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…

In a recent blog post by Bersin & Associates, Josh Bersin provides a great description of how Agile applies to training:

“Agile is also built on the understanding that people learn in small chunks – so while it may in fact take a year or two to build a highly complex website, no person needs to try to understand the entire engineering program in advance. […] Daily work becomes a part of a bigger project in a continuous, dynamic process.”

What does this mean for us?

So how do Training Vendors help training organizations go agile: they adopt Agile Development. Agile Development is an approach where vendors deliver very fast, iterative product development through close collaboration with its user base (i.e. training organizations). According to McKinsey & Company:

“This agility can deliver new systems and capabilities in a matter of weeks or months instead of years. A frequent iteration cycle also keeps IT developers and business users in sync on requirements and priorities. […] Since this approach is most effective when business needs are shifting, it is gaining favor among many IT departments.”

Indeed, according to a survey of global executives by McKinsey, over 70% of respondents have deployed or piloted Agile Development within their organizations in order to be more responsive to changing business conditions.

In 2011, recognizing the rapid change in the training industry and our clients’ need to quickly adapt to the needs of their learners, Xyleme fully embraced and adopted enterprise-wide, the Agile Development Model. This post is the first in a series, written by Greg Schottland, Vice President of Operations for Xyleme, that presents the business value of using Agile, why it has proven a key competitive advantage to companies like Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and many others. Part one of this series provides a simple overview of what Agile is. You’ll begin to see the value just discussing the basics in this post.

Agile is simple:
• Build in small increments.
• Focus your team on one well defined goal.
• Keep the team small.
• Coordinate daily
• Get everything (and everyone) else out of the way.

And the result:
• A working product in weeks, not months.
• Customers that get what they are waiting for quickly.
• Developers that build what the customer wanted and nothing else.

Sounds simple, and it is. While there are volumes written about the details of effectively practicing Agile, this post will focuses on what Agile looks like “on the ground” in daily practice.

Taken from Josh Bersin’s blog

It all starts with an idea.

Somebody wants software to do something. Say we get this great idea to be able to create and store documents on the web (a la GoogleDocs). Rather than designing an entire web based document application, we start small. What is the most important problem to solve? This is simple to define. What do users have to be able to easily do at the most basic level? For our application, this would be the ability to create a simple document using a plain web browser over an average internet connection. You may be thinking, that is pretty basic, shouldn’t we at least include other basics like spell checking, text styles, maybe import/export? I mean who wants a document processor that doesn’t support bolding and italics…I mean really!

This little example is chock full of important lessons that Agile helps address. We might be inclined to design a more complete first version. The logic being it is easier to design everything in from the start. And, in some cases it is. But, more often than not, without getting key usability, architecture or market acceptance issues implemented and down cold, much of our “complete design” ends up being wasted, as key assumptions run into challenges. Years of effort and millions of dollars down the drain.

Let’s look at our example in this respect. We have put a stake in the sand and said that the one thing that has to work is the ability to create basic text document on any browser over an average internet connection. If this doesn’t work, no one will care how slick our spell checker is, nor how easy it is to bold some text. If response is slow, same problem. But, if we have version 1 prove that we can connect 1,000 users to our system, and things are snappy responsive and basic documents can be created, isn’t that a relief? Now we can build on top of this base.

So, turns out our too small initial release may be just about right. What we do at this stage is write up our requirements for this initial release in a set of short, concise documents called User Stories. They include two major pieces of information: 1) a clear statement of some small functionality and 2) detailed description of how to test this functionality. That’s it. No massive requirements document. One of our User Stories might be that users can connect to create and save a blank document. The test would detail step by step instructions of the URL, the buttons pressed, dialogs that appear, etc.

Ease of Development.

As you can see, with well written User Stories, development is a whole lot easier. We code to the test; back our design into the tests. As a development manager, or customer, I can sleep at night. Developers aren’t done until our tests work. I don’t have to watch over it.

So, our initial planning will consist of creating a small set of User Stories which define our first release. We’ll call each such small release a “Sprint.” Each Sprint will be scheduled to last several weeks. No magic number here, can be 2, 3, 4 weeks, but probably should be less than 8 weeks. You’ll go back and forth trading off initial features against time and end up with a Sprint 1 of say 4 weeks (just an example we chose, no magic number).

