If you try to create a large number of eLearning courses with tools designed for creating a small amount, you’re going to run into issues with time and expense.

Here’s an analogy to break it down. Let’s say that your current profession is breaking rocks into pebbles for a special type of gravel. Your tool of choice is a rock hammer, and since you only have a small amount of rocks to process, you can finish your work quickly and with minimal effort. You’ve gotten so good at your rock breaking profession that your business starts to grow, and before you know it, you land a huge account at a rock quarry, breaking boulders into gravel. So on first day you walk out into the quarry with your rock hammer ready to get to work, and you immediately realize your little rock hammer isn’t going to do you any good out. You’re going to need a machine, not a tool, for this job.

Unless you just really, really like breaking rocks.

Just as you cannot use a rock hammer for a quarry, it is difficult to use an authoring tool for mass course development. Instead, you need a rock-crushing machine, a larger solution for your problem. In eLearning, this is a platform.

A platform – a set of tools and processes for efficient eLearning creation and deployment – can support larger eLearning efforts without breaking bank.

Join us tomorrow as we continue to illustrate why a platform is an efficient and robust solution for eLearning.

 We have readers from a variety of different positions and experience levels involved with eLearning, but if you’re reading this blog post, it is because you’re interested in the topic in one way or another. This section is for those of you new to eLearning. You know you want to put your learning online, and you need to start figuring out ways to do that. However, you don’t quite have your bearings, and you don’t know where to begin. Often it can feel like you need to start from the very bottom and build up from ground zero. The good news, though, is that you don’t need to reinvent the wheel!

Or use any ancient tools for that matter! 

Others before you have already made significant progress down the road to great eLearning, and you can save yourself a lot of trouble and confusion by building off what has already been done. This gives you a starting point. We understand that the technical aspects of developing a course can be difficult. We have even dedicated a whole series to gaining a better understanding of them (which you can find here)! While the technicalities can be difficult and confusing, leveraging experts and people who have been through the process and done it before is important. Utilizing a platform for creating and delivering eLearning is a very helpful place to start as well. This brings us to the next problem in developing great eLearning…What is the difference between a platform and tools?

Stay tuned for the next post in the series tomorrow!

 “Lessons learned in 2012 #56: There is nothing more tragic than a meal undocumented”

For the first time possibly ever, we can get pretty much anything we need when we need it. Want to order dinner? “Google” local restaurants and order online! Can’t find someone to watch your kids this weekend? Find a babysitter online with reviews, references, and background checks.

With so much possibility at our fingertips, why should our education and training be any different? Enter Mobile Learning (or mLearning). MLearning marks the dawn of another first, the ability to learn on your own time and at your own leisure with a mobile device. Now we’re not going to pretend that mLearning is some newfangled concept just making its way around the block. It’s been here for a good long while now, and from the looks of things, mLearning is here to stay. So like anything that’s been around for a good chunk of time, mLearning has accumulated its fair share of lovers and haters who all have a lot to say.

So in this post, prepare yourself to be thrown into the conversational fray surrounding mLearning. Don’t say we didn’t warn you….

#4: “B.Y.O.D (Bring your own devices) is an absolutely fabulous idea”

For those unfamiliar with B.Y.O.D., it’s a relatively recent addition to the body of mLearning. Essentially it means students or employees are encouraged, and in some cases required, to bring their personal mobile devices to work or school.

To what end you ask? Well, for the sake of comfort and efficiency, as it allows for the access of personal data and projects while in a work setting, with work resources. In other words, it means having access to work and personal files on a single device, allowing someone to consolidate all of their data and projects.

So what makes it so awesome? Well, for one, it saves businesses and schools a lot of money that would otherwise be spent purchasing what are generally expensive devices, especially for groups as large as a company or student body. Also, as I’ve come to learn, people like using things that are familiar to them. Students and employees alike prefer, and feel more comfortable, using their own devices to do work as opposed to a 1995 Windows that’s still on dial-up.

                                    I feel your pain, angry employee, I feel your pain.

#3: “B.Y.O.D. is a downright awful idea.”

On the other hand, riddle me this, have you ever sat in the back of a classroom that has a B.Y.O.D. policy? I have, and I can tell you right now that, of the visible screens, about 25% have notes on them with the remaining 75% featuring Angry Birds, Words with Friends, or Facebook. The same can be said for using personal devices at work. In fact, a term was created so blogs could let people know whether or not the link they were about to look at was in fact safe for work. Browse any popular website and chances are, a couple of articles will have “NSFW” or “not safe for work” somewhere in the title.

