Tagoras

7 Steps in Selecting a Learning Management System Infographic

Celisa Steele — Wed, 22 May 2013 11:00:36 +0000

How do you select a learning management system? Exactly how you examine an alligator’s teeth—very carefully. (That was one of my favorite jokes as a kid; some things stick with you.)

Joking aside, that care manifests itself in 7 steps, and we have an infographic to help you keep them in mind.

The 7-Step Process for Selecting a Learning Management System (LMS)

Jeff and I together have more than 30 years experience in the world of education and technology, and the majority of that time has been spent working in the association world. We’ve designed, built, sold, and implemented learning management systems.

Currently we work primarily with organizations around setting the strategy for their education programs and then helping them select technology. So we’ve been involved in a great many LMS selection processes.

We use a 7-step LMS selection process whenever we’re working with clients to select a learning management system.

And now we have an infographic of the 7 steps that can serve as a crib sheet if you’re going through the LMS selction process. A 4-MB PDF suitable for framing (well, printing, at least), the infographic provides the 7 steps and a synopsis of each.

More LMS Selection Resources

We recently did a Webinar on the 7-step LMS selection process, thanks to the sponsorship of Meridian Knowledge Solutions.

We’ll be offering another Webinar on the LMS selection process in August. To make sure you know about that free Webinar and others, sign up for Leading Learning, the e-newsletter and community for professionals in the business of continuing education and professional development.

In the meantime, check out our free resources for LMS selection.

Celisa

P.S.

Our next free Webinar Clearing Up the Cloud: What It Is—and How It Impacts Your Learning will be held Thursday, June 13. Thanks to Meridian for sponsoring this Webinar as well.

Social Learning for the Education Department

Guest Writer — Tue, 21 May 2013 10:07:50 +0000

We’re happy to announce the first guest post on the Tagoras blog and thrilled that it comes from Maddie Grant of SocialFish. Enjoy! – Jeff

Why do busy professionals turn to social media? For professional development, of course. Social tools make it possible for you to increase participation in your learning programs, actively engage learners, and make your learning programs more effective. Your job will be more rewarding when you transition your learners from passively listening to actively engaging through social channels you intentionally design as part of the learning experience.

But having social tools is just the start: you have to know how to apply them to instructional design. That’s where your expertise in learning and education is invaluable. You now have the tools to apply the principles of adult learning to your programs–whether face-to-face or online. Here are some tips for weaving social into your learning design – and vice-versa:

1. Make social a part of the instructional design of your programs. For adult learners, passive listening is not the most effective teaching method. Luckily, social tools give you the chance to design more engaging, effective programs.

Get creative. You can use public social networks or the built-in chat feature of your online learning platform. And you can plan interaction before, during, and/or immediately following the formal presentation of content. For example:

Plan collaborative activities using tools your learners are comfortable using. Ask your learners how they prefer to interact, whether through the built-in chat feature or using a Twitter hashtag, for example.
Schedule 5-minute chat-back periods into your programs. Ask thought provoking questions that compel participants to share.
Invite registrants to comment on what they hope to learn. This is one of many simple ideas to get registrants engaged with one another days before the program. You might choose to use your private online community to host the pre-program interaction.
Continue the Q&A after the program. You can schedule an extra 15 minutes of discussion-based Q&A with your expert in your private online community immediately following the program as a way to carry the learning forward.

Pair your presenters with experienced facilitators. If you work with subject matter experts who are long on content, but short on engagement, pair them with a partner who can help them segment their content and engage the audience between segments. Since some presenters might mistake participant engagement with distracting side conversation, be sure to brief first-time presenters on what to expect from audience members as they’re presenting.

Try alternative formats, and give credit for participation. Try a series of programs that are entirely chat- or discussion-based. Invite a group of expert practitioners to get the conversation rolling and engage the entire group. You might host the discussion on Twitter, a Facebook Group, or your private online community–whatever works best for your learners. If continuing education credit is important for your learners, find a way to offer it for these alternative formats as well.

