I recently had the opportunity to attend a mobile learning seminar hosted by CSTD here in Toronto. The key note speaker was Dr. Mohammad Alley from Athabasca University. Dr. Alley is recognized as a world visionary when it comes to Mobile Learning. He talked about what is going on around the world with regards to mobile learning. He did go to great lengths to point out that the US and Canada are very behind the rest of the world when it comes to mLearning. He spent a great deal of time discussing his speaking engagements around the world and what boards he sits on. I was a bit disappointed more time was not spent on the state of the technology and the development tools. Theory is great but at some point the rubber has to hit the road. I am glad to see that our CellCast technology solution is light years ahead of what is being used in the industry both in Canada and around the world. Dr. Alley was not familiar with our solution his grad students from George Brown College were very interested in learning more about real solutions. Dr. Alley did share the following YouTube video showing the potential of mobile technology. This was a speech that was delivered at TED during their annual symposium on the sixth sense. I hope that you will be as excited about this as I am.

In my previous post, I looked at how professional skills are acquired after many hours of background research and practice. Which often requires hours upon hours of learning delivery. But let’s focus on what Corporate Executives are demanding of their workforce. They have hired the new employee, assuming that those hours have been logged and the primary skills have been acquired…for the most part.  Now you are on the payroll.  They need to provide you with JIT/JET education for the pressing business needs…..new products, new services, new alerts, new processes, new opportunities, etc. If they can do this successfully, and better than their competition, my business will be differentiated going forward.  With everyone competing for everything, everywhere, all the time, organizations must adapt their rapid learning strategies. Rapid is not only about how fast you get the information out, but more importantly, how fast does your employee/customer learn, implement, and change their behavior to address the new business need. How fast are your new employees oriented and approaching 80% effectiveness? How do we shrink your orientation results from 8 weeks to 4 weeks? How fast does your retail reps address customer concerns over new product launches. Post-launch, how fast do you alter/improve your training when the field tells you that the new training modules are not addressing the issues/challenges arising with the customers? 24 hours? 1 week? More? I would suggest you start making these kinds of commitments to your internal business partners to ensure that the training function is accountable for truncating the learning cycle down and creating an UBER-competitive asset for the organization.

Rapid eLearning – Let’s stop talking only about authoring. Let’s get our internal learning teams to start talking about total cost of ownership; speed of collaboration; access to learning by multiple stakeholders in parallel processes prior to course launch; speed of learning design. Today, a blended rapid learning strategy involves eLearning, discussion forums, blogs, video-casts, audio-casts, mentor availability and so much more. This all needs to happen with systems and governance. If it does, we can actually measure the results and focus on continuous improvement.

Spend your money wisely. Rapid learning is about systems, processes, a governance model, and instructional technique. The authoring tool is just an ‘enabler’. It is more of a paradigm SHIFT in learning versus a discussion about a particular medium or tool.

For eLearning, find out what the learner group needs now, deliver it rapidly in an educational and fun way, and determine when the learning modules have outlived their usefulness.  Store all of the learning assets centrally, maintain version control, seek collaboration with as many relevant subject matter experts as possible and continuously improve. You can do all of this and fast. Reducing costs and improving learning delivery. Find the right systems and put the processes in place.

“Learning at the speed of change” is a reference to the fact that change is the only constant and the speed of change is increasing. The speed with which an organization learns collectively and individually will determine their fate in the coming years.  Information overload is only going to get worse for everyone. We need to find a way to ensure that our focus in learning is on two things: quality of communications and our ability to extract value from massive amounts of information. Learning is not so much about pouring massive amounts of information into our brains all at once. It is about optimizing our social/professional networks and accessing new information JIT/JET – Just-in-time/Just-enough.

A Google search on the keywords “rapid eLearning” will offer up all kinds of forums and vendors discussing the relative merits of authoring software. Corporations have been discussing the JIT/JET approach to learning for decades. Why? Because, if it is done effectively, it provides for the best training ROI. It has been discussed and debated over and over at corporate education industry events for years. Yet, very few organizations can boast that an effective rapid learning strategy exists. Microsoft has decided to implement Microsoft Academy Mobile as an answers to their global sales training challenges. “Crowd source” the best learning content and make it available in a media rich social networking infrastructure. It is real-time sharing of client solutions, overcoming challenges, new products bundles, etc.   Effectively, rapid learning in a JIT/JET model. Whether it is canned elearning, traditional classroom, virtual classrooms, discussion board, life experience and so on, most of us learn best if the learning happens when we are most ready for it, and in manageable bite-sized morsels, or ‘coursels’ as some industry folks are calling it.

