Kineo Product Knowledge E-Learning Webinar

Kineo will be holding a free webinar on creating effective product knowledge e-learning on July 16th, 2009.

Product knowledge training creates major challenge for organizations, including:

• Keeping content up to date: products change rapidly. For example there have been over 60 new versions of the Blackberry since its launch in 2002, that’s one every 5 weeks.
  
• Keeping it short and focused: sales people who need product knowledge information work in challenging, fast paced and often noisy retail environments. The learning has got to get to the point, quickly.
  
• Making it engaging: Delivering ‘just the facts’ about the product isn’t enough to increase sales. Learners need to know the benefits, how to recognize customer needs for a product, and how to close the sale.
  
• Keeping costs down: Given the pace of change, product knowledge e-learning has got to be cost effective, otherwise the maintenance costs will be prohibitive.
  

The free Kineo webinar will use real case studies to demonstrate:

• Effective designs for product knowledge e-learning
• How to use sales scenarios as part of the learning
• Prototyping effectively
  
• How to use xml files to update product e-learning in a matter of minutes
• How to use games and challenges to motivate learners
• How to design and deliver a product portal
  

The one hour webinar will be held at 3pm UK time/10am Eastern on July 16th, 2009.

If you would like to reserve a place please contact Kineo at info@kineo.

[Seats are filling up fast so be sure to sign up!]

Designing for Articulate: A Newbie’s View

I’m new to Articulate. Although I’ve been reading Tom Kuhlman’s Rapid E-Learning Blog now for a couple of years, I’ve never actually designed (or for that matter, built) an Articulate course.

My canvas for the past four years has been custom Flash. I’d have an idea and then someone much smarter than me would go figure out how to make it work.

At Kineo, we often work with our clients’ tools of choice. That is, if a client uses Articulate in-house, they may ask us to build a few courses for them in Articulate. (We also do a lot of custom Flash, Mohive, etc.)

For the past few weeks I’ve been designing and scripting my first Articulate courses. I’m such a n00b.

I started off feeling a bit pegged in: “I have to design and write for a set of templates? How constricting!”

But now I’m starting to loosen up a bit, with help from my Kineo colleagues. (Thanks especially to Matt!). It’s a fun challenge.

Some beginning tips:

Keep variety. Don’t use an Engage Tab screen for every other page. Mix it up.

Intersperse questions throughout the content. Formative questions break the content up with momentary pauses for reflection and to reinforce the learning process.

Use Engage Labeled graphics as question pages. “Which of these widgets would you use to paint a monkey?” There’s no penalty for a wrong answer. Let the learner explore.

Spice it up with scenarios. This is true for any tool. Keep it interesting with a story. Compel the learner to want to find out what comes next.

Use interesting images. I’m lucky to have some graphic artists on my team who know how to turn a page into something quite lovely! That doesn’t hurt.

I uploaded a final script last night for the UK team (five hours ahead of me) to start working on. This morning, when I logged on to email, I saw a message that the course had been built! Holy cow. That’s rapid.

The Corporate Moodle: A Tipping Point?

Richard Nantel of Brandon Hall recently posted about average LMS prices. A ‘low-cost’ LMS starts at an average of $58K. That’s the low price. Which is still a whole LOT of money.

And “in times like these…”

Why pay for a pricey LMS when you can Moodle or Drupal or Sakai?

Why do companies continue to pay huge dollars for products that are now being offered for free? Web conferencing services like DimDim now offer the equivalent of WebEx. For free.

(I’m a recent convert, perhaps on the path to open source evangelism.)

So what are some of the hurdles to overcome in the corporate market? Here are just a few:

It’s free. Because it’s open source, there are no licensing costs. This, apparently, freaks people out. Free must mean sub par, right? Wrong. Moodle and other open source products have huge communities behind them. Talented individuals who can program like hell and believe in the open source philosophy.

Support. There’s no vendor who creates Moodle per say. That means there’s no 800 number or help desk you can call. That means your IT department has to know how to do all the code. Sure they can. Or you can contract with a company like Kineo that can host and support your Moodle for you (at the risk of sounding like a company shill!)

It’s not for corporate use. Well, it’s true that Moodle was originally created for academic use and it already has a great foothold in the academic world. But Moodle is increasingly being used in the corporate market. According to an eLearning Guild survey conducted in 2007, 18% of respondents in corporate settings reported using Moodle.

Out of the box, Moodle may not have all the features an enterprise needs, but simple add-ons can be created. Kineo has recently worked on creating a classroom management add-on for a corporate client and has a fabulous Moodle reporting tool.

It looks so very bland. Moodle out of the box is like vanilla pudding. Pretty plain. But the beauty of open source is you can customize it. Kineo has done some really fabulous interfaces that look slick, modern and way beyond what you might think possible. We’ve integrated Flash animations into Moodle home pages and replicated clients’ existing web sites. Take some vanilla pudding, add raisins or rainbow sprinkles or a caramel swirl.