2. Nurture informal learning channels. You spend most of your time delivering formal education programs, as you should. But for your learners, informal learning channels are just as important. By nurturing those channels and contributing resources there, you can connect with folks who value learning. When they’re ready to spend their training dollars, they’ll turn to you.

Promote a Twitter hashtag for your learners to use. Work with your social media team to determine the best hashtag. If you’re worried there won’t be much activity at first, use one hashtag for all of your learning programs, or any hashtag your community already uses. Make sure someone monitors the Twitter chatter just before, during, and after formal programs.

Connect the dots between formal and informal channels. This is especially important if you have a private online community or listserv, but also if you have active groups on LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter.

Preview upcoming formal programs in related informal channels. Don’t think of this as promotion–think of it as sharing what you’re working on. For example, you might ask the speaker to reach out to the group with a pertinent question, or you might pull a particularly interesting slide from the presentation and ask for comments on it.
Point participants in formal programs back to related informal channels. Suggest specific, recent discussions that participants can review and even join in. Don’t worry if the discussion is members-only–just be clear about who can access what.
Reimagine content from your formal learning channels to feed informal channels. During every formal program, look for a nugget (or a pearl!) that lends itself to posting in social spaces. It could be a brief audio clip, a short video snippet, a slide or group of slides, and even great questions or dialogue between participants.
Surface archived programs related to recent discussions. No one knows your catalog of archived programs better than you. When a discussion heats up, chime in to recommend related content from your archives–or better yet, have your presenters chime in.

It’s never too late to start applying social media to education and learning. You may already be doing some of this. And with a little planning and collaboration with your colleagues, you can use social to drive better results for your participants, and greater member engagement for your entire organization.

This post is by Maddie Grant, CAE, web strategist, association practice – ICF Ironworks and lead editor of SocialFish social media blog for associations and nonprofits.

If you are interested in social learning, you may also be interested in:

Are the Next 50 Years Getting Longer?

Celisa Steele — Wed, 15 May 2013 11:00:48 +0000

The issue of college education—is it still relevant? is it worth the financial investment? what are the alternatives?—has cropped up on on my radar several times of late.

Last Tuesday the Brookings Institution issued the report Should Everyone Go to College? (Spoiler alert: The answer to the report title’s question is no.)

Last Wednesday Diane Rehm devoted an hour to “Who Benefits From College And Why.”

And last Thursday The Daily Show‘s Aasif Mandvi ran a Scared Straight-inspired session with students on the verge of ruining their lives. By going to college. (The five-minute segment is embedded below—if you need a laugh, take the time to watch it.)

The debate covered by these shows and and this report seems particularly important to those in the business of professional development and lifelong learning, like associations.

The Implications for Associations

I see both threats and opportunities for associations.

The main threat is carrying on as you have on the past. Assuming what’s worked for your education business will continue to work seems a dangerous position in today’s world where we both have unemployed college graduates and a dearth of qualified candidates in some fields.

The opportunities have to do with what associations might do to help fill the gap that’s being created as the value of college education erodes. (And looking at opportunities here dovetails nicely with Jeff’s series of posts on Blue Ocean Strategy.)

Associations already have a great opportunity to play a formative role in the “other 50 years.”

Think what else associations might do if that 50 years begins to stretch back and start earlier, as higher ed becomes less de rigueur and more dispensable.

Here are a few things to consider:

Is your association prepared to attract future employees in the new college-degree-optional world that seems to be emerging? Should a college degree be listed as a requirement for a new hire, or are there other ways to assess candidates’ readiness?
If you offer a certification, does it make sense to have a college degree as a prerequisite? Could something else, like prior work experience, substitute?
How can your association contribute to the quality and viability of your field in a world where college degrees are of questionable value? How can you help ensure those working in the field are well equipped to do their job? Can you offer apprenticeships that become an alternative to, or supplement for, college?

What other implications do you see? What other questions does your organization need to consider?

I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

Celisa

P.S. Here’s “Stay Out of School,” Aasif Mandvi’s Daily Show segment I mentioned above—enjoy.

