Community of practice ffor the Learning Organization

At the Australian eLearning Congress in Sydney, Associate Professor Philip Uys, Director Strategic Learning and Teaching, Charles Sturt University, mentioned communities of practice.

Yammer for the Learning Organization

At the Australian eLearning Congress in Sydney, Associate Professor Philip Uys, Director Strategic Learning and Teaching, Charles Sturt University, mentioned CSU has an active Yammer community, discussing how to do university education better.

Design thinking

At the Australian eLearning Congress in Sydney, Cathie Howe, Game Design Project Manager, Macquarie ICT Innovation Centre, mentioned they are teaching "Design thinking" to teachers. They develop games for education and also use Edmodo to provide a safe social networking forum for students. From a brief look, Edmodo appears to be a more hip looking tool which provides similar features to Mahara and Moodle. Cathie also mentioned use of OpenSimulator for building educational 3D worlds.

Universal Design for Learning

At the Australian eLearning Congress in Sydney, Stephanie Ley, eLeanring Manager at AGL, recommended the Universal Design for Learning materials from CAST. They provide Teacher-Friendly UDL Tools and a Resource Library. CAST developed the Bobby accessibility tool which I used to evaluate the Sydney Olympics web site for the Human Rights Case.

Dokeos Open Source Leaning Management System

At the Australian eLearning Congress in Sydney,Will Ford, e-Learning Content Author at Sony Australia, described how they use the Dokeos Open Source Leaning Management System to provide product training for sales people. They use Flash for content, but he is looking at using HTML5 in the future. The also use Audacity for audio and DAZ Studio for animations. He also uses no-free products, particularly Adobe Creative Studio 5.

Will pointed out that audio and video may cause problems for some students (who may be in a noisy shop on a slow Internet connection), so content should also be provided as text. He also showed a video game developed which had a course test built into it. He commented that while visually enguaging, this provided unpopular with people who were less skilled at video games (so this was used as formative feedback mid course, rather than as the summative assessment).

The 2020 Workplace

Greetings from the Australian eLearning Congress in Sydney. In the opening the book "The 2020 Workplace: How Innovative Companies Attract, Develop, and Keep Tomorrow's Employees Today" (by Jeanne C. Meister) was mentioned.

Work-based Virtual Learning Environment

The last session at the Australian eLearning Congress in Sydney today is by Alison Bickford of Connect Thinking. She is undertaking a PHD at UTS on "Examination of a work-based virtual learning environment: Design and practice implications". I was not sure what a "virtual learning environment" (VLE) was, so I asked and from Alison's answer, it appears these are Learning Management Systems (LMS) and similar, which include social networking tools. That is the environment provides for interaction between the participants, not just a teacher providing content to students.

VLE is a term I was not familiar with and the derivation of it seems curious. It is not clear to me what is "virtual" about the learning environment. An on-line course seems to me to be no more virtual than the content and process of a face to face one (the building the learning takes place in having little to do with what goes on). The term only occurs in papers on Google Scholar about 7,600 times. Only 550 were before the year 2000, 3850 up to 2005.

ps: The Wikipedia did not help as someone has editoed it to say VLE is "shaun the sheep featuring aidan and his doughnouts". ;-)

Reliable Low Bandwidth Video for eLearning

One topic which has come up several times at the Australian eLearning Congress in Sydney is the cost and bandwidth needed for video. Several speakers commented that their corporate networks could not handle video even if their training budget would allow it to be prepared. There are some possible technical solutions to this, with the frame rates of the video being reduced where there is insufficient bandwidth. It also should be possible to use storyboard software to reduce the cost of video production.

e-Learning at Virgin Airlines

Michael Abulencia, e-Learning Technical Developer, at Virgin Australia, discussed the motivations for use of e-Learning. One example he gave was while introducing a new uniform for staff, at they same time they provided training in how to walk (including not running for safety). One motivation for staff is promotion, which can provide them with motivation for undertaking training with a wider view than just how to service one aircraft.

