Take part in the public’s first glimpse of Bravais [brav-ey]; Xyleme’s new cloud learning solution that allows you to quickly deliver personalized learning applications.

This is a rare opportunity to attend a live webinar with Xyleme’s President & CEO, Mark Hellinger. He will be your guide as you explore everything Bravais.

Along your journey you will find out how Bravais can revolutionize the way your learners access and interact with your learning content by:

• Delivering learning anywhere, anytime, on any device
• Allowing content to be accessed within your learners favorite media channels like, Linkedin, Facebook, and Google+
• Liberating content from your learning management systems to create personalized learning experiences
• Tracking how users consume and interact with your learning content
• And more!

Reserve your spot now – before it’s too late!
 Tuesday February 7, 2012 @ 11:30 MST

What is Bravais?
Bravais is your cloud of learning content upon which you can quickly build personalized learning applications, connecting your students, employees and customers to the content they need, using the apps they prefer, on the devices they choose. Read more…

And that is exactly what Jeff Katzman, CLO at Xyleme, is proposing; replacing textbooks and gradebooks with tablets for both students and teachers. The idea is called People’s Publishing and it was presented at the Ignite Keynote at DevLearn 2011 in November.

First things first; getting in Jeff’s head.

Background

“I have a daughter in 7th grade and a son in 4th grade. My kids amaze and inspire me. They are so bright and hip, and using technology is a given in their lives.

Mobile devices, and social media are second nature to my kids, but when I send them off to school, I collect their gadgets because they are prohibited, then I hunt around for their photocopied home work assignments, load them down with textbooks, and walk them to the bus stop.

I am struck by how deeply technology is integrated into our lives, but yet my kids’ classroom isn’t all that different from my own when I was a kid. Yes, there are computers in the classroom, but the technology hasn’t really been integrated into the culture of learning. Our kids are there, but the schools aren’t….And in dealing with my kids’ homework, I see how slow the assessment cycle is. By the time the teachers hands out the assignment, the kids do it, turn it in and it’s graded, a week can go by.” – Jeff Katzman at DevLearn 2011

Where we are now

Jeff isn’t the only one talking about this revelation.  On the Move Systems Corp., an emerging mobile applications developer, announced in November of 2011 that they are planning new educational apps designed for children as schools begin trading textbooks in for iPads.

“For the next generation of students, the backpack could be obsolete,” said OMVS CEO Patrick Brown. “Tablet computers like the iPad are replacing textbooks and changing the way children learn inside the classroom and out.”

Adopting technology into the current culture of learning has many benefits. Some of the most notable include going paperless, a quicker assignment cycle and long-term financial savings. Think about doing 5 assessments in the time it takes to do one, as well as the ability to instantaneously adapt depending on each students specific needs.

There are many arguments to getting rid of textbooks, the biggest one being cost. However, while state budgets are becoming tighter, the price of textbooks increases annually. According to the Digital Textbook Run Down put out by the Association of American Publishers, the K-12 textbook market reached $6.4 billion in 2007 and the average lifespan of a K-12 textbook is 2-3 years. And, if as much as one paragraph in the text is wrong, a new edition could be required, according to the AAP. (Note, there is no cost to update incorrect text in digital books.) Now let’s examine this statistic. One student can use one tablet device to read books for all 4 years of high school – costs anywhere from $100 to $600. Furthermore, the content downloaded to these devices is free or cost a small expense. Compare that to digital books, where there’s no cost to update incorrect text.

College students are the most effected by cost of any student group, averaging around $900 a year on textbooks, according to a 2010 study by Nicole Allen. Furthermore, new editions of most books are produced about every three years and as any college student knows, each student is required to purchase the updated version. Compare that to the idea that if books were digitally published, production expenses could be reduced by approximately 55.6 percent (National Association of College Stores).

Not all students learn at the same capability, yet textbooks are produced for mass consumption. There needs to be more choices in the material teachers present.  They are grading mostly by hand, taking up a lot of time. There needs to be a more efficient way. Lastly, as we all know, each student is far from the same. We need to better support those that do not fit the mold.

The solution

Learning on tablets and teaching material based and housed in the cloud.

First, an example of cloud learning and teaching in action.

“Suppose I’m a teacher and I assign a math drill. As soon as the assignment is done, I know where my kids stand. Jenny aced it, so I go to the cloud and find a more challenging assignment. Jimmy didn’t do as well, so I find an easier drill. What took several days now can happen in moments” explains Jeff.

The key to People’s Publishing is the teachers, and that any teacher with great content can be a publisher. You no longer have to be a publishing powerhouse to share your innovations. The reality behind this is that the content will be monetized so that each time a piece of content is used, the teacher who created it receives a royalty. For example, if Mr. Jones makes a great physics lab, he publishes it to the cloud, another teacher downloads it, and Mr. Jones receives a royalty.