Are You Testing Like You Should?

Celisa Steele — Wed, 08 May 2013 11:00:00 +0000

Or maybe I should ask, “What Do You Really Know About Your Education Market?”

The problem is I don’t know which question I should ask—unless I test which blog post title is most effective.

When we think about learning and education, testing inevitably comes up. Should we offer a pre-test and a post-test? How many self-checks?

But some folks in the education business forget they have to think about the testing that needs to happen beyond any assessments grounded in the content.

I’m talking about market testing.

A Testing Lesson from Content Marketers

Good content marketers know the importance of testing. If they’re working on an e-mail campaign, they split-test different headlines to figure out which gets the best open rates.

They work hard to come up with good headlines they think will work. But they don’t assume they know—they test their assumptions and base decisions on their audience’s behavior.

For those in the education business, there’s the obvious parallel to be drawn to the marketing of educational products. Whether you have a marketing team to lean on or have to figure it out on your own, testing which titles, which descriptions, which catalog layouts get the best results (sales, enrollments, whatever metrics are important to you) is critical.

If you’ve taken the time to build a good product, don’t skimp when taking it to market—or it may not matter how good the product is.

Testing as Complement to the Beta Mentality

The other lesson to learn may be less obvious: Remember there’s testing to be done even as you’re developing your educational products.

At the end of last Thursday’s post, I touched briefly on the idea of beta mentality. Don’t aim for perfection (it’s unattainable anyway). Instead, develop a minimum viable product, and take that to your market to see the response.

Maybe you got it exactly right. If so, you can invest in building out the product more fully, knowing there’s a market for it.

Maybe you got it totally wrong. In which case, you can scrap the product without the anguish of having wasted a ton of time and resources.

And maybe you got it somewhere in between, and what you learn from the market feedback can help you improve, or remove, the rickety-rackety parts and forefront the shiny and useful.

You can even go so far as to test multiple minimum viable products to see which shows the strongest. You could offer a Webinar on a topic and a miniseries of podcasts on the same topic to see which format flies.

Have the Courage of Your Testing Conviction

While few would argue testing is bad, it’s not done as much as it should be—I’ve heard it compared to flossing.

Maybe cognitive biases, like groupthink, hold us back (“But we’ve also promoted our education this way…”), or maybe it’s the simple fact that testing takes time and planning. Whichever the case, I think it’s worth cutting through our biases to see what testing can give in the long term. So here’s to having the courage of the testing conviction.

Celisa

P.S. Tomorrow we’re offering a free Webinar (thanks to the sponsorship of Meridian Knowledge Solutions) on Selecting a Learning Management System: Picking the Right Technology for Your Association’s Vision. If you’re free at 1 pm Eastern, fate might be telling you something.

Tin Can API 1.0: Good News, Good Lesson

Celisa Steele — Wed, 01 May 2013 11:00:12 +0000

This past Friday version 1.0 of the Tin Can API was released, as promised. As I noted in the previous blog post “What the Experience API Is—and Why You Should Care,” I didn’t expect the learning landscape to change overnight, and it didn’t. But the release of version 1.0 is an important marker on the way to a new vision for technology-enabled learning.

Mike Rustici, president of Rustici Software (the developers of the API), summed up the nature of the new vision in his quote for the press release around the release of version 1.0

We spent the past decade surrounded by e-learning geeks. We think we’ll spend the next decade surrounded by K-12, teachers, hackers, universities, government, education technology, MOOCs, games, and an array of real-world use cases we can’t even imagine yet. These are especially exciting times for anyone who ever heard the acronyms SCORM or AICC.

Mike Rustici’s comments struck me as an apt complement to what Jeff describes as the “other 50 years” in his book Leading the Learning Revolution.

Education has traditionally meant K-12 and higher ed—and reasonably accurately so for many years. But we’re living longer, switching jobs and careers more, and struggling to keep up with the increasingly fast pace of change. We can’t afford to assume that education is something that we ever finish. We have to be thinking about how we keep learning (and providing learning) for the other 50 years of life that, statistically speaking, we have coming to us after we finish our formal education.

