Big Question - What did you learn about learning in 2007

08/12/2007 by nicola.

Learning Circuits Blog Big Question for December is What did you learn about learning in 2007?

2007 was a year of discovery and re-discovery for me because I had been out of elearning roles for several years and it was interesting to find out what had changed. When I was last ‘here’, e-learning Guru - what a fab resource, e-learning course authoring, learning objects, learning CMSs, experimenting with mobile learning had started, informal and workflow learning being written about. Rapid prototyping learning was also being written about. The Masie Centre had started releasing eBooks on the 700+ tips for eLearning which gathered tips from hundreds of professionals working in eLearning. Virtual classrooms existed and I remember attending Learning Technologies (the first one they set up in the UK) and seeing a demonstration from Interwise where they were able to send something from a mobile phone to a live session which updated in 8 seconds.

What I have been ‘learning’ about learning / the world of learning in 2007:

January
Project managing learning - or how not to in my case - e-learning projects are very different to every other e-project I have taken on or worked with - and I came back into e-learning thinking I had sufficient e and PM experience to find it easy - oh dear ! If you are developing with multimedia - the knock-on implications of not defining and prioritising risk properly, not planning in sufficient detail, not checking for sufficient understanding when communicating - makes achieving your deliverables infinitely more complex than standard web projects - because you storyboard web projects but in most cases don’t formally script in the same way. Also understanding the limitations of using authoring tools and templates so that you can manage timescales and expectations is very important.

Interesting to go to Learning Technologies again and see the movers and shakers. Larger Adobe and Indian corporations presence - allowed for very interesting discussions about different ways of sourcing e-learning development.

February
Considerations for designing learning that could be accessed on blackberries. With a set of operational, functional considerations and a limited amount of screen space, a good story and good instructional design can produce an effective piece of mLearning. If an existing piece of e-learning does not tell a good story then ‘importing’ onto a mobile device will not help the user any more than looking at it on a laptop. Its good to assume that your users have very limited imagination so that you need to describe situations and events on-screen for them intricately (if you are not able to include options such as a simulation or video of a very realistic situation that the user can find themselves in).

March
Continuing with the portable device theme, using podcasts for learning can be effective using simple design, simple audio and/or video. It does not have to be top of the range or cutting edge design to communicate a message - or to draw in a learner. When starting a project with a new type of device, it can be easy to over-complicate the design but for small screen for video / powerpoints slides, simple, quick screen transitions, simple use of colours are very attractive and can retain attention.

April
Learning journeys through a course. Its been disappointing to discover that not much has changed in terms of tracking of learning. If you can have clicktracks, clickprints to follow users behaviour around individual web pages, across websites and trailfire where you can follow users comments about their journeys - WHY OH WHY can’t we do this yet in e-learning. Why is the majority of e-learning just still tracking completions (and a couple of other things if you’re lucky). We are using a digital medium to design and publish our learning, a lot of it gets stuck out on the web - so why can’t we see the amount of learners who clicked on words and graphics on the screen, it is the best chance we have of ‘observing’ learners and improving our learning design as a result.
Maybe the increased use of other web-related things such as wikis and blogs will mean that separate applications/software/widgets will not be required and we can use the very good web tracking tools that are out there.

May
Discovering the mobile web and how even in remote settings with limited and/or infrequent bandwidth availability, limited budgets, using a mobile phone to capture photos and videos, then use the mobile phone to upload them onto the web in a few minutes, provides wonderful stories to capture other learners’ imaginations. Voices of Africa project is truly inspirational.

June
So what is a wiki anyway and can it be used to learn stuff ? Discovering that knowledge management team/s and my team having common goals - connecting internally - highlighted the importance of wikis and how they can help interconnections between people and teams that would otherwise have no contact. Editing and commenting on a wiki is not something that web users are familiar with, particularly those who have never used a discussion forum, so seeing your thoughts online and available for others to see requires certain level of confidence in your own beliefs and confidence with using the technology.

Great examples of education world taking wikis and creating learning materials - Curriki, Flat Classroom and Stewart Mader (wikipatterns and other great wikiness) providing fantastic examples for how people can use wikis in education. But can you actually learn from a wiki - you can have a question and go searching for the answer on a wiki, you can even ask the question on a wiki. If you find the answer does that mean you have learnt something, does acquiring a piece of written information - information about the what of something or maybe the how to do something - made me question well what on earth is learning and what is knowledge anyway, how are they different, are they different ? I’m still not 100% sure.

