Learning Blended Learning

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In general terms (and few words), Blended Learning is defined as the combination of traditional face-to-face classroom methods with more modern computer-mediated activities.

Though we may look at blended learning strategies for a variety of primary reasons (from improving the effectiveness of your training initiatives to optimizing costs, to leveraging the synergy of multiple training actors in a community or organization), we all agree that a full blended approach to training is the key to success in every organization addressing change management at any level.
A blended approach guarantees that the right people have access to the right piece of knowledge anytime anywhere, regardless their role in the organization (both internal and external), their duties, their working time and location, the technology they can access.
In a blended approach, assuring consistency of learning content design is key to an effective definition, transfer, assessment and certification of the appropriate learning objectives and outcomes. Classroom-Based (Instructor-Led) Training initiatives cannot be addressed separately from online training and eLearning project without losing a great opportunity to boost the effectiveness of your training processes, and keeping costs for both content production and training delivery significantly higher.

In short, a full blended approach has key advantages for those organizations that need to dramatically reduce the costs and time for creating and maintaining Training materials across several delivery mechanisms and a mixed network of Authors (SMEs, IDs, Trainers).
At the same time, it allows implementing effective Web-Based Training initiatives while still keeping (and improving) Instructor-Led Training initiatives in parallel.

Nowadays, high end authoring tools and learning content management solutions propose, as part of their offering, modules and features that support the production of multiple output materials from one and the same set of source documentation, all produced across one and the same publishing process. This is what we use to call “single source – multiple output” approach.

“Single source – multiple output” approach is needed to those organizations having needs such as:

• reducing the overall investment of the organization in training initiatives, maintaining the effectiveness of the related publishing processes
• leveraging the actual skills of the different actors involved in the above mentioned processes (“SMEs are subject matter experts, IDs and Trainers are instructional and training experts, not the other way around!”)
• building and maintaining a central knowledge hub from which contents may distributed through different channels in an effective and durable way
• as a matter of fact, maximize the re-usability of their contents – see my other post on re-usability of content.

“I don’t want to write, review, translate, and repurpose the same content multiple times!”

In short, a well designed “single source – multiple output” publishing process enables fully blended learning at a reasonable cost.

If the eLearning market had seen in ADL SCORM or IMS Common Cartridge its reference standards, the publishing market has identified in DITA (the Darwin Information Typing Architecture, an XML-based standard introduced by IBM and now maintained by OASIS) the standard modality to structure documentation in a way that “single source – multiple output” can become reality and traditional publishing mechanisms can be kept intact, though extending their scope to also address new media and new distribution channels.

The key component of DITA is its Topics-based authoring paradigm. Indeed, content can be structured into self-standing information chunks, each chunk (or “Topic”, in DITA terms) being the smallest piece of information that can stand for its own. This is possible because every chunk (“Topic”) is organized around a single subject. The length of a Topic may vary from a single short sentence (or word, or image) to a whole paragraph or chapter.

A second key aspect of DITA is its ability to be extended (“specialized”) to cover at best the semantic needs of a specific discipline. DITA specializations already exist for a variety of disciplines including, of course Learning and Training Content (L&TC).

To get an idea of what DITA is all about, you may check the DITA World website, collecting a comprehensive list of DITA resources (articles, vendors, user groups and more).

We plan to address DITA in further posts. Among them:

What happens when DITA meets SCORM? Happy end?

Stay tuned!

The Future of Learning: Preparing for Change.

Some time ago I was involved in a foresight study entitled “The Future of Learning: new ways to learn new skills for future jobs”. The study, launched by the European Commission, aimed at developing visions and scenarios on new ways to acquire skills and competences in Europe in 2020-2030. The following dimensions were mainly addressed:

1. Emergent skills and competences associated with future jobs
2. New ways and practices of acquiring knowledge, skills and competences
3. Associated changes in the roles of the participants in the learning process, i.e. learners and teachers
4. Implications for existing Education and Training institutions, systems and policy frameworks
5. The role of information and communication technologies in transforming and supporting creative and innovative learning
6. Changes and challenges to assessment, certification and accreditation
7. Implications of the envisaged changes for present policy action and support

The study was conducted by a group of researchers from the European Commission Institute for Prospective Technology Studies (IPTS) in Seville, the TNO (the applied research and technology organisation of the Netherlands), the Open University of the Netherlands and AtticMedia (a specialist learning communications agency from London), and a set of domain experts were involved from different disciplines and organizations, which were asked their contribution to the vision building process based on the “group concept mapping” (GCM) method.