Tin Can’s inclusive nature looks to be a good fit for the future, where technology-enabled learning isn’t just for “e-learning geeks” but for anyone serious about learning.

Good Product Development and Launch Basics

As I was following the release of version 1.0 of the Tin Can API, I found myself thinking Rustici Software did a nice job with the basic tenets of good product development and launch—tenets that apply as well to learning products as they do to software.

Listen to your market.This one is less about what Rustici Software did around last Friday’s launch, and more about the important groundwork they laid before diving into development—they convened a lot of meetings with various stakeholders and gathered input about what the new API should do. This is classic listening to your market and arguably the most important thing you can do before building a product.
Embrace a beta mentality.Rustici Software didn’t wait until they had version 1.0 of the API ready to release something—they released lower versions earlier. This let them gather feedback to finetune and add to the API.
Deliver what you promise.Rustici Software said version 1.0 would come out on April 26, and it did. It may seem a small thing, but launching on time sends the message you’re attentive and trustworthy. Those are traits I like in those I choose to work with and learn from.
Tie the product to other offerings, free and paid.Not only did the company roll out version 1.0 on time, but Rustici Software also made sure their other products were version 1.0-ready, including paid products like SCORM Cloud and free offerings like a free sandbox and Javascript open source library. Something I see overlooked too often when an organization releases a new learning offering is making the connections for potential learners about how the new offering relates to other products and making it easy for those potential learners to somehow get a little taste of the latest and greatest.

So kudos to Rustici Software for bringing us version 1.0 of the Tin Can API and for providing an example of a good product development and launch practices.

Celisa

P.S. Next Thursday, we’re offering a free Webinar (thanks to the sponsorship of Meridian Knowledge Solutions) on Selecting a Learning Management System: Picking the Right Technology for Your Association’s Vision. I hope you’ll join us!

Selecting a Learning Management System: Picking the Right Technology for Your Association’s Vision (Free Webinar)

Celisa Steele — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 11:00:20 +0000

Choosing a learning management system can be daunting—not only when it comes to evaluating features and functions, but also when the new LMS will play a strategic role in your association’s future. Your technology decision can mean the difference between a big success and a big mistake.

We’ll address that important LMS decision process on Thursday, May 9, from 1 to 2 pm Eastern. We’re grateful to Meridian Knowledge Solutions for sponsoring this Webinars so that we can provide it at no charge. You can reserve your spot now at https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/612885654.

Over the course of our years tracking LMS technology and working with clients through the selection processes, Jeff and I have learned a great deal, and we’ll draw on that experience for the Webinar. In our work, we’ve seen what amounts to a lot of good news for the organizations and learners using them.

Lower-cost models

We’ve seen LMSes get better and faster while pricing has fallen. We’ve seen companies emerge that offer low-cost models that make LMSes a possibility for small organizations, and we’ve also seen growth in all-you-can-eat models; LMSes typically charge a per-user license fee, but quite a few companies now offer an unlimited model—the license fee remains the same regardless of how many users are in the LMS.

More hosted solutions

We’ve seen a move toward hosted solutions. Most associations don’t want to maintain LMS servers in their own facility with their own staff resources—that’s something they want from their LMS partner. And, of course, of late, we hear more and more about LMS vendors moving to the cloud. (Note that we offering “Clearing Up the Cloud: What Is It—and How It Impacts Your Learning,” another free Webinar sponsored by Meridian, on June 13. Stay tuned for more details about that closer to the date.)

Better integration and interoperability

Integration and interoperability have improved. Standards like SCORM are well established and let organizations feel confident they can develop content that will play as it should even if they switch LMSes down the line. Web services and APIs allow associations to hook together key systems and give end-users an apparently seamless experience with what may really be a hodgepodge of systems working in the background.

Support for richer experiences

LMSes support richer experiences now—social tools like discussion boards or Twitter feeds can augment learning, and LMSes tend to support a wider range of formats now—online and off, real-time Webinars, self-paced e-learning, classroom and conference place-based events, etc.