I think the time for open source is now. What about you? Do you think we're at a tipping point?

The Scrambled Egg Mind of a Beginner

Apparently, when Tom Kuhlman links to your blog, crazy things happen. So hi to all of my new readers and thanks for joining.

Thought I'd check-in and give you all a quick status update on what I've been up to:

As you may know, I recently started with Kineo as the VP of Learning Design.

As with any new job, there are a lot of transitions to navigate. I'm in that beginner-mind zone. Although I've been doing this work for 15ish years, the ground beneath me is shaky and I feel like I'm in new waters, navigating new people, new processes, new tools.

Traveling. The past two weeks have been a whirlwind: ASTD, client visits, seminars on Moodle/Articulate in Boston and Chicago. I'm suddenly racking up lots of frequent flyer points. Next week I'll be heading to Kineo World Headquarters in the UK for 5 days. The kids may not take it so well...

Adjusting to life as a virtual office worker. When I'm actually in town, I work from the shed.

There are a lot of great things about this arrangement: lunch breaks with the kids, secret visitors who spy on me through the window, the occasional drum jam.

Has its downsides: the occasional drum jam while I'm trying to talk on the phone, my work is my home is my work is my home, and there's no one but me to bake cookies for the office.

My blogging and tweeting has been a bit sporadic with all of this mania. I'm in scrambled egg mind mode most of the time. Will hope for a few opportunities for reflection as things unfold.

Hope you're all doing well and please take the time to comment on the blog. I enjoy the conversations immensely. I do post a lot of learning tidbits to Twitter that never make it to the blog, so join me there if you're so inclined. I'm @cammybean.

Audio in eLearning: When Rough Around the Edges is Better

At our seminar today on using Articulate and Moodle and "Doing More for Less", the conversation turned (as it always does) to using audio in eLearning. One of the participants talked about a focus group/research project his organization did.

I don't have the specifics and I'll try to track him down to find out more because the results were fascinating. For now, this is all heresay.

Here's what I recall:

They created a set of powerpoint slides. (Perhaps the subject matter expert had created them?) Let's just say, a set of slide were created by someone.

They had the SME record the audio for the slides. I'm not sure if the SME was reading a script, reading the notes, or just speaking from the heart.

So that's one version.

Next, they had a 'professional' clean up the SME's transcript, cut out the ums and ahs and record it 'professionally'.

So that's the second version.

So you've got one version that's pretty rough around the edges and one version that's smooth and polished. They piloted these two versions and got feedback.

Something like 60-70% of the learners preferred the rough version, created by the expert. They said it "sounded more real" and they trusted it more because they knew this person was talking from experience.

So here's to more guerilla audio recording!

Go out and get your SME to say it like it is into a microphone and share their expertise. Eliminate the middle-(wo)man. Put the content where it can be accessed. And create content that learners will trust.

[We'll be hosting another seminar this week in Chicago on Thursday, June 11! More details on the Articulate/Moodle seminar.]

I Say Instructional Designer, You Say Tomah-toe

As you may know, I struggle with describing what I do. "Instructional Designer? What's that?"

I can't explain it easily to moms on the playground, nor can my mom explain it to her friends when she's bragging about me. (Which, apparently, she does. She's my mom and that's her job.)

"Instructional designer" is an umbrella term that covers about 1,217,042 different types of people and jobs. (That's not a real statistic, by the way, but my very unscientific guess at how many people actually call themselves instructional designers.)

I've said it before and I'll say it again: there are many shades of instructional design.

But I think Jonathan Atleson says it even better. He even breaks it down into the specific shades and gives them names:

• Instructional Designer
• Instructional Systems Designer
• Instructional (Multimedia) Developer
• Instructional Technologist
• Instructional Systems Developer
• Instructional Systems Analyst
• Trainer/Training Specialist

Read his full post here (The Various Roles of Instructional Designers) and be sure to catch the comments.

Photo credit: in rainbow(s) umbrella by atomicjeep

Reminder: Boston & Chicago Articulate/Moodle Seminars This Week

Just a reminder that our Boston and Chicago free seminars on Articulate and Moodle are this week. The response has been great. (So great, in fact, that we had to move the Boston session to another location to accommodate the crowd.)

Join the Kineo team in
Boston on June 9th
and Chicago on June 11th.

Delivering Quality at Speed - Articulate & Moodle

This seminar will focus on getting the best out of Articulate and Moodle with case studies from Motorola, BP, Apple and McDonald's.

The seminar will cover:

• Rapid e-learning design with Articulate
• Top tips for getting the best out of Articulate
• Rapid development processes
• Delivering engaging learning portals with Moodle
  

To learn more and sign up, visit the Kineo website. Hope to see you there!