It has been a while since the last blog post,  sorry!

Many people will know that we have a set up an innovative project with the computer games art degree at Norwich University College of the Arts. In the current academic year we have decided to build on the success of the first year and run a series of student workshops.

In November we held the first workshop called building a game in a day. We are currently developing a series of lone worker protection courses and decided to use a real-life brief with the students. They had to develop the story, narrative, learning objectives and decide upon the audience for their resource before spending the afternoon building a sample module.

At the end of the day each of the student groups has to present their finished game module and also their documentation. I was hugely impressed with the manner in which the students took to the challenge. Some of the game ideas and concepts that were presented were excellent and could easily be used in a commercial project.

To support the students I enlisted the help of Sam, George and Shaun (last year’s work placement students) who provided expert software and also offered a critical eye. Anthony and I provided commercial and project management advice and an insight into what potential clients might be looking for.

The workshop was a great success with 10 excellent game modules being developed, with one group producing 4 example games. From my perspective it was interesting to see how the games design students pushed the software and also came up with new concepts and ideas that we might not have thought of. We are continuing to use computer games designers on our elearning projects and this workshop only helped to re-inforce my belief that they make an excellent addition to our team.

It was interesting to view the different creative processes that each of the groups had. We provided some rough timings and ideas but it was largely left to the students to organise themselves and their time. It was interesting to see how they all started to sketch out design ideas and process flow maps for how the game might work. It is clear to me that game design and instructional design share many principles and once we had introduced the students to the concept of learning objectives they were able to incorporate them into their design.

In December I was able to share my thoughts on the workshop with members of the Association of Learning Technology and the eLearning network during a webinar on serious games that I was presenting.

For more information on the workshop you can read an article that was featured in the Norwich evening news.

Scott

40 apps in 40 minutes

For the latest Norfolk e-learning forum I decided that we should run a session on open source and free software tools. There are so many well known open source and free tools in use such as Moodle and WordPress that setting up the session was a challenge.

I settled on 40 applications in 40 minutes. A whirlwind tour of 40 of our favourite free applications that would hopefully offer something for everyone! I had a list of personal favourites that I needed to add to and spent a few afternoons searching the web for some new additions. After only a few hours I was amazed and the sheer number of free apps and also the quality of the apps. One of the first new apps I found was the awesome highlighter, a brilliant website that lets you mark up and highlight a website – allowing you to copy & paste, save the link and share with colleagues. A really simple idea with so many applications, you can use it in the classroom, presentations theatre or during development meetings.

40 in 40 was pretty fast paced and there wasn’t much time to look at anything in detail other than a couple of videos that I created in xtranormal and animoto to show what was possible.

The response to the session has been great with several people adding their own applications to the list and more commenting that they didn’t realise how many of these apps were available on the internet.

During the session I worked on the basis that if you didn’t like an app or wouldn’t find it useful there was another coming in less than a minute! We published the list on the real projects website alongside our other resources.

My top 3 are

• Awesome highlighter
• Xtranormal
• Animoto

There are so many ways in which you can use the applications and it was great to listen in on some of the discussions afterwards. I’ve seen xtranormal used an an online icebreaker, animation software, for product demonstrations, adverts and for teaching! The awesome highlighter can be used by the web designer and client or the teacher in class.

As I come across more I’ll add them to the list!

You get together practitioners, vendors, suppliers, buyers and users to ask them what they want!

It was at the elearning network event on Friday 25th September that this took place. New Models for Learning Management had a number of interesting speakers with the highlight being an interactive session led by Barry Sampson and Matt Brewer.

Mike and Barry suggested looking at 4 key areas to define what learners and organisations actually want. They were:

• IT
• Learning & Development/HR
• Learners
• Management

After splitting the delegates into 4 groups Barry and Mike assigned each group a role and asked them to define the ideal requirement for their role. The following discussion and specification was excellent with some great ideas coming forward with the key themes being a need to focus on the requirements of the learner.

With each group having defined their ideal requirements there was a group discussion where the outcomes were discussed. With each group coming up with close to 50 requirements the subsequent LMS could well be getting near perfection!

Barry Sampson from the elearning network has taken all of the group outputs and will be creating a specification document/mind map that will be available on the elearning network website.

I was sat with 2 delegates who were looking to procure Learning Management System and this document could save them both a lot of work!

The session proved the clear benefit in getting together all of the stakeholders and user groups before building any session. If I refer back to my IT degree and more recently my PRINCE 2 course getting together all of the stakeholders is seen an integral part of the design of any system.

The size and scale of Learning Management Systems means that a custom approach is out of the reach of some organisations but it was surprising to note that some of the more basic requirements were not being covered by the LMS market. The increasing use of social media, online learning and informal learning will make it harder for Learning Management Systems to provide what learners actually need unless they can adapt.