Improvements in reporting

With reporting, we’ve seen ad-hoc reporting options grow—so now associations don’t have to rely on canned reports but can develop their own reports and apply filters to get the information they want. We’ve also seen growth in the use of dashboards and visual reporting to provide snapshots of key data. And reporting will only continue to improve with all the buzz (deserved, in my opinion) around “big data.”

More association focus

There are a lot of LMSes out there—hundreds and hundreds. When we started, only a handful were built with associations in mind, with a focus on things like member versus non-member pricing, support for credit and certification, AMS integration, and e-commerce. But the number of LMSes focused on associations and with features and functionality that really respond to association needs has grown over the years. We put out our first Association Learning Management Systems report in 2009, and it covered 12 LMSes. The latest 2013 version covers 20 systems. Meridian’s system, Meridian Global LMS, has been in all three editions of the report.

All six of these developments make LMSes more attractive to associations that don’t have one yet, and these changes have driven some to switch vendors or at least ponder a move. Whatever your situation, we’ll help you think through the steps and issues in this Webinar.

What the Webinar Will Cover, Plus a Call for Your Input

Jeff, Jason Marceau (Meridian’s COO), and I will share processes and insights for making the crucial LMS decision. I’ll present a time-tested 7-step process for selecting a learning management system. Jason will share real-life examples of associations that dramatically increased their revenue by expanding the reach of their educational content using an LMS. Jeff will act as virtual MC, fielding questions and comments, so come prepared to participate (or just listen, if you prefer).

While we’ll take questions during the session, we encourage you to send Jeff questions you would like to have answered during the Webinar. Send them any time between now and May 9. Jeff, Jason, and I have all spent many years building, implementing, and/or running selection processes for LMSes, so this is a great opportunity to tap into that experience.

You’ll leave the session with a clear understanding of how to lead your organization in choosing the right LMS technology, and we’ll follow up with some goodies, like a checklist of key issues and questions to consider when running a successful selection process.

The Webinar Details

Title: Selecting a Learning Management System: Picking the Right Technology for Your Association’s Vision
Date: Thursday, May 9, 2013
Time: 1 to 2 pm Eastern
Reserve your Webinar seat now at https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/612885654

Press release: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2013/5/prweb10689891.htm

P.S.

The May 9 LMS selection Webinar is the first in a series of three Webinars sponsors by Meridian Knowledge Solutions. The next two will also run from 1 to 2 pm Eastern:

Clearing Up the Cloud: What Is It—and How It Impacts Your Learning (June 13)
How Mobile Impacts Your Organization’s Learning and Marketing of Learning (July 18)

So save the dates.

Celisa

6 Paths for Leading Your Education Business to Blue Ocean, Part IV

Jeff Cobb — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 12:08:52 +0000

For readers who have missed it (or simply want to review), I have done three prior posts on the six paths framework that is a fundamental component of Blue Ocean Strategy (covered in detail in Chapter 3 of the book: “Reconstruct Market Boundaries”).

In this post I consider the fourth path discussed by Kim and Mauborgne: looking across complementary products and services.

Assessing and leveraging complementary products and services

In nearly every field or industry, businesses tend to focus narrowly on a core set of products and services and competition generally occurs within commonly understood boundaries for those products and services. Significant value, however, is often “hidden in complementary products and services.” To discover this value, Kim and Mauborgne suggest a series of questions:

What is the context in which your product or service is used? What happens before, during, and after? Can you identify the pain points? How can you eliminate these pain points through a complementary product or service offering?

Think, for example, of the market for athletic shoes. The focus has traditionally been on the shoes themselves. Makers strive to offer a range of models and styles and to emphasize performance-oriented features like lightness or ruggedness. Nike, however, has recognized that the shoe is only part of the customer’s total experience. Many customers – particularly those willing to pay the premium associated with Nike products – are serious about physical activity and improving their performance over time. This recognition led Nike to introduce FuelBand, a digital device that enables users to track their activity and measure progress against goals. It’s a natural complement to Nike’s products, and at $149 it is turning into a very strategic and profitable source of additional revenue.

