Work

business & working

e-Learning Project Management Book

by

The Canadian eLearning Enterprise Alliance (CeLEA) has recently released its new e-book Plan to Learn: case studies in e-learning project management. Edited by Beverly Pasian (who is working on her PhD in project management) and Dr. Gary Woodill (who has recently become Senior Researcher at Brandon Hall Research), this volume of 22 case studies from 8 countries documents the successes and failures of a variety of e-learning implementations. Case studies are drawn from the higher education, K-12, government, non-profit and corporate sectors. The book also contains a thorough review of the literature on elearning project management. To obtain your free copy, go to www.celea-aceel.ca.

This 192 page PDF from CeLEA covers dozens of case studies on e-learning management (focus = A-DDI-E). Almost all of the cases are academic situations, using the online course model, so this book would be best suited for those developing e-learning in higher education. There is little mention of performance support, knowledge management, communities of practice, or informal learning. Nor is there much reference to aligning the learning methods to operational or business requirements.

One exception is a case study on developing math skills for nurses at Mount Royal College. In this case, the work requirement, or gap, was quite clear:

According to a May 2004 study published by the Canadian Medical Association Journal, one in nineteen adults will be given the wrong medication or dosage upon a hospital visit.

The goal was defined, though too academic in my mind:

The goal of the online Nursing Math Tutorial was to ensure that nursing students were successful in their clinical courses without the need for so much time.

A better goal would have been to reduce the number of incorrect dosages. This is obviously the performance they were really trying to achieve.

The design considered the context of the work:

The intention of the tutorial was to provide practical information to the learner, that being the basic principles and illustrations of math sequences and their relation to practical clinical settings.

However, the ADDIE model seems to have been too constraining and resource-intensive:

In the creation of the online Nursing Math Tutorial, the successes arose from creative project management solutions, which conserved resources and maintained a higher quality of student learning as a result.

I’m wondering if a better approach in this case may have been to create a series of contextual visualizations on the necessary math concepts. These could then be placed in an online collaborative environment, such as Elgg, and the learners themselves could have constructed meaning around these visual artifacts, through discussions with each other and with facilitators. Some of the visualizations could also be the test objects, such as, “here is a case, calculate the dosage”.

For those in the thick of e-learning course development, you may find some helpful nuggets in these pages. Most of the cases discuss tools for learner-to-learner discussions, so we are seeing clear moves away from just information dissemination. However, if you’re looking for innovative performance-oriented alternatives to ADDIE, you will have to look elsewhere.

Aliant delivers

by

For those not familiar with my high speed Internet woes, this story began in July 2005 with a significant update in September 2006.

Here’s the basic storyline. I purchased an additional, higher speed, ADSL Internet service from my ISP (Bell Aliant), but was not able to get the advertised speed. I called customer & technical service and checked the hardware and firmware at my own end. I posted my situation on my blog, and over the course of a year I received some good information in the comments. This caused me to push harder and finally, after two technical interventions, confirmed what the problem was – the switch had never been set by the ISP.

Two months after my speed had been correctly adjusted, I still had not heard from the company, nor received a rebate. I contacted customer service, but they were not authorised to give me a full rebate, and had no record of my July 2005 experiences.

A little bit of searching and I found the e-mail of one of Bell Aliant’s VP’s and sent my story, with links to my blog. Within 24 hours, Aliant had delivered:

  1. an apology directly from a VP
  2. a rebate on the High Speed Ultra service for which I paid
  3. a year’s worth of free Ultra service

I am satisfied with this situation, and am particularly glad when the company tells me that they have learned from the situation:

We have made some changes to our processes and done some coaching with our representatives to ensure we improve the customer experience.

Here are my personal reflections on this experience:

My problem was a result of customer service not being able to level with me and treat me as an individual – I was a protocol to be followed. In spite of my insistence that I had checked all wires and connections, I was initially told that the problem was at my end.

Even though customer service stated that they had no record of my July 2005 experience, I was able to show the date-stamped public record of my experience on my blog, thus giving my case more credibility.

The highly trained technical service staff are professional, knowledgeable and friendly. Customer service staff, who have the first contact with any problems, should be treated and trained in a similar manner as the technical staff.

Had there been a forum, such as a blog, to discuss these issues and concerns, the situation would have been rectified much quicker.

Once senior management understood the problem they were able to take action very quickly, and I greatly appreciated this. It took little effort to keep me as a customer.

Finally, it’s very difficult to understand the differences in Internet and telephony services. For instance, during this past year, I’ve learned:

  • If you have telephone service with Eastlink, you only have 30 minutes of local stand-by battery power in the event of an outage. Aliant’s telephone service has a separate power supply for the system.
  • It’s next to impossible to compare one company’s bundle of services with another, and this is done on purpose by the respective marketing departments.
  • Aliant’s ADSL gives you a dedicated pair of wires, whereas Eastlink’s cable service, which has higher speeds, is shared and may decrease with additional users in your area.