Michael warned about getting sidetracked by hype. He mentioned Gartner's Hype Cycle. Unfortunately, of course, it is very difficult in advance to work out what is hype and what will turn out to be a useful technology. The solution seems simple enough to me: learn from the experience of others (which is why I am at this event).

e-Learning at the Department of Defence

Greetings from the Australian eLearning Congress in Sydney. The first speaker is Scott Mengel, Education Training and Development Officer, Department of Defence. He started by going back through old learning technology, including "magnetic slap-ups" (words on magnetic strips affixed to a metal wall board) and overhead projectors.

Scott warned of too many Powerpoint slides, with too much content. Defence now uses Learning Management Systems, to deliver training. He is going through some of the lessons learned in preparing content and getting out of the face-to-face paradigm.

Scott used the term "glass-book" to refer to an e-learning course which is a simple translation from a textbook. He described the process to transition from this to a more interactive course format. Some of these techniques are simple and seem obvious (in retrospective), such as having a glossary of acronyms hot-linked to the course notes. As well as pure e-learning, Scott discussed blended learning. As he pointed out this is particularly useful in Defence, where it is important that all the personnel are given precisely the same procedures, but then the local instructor can provide extra local information.

Scott pointed out that Defence produces its training packages to Australian vocational standards. At question time I asked about using generic industry vocational training. He replied that some Defence packages are suitable for civilian and military staff.

Scott said that animations are very effective, but can be expensive to make and can make the presentation look cheap. He questioned the cost effectiveness of video in learning packages. He commented that videos were expensive to make and learners tended to skip over them. Also those on a low speed link may not be able to see them. This is something I will discuss tomorrow in my talk "Work-Integrated-Learning with E-books and E-Learning" (and the Slides).

Teaching With Stories

Greetings from the Australian eLearning Congress in Sydney. Chair for the event, Diane Gatto of Performance Leaders of Australia, is giving us a history lesson of e-leaning. She starting with the origins of the computer in WW2 and went through to cloud computing and the iPad. She then related the technology to Bloom's Taxonomy. She pointed out also that telling stories is a useful teaching technique. The notes for my talk "Work-Integrated-Learning with E-books and E-Learning" (and the Slides) tomorrow are available.

Work-Integrated-Learning with E-books and E-Learning

The draft notes for my talk "Work-Integrated-Learning with E-books and E-Learning" (and the Slides) for the Australian eLearning Congress in Sydney, 8 February 2012 are avialable. Please send comments and corrections. Other speakers are from the Department of Defence, KPMG, Sony Australia and Charles Sturt University. My topic is:

• Forming small multi-disciplinary teams of students
• Setting workplace-relevant student tasks
• Delivering course content in tablet-ready format
• Encouraging students to work together on-line

Australian eLearning Congress

I am the first speaker on day two of the Australian eLearning Congress in Sydney, 7 to 9 February 2012. My topic is: "Work-Integrated-Learning with E-books and E-Learning":

• Forming small multi-disciplinary teams of students
• Setting workplace-relevant student tasks
• Delivering course content in tablet-ready format
• Encouraging students to work together on-line

I will be relating my experience of designing and delivering a course in ICT Sustainability using cloud service and eBooks on tablet computers with international graduate level students at the Australian National University and the Australian Computer Society.

About the Congress:

Workforce training is widely recognised as an important force driving business performance. Professionals involved in learning and development are therefore continuously looking for ways to make sure they are delivering the training the organisation needs, and that people want to do and actually learn from. Over the past decade eLearning has become an important feature of the training and learning landscape, because of its time and cost efficiency and flexible way of getting knowledge across to the targeted people. However, the world of eLearning is constantly changing and new technology, more recently mobile and social technology, are being introduced.

This two-day congress will provide you with opportunities to hear timely and topical case studies from organisations who have successfully implemented eLearning and deployed emerging tools and technologies.

You’ll hear about:

• Demonstrating the benefits and ROI of eLearning
• Developing successful strategies for eLearning implementation
• The capabilities of games and mobile and social technology in achieving your objectives
• Leveraging informal and social learning and knowledge sharing
• Engaging learners and creating a culture of continuous learning and development

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Other speakers include:

Scott Mengel, Education Training & Development Officer, Department of Defence; Alan Jephtha, Learning Technologies, KPMG; Will Ford, eLearning Content Author, Sony Australia; Associate Professor, Philip Uys, Director, Strategic Learning and Teaching Services, Charles Sturt University.