and cons of each will help reduce time in evaluating tools.

Participants in this session will learn the strengths of both Articulate and Captivate, and see examples of how each tool can be used to create a course for the sales team in their organization. Additionally, you’ll see examples of creating courses with audio and video samples and creating assessments that are SCORM compliant.

In this session, you will learn:

• The strengths and weaknesses of Articulate and Captivate
• How rich media works in Articulate and Captivate
• How courses are rapidly developed for the sales team
• Two “gotchas” each for Articulate and Captivate

Audience: Novice and intermediate designers and developers who are familiar with rapid e-Learning development.

Wednesday, March 24, 2010 02:30 PM

Sue Collaro, Symmetree

Online tools are smarter and more sophisticated than ever, but has instructional design kept pace? Are we choosing entertainment over robust learning frames, and can the two strategies be combined? How do you take a learner through a journey of personal discovery regardless of the delivery medium? Do we really do blended learning or parallel learning? Do we try too hard to teach, at the expense of thinking?

Participants in this session will learn how e-Learning can actually create behavioral change. You’ll discuss whether the huge advancements in technology have left learning methodology behind, baffling the learner with too much glitz and wizardry and moving from learning to “infotainment.” You’ll get statistics on games-based learning and how technology is now so sophisticated that it is all so simple.

In this session, you will learn:

• How to effect behavioral change through e-Learning
• Ways to challenge the assumptions and habits that lead to behaviors
• The robust learning frames and mental models that support learning

Audience: Designers, developers, and organizational performance professionals.