Anyway, after 11 years as a customer, Aliant is still my best choice, especially since my issues are all resolved. Hopefully, this is the end of the story.

user_frederic_moser_01.jpg

Whither ISD, ADDIE & HPT?

by

big-question.gif

Here is the question of the month from The Learning Circuits Blog:

Are ISD / ADDIE / HPT relevant in a world of rapid elearning, faster time-to-performance, and informal learning?

First, some definitions:

  • HPT – Human Performance Technology
  • ISD – Instructional Systems Design [or Development]
  • ADDIE – a process incorporating Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, Evaluation, stemming from the Systems Approach to Training (SAT)

SAT, ISD and ADDIE stemmed from the need to train military personnel for the Second World War. They were necessary to train lots of people really fast. My initial experiences as a military trainer were from the point of view of ISD, SAT, & ADDIE.

Later I became immersed in HPT, and found it a good method to analyse certain aspects of organisational performance. One thing that HPT does well is to ensure that training, which is costly, isn’t prescribed unless it addresses a verifiable lack of skills and/or knowledge.

SAT, ISD and ADDIE are excellent methods to develop training that is stable. I spent several years using these methods to develop helicopter training for aircrew and maintenance personnel. These methodologies were highly suitable for the task. These methods are not suitable for developing educational programming. The problem with using training development for education is that the performance objectives are not clear. What are you supposed to do at the end of this education and how do you measure it?

As I have said before, I think that one of the problems with our education system is that there is too much of a focus on getting quantitative data, like testing. These functions are more suited to a “training” system, where the performance requirements are clear, measurable and observable. In education, the performance requirements are fuzzy. There is nothing wrong with either a training focus or an education focus; each one has its merits. The problem is when you try to mix the two.

So, are these methodologies suitable for today? The short answer is yes, but not everywhere. Too often we see training as a solution looking for a problem. Training often worked before, or at least didn’t create more problems, when work processes and organisations were stable. As we move to more networked businesses, training’s weaknesses are becoming evident. These weaknesses are also evident when we don’t really know what the performance objectives are in a constantly evolving society, economy and marketplace.

Enter the two-way web and the ubiquitously connected computer. We now have several new tools to address other performance issues that training was never good for anyway:

  • Unclear expectations – collaboratively constructed wikis and up to the minute blogs
  • Inadequate resources – user generated knowledge bases through tagging and social bookmarking
  • Unclear performance measures – direct feedback from customers via blogs

The Web is also providing an open platform for people to connect and converse with others all over the world, expanding informal education opportunities for millions. Both training and education are being opened up and exposed as individuals create their own networks and converse with each in their personal searches for knowledge and community.

The Internet is forcing us out of our self-constructed disciplinary boxes. As work and learning become connected online, the barriers are blurring between organisational development, HR, training, education, HPT, etc. A new, amalgamated field of practice requires better tools and integrated theories from which to base our practice.

These models are relevant, but they’re not enough.

Networked Work Needs Networked Learning

by

In a recent discussion on informal learning I was asked how it could be integrated into formal work environments. What I have learned so far about informal learning is that it is more of a cultural issue than about process or technology improvements. The key factor is control. To foster informal learning, organisations have to give up control. We see this with social networking on the Internet and that organisations that let go of centralised control are able to adapt quicker. The Dean campaign was one example, as is viral marketing.

The fact that small, loose organisations can adapt quicker has been evident for a couple of centuries, when you examine guerrilla groups fighting against large hierarchical military organisations. Guerrillas proved their worth against Napoleon in Spain in the early 19th century as well as against the US in Vietnam in the latter part of the 20th century. Many military experts now talk about network warfare, or netwar.

If network warfare was possible years ago, as witnessed during the Peninsular War, why is netwar something new? I think that the original guerrillas showed what was possible, but it took the ubiquitous information and communication network, the Internet, to make it the default organisational model. As a retired soldier, I always considered the military to be a conservative-minded organisation. If the military is seriously considering network warfare, then it seems that the need to understand networked business & learning is pretty obvious.

One example of networked businesses is the animation field, where creatives live all over the world. With some companies, the creative team is physically separated from the production team by several time zones, so that work can go on 24 hours a day, as the day’s work moves back and forth between teams. Even when they’re spread out, excessive control is not necessary. Christopher Sessums reports on why Pixar is so successful as a creative force, citing the fact there are no studio execs to control the process. Control is the enemy of innovation and flexibility.

