Take part in the public’s first glimpse of Bravais [brav-ey]; Xyleme’s new cloud learning solution that allows you to quickly deliver personalized learning applications.

This is a rare opportunity to attend a live webinar with Xyleme’s President & CEO, Mark Hellinger. He will be your guide as you explore everything Bravais.

Along your journey you will find out how Bravais can revolutionize the way your learners access and interact with your learning content by:

• Delivering learning anywhere, anytime, on any device
• Allowing content to be accessed within your learners favorite media channels like, Linkedin, Facebook, and Google+
• Liberating content from your learning management systems to create personalized learning experiences
• Tracking how users consume and interact with your learning content
• And more!

Reserve your spot now – before it’s too late!
 Tuesday February 7, 2012 @ 11:30 MST

What is Bravais?
Bravais is your cloud of learning content upon which you can quickly build personalized learning applications, connecting your students, employees and customers to the content they need, using the apps they prefer, on the devices they choose. Read more…

Congratulations to all of those nominated. It’s an impressive list of bloggers, Tweeters (is that a word?) and other social media leaders who I plan to now read regularly and follow if I’m not already.

This year, our educational podcast library Xyleme Voices was nominated and shortlisted in the category of Best Educational Use of Audio. I’m very honored and thrilled and if you’ll indulge me, I’d like to give a shout-out to our spectacular team here at Xyleme. While I am the host of this library, there are a number of people in the background who put tremendous time, effort, and pride into researching, recruiting, and producing these terrific podcasts.

And of course, what would our podcast series be without our outstanding participants who take the time not only to be interviewed, but always come incredibly prepared. They all understand the impact of these podcasts, and no one takes them lightly. And admittedly, even after more than a year of doing these interviews, I am still incredibly nervous before each podcast.

So, I’d like to close this post by saying a few words about my experience with each of our participants thus far:

Bryan Chapman: I never get tired of working with Bryan. In addition to being incredibly likable, he has this uncanny ability to take complex topics and present them in an understandable and enjoyable way.

Janet Clarey: Smart, insightful, and a great presenter with razor sharp wit. Janet is a true champion for others in the industry and someone I aspire to be more like.

Ruth Clark: Gracious and wonderful to work with. Never underestimate this legend’s power. Within an hour of posting her podcast, she had hundreds of downloads. Even after a year, it’s still being downloaded.

Jay Cross: Has a great perspective on all subjects learning and is a true champion of the training organization. Today, training is undervalued and Jay’s goal is to ensure CLO’s take their true spot in the C-suite – at the top.

Conrad Gottfredson: A great friend and performance support guru. With the emergence of social media, Conrad’s learning at the moment of need has never had greater significance.

Micheal Hanley: Wonderful advocate for open source technologies. He’s passionate about what he believes in and I had a great time engaging in more than one spirited discussion with him.

Lars Hyland: A great guy and incredibly personable. One of the few vendors who understands the importance of making valuable contributions to the learning community rather than just pushing a corporate message.

Harold Jarche: So intelligent, it’s almost intimidating. Harold is not afraid to challenge conventional wisdom and I still repeatedly refer to his ideas and concepts regarding learning networks.

Charles Jennings: What a thrill is was to interview this real-world CLO. His contributions to social learning in the workplace are second to none.

Ann Kwinn: Ann gave some great tips on the virtual classroom that I still use today.

Elliot Masie: A true showman and it comes through in his podcast. Deeply entrenched with learning executives, Elliot gave great insight into how training operates within blue chip companies.

Frank Nyugen: Let me just say this: there are not many people who can describe reusable learning objects with such clarity and make it so interesting.

Clark Quinn: Clark has a real gift for getting to the heart of the matter in a clear and succinct way and I’ve quoted him on numerous occasions. Also, he’s way too modest about the value he brings to training.

Allison Rossett: I think we can all agree that there is no one quite like Allison – smart, funny, and right on the money. I enjoyed our discussion – even when she let her cat join in on the conversation.

Clive Shepherd: One of my favorite podcasts because Clive makes you think hard about the things you take for granted and shows you that there is still massive room for improvement.

Ellen Wagner: Instructional designer extraordinaire! She gets it and taught me a lot about how to create an experience in learning. A great contact that I am grateful to have.