Maybe the best aspect of the whole plan is that because of the social society we live in, the content will constantly be rated and peer reviewed, forcing the content to continuously improve. The better the content, the more peers will choose to use it, the more royalties the publisher will make. Of course, this begs the question of who is paying for the use of content. Students are the ones using content and therefore, the ones that have to pay for it, but they don’t necessarily have income. By proxy, the responsibility falls to the parent for homeschooled or private school students. In some charter schools, teachers may have a student budget for materials, and in Public schools, the district will be the buyer.

Tablets are more accessible now than ever, and can integrate technology into the culture of learning. We can empower teachers with a cloud of content from which they can create individualized learning. And we can create a self-sustaining cloud using economic incentives.

You can watch Jeff’s full presentation of People’s Publishing from DevLearn 2011 below.

In a recent blog post by Bersin & Associates, Josh Bersin provides a great description of how Agile applies to training:

“Agile is also built on the understanding that people learn in small chunks – so while it may in fact take a year or two to build a highly complex website, no person needs to try to understand the entire engineering program in advance. […] Daily work becomes a part of a bigger project in a continuous, dynamic process.”

What does this mean for us?

So how do Training Vendors help training organizations go agile: they adopt Agile Development. Agile Development is an approach where vendors deliver very fast, iterative product development through close collaboration with its user base (i.e. training organizations). According to McKinsey & Company:

“This agility can deliver new systems and capabilities in a matter of weeks or months instead of years. A frequent iteration cycle also keeps IT developers and business users in sync on requirements and priorities. […] Since this approach is most effective when business needs are shifting, it is gaining favor among many IT departments.”

Indeed, according to a survey of global executives by McKinsey, over 70% of respondents have deployed or piloted Agile Development within their organizations in order to be more responsive to changing business conditions.

In 2011, recognizing the rapid change in the training industry and our clients’ need to quickly adapt to the needs of their learners, Xyleme fully embraced and adopted enterprise-wide, the Agile Development Model. This post is the first in a series, written by Greg Schottland, Vice President of Operations for Xyleme, that presents the business value of using Agile, why it has proven a key competitive advantage to companies like Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and many others. Part one of this series provides a simple overview of what Agile is. You’ll begin to see the value just discussing the basics in this post.

Agile is simple:
• Build in small increments.
• Focus your team on one well defined goal.
• Keep the team small.
• Coordinate daily
• Get everything (and everyone) else out of the way.

And the result:
• A working product in weeks, not months.
• Customers that get what they are waiting for quickly.
• Developers that build what the customer wanted and nothing else.

Sounds simple, and it is. While there are volumes written about the details of effectively practicing Agile, this post will focuses on what Agile looks like “on the ground” in daily practice.

Taken from Josh Bersin’s blog

It all starts with an idea.

Somebody wants software to do something. Say we get this great idea to be able to create and store documents on the web (a la GoogleDocs). Rather than designing an entire web based document application, we start small. What is the most important problem to solve? This is simple to define. What do users have to be able to easily do at the most basic level? For our application, this would be the ability to create a simple document using a plain web browser over an average internet connection. You may be thinking, that is pretty basic, shouldn’t we at least include other basics like spell checking, text styles, maybe import/export? I mean who wants a document processor that doesn’t support bolding and italics…I mean really!

This little example is chock full of important lessons that Agile helps address. We might be inclined to design a more complete first version. The logic being it is easier to design everything in from the start. And, in some cases it is. But, more often than not, without getting key usability, architecture or market acceptance issues implemented and down cold, much of our “complete design” ends up being wasted, as key assumptions run into challenges. Years of effort and millions of dollars down the drain.

Let’s look at our example in this respect. We have put a stake in the sand and said that the one thing that has to work is the ability to create basic text document on any browser over an average internet connection. If this doesn’t work, no one will care how slick our spell checker is, nor how easy it is to bold some text. If response is slow, same problem. But, if we have version 1 prove that we can connect 1,000 users to our system, and things are snappy responsive and basic documents can be created, isn’t that a relief? Now we can build on top of this base.

So, turns out our too small initial release may be just about right. What we do at this stage is write up our requirements for this initial release in a set of short, concise documents called User Stories. They include two major pieces of information: 1) a clear statement of some small functionality and 2) detailed description of how to test this functionality. That’s it. No massive requirements document. One of our User Stories might be that users can connect to create and save a blank document. The test would detail step by step instructions of the URL, the buttons pressed, dialogs that appear, etc.

Ease of Development.

As you can see, with well written User Stories, development is a whole lot easier. We code to the test; back our design into the tests. As a development manager, or customer, I can sleep at night. Developers aren’t done until our tests work. I don’t have to watch over it.

So, our initial planning will consist of creating a small set of User Stories which define our first release. We’ll call each such small release a “Sprint.” Each Sprint will be scheduled to last several weeks. No magic number here, can be 2, 3, 4 weeks, but probably should be less than 8 weeks. You’ll go back and forth trading off initial features against time and end up with a Sprint 1 of say 4 weeks (just an example we chose, no magic number).

