blog

Thoughts on changing employee behaviour towards safety

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 08:09:51 +0000

A common complaint I’ve heard from a few organisations is lack of employee motivation to follow safety systems.

I’ve been thinking about this problem over the last couple of weeks and have come up with some ideas.

What will not work

Telling people that they have to follow the system. This is not the way change happens. Think about all the smokers that know they should give up smoking but keep on smoking.
Telling people it's a legal requirement. This doesn't work because we don't normally change because of for negative reason. Fear can be used as a trigger to gain attention, but it will not be the motivation for long-lasting change.
A one-off face-to-face or e-Learning program that is just a series of PowerPoint slides won’t work. We learn from experience and the people around us.

Brain science has shown that humans seek rewards and positive changes that make life easier. Changing behaviour means literally rewiring the brain—and that is hard.

Possible strategies that might work

Changing the safety systems

Instead of focusing on training, which is expensive and time consuming, changing the systems might bring the greatest return on investment.

Make following the safety system a KPI for the individual, the teams and the organisation. Focus on rewarding and measuring the positive behaviour, e.g., hours worked without incidents.
Build the system with the employees. Take a group of some the most difficult employees and work with them to build a system they think might work. Focus on making the system faster and easier to use. Think about something that is highly visual and integrated into the workflow. This works well in a consultative environment, but it does take time and good leadership.

Learning experiences

1) A story-based approach
Make a series of videos of peers talking about following the systems. Make the stories personal and emotional. The videos could be fictional or perhaps case studies from other organisations. What is important is that the people telling the stories are peers of the learners, and the stories focus on positive rewards.

The videos could be placed on tablet computers that are shared by a team, and even taken home. There is a novelty factor with tablets, and tablet computers require only minimum IT skills.

We are starting to see this type of peer-based story telling being used in safe driving campaigns for young people because it works well.

2) A simulation approach

We know that we learn from experience. Simulations are a great way for learners to explore cause and effect in complex environments. In high-risk areas such as healthcare, the armed forces and the mining industries use simulations extensively. A few years ago I interviewed Deanna Hutchison from the Mining Industry Skills Centre about Project Canary, which is a safety training simulation for the mining industry.

Simulations can be low tech. Some low-cost ideas include using Lego for building the graphics and choosing you own adventure-style interactions.

Simulation-based learning is a process of awareness, practice, then reflecting. The simulation could consist of a problem that the learners then need to figure out how to fix. They could explore how things went wrong and what they would change. Once again, it could be tablet based, and it could be part of a short, facilitated face-to-face session.

How to make these learning experiences more effective

A few ways of making both learning experiences more effective are as follows:

Finish the workshops or online program with an individual safety action plan
Conduct follow-up phone calls and coaching about the action plan
Instead of day-long sessions or one-off eLearning, split the program into shorter sessions over a longer period with online activities in between.

A coaching approach

Coaching is possibly one of the most effective but highest-cost strategies.

All of these approaches could be combined into the following sequence:

Change the KPIs
Story telling—to activate the motivation to change
Employee-built systems—to build the right system with stakeholder involvement
Simulations—to learn and practice the new behaviours in a highly interactive way
Coaching—to make sure the new behaviours learnt through the simulations are applied in the workplace

10 things from the Learning Café Unconference

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 03:01:29 +0000

The format of every unconference that I’ve been to has been different. Jeevan designed an event that was a great balance between structured and unstructured discussions that the audience of 50 learning and development professionals engaged with quickly. Each of the streams had a corner of the large room where fast paced quality conversations happen. Maybe some of the discussions were a bit too fastpaced and more time would always be great to explore the ideas in more depth. Some stages of the day were spent as a whole group in more classic unconference open space sessions. For me it was the small discussion groups that were productive and in complete contrast to most conferences.

As I wrote this blog post, I realised that I experienced the Learning Café Unconference through a certain conceptual lens. I spent most of the day in the technology stream as most of Sprout Labs’ current projects can be thought of as performance improvement projects. By performance improvement projects, I mean projects like designing and building a mobile checklist system focused on improving safety for electrical contractors, or helping a group of health trainers rethink their courses around workplace performance and client outcomes.