Wikis are editable repositories of internal ‘knowledge’ of processes and news, so they can be used to support learning and possibly assist in community building (although the building of communities requires familiarisation and competence with the technology to some degree e.g. if someone can’t edit a wiki page easily, they might just add a word doc as an attachment - which is kind of half way solution - you have shared it online, but its probably not tagged with keywords like a regular wiki page). And they are web pages, so you can use widgets or similar to track them. You can also add interactivity with adding widgets. Having web design experience can help design better wikis or structures of wikis as they grow, so people can still find stuff quickly.

July
Templates for learning - providing your e-learning community (some of whom may not have had previous e-learning experience or have very little time to develop the e-learning) with templates helps them to create learning rapidly on a regular basis, using an authoring tool. Templates reduce the build time and hopefully the amount of re-work required which can help manage the timescales of e-learning project. It provides consistency and branding internally.

Templates and authoring tools are good to have but they do not provide a good e-learning (course, object, whatever) in themselves, the objectives, storytelling and instructional design provide the foundation - the templates and tools facilitate consistent and rapid development on that foundation. If you can get a ‘prototype’ out there rapidly and back to the sponsors / stakeholders and users, this will also help to cut down un-necessary revisions later on in the build or redeployments and hopefully reduce scope creep.

August
Are you ready….well, let’s play round 1….
Whilst the learning world is continuing to come out with exciting developments with 3D graphics, animation and gaming consoles are becoming more interesting, a gameshow - based on the television gameshow format is quick and interactive, non-expensive learning that can be developed very quickly and provide higher levels of enjoyment and entertainment, in corporate or non-corporate environments. Developing one with colleagues was very enjoyable (and slightly insane)too as well as seeing the end product. eLearn mag also had an article on this theme. So if don’t wish/other priorities/not ready/no budget to purchase high end gaming, virtual worlds, simulations, this can be a different route to try.

September
Launched website, a wiki and a blog, learnt a whole load of stuff but nothing much about learning itself.
Also in Sept, learnt the difference between virtual worlds and online games - this is one area that has evolved so much in learning and provided incredible collaboration and entertainment for learners in-world. For me it appeared that corporately if an organisation is familiar or not familiar with games and virtual worlds, there appeared to be some trade-offs which are all equally expensive:
- avatars - the more realistic, the more they cost
- setting up or buying a virtual world or renting part of one - buy vs build, as with avatars, for more realism, you need more sophisticated methods and technologies
- collaboration and interactions - linking Web 2 and social networking into a virtual world environment
- simulation authoring tools - at the extreme end 3D Studio Max - to basic authoring tools
Not sure how you instructionally design an environment and how much of the learning is entirely self-created based on the conditions of the environment you have set-up.

October - December
This post is too long !
So in summary - collaboration has changed, technologies have enabled people to talk to other people more quickly and more often online, but in most cases, this still involves typing rather than use of voice, so the collaboration will be affected by people’s love of writing and devices. Some great gems are not being publicised because those people do not like either writing or using a keyboard.

Self-publishing of audio and video content has meant that ’screens’ do not just need to contain text and graphics. So the world of learning has some new toys and this time round it doesn’t just have to be technical wizards building interesting pieces of learning content. Corporately knowledge management and learning teams appear to be inhabiting the same spaces and working with similar aspirations.

So where does instructional design sit - if people are collaborating with more people than they ever did, faster than they used to, formulating their ideas on the go - are they in the corp world, improving their performance as a result? Only if key ideas, real case studies and stories of corporate experience are actually being outlined and shared in a meaningful way and to date, I personally have not experienced that on a wiki or similar collaborative medium, but I see that as a not quite yet rather than a never going to happen.

Mobile learning has massively increased with a huge amount of innovative examples appearing (especially Australia - incredible range of content), but also with global usage, multiple devices with multiple functions it has been possible to create some learning content using good instructional design principles without traditional technology restrictions which have prevented some areas of the world being involved before.

As the mobile web evolves further, the same principles will apply from web design to learning design - i.e. if I am taking a course that was ‘traditionally’ on a pc screen, do I just make a miniature version of it on the smaller screen or can I create a completely different look, feel, navigation of the content to make it a better, quicker, more enjoyable experience for the learner.

Finally with mobile, people are starting to talk ‘through’ computers using VOIP etc but with mobiles they are already doing that comfortably without thinking about it and this might mean that the less you are concentrating on the piece of technology you are using, as a learner, the more immersed you will become in a learning experience.

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