You’re almost ready to start coding. The one remaining task is to take each User Story assign them to developers and have the responsible developer estimate what tasks they’ll have to do to implement the User Story, and estimate their best guess of how long it will take to complete that task. But…one twist. These tasks have to be small enough that they take between 4 -16 hours to complete. This level of detail is often unnatural. But, it has magic built into it. By forcing yourself to break down work to this level, invariably important overlooked details emerge, providing for much more accurate estimates. Now, admittedly, you are relying on the best guess skills of your developers, which will vary by developer, by task and sometimes by whether they have just had their morning coffee and are feeling optimistic or not. But, it provides a starting point, and over time you’ll find your developers get better at this, and you get better at coaching your under or over-estimators.

Ready. Set. Code!

You are ready to start coding armed with User Stories and a detailed task list for each developer. You may feel like you’re traveling light, and you are. That’s the whole point. You backpack has everything you’ll need and nothing else. You will have a daily meeting (called a Scrum) with all the developers with tasks on the project and you, the project leader and no one else. No managers, no other developers, no business analysts, just the “doers.” These meetings will be no longer than 15 minutes. You’ll ask each developer just three simple questions: which task did you work yesterday, which tasks will you be working on today, what is blocking your progress? That’s it. No lengthy design discussions or play by play of your development day. Just these three simple questions and 15 minutes later you are done. The purpose of this meeting is to ensure that any blocks from progress are removed immediately and that your developers stay on task. You, as leader of the Scrum, are there to listen for blockers and remove them as fast as possible. All the team members know exactly where the project is all the time.

One final task.

At the end of each day, developers update their task list with their best guess of the amount of time remaining to complete each task. Sometimes these numbers go down as work progresses, sometimes they increase (as you discover the task is more complex or taking longer than you guessed). Over time, you get a nice chart of all the hours remaining for the Sprint, called a “Burndown” chart. This chart, while simple, is amazingly powerful. Bersin reports,

“Companies which can adapt to agile management models will move faster and out-perform their competitors.”

So that’s it. Your team writes code each day to fulfill the tests in your User Stories, meets for 15 minutes each day, updates the time remaining for their development tasks — and after 4 weeks (in our example), you done. Delivered on time and to spec.

It sounds easy, and it is!

In our next in the series, we’ll look at how this simple process translates into faster time to market, lower costs and wildly happy customers.

We recently had the pleasure of interviewing Jeanne Meister for Xyleme Voices. Based on insights from her book, the podcast looks at trends and predictions about what the workforce will look like in 2020. Jeanne packs a tremendous amount of valuable information into a 19 minute podcast, so it’s worth a full listen, but here is a small glimpse:

• In 2020, there will be five generations in the workplace. 50% will be Millennials and Gen 2020 will just be entering the workforce. This means that over half an organization’s workforce will have been hyper-connected since birth.
• By 2020, the workplace will be highly personalized and social. Social networks will be the first point of contact between companies and their future employees and internal social networks will be the primary way that workers communicate, connect and collaborate.
• Smart phones and tablets will replace personal computers as the internet connection devices of choice. The mobile device will become an office, a classroom and a concierge.
• Employee engagement will be a key driver in helping workers more efficiently find information and increase productivity.

However, before Jeanne’s hopeful predictions of the highly agile and fluid 2020 workforce connected by mobile social networks can come to fruition, the dependence on the enterprise LMS and the old modes of training delivery needs to be broken.

In the 90′s and 0′s, the LMS became the entrenched learning channel in the organization and the gateway to learning content. The content tended to be monolithic eLearning courses delivered to desktop or laptop computers. Even now, 20 years later, new LMS companies are emerging on a regular basis and entrenching themselves in the organization. They pitch themselves as the gateway to learning content, but in today’s world they feel more like a bottleneck.

Jeanne argues that in the 2020 workplace employees will want to engage and learn in the same way and with the same ease as they do outside work. That being said, I’ve never heard the process of connecting to the content in an LMS described as “easy”. And it’s highly suspect that outside work, people browse catalogs, register for content, launch systems to play that content then root through a plethora of mostly irrelevant information to find information they need in their personal lives.

Let’s take this a step further. In her podcast, Jeanne cites an IDC report that states that workers, on average, spend two hours per day trying to find relevant information to help them do their job. However, much of the effort in creating learning products has been misdirected, placing a higher value on production values rather than solving the problem of supporting learners in their moment of need.

In order to hold learners’ attention, today’s courses are dressed up with high gloss production values. But, are employees that are truly motivated to learn a new skill because they are on the hook to perform it really care about the production value of learning?  I contend it is less important that the content looks cool, than being able to quickly connect to relevant content and experts at the moment a learner needs it.  The Millennials and 2020 employees will shun the old model and place a premium on the ability to connect with most relevant content and experts, wherever they are, on the device they have at the moment and at the moment it they need it.