I tried to summarise the day in the comparison grid below.

From	To
Watching PowerPoints	Exciting small group discussions
Hundreds of people	50 great people
Learning and Development	Performance Improvement With performance improvement, the focus is on measuring and supporting performance instead of learning. At the moment there is a lot of discussion in the learning and development area about performance improvement and the Learning Café unconference seems to be a reflection of this current thinking.
Focusing on formal learning	Focus on supporting and fostering informal learning
Tracking hours and activity	To measuring competency For example, consider an employee’s development plan where instead of focusing on what activities the employee is going to do, the focus could be on how new skills will be measured and observed. Tracking competency also means we don’t need to attempt to measure informal learning. Instead, organisations measure the outcomes of learning no matter how that learning happened.
Content and then assessment	Assessment first, with learning experiences only if they are needed This is something Sprout Labs does with our approach to course design, where we focus on what the learners do, not on want they need to know.
Learning Management Systems and courses	Performance Support Systems Sometimes, I wonder how much of what organisations do are driven by their real needs or driven by what vendors and providers, who sell learning management systems, to them. Organisations and vendors need to shift to being performance focused. Perhaps, Learning Management Systems are not what is needed. Instead, course material could be located on a company’s intranet, with the assessment being in a separate trackable system.
Pages of text, some video and quizzes	Serious games and simulations
IT as the enemy	IT as a key partner for Learning and Development
eLearning is the future	Paper based solutions can still work Learning is not about the technology it’s about the experience.

Some of this language reminds me of the language of vocational education and training but what is being talked about is different to the classic VET learner experience.

My Sketchnotes are on Flickr at http://www.flickr.com/photos/33263856@N02/sets/72157629411628741/

For more information about Learning Café see http://www.learningcafe.com.au/

Learning Cafe Unconference - Getting Ready for Rich Media Learning

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 04:52:37 +0000

Finally completed the outline for the session I will be running at Learning Cafe Unconference on the 15th of February in Sydney.

Session Overview

Bandwidth is like the fuel for IT. It makes technology run faster and less expensively. Australia is currently lagging behind in its access to broadband—in 2010, only 23.4% of households had broadband connections.

The establishment of the National Broadband Network will mean that 93% of Australian homes, schools and businesses will have broadband speeds approaching 100 Mbps. The remaining 7% will have access to high-speed wireless and satellite technologies.

If you don’t already know it, YouTube is the second largest online search engine (after Google), and most of our network traffic now consists of video bandwidth. As our Internet connections become faster, we use this bandwidth for video watching.

Rich media has a huge potential for learning. In this session, we will explore the barriers and opportunities for leveraging this potential.

Big Questions

What barriers prevent the use of rich media in learning programs?
What are the possibilities, given an unlimited bandwidth?
How can learner-generated rich media be integrated in learning?

For more information about the Learning Cafe Unconference event see http://learningcafe.com.au/unconference/.

Learner Profile Poster

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 03:33:27 +0000

I’ve been editing a video interview I did a while ago with Cathy Moore, and it was a great reminder how the analysis stage of instructional design is key.

Here is the Learner Profile Poster I use in planning workshops as a .doc and as a .pdf. Normally, I take these to OfficeWorks and get them to print them out on their plan printer as large as possible. I think it costs about $6 per print. Then, they make great posters to use on the walls and can be kept as records. You can also take photos with them.

The questions are used as prompts, and I normally used the summary box as a space to write the profile as more of a character story.

Here is the document as a .doc and as a .pdf

eLearning Leaders - Graham Clark talking about QR codes and Learning

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 14:01:07 +0000

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Video for eLearning – Workbook

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 10:37:14 +0000

Just ran a Video for eLearning workshop for a client. It’s been a while since I’ve run one of these workshop, and while I was doing the preparation for the course I hunted out and updated this planning workbook. To make it easy for everyone to re-use, I’ve also released this under a Creative Commons license.