“I wonder if she can tell I’m looking at pictures of kittens right now…”

It is important to note, however, that the distraction excuse doesn’t really hold up as evidence against the use of personal devices. Employees are just as easily distracted on work computers, and since the dawn of time, students have proven they can be distracted by just about anything.

Yet distraction isn’t the only issue many people have with B.Y.O.D. There is also the issue of what to do with those who do not have, or cannot afford, smart phones or tablets. This type of policy can exclude students and employees who cannot afford devices and set them apart from their colleagues in a negative way. This brings us to our next discussion point…

#2: “Won’t it be expensive? Tablets aren’t cheap.”

This is a big issue for a lot of people when it comes to mLearning. With the latest iPad running you between $500 (excuse me $499) and $700, they certainly do not come cheap. And as far as smart phones go, those are less expensive but still not always affordable and come with a smaller screen. Imagine buying one of those as a broke recent college graduate or as a parent for each of your kids! It’s not always feasible.

Thankfully, eLearning companies and consumers realized this was in issue early on when it came to mLearning. As a result, a demand has been created for more affordable tablets that can fit into just about any budget.

Apple’s newest introduction to the tablet world, the iPad mini (below left), is a still-pricy-yet-more-affordable $329. Furthermore, a Kindle Fire (below right) will run you $159! There’s even news from India of the world’s cheapest tablets being sold for $35 each (below middle).

But even after buying a tablet, what’s to say you’ll be able to access your course whenever you want? Which leads to the inevitable next turn in the mLearning conversation.

#1: “Anytime, Anywhere”

So you just spent $700 on a tablet, and you’re feeling invincible. Now you need to figure out how to access the course. Anytime, anywhere. All you need is the Internet.

This implies that you can access your training course or online class while you are out and away from your computer. So if you’re a mom waiting in the carpool line at your child’s school, you can look through a course using the school’s wifi. Or let’s say you’re waiting for your lunch date at starbucks, and they tell you they’re going to be half an hour late, you can pull out your tablet and get a little farther on your course.

What mLearning really should claim is that you can learn wherever and whenever it is possible for you, without having to lug around a laptop all day. And CourseAvenue can offer that for you.

CourseAvenue has a OneCourse solution for mobile learning, that allows courses to be taken on a cross-device platform, in which you can start a course on your desktop and continue it on you tablet on the way home. An industry-leading mobile solution, we recognize that this could sound like just another marketing pitch in all the hype. That is why CourseAvenue is offering a Mobile Learning Development Workshop, to offer participants a practical education on mobile tools as well as a hands-on experience with a mobile solution, helping the particpants create their very own course that can be launched on mobile and non-mobile devices! Learn more at www.CourseAvenue.com/Workshop.

What exactly is Tin Can API? Is it the new SCORM? How does it affect them?

As we have looked closer at Project Tin Can, we project that its implementation can fundamentally change the following areas in the learning industry:

• How content can be launched and tracked
• The role of the LMS in an organization
• What can be tracked and reported on
• The role of an instructional designer with respect to what, how, and where data is captured and reported

If Tin Can API truly changes how all these areas work, then it is a big issue that should not be ignored. To alleviate the fear that comes with the confusion and mystery of Tin Can API, we are hosting a free webinar on July 25^th at 11am CDT to give more information on Project Tin Can. Register at http://bit.ly/SFCWBY to join us!

Typical arguments in favor of chunking up the content say that learners using mobile devices are distracted so you need to keep the content short.  Or people want short bursts of learning to fill in time when they are standing in line or putting gas in the car.

CourseAvenue disagrees with this. We believe that chunking of content has more to do with technical limitations than anything else.  When mobile learning meant a web-enabled Nokia 3100, the need for smaller chunks of content to fit to the device made sense.  Does this still apply on something like a Retina display iPad? We don’t think so. We believe people want access to learning – complete learning – wherever they are, using whatever device they happen to have.  What this means is that one should design instructionally sound learning materials, then let today’s devices do their thing…which is quite a lot.

As to the distracted learner issue, the argument that “mobile devices make a person more distracted, therefore we need shorter content” simply does not make sense. This implies that when learning at a desk, there are suddenly no distractions.  No phones ringing, no emails not coming in, no fantasy football leagues being discussed. Let’s be honest, sitting on my couch reading Tom Clancy on my mobile device is probably the least distracted I am all day. Now if the argument shifts and says that “our culture has become so distracted that they can only pay attention to sound-bite lessons,” then we need to reconsider learning altogether. Learning on mobile devices should keep the full content that people need to be best equipped to do their job while making it as accessible as possible. Accessibility should not compromise the content.