There will always be a need to have an LMS for certain modalities of learning, compliance being cited most often, but a lot of what is currently handled via the LMS has be decoupled from it and moved into the social mobile realm.  For Millennial and 2020 employees, smart mobile devices are appendages and social networking is second nature. It is a totally different means to collaborate and our concept of training and learning need to adapt to the rhythm of these workers.

In most organizations, the need for training happens on the job, at a moment of need. Much of what used to be rolled up into training can, and should be, relegated to Performance Support. But we’re talking Performance Support 2020 which is Mobile, Personalized and Social.

• It is mobile in that you will be able to access the knowledge base from your mobile device where ever you are, at exactly the moment you need it.

• It will be personalized in that the features of the device, such as GPS and barcode scanners, can help set a context for where you are and what you are doing and assist in connecting you to the content and experts you need.

• It will be social in that you will be able to comment and rate the content and use the comments ratings of others to help you decide what content is best for you.

In the 2020 workforce, every learner is a teacher and every teacher is a learner. If you find that content doesn’t quite hit the mark or doesn’t yet exist, you will use your mobile device to create user-generated video, photos, or voice recordings. If your content is highly rated by your peers, you will be an expert on this subject, and be an accessible mentor to others.

The future does look bright, and the 2020 workforce can be quicker and more agile if we can harness the mobile social networks. We just need to pry the content out of the eLearning and free it from the LMS.

The Pastiche iPad app version 1.4 is out! You can now download it from the App Store.

This new version comes with support for glossary. So now when you open a course from the Bookshelf you can access the glossary for that course through a button on the bottom bar. Keeping true to our flexible model, publishers can decide whether they want to have a glossary or not when they create a course for Pastiche. The feature will automatically be enabled or disabled by the app for each particular course.

To navigate through the glossary users swipe a finger vertically on the screen or use the top bar letter index for quicker access to a section. Clicking on a term will reveal its definition.

Publishers can now group the lessons of a course within modules, offering learners a more convenient navigation through the content when courses are long.

On top of the glossary and module feature, we have updated the look and feel of the questions in the Quiz Me section in our demo app. The new design is cleaner and more user friendly. In any case, publishers have total control over this and can define their own look and feel.

Big announcements are coming with the next version of Pastiche that will be available in 7 weeks, so stay tuned.

As social learning grows does the requirement for traditional training departments shrink? U.K.-based eLearning development firm Epic asks this very question in its fourth E-learning Debate – and this Epic debate is being hosted only online.

The motion presented for discussion: This house believes that as social learning grows, so the requirement for traditional training departments shrinks. Those arguing in favor include Donna Hamilton, Head of Group Learning at Royal Bank of Scotland and Jane Hart, founder of C4LPT. Those arguing against the motion: Melissa Highton, Head of the Learning Technologies Group at the University of Oxford, and Clive Shepherd, Chair of the UK’s eLearning Network.

The debate is engaging people in an important discussion about topics that are vital to anyone working in L&D, with participants on both sides making some excellent points.

Those who favor the motion argue that the requirement for traditional training departments will shrink. Donna Hamilton points out, “We know that very little of what is taught in the class room ever makes its way into working life. Learners need to undertake fieldwork – repetitive, mindful, problem focused practice – to gain skills.” She also says that the role of the new learning department should be to support this on the job skill development with “the right coaching, expert teaching and challenging work based activities.”

Jane Hart, also arguing in favor, suggests there is a major new role that the traditional training department can play in helping people work and learn in the new social workplace. She says that role will involve “moving from a ‘managing learning’ to a ‘supporting performance’ mindset.”  Jane argues that the requirement for traditional training departments will shrink “as knowledge, work and learning become indistinguishable, [and] social learning (powered by social media tools) becomes an organizational imperative.” As Nic Laycock put it in his blogged response to the debate, Jane’s point is that “the traditional training department has run its course – with the opportunity now to transform itself into a true business added value function by leveraging new technologies to become a key business partner.” Donna Hamilton sums it up: “we are failing to take advantage of developments in social learning that are fundamentally reshaping the relationship between people and information. Traditional training departments need to evolve or be relegated to corporate history.”

What would cause training departments to shrink would be a change in how learning is perceived by the business.  -A. Jones (Thomas Reuters) via @eLearningdebate

Opponents, on the other hand, have pointed out that traditional learning is itself inherently social – and that social learning is nothing new. In a recent blog post Clive Shepherd calls attention to the fact that social learning is not the same as social media, and that L&D departments are not the only stakeholders in workplace social media. He points out that social media has a multitude of uses in the workplace with outcomes unrelated to learning such as collaborating on tasks, promoting goods and services, entertaining each other, exchanging information etc. Clive says, “What is important is that L&D is at the table, campaigning for the use of social media at work where this is likely to make a worthwhile contribution to the overall learning architecture.” Clive argues that social learning that employs Web 2.0 social media is new, and as it develops it should continue to complement formal learning – i.e. social learning is just one part of the learning mix.