Here is the document as a .doc and as a .pdf

I hope that you’ll find it useful. There are plans to turn the Video for eLearning course into an online course soon.

edIT – temporary education focus hackspace

Thu, 17 Nov 2011 03:35:38 +0000

What

Over the two Sundays, a group of education/learning developers will come together to build or improve a product.

It looks like the project might be building a mobile HTML5 Treasure Hunt application.

When

Sunday, November, 27 and Sunday, December, 4

Where

SproutLabs - Room 6, First floor, 64 Liverpool Street, Hobart
There has been talk about a Launceston node. Nodes elsewhere are also possible.

How to get involved

It would be great to have developers who are interested in creating interface designs, writing tutorials and user documents, and possibly building a website for the project.

Moodle Forms Theme

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 02:07:38 +0000

I've got a few different blog posts coming up in the near future. Normally, I try to avoid blogging about technical topics.

When I started working with Moodle, I found that I kept losing where the "save" or "delete" buttons were on the screen. What I’ve done is developed a simple Moodle theme that is designed to be used with other themes. It makes buttons like "save" bright green and buttons like "delete" bright red. It’s simple, but for me it has made Moodle a lot more usable.

You can download the latest version from https://github.com/sproutlabs/Moodle-form-design

To install:

Open the config.php file of your theme.

Add 'sl-forms' to the $THEME->parents

$THEME->parents = array( 'canvas', 'base', 'sl-forms' );

Watch http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eohm2pl9qI to see how to do this.

NBN and eLearning

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 23:42:00 +0000

This post is going to focus on learning at work and the effects the National Broadband Network (NBN) might have on that. It’s based on a short talk I gave at LearnX 2011.

The NBN will mean that 93% of Australian homes, schools and businesses will have broadband speeds of up to 100 MB. The remaining 7% will have access to high-speed wireless and satellite technologies.

The NBN is a major infrastructure project that is expected to be completed by 2021.

Why is bandwidth important?

Bandwidth is like the fuel for IT. It makes technology run faster and more cheaply. Australia is currently lagging behind in terms of access to broadband; in 2010, only 23.4% of households had broadband connections. Meanwhile, in Korea, the level is 50%; Seoul is known as the bandwidth capital of the world. In addition, Finland declared access to bandwidth to be a legal right. Maybe we could think about Australia’s IT fuel as being a bit slow.

A lot of what is outlined in this blog post can already be done, but it’s at the edges.

The future is already here; it's just not evenly distributed—William Gibson.

It’s the activity in which early adaptors are exploring. A good example of this is when clients start talking about interactive video and I start thinking about loading screen. Yes, it can be done now, but in a broadband enabled future it will be a reality.

To illustrate the possibilities, I’m going to use an example: joining a new organisation and comparing how things might work now with how they might work in the future. We are going to follow John on this journey.

John has been asked to do his safety induction online before he starts his first day.

Now

Now we have to worry about whether John has broadband access at home and his digital literacy.

In the future

In the future we will know that John is far more likely to have broadband access and be digitally literate. The NBN will give more people broadband connections at home, which will lead to a profound increase in digital literacy skills. This will also lead to greater demands and expectations for eLearning.

John wants to work from home for a few days a week.

Now

The organisation John is joining might have a work-from-home policy, but he will more than likely be the only person on the team working remotely, and the learning systems are geared for on-site access or face-to-face courses.

In 2010, a Telstra Survey showed that 80% of Australian employees would take up the offer of work-from-home arrangements if their employer offered it along with high-speed broadband access.

In the Future

In the future most of John’s team will be nomadic and constantly connected through social networking. There will be daily HD video conferences that will allow the team to check in. It will feel just like being in the same room. The video sessions won’t be just for meetings; they will be a permanent link to the office. The office will have a number of monitors with full-time video links to the people who are working remotely.

The learning and knowledge systems can be accessed from anywhere and are optimized for display on mobile devices.

An increase in telecommuting is one of major goal of the federal governments digital economy strategy. “Australia will have at least double its level of teleworking so that at least 12 percent of Australian employees report having a teleworking arrangement with their employer.”

In the near future, more people will be working from home.

As part of John’s career change he wants to complete a new postgraduate qualification.