As to sneaking in learning while standing in a line, filling up the car, etc…it is not as common as people think. In almost 2 years of research on mobile platforms, we have yet to find a single person brushing up on their education while running errands.  We do see are millions of devices being used for reading and generally as a replacement to the desktop.  So as opposed to firing up a notebook, it’s just easier to turn on my tablet and get going. Sitting at a Starbucks with headphones on, using their tablet…sure. Learn away. Whipping out their cell phone to brush up the latest compliance topics while in line at the grocery story…not so much.

All this talk is to make the point that learning is learning – whether on mobile devices, desktops, books, or face-to-face. The “mobile learning” catchphrase is not an excuse to simply chunk up learning content to make it mobile. That suddenly makes it a separate version from the rest of the learning world. Instead, we should keep learning in its best and most complete form to achieve the best results, regardless of the device being used. This means that we need to have the technology that allows the learning content to run on any device. CourseAvenue has this with OneCourse, a technology that takes device limitations out of the picture and leaves learning as learning and makes it accessible on any device.

The Vision

We have a vision of enabling seamless learning experience for learners – create the education, do the instructional design, build the content, and let the learners decide what device(s) they want to use.  Of course this vision requires one course that can be launched and tracked across devices.

Size and Shape

Creating material that looks the same on different devices gets tricky. It gets even more complicated when you change which device you are using mid-course. When you consider different versions of the iPad, a variety of Android devices, the Kindle Fire, and even the 40″ Google TV, there are a lot of different screen sizes and device specifications to accommodate!

From a purely technological perspective, creating mLearning that works uniformly on each device is difficult to do. Building a framework flexible enough to adapt to different devices is a huge coding task.  The response until now? People have turned to authoring tool solutions that rely on devices templates. The problem with this solution is the device templates. People have to create mLearning specific to each device they use, duplicating the content and wasting both time and money. Moreover, having the ability to change a device mid-course and pick up where you left off is out of the question.

Media support

Another factor that plays into this is the browser. The mobile market relies on it. In the past, once you had something working on a Flash device, you could support any Flash device.  This is no longer the case. Why? Because each browser can set the rules, so to speak, for how and on which media format it will render.

Here is a little experiment.  Open a Chrome or Safari browser.  Next, use your file manager tool (e.g. Finder or Explorer) select and drag an .mp3 file into the new browser window.  If you have done it correctly, it works fine. Your address bar would look something like this: file:///Users/JaneDoe/Music/Adele/Daydreamer.mp3

Now, open Firefox and do the same thing. It won’t work.  Why? Because Firefox does not natively support .mp3 audio. It must to be converted to an .ogg file. Moreover, it gets even worse for video!

Under the covers, it’s great that HTML5 has an audio and a video tag, but as developers are finding out, how these tags are implemented and what file formats they require are inconsistent, causing developers a lot of grief.

How do you overcome this?

The honest answer to overcoming this obstacle is this: You must build your own platform-independent foundation that gives you the ability to build content that works on both to Flash or HTML5. Then you need to build an HTML5-based framework that is device-independent and can handle orientation changes when it’s put up against different screen sizes and device specifications. Once that is done, build the intelligence so that it senses which media format should run on the device you are using and/or which browser to use on that device. Then build a means to render the content using either Flash or HTML5 based on the current device.

We know that sounds complicated. But we want to share with you that we’ve done it. You can license CourseAvenue Studio with our OneCourse solution for mobile learning because we have done what we’ve just described.

CourseAvenue’s OneCourse solution creates one course that works on multiple devices.

Flash won’t run on an iPhone or iPad, short of jail-breaking the device (note: this usually ends badly). The fact that Adobe has decided to abandon Mobile Flash altogether (Read more) calls into question Flash’s viability as a platform.

This has caused quite a headache for many eLearning professionals, and, while we can’t confirm it, rumor has it there’s been a spike in grief counseling.  The iPad and iPhone’s inability to run a Flash-based course represents a major limitation for eLearning content on mobile and iOS devices.

The sheer volume of Flash-based learning is a stumbling block for the development of mobile learning.  As we’ve talked with customers, this is clearly a dreaded topic of conversation.

Mobile Learning and Flash

The near silence concerning what to do with Flash content in mobile learning is certainly not helping the issue.  Google’s Swiffy  provides limited conversion of Flash-based content, the key word being “limited.”  Adobe’s Wallaby  provides a similiar service, but according to their website, this is still “experimental technology.” Doesn’t instill much confidence.

CourseAvenue’s approach helps customers design learning content that will work in both Flash and HTML5 environments…a focus on “platform independence.”  We’ve created the technology that allows clients to continue using their existing Flash programs for their desktops, while also giving them the freedom to use Flash-alternative media as necessary.  In other words, we let people design their education content, and then supply platform and device independence so they can use it whenever and wherever they like.