Melissa Highton takes it a step further by saying that the role of training departments will in fact grow rather than shrink and that traditional training departments have an important part to play in the quality and accreditation of social learning. She argues that training departments should participate as equals in the open content movement by sharing materials developed in-house and by employees. She points out that when traditional training departments shift away from in-house production to shared, social learning their emphasis must shift to become more skilled at varied methods of assessment. In a nutshell, the requirement for traditional training departments to adapt and develop is inevitable and L&D’s new challenge is the accreditation of prior learning and peer learning.

Whether you’re for or against, what’s clear is that this debate has caused quite a stir, with thought provoking arguments on both sides and a number of key issues brought to light. As Dr. Naomi Norman, Director of Learning, says, “The debate format has proved incredibly successful at getting people discussing and arguing and encouraging thinking.” So if you would like to read more on what people have to say on this latest social learning debate or wish to share your own thoughts, visit www.elearningdebate.com.

This is the first in a series of articles about the tablet market and the impact of this new device on education and training.

The tablet is a disrupter for Learning & Development. Members at every level of your organization – from the field to management to the C-suite – are gaining the experience of touching, expanding, holding and dealing with content in a personalized and collaborative fashion. This is the new normal of content consumption and we as an industry can’t afford not to give this experience to learners.

Today, the iPad is the undisputed leader both for massive corporate deployments and usage in schools. Since Apple launched the iPad in April 2010, the first in the new generation of media tablets to hit the market, it has sold more than 30 million units. According to a study by Gartner published in April, 70 million tablets will be sold in 2011, 300% more than in 2010. In comparison, 325 million laptops were sold last year. These stats are shocking if we realize that before the iPad this market did not exist. And even more so if we take into account the current market conditions and the fact that the iPad often acts as a secondary device – or “second screen” – as it cannot completely replace a PC.

According to the same Gartner study, sales of tablets will reach almost 300 million units in 2015 and the market will be clearly dominated by iOS and Android.

2011 has been so far a very exciting year for the tablet market:

• January – Google unveils Honeycomb, its first tablet-specific Android operating system.
• February – Motorola Xoom, the first tablet using Honeycomb, goes on sale.
• March – Apple releases the iPad 2.
• April – RIM launches the PlayBook, its first tablet.
• July – HP releases the TouchPad.
• August – Google buys Motorola, getting control of the hardware (and some patents along the way) and opening the door to provide a fully integrated user experience.

The competition is fierce though. The HP TouchPad is already out of business, the PlayBook may soon follow. In Q2 of this year 30% of total worldwide shipments were Android Tablets from Samsung, Motorola, Asus, Lenovo and others. Sales are probably a different story though.

This leaves us with just two players for the future: Apple with the iPad and Google with Android. Or, then again, perhaps not?

iPad vs Android

Apple created the tablet market and holds a very strong position that it will retain for some time, even with the sudden resignation of Steve Jobs. Many even go so far as to say that Apple actually created an iPad market rather than a tablet market and that’s why other devices are not selling well. And they may be right. Currently there is really no compelling reason to buy a tablet other than the iPad because other competing tablets don’t have anything near the strong app ecosystem that the iPad has – and their prices are in the same range as the iPad.

In the meantime, Apple continues to improve their platform. They will release iOS 5 in autumn and continue to improve and build upon the massive ecosystem they have created. iOS 5 comes with more than 200 new features. They have focused on improving the overall experience and provide better content services like Newsstand, for instant access to magazines and newspaper subscriptions.

The ecosystem

As of today there are 115,000 iPad apps in the App Store and this does not include all the iPhone apps that also run on the iPad. This is really amazing. I have not found how many apps have been built for Honeycomb but I expect this number to be in the hundreds.

Android will need time before it can compete with Apple in terms of apps. This is the typical chicken and egg problem. Developers don’t care about the Android tablet because there are not enough users to justify the investment. And users won’t buy an Android tablet unless there isn’t a compelling app and content story behind it. On top of that, the market is fragmented because Google does not have full control over it. Hence, some manufacturers are running the phone version of Android on their tablets while others are running Honeycomb. Google will try to solve this with the Android Ice Cream Sandwich that will run on phones, tablets and also on TVs and other devices which will allow them to leverage the full app ecosystem. The acquisition of Motorola will also allow Google to provide a tablet solution to the market where the hardware and the software work very well together – although Android OEMs will have something to say.

The price

If we look at the price, the basic iPad 2 model retails at $499, which is relatively low for Apple standards. They can keep the price low because they can leverage the app and content ecosystem to increase their profits. Most of the costs are currently related to the touch screen and the memory (around $200 according to IHS iSupply).

If tablet manufacturers want to compete with Apple in price they will have to either sacrifice their margins or wait until the technology evolves and prices drop.

Amazon to the rescue

In the phone industry it is common to subsidize the devices and amortize them over a 1 or 2 year plan. Carriers are not so worried about the upfront payment because they focus on the lifetime value of the customer over the whole period. This combined with the opensource nature of Android helped it succeed in that market.