You’re almost ready to start coding. The one remaining task is to take each User Story assign them to developers and have the responsible developer estimate what tasks they’ll have to do to implement the User Story, and estimate their best guess of how long it will take to complete that task. But…one twist. These tasks have to be small enough that they take between 4 -16 hours to complete. This level of detail is often unnatural. But, it has magic built into it. By forcing yourself to break down work to this level, invariably important overlooked details emerge, providing for much more accurate estimates. Now, admittedly, you are relying on the best guess skills of your developers, which will vary by developer, by task and sometimes by whether they have just had their morning coffee and are feeling optimistic or not. But, it provides a starting point, and over time you’ll find your developers get better at this, and you get better at coaching your under or over-estimators.

Ready. Set. Code!

You are ready to start coding armed with User Stories and a detailed task list for each developer. You may feel like you’re traveling light, and you are. That’s the whole point. You backpack has everything you’ll need and nothing else. You will have a daily meeting (called a Scrum) with all the developers with tasks on the project and you, the project leader and no one else. No managers, no other developers, no business analysts, just the “doers.” These meetings will be no longer than 15 minutes. You’ll ask each developer just three simple questions: which task did you work yesterday, which tasks will you be working on today, what is blocking your progress? That’s it. No lengthy design discussions or play by play of your development day. Just these three simple questions and 15 minutes later you are done. The purpose of this meeting is to ensure that any blocks from progress are removed immediately and that your developers stay on task. You, as leader of the Scrum, are there to listen for blockers and remove them as fast as possible. All the team members know exactly where the project is all the time.

One final task.

At the end of each day, developers update their task list with their best guess of the amount of time remaining to complete each task. Sometimes these numbers go down as work progresses, sometimes they increase (as you discover the task is more complex or taking longer than you guessed). Over time, you get a nice chart of all the hours remaining for the Sprint, called a “Burndown” chart. This chart, while simple, is amazingly powerful. Bersin reports,

“Companies which can adapt to agile management models will move faster and out-perform their competitors.”

So that’s it. Your team writes code each day to fulfill the tests in your User Stories, meets for 15 minutes each day, updates the time remaining for their development tasks — and after 4 weeks (in our example), you done. Delivered on time and to spec.

It sounds easy, and it is!

In our next in the series, we’ll look at how this simple process translates into faster time to market, lower costs and wildly happy customers.

While there are countless articles about the future of the LMS, it was arguably George’s blog post titled Future of learning: LMS or SNS? which kicked this discussion into high gear. So, I was not going to let the opportunity to debate this topic pass me by.

George believes that the future of both the LMS and the LCMS is quite strong, the obvious point being that there will always be a need for structured content and reporting to meet regulatory and legal obligations. However, those vendors who rely solely on this argument are very likely to find themselves quickly marginalized. To stay relevant, George believes training vendors should do two things:

1. Stop talking “learning” and start talking “capacity” and “execution” like the rest of the C-suite.
2. Augment their systems with components that provide opportunities for people to interact in social systems for informal learning.

By doing this, George argues that vendors (LMS in particular), and the organizations they sell to, will begin to see their product no longer as simply an event-based tool for learning, but rather as a process-based tool for capacity planning and workplace effectiveness. When this happens, the LMS will move past somewhat of a marginalized view to something that is more systemic and more broadly leveraged across the organization.

The problem lies not in this goal, but how learning vendors are choosing to get there. Dan Pontefract, in his most excellent post The Standalone LMS is Dead makes the following argument:

“Set up your ‘Facebook for the organization’ by embedding an LMS (or LMS like features) into your enterprise-wide collaboration platform. Coaches, mentors, online buddies need to coexist within the wiki’s, blogs, discussion forums, webcam meetings, online presence, etc. which needs to coexist within the list of formal classroom and eLearning offerings which needs to coexist with your documents, knowledge management, videos, podcasts, which needs to coexist with the profiles, skills, and recent activity-feed happenings of all employees. Blow up your LMS. Find a way to integrate it into your collaboration platform.”