Some help

While platform independence is great, there are still a lot of questions swirling around the Flash world.  Here are some tips and guidelines we have gleaned from our experience when facing this dreaded topic of conversation:

1)    Try to avoid saying “the course is built in Flash.”
This says little to nothing about the technology used to create the content.  Believe it or not, there are hundreds, even thousands, of tools that can generate Flash. So, saying that you have a course built in Flash is kind of like trying to explain your car to a mechanic, without any information beyond its color, and fact that it runs on four wheels.

2)    Divide and conquer: Part I
Not all Flash is created equal.  Are you sure your text and graphics-based content is actually Flash-based? If you used any PowerPoint-to-Flash tools to create a course, you many not have much Flash.
It’s important to distinguish between your content and how your content is presented.  It may be that the tool you use to present your content is Flash-based, while the actual content isn’t Flash at all!

3)    Divide and conquer: Part II
It’s also important to distinguish between Flash animations and interactions.  We’ve seen a lot of Flash that looks great, visually explaining a concept, but it doesn’t let the learner to interact with it.  And “Play, pause, rewind” doesn’t count! It’s not true “animation” if the learner can’t influence how or what gets animated.  Take a look at this example.  The optics slide back and forth, and the learner can pause, rewind, and fast-forward the animation, but that’s all.  The learner cannot, for example, change the angle of the optics or adjust the height of the lens.
Why distinguish between animation and interaction? In general, animations are much simpler to convert to mobile devices, so know what you’re getting! The animation above was converted using Swiffy, resulting in a perfect HTML5 version.  Using CourseAvenue’s OneCourse^© Technology, we then used the Swiffy-generated HTML5 version as “alternative media,” to the Flash version.  This way, we enable our our users to support both desktop delivery and mobile delivery with the same course.

As for truly interactive pieces, these are generally much more difficult to convert and, depending on the complexity and tools used, may or may not require a “re-do” (e.g. no automated way to convert).

In any case, with animation or interaction, having the ability to support both Flash and HTML5 technologies in one course can be a huge advantage.

4)    Understand the skill sets out there
There’s a wide range of skill sets in the Flash world. On one hand, you have “Flash animators”, on the other “Flash developers.” Animators can use any number of tools to generate Flash-based media.  Flash-developers generally do not use automated tools, but use code with “Action Script” (Action Script is the geeky language coders use to create custom Flash interactions.) Point: Know what you are working with.

5)    Recognize when you need outside help
As you look to integrate mobile and address the Flash issue, you may not want to pay people to learn on your dime. CourseAvenue provides customized professional services along with its OneCourse Technology that can create course content that works on any device, despite its Flash or HTML5 platforms.  Let us know if you need any help adopting mobile while still supporting your desktops. We would love to have the chance to get to know you, provide you with an efficient upgrade path, and troubleshoot any issues you might run into.  Contact us at http://www.courseavenue.com/help/contact-us.

We’ve dove into our thoughts on what’s holding mLearning back, examined the “people don’t want to take a two hour course on their phone” half-truth, uncovered the LMS and desktop infrastructure challenges, and discussed the reliance of SCORM dependence of JAVA.

In light of these previous posts, we have been watching the ways many are responding to the obstacles mLearning presents. Many are either creating device-specific mobile solutions or dividing their existing content into large chunks. These two supposed “solutions” prove to be a greater problem than answer to mLearning.

We see a number of tools out there whose mLearning solution boils down to using a device-specific page template.  While this is one approach to doing mobile learning, it falls short in a number of areas.

For example, using this approach to build a course with the “phone-template,” the entire course is now targeted and sized solely for a phone.  This begs the question…what if someone does not have a smart phone or does not want to take the course on his phone? Do you then have to create and maintain a desktop version of the course too?

Let’s take this a step further. The reality is, mobile encompasses MUCH more than the smart phone alone. What happens when a course is custom-made for the tablet, yet not all your learners own one?  Do they just not have access to the content?  Do they have to take the desktop version?  What if someone has a Kindle Fire, a Samsung Galaxy Tablet, or a Google TV?  Do we need device templates for all of these as well?

You get the point.

Device-specific templates may work well when done a) on a small scale, b) with a very homogeneous mobile environment (e.g. supporting one mobile device for all learners) and c) so that content can be well segregated into its mobile and non-mobile elements.  However, this is clearly not a saleable, enterprise-wide approach.

We believe the concept of “chucking up” content for mobile delivery hinders mLearning as well.  The thinking seems to be that content created for mobile devices needs to be “small” and that “people don’t want to take a 2 hour course on their phone.”  As noted above, we covered this idea is an earlier post.