This is not possible in the tablet arena because most of the units sold are the basic Wi-Fi model and they are not tied to any contract. That said there is one company that could apply a similar model to the tablet and compete with Apple: Amazon with its digital content ecosystem.

In July, the Wall Street Journal revealed that Amazon plans to release an Android tablet by October. Users of the tablet could get instant access to a massive collection of digital books, music and streaming and downloadable movies through their Amazon Prime service. And this makes total sense for Amazon since they could build a device that is tightly integrated with those services, improving user experience and increasing their revenues along the way. They could afford not to make a penny out of the tablet and make all the profits through the sale of content

Don’t discard Microsoft just yet, though they are late in the game

Microsoft seems to be slowly catching up. They are doing things very well lately. Windows 7 is a very solid operating system and Windows Phone 7 has also received very positive reviews from the market.

Microsoft sees the tablet market very differently, though. Their tablets will run Windows 8 which will have all the features of the desktop version but will play nicely with touch screens. From what I have seen it provides two separate user interfaces that coexist, one based on the Windows desktop version and another one based on the Windows Phone version. Although I have some concerns about usability, for people who hesitate between a tablet and a laptop it could be the right solution. I think it will also be very appealing to the corporate market if it integrates well within the existing IT infrastructure.

The latest rumors say that Windows 8 won’t be released until fall 2012. The tablet market will have changed a lot by then…

In my next article I will focus on the different ways tablets can be used, with a specific focus on education and training.

You have probably heard the (rather exciting) news of Xyleme’s new “iPad app that creates apps” - Pastiche™.  We believe that it’s a revolutionary product that will change the way organizations define blended learning and we’re proud of our continued work on its development. We will try to keep release cycles for the Pastiche™ app short and agile with new versions to be released every 5-8 weeks and numbered with even numbers as follows: v 1.0, v1.2, v1.4 etc.

Keeping true to that process we just released a new version to the App Store last week.  Based on early user feedback we decided to release Pastiche v1.2, a slightly modified version with two major user interface features. This release also includes a few minor design improvements.

Here are the latest feature updates:

Finger Swipe

The first major feature we have introduced in this new version is the ability to turn pages back and forth using the finger swipe gesture. This significantly improves the user experience and makes the environment much more comfortable for learners and iPad users.

Pinch-to-Zoom

The other major feature that is also part of this release is the ability to zoom content in the Read Me and Show Me sections. To zoom in and out the learner uses the pinch gesture to increase or decrease the size of the content in the screen. All the content will be zoomed, including text, video and images. We see this being particularly helpful when looking at figures that contain so much detail that one needs to be zoomed in order to see all the information.

Stay tuned for more news on Pastiche™ development and plans!

Last month Xyleme had the pleasure of presenting a webinar with none other than elearning luminary Elliott Masie on “iPad, a Game Changer for Blended Learning”. During this webinar event Elliott Masie shared valuable insights on how the iPad is transforming learning within organizations, and why organizations need to offer training on the iPad.

Elliott Masie and Xyleme’s CEO, Mark Hellinger, covered a lot of ground so rather than giving a synopsis I have selected the most insightful “iPad-isms” to give readers a taste of what was discussed.

On how the iPad is a game-changer, a disruptor:

[The chancellor of the California State University system] said, “…we are giving out 450,000 iPads and every one of our students will be getting all of their textbooks for just a couple hundred dollars a semester on the iPad.” It’s a game changer in that sense.

On how tablets have changed learner expectations:

Tablets have become part of an ability for us to define learning more broadly […]. They [the USDOD] want to be more agile.  They want to be able to take a mission, a situation and agilely create new learning not in 18 weeks but in a much shorter timeframe.  They want to acknowledge that the learners are becoming more empowered and that they in fact want to make their own choices.

There is the beginning of a learning economy that’s building within the app world and in fact we’re seeing a lot of learning that’s being created and harvested not by experts but by folks within organizations.  So it’s not just the app or just the tablet that’s doing it, but it’s a convergence of this moment that allows it us to use it as a change mechanism for learning in our organizations.

[And] whether or not the iPad is officially in your organization – it’s unofficially there.  So many organizations have banned tablets and yet if you look in the briefcase of the many people coming to work, they’ve got their own personal tablets that they’re using as a second screen at work.

On how important it is for organizations to make their content available on tablets: 

At the end of the day, you can’t afford not to.  Outside of work members of your organization are gaining the experience of touching, expanding, stretching, holding in their hand and dealing in a tactile and collaborative fashion with content.  Why would you not want to give them that same capability at work?

You can’t afford not to be putting the tablet and multiple devices on your radar screen for content – and do it sooner rather than later.  It’ll be an experiment at first but it’s a necessary, critical, important experiment to align with the significant change in learner expectation that’s occurring outside of the workplace.