Now

Now it’s a blended course, with a workshop one weekend per month. All the lectures are recorded online and can be accessed on the learning management system.

Future

John finds some of the project work involves simulations using 3D virtual worlds. There is extensive use of video conferencing. As well as the traditional reading, there is a library of videos made by lecturers. One of the biggest changes the NBN will bring is in the way the “institutions of education” designs and develops delivery courses.

Video

If you don’t already know it, YouTube is the second largest search engine online (after Google), and most of the traffic on our networks is now video bandwidth. As our Internet connections are becoming faster, we are choosing to use this bandwidth to watch video. We need to consider how we can increase the level of usage of video in our learning experiences.

John has some gaps in his skills and needs to understand some new business processes.

Now

He might now take some short face-to-face courses and be given coaching and mentoring in the workplace.

Future

Instead of taking face-to-face courses, there will be simulations of processes, and John could be coached through them. He learns by real exploration and gains real knowledge and expertise. Project Canary (http://projectcanary.com/), a safe training simulation of the mining industry, is a good example of this.

As John is working, he often needs to learn quickly.

Now

John’s key resources for performance support are the intranet and LMS with PowerPoint style eLearning.

Future

In the near future, John’s key resources will be in his pocket, on his phone, or on his tablet computer.

The NBN is mostly a fixed network, but there will be flow-on effects onto mobile networks.

We have already seen an explosion in sophisticated mobile use for learning. The real power and potential of mobile learning is to give context-sensitive instructions and information. Technologies such as augmented reality can look at a GPS location and allow video, sound and text to be layer over the views of the real world. Imagine standard operating procedures for machinery being shown over the tops of the machines. This could be the ultimate in real-time learning.

John discovers a process on Intranet that could be improved

Now

John has to talk with his manager about the change, and then the manager has to take that change to a committee.

Future

While John is following the process, he is able to make changes to the documentation. The performance systems are open, media rich and dynamic.

As more people become involved in generating content in their personal lives, doing things such as posting images on Facebook, they will come to expect the same sort of user-generated open-content systems at work.

Learner and user-generated content will become a more common part of our business systems.

To review the key points: The NBN will mean

Increased digital literacy in the workplace
Increased teleworking
Increased media-rich learning experiences in our workplaces
Increased context-sensitive mobile learning
Increased learner-generated content

When we think about increased bandwidth, we often think about rich media, such as video and 3D simulations, what is more important is to think about what it might mean to have an increase in digital literacy in the workplace and increased teleworking. At a basic level, we see will see a profound shift in the demand for eLearning and an increased expectation for more sophisticated e-learning, which goes beyond PowerPoint slides and quizzes.

OpenLab for upcoming ElNet webinars

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 00:01:00 +0000

ElNet has three interesting webinars coming up. ElNet is the E-learning Network of Australasia. It's an independent community of e-learning professionals working in the e-learning industry.

One presenter is Cathy Moore - I love her approach to Instructional Design and sometimes use her eLearning Blueprints with clients. Jeevan Joshi is one of my strategic business partners and we've worked together on a number of projects.

I thought it could fun to get a group of people together at SproutLabs to take part in the session together, drink coffee and debrief at the end.

Information about the sessions from ElNet

As part of the Webinar Connect Series, ElNet is hosting 3 free webinars.

The first of these will be held next Tuesday 4th October, 2011 at 11 am AEST. Duy Huynh, the creative director from Beyondedge www.beyondedge.com will present a webinar on Creative writing and visual design in eLearning. This presentation will showcase his work in embedding multimedia into eLearning and will include some working examples. Some of his clients include Coca Cola ~ Amatil, Queensland Ambulance, Gold Coast Hospital and the Queensland Government. A must attend for all instructional designers.

Cathy Moore from Cathy Moore Consulting http://blog.cathy-moore.com will follow on October 18th at 10am AEST. Cathy will give her insights into designing scenarios and the ways that we can get the most out of this tool for engaged learning. A rare opportunity to attend a webinar with this inspirational and internationally recognised thought leader. This webinar is not to be missed.