The study, recently published by the IPTS, is worth reading and now available for download.

The report aims to identify, understand and visualise major changes to learning in the future. It developed a descriptive vision of the future, based on existing trends and drivers, and a normative vision outlining how future learning opportunities should be developed to contribute to social cohesion, socio-economic inclusion and economic growth.

The overall vision is that personalisation, collaboration and informalisation (informal learning) are at the core of learning in the future. These terms are not new in education and training but will have to become the central guiding principle for organising learning and teaching in the future. The central learning paradigm is thereby characterised by lifelong and life-wide learning, shaped by the ubiquity of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). At the same time, due to fast advances in technology and structural changes to European labour markets that are related to demographic change, globalisation and immigration, generic and transversal skills become more important, which support citizens in becoming lifelong learners who flexibly respond to change, are able to pro-actively develop their competences and thrive in collaborative learning and working environments.

Many of the changes depicted have been foreseen for some time but they now come together in such a way that is becomes urgent and pressing for policymakers to consider them and to propose and implement a fundamental shift in the learning paradigm for the 21st century digital world and economy. To reach the goals of personalised, collaborative and informalised learning, holistic changes need to be made (curricula, pedagogies, assessment, leadership, teacher training, etc.) and mechanisms need to be put in place which make flexible and targeted lifelong learning a reality and support the recognition of informally acquired skills.

You will especially appreciate the way the EU challenges for future learning policies have been described through a set of “user personas”, and in particular:

• Chanta, the 6 year old child of Cambodian immigrants who came to Poitiers (France) in 2023
• Bruno, who lives in Milan (Italy) and is in the 9th grade of a public school
• Emma, a 17-year-old girl who lives in Munich (Germany) and is in her last year of high school
• Joshua, a young man form suburban England who finished his three-year vocational training programme for hotel industry and who is now strugging to find a job
• Sven, a 42-year-old father who lives in the Swedish town of Katrineholm and lost his job when the car factory he worked for closed in 2014
• Martina, now 59, highly qualified and specialized programmer from Prague (Czech Republic) whose skills became obsolete because of the rapid rise of quantum computing and neural self-correcting networks

All these personas have something in common: there seems to be no place for them in their surrounding labour market.

How can they improve their skills and get ready for new professional challenges?
A quick and effective answer can be found in a set of videos produced as part of the study and now available on YouTube.

And you? What do you think will be the challenges of learning in 2020 and beyond?

From usability to re-usability: effective learning content design

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Considering the time and effort spent by experts to create effective educational content, reusing content would be prudent for eLearning. Institutions could spend time on improving or localizing existing modules. Organisations spend (and spent!) millions of dollars in producing and managing knowledge among their individuals and groups. Although each investment if often covered by a dedicated budget allocation, there is usually a great benefit in reusing the output of such investment for further initiatives related to training, knowledge distribution, marketing.

IEEE defines reusability as: “the ability of a component to function and integrate outside the environment for which it was primarily designed.”

In order to maximise the reusability of your learning content, you should be able to structure it in single, independent, small-enough pieces of content. From a pedagogical and publishing perspective this is something we typically name “learning unit”, “unit of learning”, “learning object“, “content item” and such (eLearning gurus call those units of content “SCOs”, Shareable Content Objects, meaning that they should be self-contained and self-consistent units of content that can easily be shared across different courses).

This may have an impact on both pedagogy and technology.

From a pedagogical perspective, assuming that the scope of the e-learning module is primarily knowledge acquisition, a SCO should address a consistent set of learning objectives. The “design” phase of the learning content production process covers a relevant part of the overall investment. During this phase, it is important to start the conception of each learning unit having clear in mind which are the learning objectives that should be supported by each activity, at every level of granularity. This will help designing learning objects which are consistent and effective, having the marvelous ability to convey a measurable learning outcome. There are a variety of methodological patterns and tools that can be used to correctly define the learning objectives of a learning unit. Among them, “Bloom’s taxonomy” addresses the learning objectives definition through six cognitive domains (we suggest adopting the taxonomy revision done by Anderson & Krathwohl in 2001, which renames the six categories through the verbs Remembering, Understanding, Applying, Analysing, Evaluating, Creating).