On how the iPad changes content development:

[Ken Blanchard…] said, “You know I’ve written some great books but sometimes I just want people to get to one paragraph of my book or three paragraphs from three different books.” We need to be able to allow our content that agility.  We need to be able to have a way that when things change they’re updated almost instantly and the other thing we need to do is to be able to add deeper and deeper context to content.

On what tablet applications should provide learners, & what that means for ‘learning designers’:

We need to be able to allow our content agility.  We need to be able to have a way that when things change they’re updated almost instantly and the other thing we need to do is to be able to add deeper and deeper context to content.

We’re going to see some really amazingly different blends.  That’s why it’s a game changer for blended learning because some of this content is going to be used blended into a classroom – some of this content’s going to be used with a coach or as part of performance review or as part of new higher orientation but perhaps delivered in a distributed fashion.

 We are going to be able to make a shift from being an instructional developer to being a learning designer and I always say to my colleagues, “Be a learning designer.  You’re not just designing content but you’re designing an environment in where learners can then sculpture their own learning experience or organizations can do that.”

On how organizations need to move to a mobile first development strategy instead of elearning:

As we make a shift [from elearning to mobile] we are going to see a broader spectrum around learning. […] You ought to be thinking about content that’s built once, used many.  It might be used in a traditional elearning format.  It might be used as part of a blended classroom course.  It might be used as a follow on to a performance review.  [And] it might be used as a just in time element. 

On moving away from being elearning centric:

We have to move away from being overly elearning centric to rather thinking about building content, building assessment, building interaction, collaboration, and other apps that’s for performance. 

I’m enormously excited about the shifts that we can make and I will tell you, I sit on corporate boards, I work with CEOs for major corporations.  This is something they’re not going to oppose.  There’s an innate sense that our learners are capable of bearing more responsibility around their learning and they see the tablets and mobile devices may be part of the mix as we try to meet that greater potential from learners.

 

We were thrilled to have Elliott Masie join us for the “iPad, a Game Changer for Blended Learning” webinar event – to shed some light on how the iPad is transforming learning in the workplace – whilst Xyleme’s CEO Mark Hellinger explored how to effectively offer training on the iPad with Xyleme’s new product Pastiche™, a tool for developing interactive learning iPad apps.  What also made this webinar particularly memorable were our attendees, who, with their insightful questions drove the event. (So, a shout out to all our webinar attendees!)

If you couldn’t make the webinar you can now view it here and if anyone has an “iPad-ism” to add to the above list we’d love to hear from you!

“[The iPad] it’s the first device that actually is a reflection of me – or us. It’s so revolutionary that it’s no longer about me adapting myself to somebody else’s set of programmings or the way in which a device is going to engage. It is the reverse. It is as though I’m looking in a mirror.”

I love this description because it encapsulates what should be the crux of any mobile learning strategy. That is, recognizing that mobile content delivery should be fully controlled by the learner. In other words, what content the learner wants; where and when they want it; and how they want it delivered – with no constraints.

While it took the iPad to make learner-controlled content a reality, this level of flexibility is now the gold standard for delivery to any device, be it tablets, smart phones or any number of performance support devices.

For learning organizations, the clear challenge to meet this gold standard in their frenzied rush to mLearning will be to NOT repeat the mistakes that were made in the move from classroom to on-line training. It’s been 15 years since the introduction of computer-based training and our industry still struggles with delivering engaging eLearning, developing it in a cost effective way and achieving positive learner outcomes.

We all know that old habits die hard, so here are 10 repeat offenders that could deliver a devastating blow to your mLearning strategy:

1. Don’t assess how mobile fits in your blended learning strategy. Today, 50% of the US workforce is now considered mobile. However, while exploding, the mobile share of total web consumption is still extremely low, topping out at about slightly over 3% according to Quantcast. Furthermore, a recent report from iPass indicates that mobile workers are not committed to any one mobile device, leveraging notebooks as much as they do smartphones and more than tablets.

What this tells us is that it’s still early days for mobile learning. Without a proper assessment of how learners want to leverage mobile for their learning needs and on what devices, it’s highly likely to result in a poor allocation of resources across delivery modalities.

2. Keep mLearning content development tactical. According to Ambient Insight, the leading marketing research firm for eLearning and mobile learning, the 2011 market forecast for mobile content authoring & development tools and installed platforms is $175M. Ambient indicates that this figure is made up primarily of new, specialized native tools. This tactical approach is exactly what we would expect in a new market: a high demand for tools that allow organizations to get some form of mLearning out quickly. However, as any CIO will tell you, this approach is unsustainable. What typically happens as a market matures is that specialized tools give way to more efficient cross-platform and enterprise-based solutions. Indeed, as we can see from the table below, Ambient predicts this very same trend with specialized and device-dependent mobile apps giving way to cloud-based, cross platform solutions.

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Today, while other areas of information publishing have experienced tremendous cost efficiencies and scalability through single-source development, content reusability and cross-platform delivery, eLearning has barely budged from its tactical approach. According to Ambient, the 2011 market forecast for specialized eLearning software and tools is a whopping $425M in North America, indicating that closed, proprietary, and single delivery modality tools still dominate eLearning.