As far as chunking up content, let’s play out the logic: What happens to, say, 50 minutes of instructional content when it is “chunked” into any number of pieces?  Fundamentally, what does this do to the instructional design?  Does this concept imply that the only content worthy of an iPad or iPhone is an eight-minute chunk?  That does not make sense. If that were true, I can ironically read War & Peace on my iPad but not take a 45-minute course.  Moreover, how are these pieces supposed to be represented in the LMS?  What happens to the one legacy desktop course?  Do we keep it and maintain the content in multiple places?

What is so sad about all this is that these questions don’t have to be problems. There are companies with the technology to seamlessly transition learning content across any device. CourseAvenue is one of them.

At CourseAvenue, we promote the concept of eLearning and mLearning converging to the collective concept of “learning.” We feel the focus needs to be on a universal experience instead of just turning instructional design on its head trying to fit it into a mobile box.

Combining device-specific solutions and content chunking, the number of course versions necessary to satisfy all the different devices becomes intolerable. For example, say you have eight hours of content and end-up pulling five items per hour of content out and making it mobile ready.  You now have 40 more objects to manage on top of the original desktop course.  Then consider needing these 40 mobile items available on the iPad, the Android Phone, and the Kindle Fire.  These 40 objects turn into 120 device-specific media items to keep updated, in sync, etc.

What’s the solution to this?  Design instructionally sound content using long-accepted ISD principles, freeing the learners to decide what device they want to use.  Does it sound impossible to have device and platform independence? Not with CourseAvenue’s enterprise mobile solution.

Tin Can represents a way to track mobile learning, but it takes a long time to go from a specification to large-scale adoption, which isn’t ideal since our customers are searching for something they can do today.  Swept up by the rise of iPads and smart devices, the pressure is on providing a migration path, enabling immediate online access to the content.

While there is a lot of discussion about “real” mobile learning, our customers are frantically searching for ways to provide mobile access to content stored in their LMS’s. As LMS’s enable mobile login capabilities, the question quickly turns to “Why can’t I launch the course from my iPad?”

Great question. Why can’t they launch the course, and why does the current SCORM model prevent mobile access? Let’s take a look.

The main reason the course can’t be successfully launched via a mobile device is because every LMS we have ever worked with (e.g. Plateau, Saba, SumTotal, etc.) launches a SCORM course using a Java Applet, requiring the client to install Java. Unfortunately, most mobile devices (especially iPads and iPhones) don’t support Java. Game over.

Why is this holding back mobile learning overall?

First, many eLearning developers and customers rely on content being delivered as a SCORM package; so naturally, many authoring tools publish SCORM packages to load their content into the LMS. As a result, providing mobile access can be a difficult task for both tool vendors and custom eLearning developers.

Somewhat ironically, because of this industry-wide standard, mLearning’s growth has been severely hindered, as organizations can’t simply flip a switch to enable mobile access to the content.

The second major issue is lack of education. This shows up in numerous conversations where a customer requests that a) all their content be published as a SCORM package, and b) that it is accessible using mobile devices. The conversation about Java supportability quickly follows!

What’s the solution?  The most effective way to address this issue is to bundle SCORM, AICC, Flash, and HTML5 into a cohesive package.  Publishing “for mobile” or “for desktop” is fine, but most customers we deal with need both and having to manage two courses in the LMS opens a new can of worms.  As implied, we must figure out how to best render the course (e.g. Flash for some users, HTML5 for others) for a given user on their device.  By bridging both worlds (desktop/SCORM with mobile) organizations can move ahead and fully embrace mobile…today.

In Chicago there is a 5:04pm express train that goes directly from the train station at Canal & Madison to the western suburbs about 30 miles away. It arrives at 5:38, which given the traffic in the Chicago-land area, seems like something out of the Jetsons.   This train is highly coveted and at 5:01pm, the intersection of Canal & Madison is a dangerous place as hordes of briefcase toting commuters vie for a spot on that train.

Miss the 5:04 and you will be a) stuck on an hour long ride that seems to stop every 4 minutes, b) probably be late for dinner, c) likely to miss your child’s practice or game, and d) almost assuredly have to answer your “significant other.”

This post is dedicated to those “5:04 Warriors” who, while not wanting to finish a continuing education course on their phone, will do so in a heartbeat to make that train.

There is a difference between wanting to take a course and needing to take a course. The mobile device makes the need more accessible and convenient.

The end justifies the means

The “people don’t want to take a 2-hour course on their phone” statement, or something like this, circulates in many discussions around mLearning. When reading or discussing it, there is usually a nodding of heads and a “…yeah, who would want to be forced to do that!”