This was a great session, we may have found the answer to how to specify the perfect Learning Management System but the key message for delegates to take home was whatever you are designing you need to get the views and opinions and everyone who is going to be affected. Always remember who you are designing for!

One hour or 60 minutes or 3600 seconds, the hour is the standard by which elearning development costs appear to be measured. I’ve read with interest several blog posts about development cost per hour but what exactly is an hour of elearning and how is it measured?

In an industry it is valuable to have a benchmark or standard against which price and quality comparisons can be made but with the advances in technology and the range of development tools available is the hour still relevant?

We read and are told that learners work at different speeds at different times and in different ways yet the one hour matrix is readily applied. I’m interested in what constitutes the hour? Is it the time the learner uses the course? Are we using an average? For the development company is it number of screens x number of minutes? I’m not sure of the answer but I’m conscious that as we deliver on different platforms in different modes to an ever wider learner group that an hour used as a standard could be misleading if it’s not applied consistently and everyone knows how it is measured.

Often I read a blog post about company x who are paying £ 000’s for an hour of elearning and want to know whether it represents value. I don’t think that you can make an accurate assessment without knowing more information including the full details of what the developer is being asked to do. Development time using Rapid tools is widely regarded as being less than custom work and its only when you factor in all of the development tasks only then can you start to make an assessment.

In a creative industry like e-learning benchmarking costs will always be a challenging task but perhaps it’s time to think about a basic formula that will provide a base for suppliers and developers to work from.

In addition to writing the blog, tweeting and providing resources for other websites we follow several blogs. I thought that it would be a good time to share them.

The Rapid e-learning blog

This is the articulate tool blog providing useful tips for using a range of development tools, not just Articulate.

Games Can Teach

We have only recently come across this blog. It is a very interesting resource with lots of links to educational games, ideas and research.

Clive On Learning

Clive Shepherd is the Chairman of the elearning network and a passionate adovate of elearning and learning technology. His presentation at Learning Technologies last year was one of my highlights.

Cakes:Learning Technology Blog

Interesting blog from the Learning Technology Team at Edge Hill University

elearninglearning

The blog with all the elearning blogs from Tony Karrer in the US. Some great blogs and articles on this site.

TechCrunch

Techie blog posts from tech crunch. This link will take you to the top 32 iphone apps from Japan.

Please comment on any good blogs that you have come across.

I’ve have just finished reading a book at the British Cycling team and their meteoric rise over the past 10 years. As a keen cyclist the book provides a number of insights into how the team operated. There is one section in particular that raised a number of questions.

Sir Chris Hoy started to compete in an event called the Keirin several years ago when the Kilo event was removed from the Olympics. For those of you who have caught a bit of track cycling on the TV it’s the one where they all ride behind a motorbike at increasingly high speeds. The cycling aficionados amongst you will know that Keirin originates from Japan and is remains hugely popular. Kieran riders earn vast sums and enjoy celebrity status due to the massive amounts that are bet on the outcome of races. Increasingly overseas riders saw the money on offer and wanted to compete in Japan, to date without a great deal of success. Before any overseas rider can compete in a Japanese event they have to undertake a rigorous 2 week training camp, where one of the tasks involves taking a bike to pieces without dropping a tool and re-assembling it in a set order.

At the end of the 2 week course there is a test. Pass the test and you can ride in events, fail and you can’t. Simple.

It was the test aspect of the course that interested me the most. One of the cyclists commented on the monotony of the course and the sheer basic nature of the course content…but…he remained ‘switched on’ at all times as if you didn’t pass the test you couldn’t ride. The rider attended all of the sessions, took everything on board, put up with the monotony to ensure that he was ready for the test. He took the test, passed and rode in events.

Reading this particular chapter really made me think of all the courses where the qualification is vital to future success and progress but the learning experience is often disappointing for those involved. I’ve spoken to my friends who have attended courses that have not been challenging and focused purely on getting the badge. I’ve also got my own experience to share. Over 5 years ago I took my PRINCE 2 exams; the first 2 days pretty much consisted of highlighting pages from the course book. I was somewhat disillusioned by this and in the revision periods at the end of the day I actually tried to gain a deeper understanding of what the course was about. It was only at the first multiple choice exam that I realised what I was being prepared for. Each of the sections I had highlighted had been linked to potential answers in the multiple choice exam. Once this was passed the whole teaching style changed as we approached an open book written exam. I’d not thought about this course until after I’d finished reading the Keirin chapter and it all came back to me!