Does your learning strategy incorporate enough focus on innovative tactics for training people JIT/JET? I often find that many academics frown at the simplicity of concept. Yet the Gen Y’ers are demanding only a JIT/JET learning strategy and have very little patience for the information dump that occurs in sessions that last much longer than 20 minutes.  They want to know, what they need to know, as they recognize the need to know it.  Get it?

In my next post I’ll explore the practice of rapid eLearning and how, properly implemented, it can revolutionize how virtual learning is delivered.

We here at MindMuze we are really excited about a new web-based authoring system called Shift being added to our repertoire of tools.  It represents a real departure from the traditional client-based applications because it allows anyone to create an eLearning course. And I mean anyone! Basically, if you can use Powerpoint, you can use Shift.

It really is an amazing piece of technology. It lets you create completely professional content. You can create drafts, and reviewers can add comments right in the learning materials, where they can be aggregated with other comments. It can therefore be as collaborative and interactive as you like. It also includes a powerful gallery of content templates that cover everything from straightforward presentations to complex scenarios and software simulations.

We recently used Shift to put together a special H1N1 awareness package. Our clients were stunned by how quickly we were able to put it together — it went online during the first wave of news reports, when people were only just hearing of H1N1 and few people yet knew what to do about it. As a public service, we quickly began offering the course as a free download (it’s still available), all thanks to this amazing system.

And if we were able to rush together an eLearning course of such importance in so short a time, imagine how easily it will be for anyone to create similar packages in response to frequently asked questions, even if those questions are constantly changing.

Shift will be officially launched very soon. Having worked with it myself, I can tell you this will be a huge, potentially game-changing event. Stay tuned!

For those of us trying to stay on top of trends in the learning space, consider this: How can you re-purpose the tried, tested and true?

It’s easy for us to get caught up in the really big “2.0 what-a-do” of large scale project implementations, systems integrations and markup languages, but what happens to our brains when we see headway being made by a whiteboard?!

I know that in my head, the light goes on and the words tumble right out… “BUT OF COURSE!”

That was my reaction the first time I watched the Common Craft Show. This dynamic duo (husband and wife) were teaching me about some of the newest tools and trends in web 2.0 by using cut-outs, erasable markers and a whiteboard. Granted, the scripting was perfected and they knew of what they spoke… but seriously, paper cut-outs!?! It’s almost too perfect.

Believe it or not, the CC team didn’t arrive at this magic mix on the first try. Nope. They experimented and experimented some more… falling short a few times here and there. Until finally they decided that laying a whiteboard on the floor would work. And work it did. Now they do custom instructional videos for the likes of Google and Salesforce as well as other big name companies who’ve jumped on the bandwagon. But they haven’t forgotten the secret of the web and still provide a Common Craft branded version of their “101″ videos free to YouTube viewers.

And if you’re ever trying to explain social media to your own customers and want to license a video of theirs, you can. It’s cheap to do and you get the white labeled version.

So the next time you’re wondering about what instructional designs of the future might look like - consider remixing what’s right in front of you first. In many ways, this is the mashup mentality you’ll need to get good at in order to survive the social web revolution.

Writers House, a creative community of writers and thinkers that opened in the fall at Rutgers University, is pioneering new forms of writing for the tech-savvy generation.

This is just the latest in new learning best practices moving into prominent academic circles. This isn’t just an incorporation of the latest “2.0″ trends. To quote Richard Miller, chairman of the university’s English department, “Writers House seeks to foster the kind of complex thought that is believed to be missing in modern communications on social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, or on YouTube.”

It’s this writer’s opinion that a shift is seemingly happening once more in the leader-follower relationship between the corporate world and academia. Whereas historically academia was charged with research projects that dictated the next generation of best practices in the business world, the last decade marked a change of pace where businesses took to technology much faster than academia could test, evaluate and make recommendations.

Now it seems that academia is once again emerging as the thought leader we’ve always held it to be. While marketers and learning organizations scramble to get with the latest trends, academic projects are being built using the same tools, but with a definitive purpose - in this case providing a modern means to reading and writing. Inevitably this will lead to better learning.

1,800 courses online in 11 months. All in a days work.

In February 2007, MIT went on the record and said that 1,800 courses at the university would be online by 2008. This was a truly remarkable statement considering the amount of knowledge and clout inherent in MIT’s curriculum.

While the push began in 2001, as an Open CourseWare Programme, the premise was that this information was best served free (with obvious provisions against commercial re-use).

Now, in April 2008, more than 1,800 courses are online and available for download - the entire MIT course database. Everything from student work to lecture notes.

Welcome to a time when learning should, and will be, democratized.