This truism is then followed by a list of alternative solutions, such as “chunk your content into mobile-sized pieces” and “have an instructional design that fits this new mobile reality.”

This statement is formed as a negative.  It says what people don’t is the dictating concern. It leads down a number of dark alleys of how to avoid giving people what they don’t want instead of focusing on what they do desire.

As an analogy, it is like saying “…people don’t want to spend 11 hours on an airplane.”  You say that and there will generally be nodding of heads while people conjure up an image of sitting on a runway, for hours, getting de-iced…again.

What’s obviously missing is stating what people DO want.  Following the airplane analogy, what people DO want is to leave frigid cold, noise, and congestion for a beach on a lush tropical island.  Oh, by the way, the flight time from New York to Maui is 11 hours.

Applying this to mLearning, people DO want access to the 2-hour course from wherever they want to be, from whatever device they have handy.  In other words, don’t force me to take the 2-hour course on my phone. Instead, let me decide what parts I can/want to take on my desktop, on my tablet, or on my phone.

What we DO want: a choice

An observation: My 20-year-old son just read the entire Hunger Games trilogy – on his iPhone.  I watched the 2-minute movie trailer on my phone – that was enough for me.  When I asked him why he was reading it on his phone, he said, “It’s handy.”

The point is this…trying to determine what pieces of a course should be accessible and where they should be accessed is a losing proposition.  What a 20-something may deem appropriate content for his phone is vastly different than what a 40-something does.

So how is following this “what people don’t want” philosophy holding back mLearning?  For one, it introduces an entire level of complexity to instructional design.  The reality is that many topics take more than 8 minutes to explain (the estimated size of a “chunk” of a course). How then does one divide up the learning into bite-sized pieces that might be accessed at completely different times?  What about addressing learners that don’t have a mobile device?  Do you build 1-hour course for everyone, then a chunked-up version for those with mobile devices?  How does this get represented in a transcript or in the LMS?

Another lingering question still stands: What is the learning impact of taking an hour of content and dividing it into different pieces running in different platforms?  Put another way, how will the learner receive/remember the context of the 8-minute mobile piece of an hour-long piece of content?

Answers

The answer, of course, is to focus on providing all of the content on every device, letting instructional designers to focus on a cohesive, sound design, be it a 15-minute refresher or a 2-hour module.  This allows the learner to decide what content and how much content is right for them.

The answer to giving people what they want is found in the technology that enables cross-device access. This is where CourseAvenue comes in.

Update

Since the initial 60-day snapshot, the USDA’s use of CourseAvenue Studio has exploded. Now, eight months later, the USDA has built more than 125 e-Learning courses with more than 12,000 pages of custom content and over 4,700 unique graphics and media items. Team AgLearn’s ROI is now more than 533%.

Team AgLearn plans to move beyond this Pilot Project to a full enterprise rollout. This will allow each USDA business unit to create its own virtual team of e-Learning developers and move the content development even closer to those who are best at it: the subject- matter experts. This should increase the USDA’s ROI even further.

By first reviewing its entire e-Learning development process, and then leveraging CourseAvenue’s Cloud- based technology and Player Skin to improve its development process, Team AgLearn has found a way to produce more e-Learning courses in less time with fewer people and less money. They have clearly become a model of true enterprise e-Learning development.

The Results

In January and February of 2011, approximately 50 USDA professionals with various skill levels from several different business units completed either a one-day “Beginner” or a two-day “Beginner and Advanced” CourseAvenue training. With just this small amount of training – and by using the USDA Player Skin – this team was able to start building e-Learning that met all of USDA’s standards. Because CourseAvenue is Cloud-based, everyone could use it without installing any other software. Because of CourseAvenue’s built-in collaboration features, everyone was able to work in virtual teams to build and review their courses. And only 60 days later, here’s what they had accomplished: 14 complete e-Learning courses were built, tested, approved and loaded on the LMS. Those 14 courses included: 5,127 pages of completely custom content, including: 3,454 content pages; 1,581 assessment questions; and over 2,700 unique graphics and media items.

Almost as impressive is that Team AgLearn significantly cut its costly “test-fix-retest” process. Because of the CourseAvenue Player Skin, Team AgLearn reduced this process for each of these 14 courses from 35 days to an average of only 3. This 32-day savings, by itself and without including any other benefits, earned Team AgLearn an initial ROI (in just the first 60 days) of more than 150%.