In education markets, the focus tends to be on the particular body of content or time that defines a formal education experience: a course, a conference, a Webinar. A great deal of emphasis is put on determining titles, identifying subject matter experts, and – particularly in recent history – trying to improve the quality of what happens within the prescribed space of the formal experiences. We tend not to pay enough attention to the fact that any single educational experience is only one of many that will factor into an individual’s ongoing learning process.

Consider what happens before an individual engages in a learning experience. I routinely have clients tell me, for example, that their staff members spend a good bit of time by phone or e-mail helping members find and understand the available choices for continuing education. This is not just a matter of a Web site with usability issues (though, alas, that often is an issue): it’s a reflection of the complexity of the world we now live in, and of a desire – at least among a certain segment customers – to maximize the value of their educational investments. Similarly, in my consulting work, I have actually had clients pay me to map out how they might get the most out of a particular conference.

These examples suggest possible opportunities for engaging customers with complementary services before the formal education experience. There may also be other good opportunities after a formal educational experience. For example, coaching services – whether on an individual or group basis – could be a powerful way to help learners retain, apply, and improve upon what they learn from formal educational experiences like courses or conferences.

As with the the examples offered in other parts of the series, these may or may not be ideas that jibe with your education business. But, in general, it is worth remembering that a particular conference session, seminar, or online course is rarely the “total solution” a customer seeks. Lifelong learners want to grow and develop over time in ways that increase their professional competence and confidence (the two go hand in hand), provide personal satisfaction, and enhance their overall value in the employment market. If you step back and take a look at your offerings from this perspective, you will almost certainly see ways in which you can unlock new value.

What the Experience API Is—and Why You Should Care

Celisa Steele — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 14:10:10 +0000

You probably know it better as Tin Can, the popular name that’s stuck and been embraced by Rustici Software (the developers of the API), although Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) prefers calling it the Experience API, or even xAPI.

No matter what we call it, though, it’s the first step in a comprehensive vision for the future of technology-enabled learning.

Part of the Training and Learning Architecture (TLA)

Established in 1997 by President Clinton and overseen by the Department of Defense (DoD), ADL developed the Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM), the most widely recognized set of standards for e-learning which have been broadly adopted, even outside of the government.

The primary appeal of SCORM is that it assures some degree of interoperability—SCORM content can be delivered using any SCORM-conformant learning management system (LMS) using the same version of SCORM.

But SCORM is 15 years old at this point. How we live and learn has changed. Google and Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn didn’t exist when SCORM was born, not to mention game-changers specific to online education, like Coursera, edX, and Udacity.

Source: http://www.adlnet.gov/introducing-the-training-and-learning-architecture-tla

The Training and Learning Architecture (TLA) is ADL’s answer to what the next generation of SCORM looks like. TLA focuses on four interrelated areas:

Experience tracking
Learning profiles
Content brokering
Competency infrastructure

In a Training magazine article, Dr. Kristy Murray, director of the ADL Initiative, and Aaron E. Silvers, community manager for ADL explain the four areas of the TLA:

Learner Profiles will be powered by technologies that describe information about a learner: their preferences, competencies, and experiences.

Content Brokering will focus on technologies that describe, discover, and deliver content.

Competency Infrastructure will provide authoritative, machine-readable definitions of learning objectives, competencies, tasks, standards, and conditions.

Experience Tracking is the part that currently is being developed: the Experience API. Its design addresses the limitations people find with e-learning technologies currently used in organizations that are focused only on tracking the learner through a specific course, rather than through diverse learning experiences.

The Shortcomings of SCORM

As Murray and Silvers suggest in their description of experience tracking, Tin Can is meant to address what have become major shortcomings of SCORM.