Effective work and learning networks are composed of unique individuals working on common challenges, together for a discrete period of time before the network begins to shift its focus again. This is like small groups of guerrillas joining for a raid, conducting it, and then going their separate ways to reform as a different set for a new mission. If armies and businesses organisations are changing to networked models, then the best learning support has to be informal, loose and networked as well. We are shifting from a “one size fits all” attitude on work and learning to an “everyone is unique” perspective. If everyone is unique then there are no generic work processes and no standard curricula.

If everyone is unique, we need to seriously reconsider our models for training and education. Brian Alger has shown the severe limitations of standard curricula and Bill and Julie at NineShift sum up the issue as:

The issue is also about the biggest educational struggle in this early century: the switch from making every student “normal” to understanding that every student is not normal, in other words, unique.

In warfare, work and learning we are witnessing a major change in command and control and we will have to shift with it or suffer the fate of several defeated armies.

Learning Quote of the Year

by

Kathy Sierra sums up the problems with mass schooling that I’ve discussed over the year, with Knocking the Exuberance Out of Employees:

“If you knock out exuberance, you knock out curiosity, and curiosity is the single most important attribute in a world that requires continuous learning and unlearning just to keep up.”
– Kathy Sierra

Our work systems reflect our education systems and vice versa. As with kids, so with adults. Too many public school and university graduates already have the exuberance knocked out of them; the managerial corporation just finishes them off.

Let’s celebrate exuberance & curiosity in learning and work.

“32 new companies within 36 months”

by

I just came across this project in Saint John, New Brunswick called PropelSJ, with a stated aim of creating 32 new information and communications technology (ICT) companies in the next 36 months. This is similar to what I recommended as a prescription for the NB learning industry in Rx for NB Learning, minus the aggressive timeline.
The PropelSJ strategy is to:

  1. formalize and operate a growth focused ecosystem for entrepreneurs
  2. invest in a targeted plan
  3. strengthen the knowledge environment by expanding the educational focus

This is all good stuff, but lacks details for me to get too excited yet.

Since PropelSJ is focused on ICT (a.k.a. IT), let’s compare it with the IT mecca of the world – Silicon Valley. Here’s some advice on what to do from Guy Kawasaki, in How to Kick Silicon Valley’s Butt:

  • Focus on educating engineers
  • Encourage immigration
  • Send the best and brightest to Silicon Valley
  • Celebrate your heroes
  • Forgive your failures
  • Be logical
  • Don’t pat yourself on the back too soon
  • Be patient

Guy also advises what you SHOULD NOT do:

  • Don’t focus on “creating jobs”
  • Don’t pass a special tax exemption
  • Don’t create a venture capital fund
  • Don’t provide cheap office space and infrastructure

There is much more to read in this article, as well as many comments for and against Guy’s advice.

I look forward to watching PropelSJ over the next 36 months. It’s a big challenge.

Stay focused on the small stuff

by

A couple of recent articles reminded me about the importance of doing the small things well and possibly reaping large rewards. We often look for magic bullets or big systems to address big problems but it’s usually the little stuff that makes a difference.

Christian Long tells a story about teachable moments and how this statement from a student, “I have to go to the bathroom bad“, can be used for all kinds of learning about grammar. As Christian says, this is a “real glimpses of innovation inside the ‘learning’ space.”

Another case in point is an article from Green Chameleon about knowledge management that does not include expensive IT systems. This is a story about housekeeping and concierge staff at a hotel:

Each day, one staff member got to share in about 5-10 minutes a topic of interest just before roll-call which happens at the start of a new shift. The staff get to pick the topic and the day they would like to do the sharing. The topic could be on anything of interest or an incident they considered useful for others to learn from such as how to check-in baggage, how to deal with “weird” guests, where to buy foreign magazines, what Deepavali which is a Hindu festival coming up in October is all about, and so on – in short, topics that would help them deal with their guests better.

In either case, taking advantage of a teachable moment or adding a 5 minute sharing session, the cost of implementation is negligible. The key is in understanding the business, the issues and the organisational culture so that these kinds of informal learning activities can take place. The only way that I can see this happening is when those in charge remain connected to the day-to-day operations and when there is a climate of trust to try out new ways of working.

New Social Media Company in New Brunswick

by

I just came across Radian6, a start-up in Fredericton that is focused on the analysis of online social media:

Radian6’s core technology, SentimentLive, is designed to identify, correlate and deliver the following elements from Social Media:

Topic
A topic represents the key concept being tracked such as a brand, product name, movie, sports team, politician, country, or celebrity. SentimentLive applies advanced proprietary analytical techniques that go beyond basic keyword searches to identify topics with minimal false positives or spam. Social media is gathered, indexed and presented to the user in summary form as it is posted to the Internet, in real-time.