This argument, while spot-on, has fallen on deaf ears. Instead of partnering with social media vendors who are already firmly entrenched in the enterprise and integrating their own best-of-breed LMS features into these platforms, we are instead watching LMS and some LCMS vendors develop their own set of social media functionality. Here is why I believe this strategy will not only fail but risk further marginalizing L&D:

1. Companies will choose best-of-breed social business software vendors for enterprise social learning deployments, not niche players

Below is Gartner’s 2009 Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace, G00171792 [see note at end of post]. This is a list of roughly the top 35 or so social media vendors providing a broad core set of social media capabilities. You’ll see with the exception of Saba, there are no learning vendors on this list. This is due either to a lack of revenues derived from social software licenses or to having a specific industry focus, or both.

In this report Gartner defines the main uses for these vendors’ social software tools, two of them being the following:

“Empowering communities of experts and interested parties (bonding people by specific interests, capturing best practices, disseminating lead-user innovation and providing an informal support network).”

“Accessing relevant knowledge and expertise that can be used to formulate a plan of action when decisions need to be made.”

Wow! These sound a lot like the definition of Social Learning. This poses an interesting question: If best-of-breed broad ecosystem social software vendors can meet the requirements of social learning in addition to other social functionality required within an enterprise, what sense does it make to implement the social learning solutions offered by the LMS/LCMS players?

Indeed, in this same report, Gartner makes the following observation:

“Being smaller with a specialist focus rather than broader ‘ecosystem’ players, they are struggling to demonstrate enterprise credibility and long-term viability through partnerships, alliances, integration options and examples of customer success.”

2. Learning-focused social functionality simply reinforces L&D’s status as a small, siloed organization with minimal enterprise influence.

With social media, the hard reality is that small niche players like LMS and LCMS vendors will always lag behind dedicated social business software players. Referring again the Magic Quadrant report for Social Software in the workplace, Gartner states the following:

“They (niche players) are still held back by breadth of functionality, by product road map urgency or by lack of an innovative growth strategy.”

A quick social media search also turned up a number of comments on the subject. Here is one I found interesting from @jacobboone:

“. . .I was at the CLO symposium in 2009 and eLearning vendors are coming at it from the other angle…providing collaboration platforms wrapped around their content. The problem is that this results in informal learning about formal training content only…and the usability is way behind. . .”

Despite this, Gartner does believe that niche players do have a viable growth strategy available to them by focusing on specific verticals or supporting specific activities. Obviously, this is the sweet spot for LMS/LCMS vendors offering social media functionality. However, we need to face another harsh reality posed by Gartner:

“Products from specialist vendors continued to be preferred for first and follow-on deployments, but many smaller vendors are struggling to close large enterprise-wide deals.”

This poses another interesting dilemma. George Siemens believes that LMS vendors need move past their current marginalized view by providing process-based social media tools that are systematic and leveraged broadly across the organization. But, how can L&D break out of their siloed state and exercise enterprise-wide influence when they utilize point social solutions that lack the ability (both in terms of functionality and vendor influence) to extend beyond training? I’d say they can’t.

3. In most organizations, social learning initiatives will be driven outside L&D

Back in April, I had the opportunity to chat with Ben Kiker, the Chief Marketing Officer at Jive Software at the time. Although we never hear about it in the training blogs, Jive is actually driving some of the biggest and most successful social learning projects today in terms of scope, size, adoption and engagement.

When I asked Ben who was the driving force behind these projects, his answer was not L&D, but rather the COO or General Manager of a substantial business unit. He then provided me some pretty stunning examples of social learning in action and across the enterprise. You can listen to the podcast here, but check out the stats of these two examples:

Swiss Re (global reinsurer operating in >20 countries): Internal Collaboration – The goal here was the efficient exchange of subject matter expertise across worldwide business units, locations, and time zones. Within seven weeks of implementing their social network:

• The adoption rate surpassed 60%
• 2,200 people created profiles and/or joined groups
• >1,000 people engaged in discussions
• >600 users were creating content

CSC (92K employees in >90 countries): Expertise Location – The goal was to quickly located experts and relevant assets for rapid turnaround and effective communication with key accounts. Within 20 weeks of implementing their social network:

• Adoption surpassed 25K users
• Over 2,100 groups were formed across practices, communities of interest, competencies, etc.
• Activity was robust with over 1million page views and >150 actions per month

So, social learning is happening and it’s happening in a major way with vendors who provide a broad range of capabilities, not the niche LMS/LCMS social media players. Social learning doesn’t work unless it permeates the enterprise and this cannot happen on the departmental level. So perhaps it’s time for learning vendors to rethink their social learning strategies. L&D shouldn’t be thought of as an island in a social world. It needs to be part of an overall enterprise content development and delivery strategy.