Thank you all and looking forward to another great year of podcasts at Xyleme Voices.

It was a fascinating discussion because it made me realize that we tend to take things like web conferencing for granted and probably don’t dedicate the resources we should to optimize this communication channel.

Clive argues that despite the fact that web conferencing has been around for over 10 years, companies are still in the early stages of effectively utilizing this medium – essentially trying to copy what is done in the real classroom and make it as similar as possible in the virtual classroom. What happens over time Clive states is that we begin to appreciate the unique benefits of the new medium and try to capitalize on them. He gives webinars as an example using the analogy of a conference presentation. During webinars, text chat now becomes a back channel where people discuss, interact and exchange views, contacts and links in a way not possible in a face-to-face event. As a result, we now start to use web conferencing by preference, not just due to economic reasons.

Clive and I ended our discussion with what it takes to facilitate a successful online event and while he gave tremendous advice, one thing struck a real chord with me:

“Accept the fact that it’s likely that your audience will be distracted and work on other tasks if you are not fully engaging them, so you have to work doubly hard to make sure what you present, what you say and the interactions you use make an impact and earn you the audience’s engagement.”

As someone who puts on a fair number of webinars, I am painfully aware of the multi-tasking audience and their tendency for distraction. Over the past couple years we have tried a number of things to create engaging, interactive events for our audience, some more successful than others. Based on this experience, here are some things we tend to keep in mind when preparing our online events.

Think hard about poll questions: Polls are just terrific little tools because good questions keep viewers engaged and can provide some really good, albeit informal, industry statistics that your audience will appreciate and value. A mistake that I feel is made repeatedly is that people are putting poll questions in as an after-thought instead of thinking hard about what value the information resulting from these polls can provide to the audience. Furthermore, often presenters are not willing to go off-script and discuss poll results and their potential implication in real-time, and therefore miss a key opportunity for discussion.

Consider Q&A anytime: A couple of times we have just answered questions as they arise instead of waiting until the end of the presentation because it keeps the discussion more interactive and more free-moving. This may not seem very revolutionary, but it takes some real coordination and the ability to make lightening fast decisions. Unlike face-to-face, you generally have a bigger audience online and therefore more questions and comments flowing in – both positive and negative. So you have to know when to stop your cut into the presentation and which questions to address so as to provide the most value to the audience. Also, you run the risk of getting off topic quickly and not being able to get back on track.

Open mic night anyone? Last year, we held a webinar that consisted of a 15 minute conversation starter followed by opening the audio for people to speak freely and make comments or ask our facilitator any question they wanted. The point was to make the next 45 minutes a free-flowing discussion capable of going in any direction the audience desired. While we had a lot of comments and questions, sadly, almost none came via audio but instead were typed into the chat box and had to be read out loud. Admittedly, I am still trying to figure out how to encourage people to talk because I really believe that an audio (coupled with text) discussion can be significantly more engaging than using chat alone. Perhaps it is like Clive says and that it just takes time for people to get comfortable with and capitalize on the uniqueness of new channels of communication.

Should we let them Tweet? Using the Twitter hashtag, we always encourage the use of Twitter as a informational and conversational channel pre- and post-event. Tony Karrer has an interesting blog post called Twitter and Webinars that has some insights on this subject and his views on coupling social media with web conferencing technology. While I really like this post and think it provides some excellent insights, I am on the fence with his assertion that “The use of Twitter as a true chat channel is a bit annoying.” Yes, he’s correct when he says Twitter chat can turn into noise, but in my personal opinion, there is no better compliment to your webinar than your audience wanting not only discuss what is being learned, but also sharing that info with their followers, many of whom may not have previously been aware of you and your event. Don’t forget that it also can get you new and relevant followers.

Incorporate other new technologies: After the success of incorporating Twitter into our webinars, we are always on the lookout for new technologies to incorporate as well. My newest fascination after reading Jane Hart’s pick of the day is AllPlayWeb. This looks wildly interesting and I am curious to know if anyone has any experience with it and what the results were for them.

Anyway, these are just a few thoughts spurred on by my discussion with Clive and his posts from his terrific new Onlignment blog.