Sentiment
As topics are identified, the system derives the sentiment around the instance of the topic. By applying advanced sentiment analysis, users are able to see trends in attitudes and opinions relating to their topics of interest, which in turn enables them to make more informed decisions.

Influence
As SentimentLive identifies topics, it also calculates the relative level of influence associated with each posting and with each consumer that posted about a specific topic. This enables organizations to apply resources to areas that will have the most influence on their business – either positively or negatively – and also provides a view into the top-most influential consumers who yield the strongest word-of-mouth (WOM) influence over specific topics.

In typical Dot Com fashion, there is not much more information on the website, and no evidence of any two-way web tools to allow the company to interact with its market. In reading what is posted on the website, I wonder how this offering differs from free tools such as Technorati, Alexa, TagCloud, BlogFlux or dozens of other web applications that anyone can use to monitor the Internet buzz.

There’s always room here to post a comment ;-)

Don’t feed the dinosaurs

by

This cartoon, from Hugh MacLeod, sums up much of my work over the past few years:

dinosaur001.jpg

My focus on open source software & business models as well as informal learning, puts me outside many established business and education hierarchies. That’s why I recently left our local learning industry association. I’ve made several recommendations on what I think our strategy should be, such as Rx for NB Learning and The relevance of the learning profession to little avail.

As a “meteor salesman”, it would be better to focus my attention on the gazelles instead of the dinosaurs. Supporting established industrial business models and trying to change hierarchies from within just doesn’t seem viable, especially in this Conceptual Age, as once again, Hugh shows with concise accuracy:

changethesystem117.jpg

Thanks to Hugh for these additional two thousand words.

Preparing for the Conceptual Age – what a concept

by

We’re in a provincial election right now and many of the candidates are talking about the need for job creation. I think that this is wrong.

Jobs are means but wealth generation is the real end. Jobs are a measurement of wealth generation used in an industrial society, one that produces goods in factories which employ people to do some kind of replicable work. Today, manufacturing and even white-collar information processing jobs are decreasing, while creative knowledge work is increasing. There are not more knowledge workers than industrial employees (yet), but we can look at history and see what happened to farm workers.

Go back 100 years and imagine what a politician would be saying on the issue of work. He might say, “We need to keep our people on the land because farmers are the fabric of our nation” – or words to that effect. This would be true, because, in 1900, “Most people – almost 63% – live on farms, not in cities.” However, in 2001, only 4.5% of Canadians lived on farms, but Canadians can still eat well today; perhaps too well. What happened to all of these farm workers? They took jobs in cities; many of which were higher paying factory jobs.

Today we are are seeing similar decreases in manufacturing and wealth generation moving to the knowledge sector. The term, knowledge worker, was coined by Peter Drucker, but I like David Gurteen’s definition of a knowledge worker best:

Knowledge workers are those people who have taken responsibility for their work lives. They continually strive to understand the world about them and modify their work practices and behaviours to better meet their personal and organisational objectives. No one tells them what to do. They do not take “no” for an answer. They are self motivated.

Knowledge workers don’t need jobs, they need opportunities. More and more knowledge workers can choose where they live, using the Internet to get their work done, so that local economic growth is becoming dependent on the ability to attract knowledge workers. Creating more industrial-style jobs is only a stop-gap measure.

We are changing from an industrial society to a networked knowledge society. Dan Pink, in “A whole new mind” described three forces (Abundance, Asia, Automation) that are pushing us into a society where creators and empathisers will be highly valued in what he calls the “Conceptual Age”.

Abundance has satisfied, and even oversatisfied, the material needs of millions – boosting the significance of beauty and emotion and accelerating individuals’ search for meaning. Asia is now performing large amounts of routine, white collar, L-Directed [left brain] work at significantly lower costs, thereby forcing knowledge workers in the advanced world to master abilities that can’t be shipped overseas. And automation has begun to affect this generation’s white-collar workers in much the same way it did last generation’s blue-collar workers, requiring L-Directed professionals to develop aptitudes that computers can’t do better, faster or cheaper.

So what are our politicians and voters talking about today? Many say that we need jobs and we need to put more money into our school system. Our schools, as they currently exist, are focused on the past. Our children need to be ready for the demands of the Conceptual Age and to take responsibility for themselves. Unfortunately, schools do little to prepare students to be empathetic or creative. They are focused on left brain attributes of logic and process.

This quote, via David Warlick, sums up the problems with our systems:

we have an 18th century form of government depending upon a 19th century industrial model school system to supply a 21st century electorate capable of making the monumental decisions we will face in the coming years.

Please let’s talk about the real issues facing our society and stop focusing on the next 24 hours. Our children deserve better.