3. Use rapid authoring tools. Rapid eLearning tools are the antithesis to the promise of mobile learning. That’s because rapid eLearning has nothing to do with the learner and everything to do with the Instructional Designer and how they want you to see their knowledge. Sure, it’s quick, but the learner has absolutely no control as to how he/she can view the content.

For mobile learning it’s not about rapid authoring, it’s about rapid reuse. In other words, automating the assembly and reassembly of content and media assets in myriad different ways based on what the end user wants to see.

4. Forget about your classroom materials: With all buzz surrounding mobile learning, it’s easy to gloss over the fact that instructor-led training still dominates. According to a survey of 1,500 learning professionals by Chief Learning Officer magazine, 41% of learning executives indicated they continue to use classroom training as the primary learning delivery method. An additional 12% will use synchronous eLearning. This means that over 50% of training today still uses traditional classroom materials.

In the move to eLearning, we disregarded printed materials wrongly assuming they would fall by the wayside. Today we pay the price of that oversight through redundant content development.

While mobile learning will (or should) be delivered in a more granular format, it will none the less leverage the information found in print and eLearning materials. Not being able to cost-effectively leverage this existing content for mobile will have a devastating impact on content development costs.

5. Build your mobile content from scratch. In hindsight, the biggest mistake we have made with eLearning was the choice to create eLearning content from scratch instead of leveraging existing classroom content. It’s an ugly practice that mars L&D and continues to this day.

As you can see from the table below from the Chapman Alliance, 30% of the cost of eLearning can be contributed to redundant content development processes including authoring, QA and SME/stakeholder review. It boggles the mind that training organizations are starting down this same path with mobile learning.

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You see, adding mobile doesn’t simply add a third silo or a third set of redundant processes in addition to classroom and eLearning. Unlike eLearning, mobile means many different types of content (courseware, performance support, assessments, etc.) delivered to multiple devices (notebooks, smartphones, tablets, etc.). Attempting to build the content for these mobile applications from scratch will create an unsustainable number of silos and redundant processes that require a level of additional resources you have absolutely no chance of getting.

6. Be proprietary: Lots of things can happen in three short years:

• In 2008, RIM ruled the mobile OS market with 58% market share. Today, Android, not even in existence until late 2008, has just taken over the number one spot in the U.S. with 31% market share.
• The iPad, at the tender age of one year old, and has already sold a staggering 15 million units.
• The Honeycomb OS, a mere month old, is already (or soon to be) powering tablets from Motorola, Samsung, Dell and Sony.

My obvious point: things change at lightning speed in the mobile market. eLearning content today sits in proprietary formats that can’t be used in more than one delivery format, can’t be shared with other applications and can’t be easily migrated to other systems. Locking your mobile learning content up like this is simply a death wish in today’s environment.

7. Believe that learners really want PowerPoint on their mobile. I was recently reading about a mobile content development app that lets you “leverage the familiar PowerPoint environment to comfortably and quickly develop mobile content.” Let’s get serious here. Does anybody really believe that content derived from a PowerPoint presentation is what a mobile learner wants or needs?

Here are a few choice excerpts from a great NY Times article that summarizes what blow PowerPoint has dealt learning in the US Military:

“PowerPoint makes us stupid”

“It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding”

“The program stifles discussion, critical thinking and thoughtful decision-making”

“Sitting through some PowerPoint briefings is just agony”

Exactly how will this change by putting the PowerPoint content on a mobile device?

8. Forego XML – again. If you don’t believe that open, platform-neutral XML is critical for mobile learning, I’m not going to try to convince you. Instead, take a look at this TED Talk clip from Richard Baruaniuk, the founder of Connextions. In particular, look at the section from 10.48 to 14.06. In it, he discusses why XML is the underlying technology for his wildly successful open source initiative that allows authors, educations and learners access a rich repository of content to create free, customized textbooks, courses, and learning materials.

Each month, Connexions‘ free educational materials are used by over 850,000 people from over 200 countries. Let’s see you try that without XML!
 

9. Don’t write granular content. For eLearning, content is written page by page for a broad audience. The problem with this is that mLearning is about the individual learner and that learner often wants to receive only “part of a page” – the nuggets information that is relevant to his/her task at hand.

While we like to dismiss reusable learning objects, this is exactly what these nuggets are: small context-free pieces of information wrapped with user dimensions such as role, task, language, stage, etc. It’s time to move away from the designer-centric view of content to the learner-centric view. That means building content in a model that is liberated from the web course/page model. It’s not to say you wouldn’t use it in that way for eLearning, it’s just that you can no longer force this upon the learner.

10. Ignore the above recommendations. mLearning provides a great opportunity for the Learning and Development organization to take our industry to the next level. To be successful though requires learning from our past mistakes, breaking out of old mindsets and having the courage to step outside our comfort zone. At the end of the day ask yourself: is the content I am delivering a reflection of me or my learners?