The final presentation will be given by Jeevan Joshi on Tuesday October 25th 2011 at 11am AEST. Jeevan is the principal consultant at KnowledgeWorking www.knowledgeworking.com and is an experienced practitioner of technology based learning. His presentation will be focused on Polishing the Diamond - maximising the return on investments in online learning environments. A thought provoking webinar with a business focus.

If you are interested in coming along, please email me at least the day before, so I can make sure I've got the 3C's organised: coffee, cake and chairs!

Some of the features of good eLearning

Wed, 02 Mar 2011 14:15:00 +0000

Elearning Features on Prezi

Interview with Jeevan Joshi about the use of Moodle in corporate environments

Sun, 27 Feb 2011 19:56:00 +0000

About Jeevan

Jeevan Joshi is the Principal Consultant at KnowledgeWorking, a company that specialises in technology enabled workforces and business productivity solutions. Jeevan has more than 17 years of experience in designing and delivering e-learning, human capital, knowledge, and risk and compliance solutions for leading organisations in Australia, New Zealand, and Asia. He has had wide exposure to various functions, including business development, project management, consulting, and human resources and has worked for leading companies such as Deloitte, Ernst & Young, and PWC.

Robin: Jeevan, the use of Moodle is growing in the education area, especially the K-12 area. Do you think Moodle is ready for business environments? As an enterprise system?

Jeevan: Robin, that’s a good question and it is one that is being asked by a lot of people. Moodle is a fairly popular Learning Management System, or Virtual Learning Environment, in the education sector and with some small to mid-sized companies. Moodle, I would say at this point in time, doesn’t actually meet the requirements of the larger organizations, which have a different set of requirements in terms of scalability, integration, and functionality.

However for small and mid-size businesses, Moodle does present a very attractive option as a learning management system. Having said that, there are instances where Moodle has been used for large-scale deployments.

Robin: By mid-sized, you mean businesses that might have 1,000 employees?

Jeevan: Yes. Anywhere between 500 to 2,000 employees. Mid-sized companies typically cannot put in the capital expenditure to implement proprietary LMSs. Open-source applications like Moodle, do not have annual license fees. Having said that, another angle for even large companies, who typically can afford LMSs, to consider is: What are you trying to achieve through the LMS?

There have been instances where fairly large organizations have deployed Moodle for certain learning initiatives or projects; for example, to their customers, suppliers, or to a specific segment of their employees. Again, the numbers are not as large as 10,000, but certainly Moodle has been deployed for specific initiatives.

Robin: In these enterprise markets, what do you think is the actual weakness of Moodle?

Jeevan: A couple of things.

The first is that most corporations’ IT departments are not comfortable with open-source models, and Moodle, being an open-source system, is available for free from Moodle.org. They are used to the more traditional proprietary software packages, with their skills ecosystem and accountability — if things go wrong, the vendor can be approached.

Deploying an open-source application like Moodle does require a different skill; e.g., PHP or My SQL. IT departments do not always have this skill set. So, they would obviously focus on something like Oracle or ASP.NET technologies. In terms of selection, that’s one disadvantage of Moodle. The PHP skill set is not readily available, and corporations don’t necessarily want to develop that skill set unless there is a critical mass within the organization.

However, open-source models are now gaining acceptance in enterprises as open-source applications mature.

Having said that, organizations are exploring open-source systems, and it’s quite possible that a skill set will develop. Hence, they will become more open to open-source applications.

The second weakness is the corporate-level learning requirements, which are not really met by Moodle.

Originally, Moodle was really a class management system. It’s a learning management system used by teachers for teaching courses to their students. It has progressed beyond that and put on some additional features.

However, the fact remains: it is that legacy.

The proprietary element systems have been designed with the intention of providing an enterprise-wide, consistent platform.

Consider some of the features that are needed by large corporate deployments but that are missing in Moodle, slowing its use in corporate training.

The first item is scalability. Certainly the scalability of PHP, MySQL is getting better, but there are some question marks. There is a perception that PHP, MySQL doesn't scale up as well as needed for the corporate world.