Part of how Team AgLearn is able to do more with less is by enabling everyone to focus on what they do best. By using CourseAvenue’s Player Skin, content developers can focus on what they do best (developing great content), while Team AgLearn can focus on what it does best (answering technical questions). This change has allowed Team AgLearn to move from the 1:1 model it had before where each professional was focused on only one e-Learning course at a time, to a 10:1 model where each person helps develop ten times as many courses. The following is just one example of this:

 Spotlight on Success: A Real-Life Example of the 10:1 Model

Dr. Zina Sutch is the USDA’s Chief Training Officer. To deploy a new On-Boarding program, she wanted to do much more than just send out an e-mail. She wanted to educate people about the new program and leverage the reach and sophistication of the USDA’s LMS.

Dr. Sutch faced a severe time crunch and didn’t have the time to hire a contractor to build the e-Learning she needed. Instead, her team took part in Team AgLearn’s Pilot Project.

After taking a four-hour, Web-based training session in CourseAvenue Studio, Dr. Sutch’s team started building their course. They used CourseAvenue’s PowerPoint import tool to quickly and easily import content into CourseAvenue Studio and then edited it into the finished course. By using the USDA’s Player Skin, their course automatically met all of the USDA’s standards, was fully SCORM conformant, and fully 508 compliant. This produced huge productivity gains for Dr. Sutch’s team, and allowed them to focus their time on what they were best at: building great content.

Before publishing the course, a consultant from Team AgLearn helped Dr. Sutch’s team with a few media and page layout details. Once done, Team AgLearn published the course, did a quick test to confirm compliance, and loaded it on the LMS. In the end, Dr. Sutch built and launched her course in a fraction of the time, helping her deploy the USDA’s new On-Boarding program that much faster.

Tomorrow will wrap up this Case Study with an update on how the USDA is doing with this eLearning technology…

The Solution

Team AgLearn needed a solution. They realized that the best solution would allow more people to work together to build courses, while also allowing them to meet the USDA’s standards faster and easier. Developing a course “template” or “style guide” was one option, but Team AgLearn quickly saw that tools like that still depend on each developer applying the “style guide” correctly and don’t help the developers build more courses in less time with less money. Those tools might help the courses meet the USDA’s standards, but they wouldn’t solve the other problems. Team AgLearn also wanted to identify a solution that would work across the entire USDA. As Davin put it, “We were looking to alleviate a bottleneck across the Agency. Therefore, we needed the pilot project to truly test enterprise- wide scalability and applicability.”

After a formal solicitation process, Team AgLearn chose CourseAvenue Studio©. Team AgLearn chose CourseAvenue for several reasons. One is CourseAvenue’s unique “player skin” technology.

More than a simple “template,” CourseAvenue’s Player Skin builds in all of the USDA’s use and graphics standards. This includes everything from the use and location of media controls to when and where an audio script is displayed to the overall screen size and navigation elements (the “help,” “glossary,” “back” and “next” buttons). Team AgLearn and CourseAvenue also designed the USDA’s Player Skin to have the same color scheme and branding for every course.

Another benefit to CourseAvenue is its built-in LMS communication – both SCORM 1.2 and 2004 – and its built-in Section 508 standards. “CourseAvenue’s handling of 508 compliance was an important factor in our decision to use their product,” says Davin. As opposed to relying on each developer to make each course 508-compliant, CourseAvenue builds 508 compliance into the Player Skin and the course itself. This allows people to focus on building content – not trying to learn and meet the USDA’s standards – which allows them to build more courses in less time.

Read more tomorrow to see the results to this case study!

How is eLearning really affecting people’s everyday lives? Often we trumpet the theories, controversies, or pros and cons in the eLearning world, but stepping back into reality, it is important to keep perspective of how eLearning is truly affects the daily life of the people and companies who use it. The following blog posts are a case study of eLearning’s influence with the US Department of Agriculture.

Case Study #17: e-Learning Development at the USDA 

What Would You Do?

What would you do if you had to build 125 new e-Learning courses with more than 12,000 pages of completely custom content and more than 4,700 unique graphics and media items?

And what if every course – on top of being completely custom – still had to have exactly the same look and feel? And be SCORM conformant? And Section 508 compliant?

And what would you do if it took 35 days after you built just one course for your testing group to review, fix and approve it and, while you were building all these new courses, you also had to redesign that 35-day process to reduce it to only 3 days? And what if you had only 180 days to get all 45 of these courses built, tested, approved and loaded on your learning management system?

How would you do it? Is it even possible?

It is possible and the US Department of Agriculture’s “ Team AgLearn” did it. Read on to find out how they did it, how they earned a 533% ROI while doing it, and some of the other amazing benefits they achieved.

The Problem

Team AgLearn serves more than 130,000 USDA professionals in more than 20 business units spread all over the US. Like every organization in an era of shrinking budgets, Team AgLearn must find ways to do more with less. What makes this even harder when it comes to e-Learning is that the demand for e-Learning is going up. To meet these challenges, Team AgLearn’s director, Jerome Davin, and his leadership team knew they had to make fundamental changes to save time, save money, and still build and deliver more content.