Note:

The Gartner Report(s) described herein, (the “Gartner Report(s)”) represent(s) data, research opinion or viewpoints published, as part of a syndicated subscription service, by Gartner, Inc. (“Gartner”), and are not representations of fact. Each Gartner Report speaks as of its original publication date (and not as of the date of this Prospectus) and the opinions expressed in the Gartner Report(s) are subject to change without notice.

• Open source software has grown to include […] an adherence to established standards, which is a high priority for open source software development.

• Proprietary software has closed standards that hinder further development.

The debate regarding open source versus proprietary is one that will rage on for a long time and it is not really black or white. However, I think there is one thing that most people can agree upon:

A solution based on standards is the best way to lower costs and protect the return on investment for learning projects in the long run (and, yes, there is an investment whether you use proprietary or open source software).

Having said this, the assertions stated above would lead us to believe that open source is the answer to all of our issues with standards in e-learning. Brent Schlenker, commenting on Michael Hanley’s blog, says: “. . . once people get past their initial fears and the stigma, the Open Source learning development community will grow exponentially.” While I admire the enthusiasm, experience in other application areas has shown us that this is not always the case. (Does your company use an open source ERP system, or perhaps SAP or Oracle? Does your company use an open source Enterprise Content Management Solution, or perhaps Sharepoint or Documentum?)

Let me make what at first blush may seem like a preposterous argument:

Open source has failed to reach critical mass in a number of technology sectors, and may also fail to do so in learning for the foreseeable future. One reason is clearly a lack of robust adherence to standards that negatively impacts functionality and limits a developer’s ability to create sophisticated solutions.

I know, how can I say such a thing? I didn’t believe it myself, so I did the following Google search: “Moodle and standards.” On the first page I ran into the following post entitled On Open Source, Open Standards, and Lock-in. Here’s the salient bit:

Moodle happily ingests those formats, acting to absorb content into what then becomes an inescapable pit of quicksand. It’s a one-way trip. Content can check in, but it can never leave.

If Blackboard did that, there would be villagers marching in the streets with torches in hand. The Blackboard SCORM import/export stuff might not be perfect, but at least they try to let people move content out.

With Moodle, it’s currently a vendor lock-in proposition. The only saving grace is that the vendor just happens to be an open source project. But it’s still lock-in.

So, open source Moodle does not export to SCORM, the most prevalent e-learning standard?

The post is dated March 2008. Its 18 months old, so I did a quick search of the Moodle forums to see what the status of the SCORM export feature is today. It’s marked as major and it seems to still be open. You can read the comments yourself but here is one that caught my attention:

There are people that use the fact that moodle is “scorm compliant” as one of its many virtues. Now I’m realizing that it is NOT scorm compliant – moodle can import courses but not export them in scorm.

This is a big priority for any software that wants to call itself a viable competitor in this field.

Well, according to these posts, at least Moodle can import SCORM – or can it?

Perusing Moodle.org a bit further, I came across the following:

SCORM 2004 is not completely supported in Moodle at this stage. Parts of the API have been implemented, but others such as Navigation and Sequencing have not yet been implemented.

So, open source Moodle sort of imports SCORM 2004, the most prevalent e-learning standard?

I’ll stop here because the point of this post it certainly not to crack on Moodle or say that open source is a bad investment. I don’t believe either. I think open source software can be a great viable solution for many organizations. In fact, we use open source here for our web content management.

The point that I am trying to make is that standards and breadth of functionality are hugely important and to make the assumption that the term ‘open source’ automatically translates into these can lead to uninformed decision-making and projects that don’t reach their expected ROI. Or to put it more simply:

Open source or proprietary? You’re asking the wrong question.

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.