Producing an effective eLearning offering means addressing extensively and consistently each of the above mentioned levels of human cognition, guiding trainees through the learning path that will help them to collect from their life experiences some examples of the new knowledge being acquired, and combine them to generate new patterns of knowledge (sorry, I am afraid we do not have enough time here to mention Lev Vygotsky‘s thoughts on creativity, but I promise there will be a dedicated blog entry soon!).

Thus, a correct definition of the learning objectives has a strong impact on learners (the target users of our learning units). A learner consuming a Learning Object should be able to achieve the declared learning outcomes by consuming the content item itself. This does not necessarily mean that additional external resources or referenced materials should not be used within the scope of a Learning Object (in SCORM terms, a SCO). Instructional Designers are always encouraged to provide drill-down materials to reinforce the learning process. But whatever material not strictly included (“embedded”) in a SCO should not be a mandatory component of the Learning Object, meaning that learners should be able to achieve the declared learning outcomes even in case they cannot access (“reach”) the additional material (“resource”, or “asset”).

Now, using terms such as “embedded” or “reachable” we immediately fall within the realm of technology. Indeed, from a technological perspective a self-consistent SCO is meant to be accessible in its entirety under the conditions in which the SCO itself is meant to be consumed (an intranet, a Learning Management System, the whole Internet).

A strict interpretation of this principle may be phrased as in the following:

…when designing a web-based learning unit, you should not reference external materials (e.g. through an absolute URL) unless you are sure that the URL will always be reachable.

This means for instance that no learning material will ever change or become unreliable, but also that relevant URLs will not require a specific authentication to be accessed, or will not be firewall-protected.

Nonetheless, a correct interpretation of this principle should take into account the actual context in which eLearning is being delivered. For instance, let us assume that I am commissioned a learning unit to be delivered to the employees of my company, and they are supposed to consume their eLearning path mainly (even solely) from within the company intranet. Am I supposed to include as mandatory learning resource a document that employees can reach at any time from within their intranet settings? Shall I decide to do so, will the fact that the URL will not be accessible on the internet (as well as by intranet users without the needed privileges) be an issue in the end?

To summarise (and, at some extent, to over-simplify), if we want to achieve an acceptable level of reusability for our learning content, we should have a clear, upfront definition of the target learning goals, and carefully define how our learning content strategy may help reaching them.

Those of you that are currently in the selection or adoption process for a learning content authoring and management tool should pay very much attention to its ability to support them in expressing and structuring the learning objectives first. All in all, the design of an effective learning offering starts from there.

Cooking videos that work for everybody

While someone still wonders how to get started with mLearning, a good old friend of mine was recently struggling with much more tangible and (sadly enough) trivial concerns as witnessed in the following lines:

Believe me. I spent no less than three days trying to have a bl***y mp4 video showing up in that sh***y tablet. Three crazy days, myself and a couple of colleagues unable to get it running on screen!

Actually, if you could read the whole story, you would see that in the end he found his way through the impenetrable jungle of video resolutions, framerate, codex, and such amenities. He was doing actually ok since he found a few good and effective video conversion tools, among which you might want to try Avidemux, a free video editor designed for simple cutting, filtering and encoding tasks.

More in general, the pain came when he had tried to embed the right video, in the right format, with the right HTML code that could work on each of the devices to be supported (along with their embedded web browser). And here, to be honest, I could kind of feel his own frustration.

Indeed, if you limit your needs to flash-enabled devices, you can actually sort this out by carefully selecting and integrating one of the several JS and flash-based video players available out there. But even valuable simplification attempts could not make him feel better. The multidimensional matrix of video formats, flash player options and HTML5 compatible-browsers were just too much for him. In the end, he gave up.

This is where I decided to step in, try to get just a little bit further and look at how others were making do with that.

Did I sort it our in the end? Of course no, but I’ve been surfing the web for a while, and happened to see this “vid.ly” upcoming service (still in beta as per now) by a company named encoding.com. Encoding.com markets itself as “the leading global provider of studio-class video services for websites offering user-generated and premium video”.

Besides being presented as the emerging actor in the battle between Google, Microsoft and others over the future of HTML5 video standards, this new service looks very interesting. They say vid.ly seamlessly allows playing the same video on the five major desktop browsers (Chrome, Firefox, IE, Opera and Safari),  mobile devices such as the iPhone, Android and BlackBerry (but also Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Samsung), and a bunch of gaming devices sich as Nintendo DS, Wii and PSP.

All in all, the vid.ly service actually looks smart and promising. Their reaction time to my beta activation code request was almost immediate.