Another item is the function of learning. Learning in a corporate environment typically works by a training needs analysis of a certain audience within the organization. It could be, for example, staff in the retail branches of a bank honing a certain new skill set or knowledge about a new system. Moodle doesn't allow the management of these groups very well, certainly not as well as do some of the proprietary LMSs.

An additional item is management of complexity. Complex organizations, with a matrix of learning needs, audiences, and business initiatives are not being well-served by Moodle at this time. The complexity of a large learning organization is overwhelming for Moodle. A further issue is reporting capability. Moodle certainly does have reporting capability at the student, class, and host level. But many large organizations generate reports about the entire organization and need the ability to drill down to certain groups of employees.

That reporting needs to be high-powered, considering some large organizations have as many as 30,000 employees.

However, the fact remains: it is that legacy.

The proprietary element systems have been designed with the intention of providing an enterprise-wide, consistent platform.

Consider some of the features that are needed by large corporate deployments but that are missing in Moodle, slowing its use in corporate training.

That reporting needs to be high-powered, considering some large organizations have as many as 30,000 employees.

Moodle varies from installation to installation. The corporate world prefers consistency. Corporate leaders want to see a list of all available features in an application. You can certainly use that.

Robin: We've talked about some of the negatives for Moodle. What do you see as some its advantages?

Jeevan: There certainly are some advantages. Moodle's learning model is different from those of the larger, proprietary LMSs. Moodle is learner centric and integrates social learning very well, which is something that proprietary LMSs are starting now. Being designed from scratch has helped Moodle gain some advantages over proprietary LMSs. The flexibility of the application allows people to modify content by logging onto Moodle and making changes.

Essentially, the learner-centric approach is very advantageous.

Robin: Have you seen any evidence that Moodle has been used to save money on training?

Jeevan: Yes, it has. In fact, we've replaced some of the current, proprietary LMSs with Moodle for some of our customers. Costs have been the driving force many times. We've been able to compare the costs of deploying an open-source application, such as Moodle, and a proprietary system. Not only does Moodle save money, but it also provides flexibility. Many commercial models for LMSs are based on the number of users. Thus, a larger number of users results in higher license fees or subscription fees. Moodle doesn't have this restriction, which is another way of saving.

You always have to remember that the total cost of ownership of a system is extremely important.

Moodle software itself is open source and doesn't cost anything; however, you do need to implement it well, meaning consulting fees will be required.

In terms of modification, technical help might be required. If your IT department does not have those skills, you will have to consider going with external technical support, which could cost more.

Overall, though, Moodle is an extremely attractive financial proposition for many corporate customers in certain segments.

Robin: What are some of the ways in which you've seen Moodle implemented?

Jeevan: There are different approaches to implementing Moodle. The most popular is one where Moodle has been used to deploy one course. So, an online course is developed and put onto Moodle.

In terms of the deployment of Moodle, it should be done using a structured, project-managed approach.

On the other hand, structured approaches require a lot of time and a lot of support from the organization, which is why Moodle also allows you to start deployment on a fairly user-friendly pilot basis. It allows you to start small and scale up once you've proven your concept.

Robin: One thing I like about Moodle is that it allows an enterprise operation in an ecosystem, instead of forcing a company to go to a particular solution provider and be locked in with the maintenance and ongoing user fees inherent to content and learning management systems. How do you see this working for and against enterprises?

Jeevan: One of the major considerations for the deployment of an enterprise-wide system is security and managing the risk around that application. There is very low tolerance for risk in large organizations.

Moodle is open source. Open source software’s strength is that if there are any security issues, they are identified and fixed fairly quickly. However, someone needs to monitor, test, and apply any fixes. In terms of considering Moodle for an enterprise-wide software deployment, its security aspect does not yet have proven credentials.

Moodle itself is not insecure. However, there are few examples of large Moodle deployments that have had to be really secure. I'm sure it can be done. The lack of a track record at this point in time is one of the reasons why corporates may be a little reluctant.

Robin: Your answer covers some of the questions I was going to ask regarding the issue of intellectual property. Do you have anything to add on that topic?