SCORM doesn’t track informal or self-directed learning, and we know that an estimated 90 percent of learning is either self-managed or informal.
Because SCORM uses JavaScript in a Web browser to talk to an LMS, it can’t launch and track native mobile apps and has required a steady Internet connection (versus working when access to network infrastructure is intermittent).
SCORM focuses on the individual learner in isolation and doesn’t accommodate team-based exercises, collaboration, and instructor intervention.
SCORM looks at scores (usually a single score) and completions in courses, but doesn’t provide a good way to capture multiple scores (pre- and post-test, say) or detailed test data or to assess learners after the course is complete (but the learning presumably, hopefully, continues).

There are other limitations of the current incarnation of SCORM, but this list alone declares the need for Tin Can.

The Tin Can API is built around simple subject-verb-object statements that will allow a learning record store (LRS) to collect data about a wide variety of real-world learning activities. So, yes, the API will support familiar-to-SCORM statements like “Celisa completed the Intro to Tin Can course,” but also “Celisa asked the Leading Learning group members on LinkedIn what they’re doing about Tin Can,” or “Celisa wrote a blog post on Tin Can.”

With SCORM, an LMS is limited to delivering and tracking content it knows about. As Rustici Software points out, that SCORM limitation goes away with Tin Can: “With Tin Can, the latest Khan Academy video can become a trackable learning event as soon as it is released.”

Another key innovation of Tin Can is that it decouples “the content and the asserter of a learning experience.” Rustici Software explains:

In SCORM, the “thing reporting a result about a learning experience” always had to be the experience itself. You had a SCO [shareable content object] that was both a piece of educational content and a communicator of data about the learning experience. Content had to be smart. Content had to be intentionally converted to enable SCORM functionality. Tin Can removes the requirement that the communicator of data be the educational experience itself.

(By the way, Rustici Software’s “Layers of the Tin Can Onion” is an accessible overview of what Tin Can makes possible, and I recommend it for anyone interested in learning more about the API.)

What It Means for You

This post is timely—version 1.0 of Tin Can is due out April 26.

That doesn’t mean that SCORM is dead as of next Friday—ADL emphasizes Tin Can is not a replacement for SCORM, but the evolution of SCORM. Plus, while some organizations have implemented early versions of the API, it will take years for broad adoption among technology developers (LMS and content authoring companies).

But, clearly, Tin Can touches on many critical issues that organizations in the business of lifelong learning grapple with today—informal and self-directed learning, social learning, mobile access.

What’s more, Tin Can provides the possibility of “personal data lockers” that pull information from all the relevant LRSes and aggregate it so learners, rather than a siloed LMS maintained by an organization, have access to their learning records. Given late baby boomers averaged 11.3 job changes between the ages 18 and 46, personal data lockers look really appealing, and figuring out how your association or organization interacts with these lockers will be an important question to sort out.

So keep an eye on the Tin Can API. Ask your current learning technology partners about their plans for Tin Can, and, if you’re looking to add any new learning technology, raise Tin Can in your conversations with those vendors. I’m not arguing these companies need to have a development timeline in place yet—but you want to know they’re staying abreast and have a plan for evolving their technology to help you deal with your critical issues.

6 Paths for Leading You Education Business to Blue Ocean, Part III

Jeff Cobb — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 10:53:14 +0000

In my previous two posts on the 6 paths (from Blue Ocean Strategy), I discussed looking across alternative industries and looking across strategic groups. In this post, I consider looking across the chain of buyers.

Assessing Your Buyer Chain

While it is typical to target a specific buyer when selling pretty much any type of product or service – education included – in most sales there is actually a range of people, a “chain” of buyers who can impact the buying decision. As Kim and Maubourgne write in Blue Ocean Strategy,

The purchasers who pay for the product or service may differ from the actual users, and in some cases there are important influencers as well. Although these three groups may overlap, they often differ. When they do, they frequently hold different definitions of value. A corporate purchasing agent, for example, may be more concerned with costs than the corporate user, who is likely to be far more concerned with ease of use. Similarly, a retailer may value a manufacturer’s just-in-time stock replenishment and innovative financing.

