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!

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…