• Trying to shoe-horn your existing process into your new system.
  One of the reasons you’re adopting an LCMS is to streamline your process. You have to be open to looking at what about your existing process could and should change.
• Rolling out a system before you’ve completely mapped your “as-is” business process to the “to-be”
  People don’t like change. They particularly don’t like change that is not well thought out. It’s important to provide your team with a map of here is how we used to do this, this is how we’re going to do it now.
• Not investing the time up front to define a palette of options for your designers and writers to choose from that cover 80% of the things they need to do on a day-in, day-out basis
  While template is a four-letter word in some training organizations, you can gain huge efficiency by standardizing on a rich palette of screen layouts, interaction types, and content structures that your team can choose from when designing your training. When none of those really fit a particular need, then create something new. But make that the exception not the rule.

Some best practices are:

• Create a small core team to work through the process changes and design the rich palette of templates needed for your organization
  The members should know your organization and its pain points, be technically savvy and open minded
• Be open to doing it differently
  Just because you’ve always done it this way, is not a good enough. This is a chance to re-tool things when they no longer fit.
• Iterate, iterate, iterate
  It’s very difficult to sit down and design the perfect solution in a vacuum. The best way to approach the process is to use a set of common scenarios and example documents to step through the process and identify how you will accomplish each case in the new system. Try to build each use-case out in the system. You’ll find lots of opportunities for templates to streamline the process and you’ll find a handful of places where something needs to change, either in your process or the system.

In contrast, Xyleme LCMS is a “component-based, XML publishing solution”. Following a proven single source XML model, you can reuse content at very low levels. For example, this means that you can take a paragraph out of a topic originally written for instructor-led training and reuse it inside of a page in a web course. Or show the steps in a procedure in the remediation loop of an assessment. This is particularly important when creating multiple derivatives of courses which vary only slightly in content.

XML-based publishing systems have extraordinary return on investment results. They have been proven this over time across many industries. By applying these same techniques to learning content, we can achieve extraordinary ROI results for training and development departments as well.

Suppose you wanted to have the same course materials offered in the U.S. and the United Kingdom. You have an on-line course, a Word-based study guide and PowerPoint-based instructor slides to update. In the XML-based world, we can have the same course dynamically substitute “Labour” for “Labor”, “Familiarise” for “Familiarize” and more complex phrases like “Chartered Accountant” for “Certified Public Accountant”. I am not talking about a find and replace and copying to a new file. Or cutting and pasting into a new file. Then spending a lot of time re-checking the formatting. In Xyleme LCMS, a simple operation does this for you automatically. We are able to manipulate and transform component content while maintaining a single source of content. It’s all in the underlying XML technology for building, storing and publishing reusable learning content.

As I said above, I am not surprised by the study about LCMS and RLO’s. The traditional approach for creating asset-based objects has some utility, but if you want to dramatically improve the return on investment, you should be thinking about moving to component-based learning content development.

As an LCMS based on a native XML platform, Xyleme has had minimal work to deliver our content to this new standard and platform. We have now a standard capability for e-Book output that can be used just like of our other multi-channel publishing options. We use the same publishing infrastructure, transformation tools and application functionality for the development of e-Books as we do for our other outputs. We don’t have to develop a new way to handle e-Books in our application workflow, it’s simply another output. This is where the fundamental question of XML as the native storage format comes into play. With XML it’s easy. With a proprietary system, it requires a lot more effort to develop and integrate seamlessly into the existing workflow. Both short-term and long-term, XML content storage makes it easier. And now you can download your Xyleme LCMS User Guide to your e-Book

Let’s suppose you have a product or technical documentation group that is using XML for its content development (a pretty typical scenario). By utilizing Xyleme LCMS on the EMC platform, you can read and write XML to the same repository. This means that as technical documentation develops topics, procedures and the like, you can use them in your learning content, whether for eLearning, instructor-led training or performance support. Even if the content wasn’t developed in XML, with our new offering you can see all of the content in Documentum from inside of Xyleme LCMS and decide how to repurpose it. You can take advantage of Documentum’s collaboration tools, extensive media management capabilities and workflow technology. And your IT organization will eagerly support this strategy since they already support the platform!

Xyleme LCMS on Documentum is not for everyone. Our existing platform continues to provide great price/performance and is the right footprint for many organizations. But now you have options…