There can, of course, be overlap among the links in the buyer chain. For educational products, for example, the user and purchaser are very often one and the same. I think there are ample opportunities, however, to target influencers and perhaps even to break the purchaser/user into separate links.

Targeting influencers, in particular, can be a powerful way to solidify a position that competitors will find it hard to touch. Organizations that offer some form of credential – a certification or assessment-based certificate, for example – have an edge here. Most people go through the trouble of earning a credential not just for their personal satisfaction but because somebody else – potential employers, potential customers, etc. – cares about it. Those “somebody elses” are potential influencers.

The Project Management Institute (PMI), for example, has done a good job over the years of cultivating influencer demand for its credential – employers value a PMI certification, and prospective employees know it. Similarly, the CFP Board currently has a campaign under way to dramatically boost general public awareness of and demand for its credential (see http://www.letsmakeaplan.org/). CFP Board is going after the influencers.

Shifting the purchaser involves some of the same dynamics as targeting influencers – you have to make someone beside your usual target buyer care enough about whatever you offer to pick up the bill. If you can tell a convincing story about the value your education provides to employers, for example. they are going to be much more likely to pick up some or all of the bill – or not stop doing it when times get tough.

I think CAI, an organization I highlight in Leading the Learning Revolution, has made significant steps in this direction by developing The Management Advantage™ program over the past few years. By creating a clear path, and essentially, a compelling story about the value created through its educational programs, CAI has made its offering much more attractive to – and more likely to be funded by – executives at the companies it serves.

As you may have gathered, targeting influencers and shifting purchasers both tend to be long term approaches. They are reliant upon strong positioning and on consistent brand building. Organizations that employe them successfully, however, can become practically unassailable in their target markets.

So, as you are planning that next seminar or conference, think about all of the links in your chain of buyers, and think long term. How could you strengthen the pull of your products in parts of the chain you may not have focused on before? There may be breakthrough opportunities there.

In the meantime, stay tuned for the next post in this Blue Ocean Strategy series, and be sure to visit or revisit my posts on looking across alternative industries and looking across strategic groups.

Jeff

P.S. – If you want to be sure to get all of the installments of this series, the easiest way is to subscribe for free to this blog.

What’s Coming Down the Pike for Learning

Celisa Steele — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 11:00:03 +0000

Given all the change and upheaval online and off, the future of learning may seem fuzzy. But talking with folks who live and breathe learning every day can provide some clarity.

In the 20 interviews we did with representatives—mostly CEOs and other senior employees—of the learning management system companies profiled in the 2013 edition of Association Learning Management Systems report, we asked what’s coming down the pike for learning. Ten subjects bubbled up.

Ten Things to Watch for in the Future of Learning

Ten things were cited by the 20 interviewees as something coming down the pike for learning. And, yes, the numbers add up to more than 20, as few interviewees limited themselves to a single subject in response to the question.

The groupings are mine, and the responses could arguably have been sliced and diced differently, but I still think this analysis still helps focus on areas of likely growth.

The impact of mobile technologies and habits on learning tied with the ability to truly personalize learning for the top spot.

Big data, gamification and badges, and increasing integration of systems for a more seamless, less-siloed user experience come in at the bottom of the list, with only one mention each—but even these are clearly areas to watch.

Back near the top, tying for second place, we see social learning and a focus on performance and quality improvement (and whatever other name you might give to making sure education is really engendering positive change in the learners’ behavior).

Coming in third is multimedia, especially video. With the making of video as well as bandwidth and storage so easy and affordable, interviewees see multimedia playing an increasingly prominent role in learning.

With a couple of mentions each, just-in-time learning and return on investment fill out the ten subjects. Both of these may sound somewhat old hat, but the interviewees make the point that technology has finally evolved to the point where it can truly support just-in-time learning, and ROI has only gotten more important with the current economy.

How do these ten areas match with what you’re watching on the learning front?

The Interviewees

I want to thank all the interviewees (listed alphabetically by company name) for taking time to talk with Jeff or me.

Celisa