The BBC website is carrying a feature on PowerPoint. It’s 25 this month if you didn’t realise! The author of the article details some of the problems with presentations and some of the common mistakes that people make.

If you are interested in presentations and improving your slides, regardless of what tool you use then I suggest that you take a look at these 2 websites.

http://www.presentationzen.com/

I first came across the book a few years ago and it changed the way that I thought about presentations. I’ve recommended the book to lots of colleagues and have had to re-order as we keep giving away our office copy to clients and friends. The website is well supported by a range of videos that provide an insight into the presentation zen style. The author is Garr Reynolds, a designer who has worked in the US and Japan and he advocates the use of strong imagery and a single key message. The book shows several iterations of the same slide to show how simple design changes can dramatically alter the power of a slide.

We have used the presentation zen style on a few occasions. It is hard to get right and I don’t think we’ve mastered the art but it certainly improved the quality of our presentations.

http://prezi.com/

Visit the prezi website and view the 1 minute video to find out how it works in detail. The basic idea its like using one big canvas that you can move around all areas of the canvas, linking objects and delving into specific areas.

http://prezi.com/w79q1epfl27s/view/ - is an example using emerging technology.

Is PowerPoint really the problem? Surely the issue is how we decide to use the tool? We should be thinking about how porly constructed PowerPoint files are now being transformed into e-learning content using Rapid Development tools. The tools are not the issue it is the content that is being used to create the courses. Rapid tools have an important place in the e-learning sector for developers and internal teams but we need to make sure that we are getting the learning design right.

Before the internet explosion and during the birth of CBT and e-learning roles were much easier to define. I worked in several e-learning development teams that consisted of

Researcher, Programmer/Author, graphic design, technical person, intstructional designer

over time the roles began to blur, the number of people required for each skill changed, programmers learnt photoshop and graphic designers learnt HTML and basic code and this led to much more flexibility, a good thing!

So has the same thing happened in Instructional design, its a term that I still hear but I’m not sure that I know what it means any more. Social media, interactive media, CD-Rom, web, podcasts, sim, games are just a few of the learning technologies that we are working with - I’ve not even mentioned iPhone! Maybe the job title is the same but the role and skills that are required have changed substantially. The instructional designer role is now much of an interactive designer, applying their thoughts, ideas and skills to a range of interactive media. At Real Projects we’ve thrown another set of skills in by using games designers on e-learning projects who bring a whole raft of new ideas and skills including Game Theory..

I’m never comfortable with the idea of keeping people firmly in their role, agile development and the rapid pace of technological changes means that was as well as being an expert in your field you need to have an understanding of what is happening in all the other development areas. Its no use putting forward a design that won’t work technically or isn’t making use of the amazing new technology that is out there. Check out PaperVision for an example. In our office we regularly exchange websites, articles and videos that we’ve seen to others in the team and everyday we seem to find something new.

What next for the instructional designer? I think they still have a vital role to play but the composition of what’s needed is going to change. They are going to need to be able to work on a range of media taking a little bit from game design, graphic design, instructional design and learning design. They could be the members of your team that actually being everything together.

I might be missing something here but after spending the last 15 years working in e-learning and new media it is still far more common to have a conversation about accessibility when talking to a client about a website than a piece of e-learning. Website design has made great strides in supporting usbaility standards, although it still has work to do. With all the different platforms, browsers and technologies it is difficult to achieve complete standards compliance but it does appear to be a common theme in the web design areas. Within e-learning its just doesn’t seem to have the same importance at the moment.

We have worked with e-learning teams where we have created levels of content to provide as much access as possible. NCSL is a fine example of an organisation that has a really clear set of guidelines for developers that includes their position on accesible content. These guidelines help everyone involved are opened up for developers to suggest improvements and also to challenge.

I’m sure that accesibility is a consideration for lots of learning providers, developers and trainers but it doesn’t seem to have the same weight within e-learning. A simple google search saw these results for the term accesiibility e-learning (7,280,000 results) website accessibility (64,500,000) - quite a difference. There are clearly a number of practitioners and researchers carrying out a great deal of work in this area and my google search is hardly a thorough piece of research but I did find the numbers interesting. I’ve got lots of friends and colleagues in the industry who are looking at accessibility but does the industry really discuss what’s needed?

Has the time come for the e-learning industry to look a set of standards relating to accessibility for e-learning design could help? A set of design standards and good practice might also bring some balance to the tender process where so much of the evaluation process is based on price. I know that lots of e-learning practitioners are carrying out great work in this area but isn’t time we all come together?

Thoughts?

During my web searches I found several interesting links and articles:

http://www.skillsforaccess.org.uk/

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearningpedagogy.aspx

http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue51/ball-rvw/