The need for more e-Learning and the need to cut costs weren’t the only hurdles Team AgLearn faced. According to Davin, “Like all federal agencies, the USDA has strict standards for everything from bandwidth usage to LMS integration to Section 508 compliance.”

Although these standards create quality e-Learning, meeting them requires dozens of people to be part of both the development process and the review and approval process.

One way to build more courses would be to add more developers. Having more people might make it easier to build more courses, but it makes it much harder to meet the USDA’s strict standards. As Davin explained, “In many cases, Team AgLearn gets courses to put on the LMS that fall short of one or more of these standards – Section 508 being a leading failure.” If a course failed, Team AgLearn was forced to put it through a long and costly “test-fix- retest” process. That process ate up key resources – people, time and money – the USDA needed elsewhere. In most cases, the development process meant that a Team AgLearn professional spent almost all of their time dealing with only one course – from explaining the requirements of Section 508 to fixing SCORM issues to dealing with look-and-feel problems – all of which created a 1:1 model in which one Team AgLearn professional could focus on only one e-Learning course at a time. This process also meant the courses weren’t ready when the students needed them, which wasted even more time and money.

Follow up in the next couple days to read about the solution in this case study!

Meeting the challenge head on

Using our understanding of the marketplace, CourseAvenue launched an initiative to create accessible eLearning content on a large-scale. Our approach was to make our learning technology universally accessible.

Instead of relying on a single developer to understand and correctly apply accessibility design, we assembled a team of people dedicated to building this kind of accessible technology.

As we learned more about the challenges of building accessible eLearning, we realized we could capitalize on a technology we called the player skin. Originally developed to enable organizations to have one course for multiple brands, we embarked on using this technology to build an accessible version. We named this the “Accessibility Player.”

We wanted to create a product that, with 508 compliance, functioned in the same as our normal, core product. Therefore, audio, video, text, graphics, true-false assessments, multiple choice, matching, fill-in-the-blank, and ordered list question types all had to work in the 508 compliant version the same as they did in any other form. You see, we were not just skirting the issue of accessibility (as we mentioned is a common problem in our previous blog post). Instead, we want to enable as much functionality as possible.

To do this, we did not want to rely on any given content developer to know about accessibility. Other tools that are developer-dependent are too prone to error and time consuming. Instead, we created a player that handled the content development. Things like tab order and learner feedback are all handled bu the Accessibility Player. Instead of relying on the eLearning developer to set a tab order on a given page, our technology now does this, ensuring consistent navigation through the entire course, no matter how many elements are on a given page.

We also saw the need to create and manage a single course for all learners — independent of their need for adaptive technology. Aside from just matching what we believe to be the spirit of ADA/Section 508 compliance law, it enables organizations to maintain a single source of content, dramatically reducing the cost of development and content maintenance.

Just as today you probably don’t realize just how accessible public buildings are compared to those built years ago, our Accessibility Player is designed to be visually pleasing and highly functional. While not everyone may use features such as keyboard shortcuts, audio transcripts, or closed captioning, their presence really blends in with the overall course design and are available for those who can truly benefit from them.

508 compliance should not sacrifice the quality of a product, and our Accessibility player testifies to that. Moreover, at the end of the day, it helps people who may need accessible eLearning content the most.

My eLearning Course Won’t Run

The CourseAvenue Player does not use Java and is therefore unaffected by the Java patch. However, many an LMS  do use Java-based SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model) as a way to connect to the eLearning course player. As a result, trying to launch the player will result in an error that basically tells the user the SCORM (Java) connection can’t be found. The security patch effectively disabled the SCORM interface. Of course, CourseAvenue’s player does not need an LMS to function as it can work independently. However, any bookmarks, etc. that would normally be saved to SCORM would be inoperative.

AICC To The Rescue

If your LMS is set to use SCORM and has been disabled by the Java patch, try setting the LMS to use AICC instead. AICC does not rely on Java and should allow your LMS/eLearning player to function as usual. One of our customers found discovered the issue when a majority of the learners appeared not to have completed their course. Upon closer inspection it was discovered that all had installed the Java security patch and where being informed by the CourseAvenue player that the connection to SCORM could not be established – a smoking gun that a Java issue in the LMS was involved. After a quick call to CourseAvenue, they reset the LMS to use AICC and the issue was resolved.

SCORM vs. AICC in eLearning

Which to use seems to be one of those arguments that hinge on personal preference. But as the Java security patch issue illustrates, AICC clearly has at least one advantage in that it does not rely on Java.