If you read through their website, you can see that Vid.ly mostly deliver, out of the original video format, the right “conversion” format for each device attempting to access the video.

When a user visits a vid.ly url we automatically detect the device or browser type and deliver the correctly formatted video from a high quality CDN network.

The conversion is done as soon as your original video format gets uploaded, At that same time, a new unique vid.ly URL is sent to you via email together with a bunch of embedding options. Among which, of course, the ready-made <video> HTML5 embed script, such as the one that you can see below:

<video id="vidly-video" controls="controls" width="640" height="390">
	<source src="http://vid.ly/3e7r1e?content=video" />
	<script id="vidjs" language="javascript"
	 src="http://m.vid.ly/js/html5.js"></script>
</video>

Support for legacy Flash players is also available.

Fine. The idea is smart enough. Most probably we will shortly see something similar (maybe vid.ly itself) embedded in YouTube, Vimeo or such, providing flash-free video streaming to every internet user. At vid.ly they even see their service as a potential booster to Twitter and other social networking sites, considering the massively growing use of such services from mobile devices.

What we all need to see, now, is how the vid.ly guys will cope with our daily customers, who expect their mobile packages to be self-consistent to reduce internet traffic on the go and assure content integrity even with bad or no connectivity at all.

I asked the same question to the vid.ly guys.  Let us see what they will come back with.

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P.S.: It’s just a pity that I could not include the vid.ly video above using their ready made HTML5 code. Unfortunately the WordPress editor does not seem to digest HTML5 tags yet…

Mobile learning is…

Looking for a good definition of “Mobile learning” that could go beyond the catchword “learning on the go”, I finally chose to google for it.

Run a query for “Mobile learning is” and here is a subset of the results.

• Democratic: “Mobile learning is for everyone” (M-learning.org)
• Optimistic: “Mobile learning is good” (mobileben.wordpress.com)
• Irreproachable: “Mobile learning is any sort of learning that happens when the learner is not at a fixed, predetermined location” (WP4 report from the “MOBIlearn” project)
• Techy: “Mobile learning is learning that happens when the learner takes advantage of the learning opportunities offered by mobile technologies” (same MOBIlearn report, few lines later)

Learning outside the box

A few days ago, someone asked me: how would you define innovation and creativity?

Though my mind immediately went back to Ed de Bono and his “parallel thinking” thing, I could not refrain from reflecting on how innovation and creativity is addressed nowadays in most schools. I decided to stop when my brain started offering me the following image.

Sunny weather, vintage classroom, tables close to the wall, 32 kids sitting on the floor watching their teacher who bashfully interacts with the brand new digital board exceptionally offered to their school by the local bank.

OK. Besides the catastrophic scenarios of imaginary school settings on the one side, and the excellent “iJokes” by “Les Guignoles” on the other side, we may all agree on the fact that innovation does not necessarily require technology, and giving old stuff a new shape is far from having a creative attitude.

Creativity and innovation require looking at things from a different angle. A consciously directed thought process in which individuals change and combine ideas in specific social conditions, with the clear aim of producing innovation.

In other words, rather than trying to define what “creativity and innovation” are, we should focus our attention on how creativity may help us producing innovation.

How may this drive learning and education strategies? For those who care we suggest having a look at the manifesto of EU’s creativity and innovation year (2009).

Ladies and gentlemen, the invisible man!

Here we go.

The parrotScience WordPress account was created a while ago, it’s now time to fill it in with some entry.

I’m not saying I will write anything special or fun, just needed a place to keep track of new ideas, experiences or just thoughts. Now, is a blog the right way to do so? I don’t know. I’ve been using wikis for quite some time now, and I must admin they are great when you have some knowledge to store and share. You update your articles as soon as something new happens or tweak and tune them whenever you have some spare time.

But blogs have a sort of forcing function that makes them unique. A blog requires you to freeze your thought in a few lines. It naturally combines your texts with comments by others. And it does not require you to know everything about the subject you are addressing. Your contract with readers is extremely loose: this is my instant thought, right here and right now. Take it or leave it.

The issue is: will you find the time to write a few lines in your blog once in a while? Once a week maybe? Or once a month? Even every third month… come on, 4 posts a year is not much of a burden!

So… will it work? Who knows.

As per now, what really matters is this post. Next months will tell us whether the experiment worked. If not, it will be just another son of the invisible man around the corner…