Jeevan: Absolutely. Moodle is a learning management system and a learning content management system combined in one. That is one of Moodle’s strengths that many people don't realize. It does allow the speed of learning to increase. That is, the speed from the time when a learning need is identified to the time that learning is completed for a particular employee, for example. A subject-matter expert, with a little bit of training, can easily get onto Moodle and develop a course using its content development tools. Thus, it won't be a SCORM-compliant course, meaning it may not be easily transferable to other LMSs.

But in a lot of cases it’s not necessary; it’s a course which probably is pertinent only to the organization and doesn't need to be transferred to other LMSs. It does provide quite a flexible set of simple content development tools. This is an advantage and is certainly something that should be kept in mind.

Robin: I recently came across figures saying that training that happens in businesses is induction training. How do you think Moodle compares to some of the other systems that are specifically set up for induction training?

Jeevan: I think Moodle would fit very well into the induction training. In fact, I don't really consider induction training to be any different from other forms of training. Many companies that I know of and worked with have the case where induction actually begins before the person arrives with the company on day one. I've seen cases where, for example, Occupation Health and Safety courses are given to employees before they start work. In most cases they're paid for the time they've spent on the course.

It certainly can be used for induction, but I don't necessarily see the requirements for induction being of greater importance than the other forms of training.

Robin: For corporate users, the reporting and integration features of Moodle are often weak. What are your thoughts on this, reporting and the potential that exists for integration in Moodle?

Jeevan: To be honest, reporting is an issue with any kind of enterprise wide system. Because there is a lot of data and there is a lot of querying, performance and the flexibility required for reporting is always an issue with large enterprise systems. This is slightly changing with Moodle 2.0.

But I think the way to tackle the reporting in Moodle for large enterprise deployments would be to actually have the data go to a data warehouse. And then use the data warehouse tools to report against them.

Certainly there is very good reporting within Moodle. In fact, in terms of reporting on learning effectiveness, Moodle is probably stronger than a lot of other proprietary LMSs.

By that, I mean the ability of Moodle to drill into; for example, the responses given to a question, the ability to see what those responses are, and to see the trends. Therefore, the ability to identify any weaknesses in the course of analysis is pretty strong.

But in terms of the other reporting, which typically involves such items as, how many people from this division have completed this course by this date? And the ability to filter information, I think that’s probably better served by putting the data into a data warehouse and then querying against it. This matter is most applicable to about large organizations with more than 20,000 to 30,000 employees. Anything less than that may not be such a big problem.

Robin: What, do you think, are some of the interesting trends that will happen with Moodle in the next year or so?

Jeevan: It’s an interesting space. You’ve mentioned that there are some vendors who have now added some new features to Moodle, are offering Moodle as a supported and hosted application, and are providing professional services around that. Certainly that is a good trend moving forward. Moodle does suffer from its legacy of being an open-source system that can be installed in just a couple of hours. It’s got a little bit of a reputation of being a lightweight, which is not actually true.

We’ll see that change with these deployments coming to light and becoming successful. The thing is that, a lot of times, there are a lot of successful Moodle deployments that people don’t know about because it is badged with the name of another company.

Moodle is the engine for many LMSs that have been deployed in some corporate spaces. It's just not very visible.

In the future, I see Moodle entering corporate spaces. We've always known that it is a game changer.

However, Moodle must face a very structured and fairly large LMS industry. Moodle will require corporations to take risks and think outside of the box in order to displace these large corporate LMSs. This will happen when these corporations see Moodle working.

We will just have to watch for signs of large, successful Moodle deployments.

Robin: What plug-ins and modules do you think are useful for Moodle in the business and corporate environment?

Jeevan: That's one of the issues that corporations face. They have a huge array of add-ins, and each add-in needs to be vetted and tested for security and compatibility with applications. It would help if more of these useful enhancements were actually incorporated into the core product. There are two types of important enhancements. One increases the depth of the functionality within the current feature set, and the other adds new features or functionalities to Moodle.

There are some great examples of this. I also know that some of the add-ons have actually been incorporated into the Moodle code for version two. There are add-ons for managing certificates and for managing grade books. There are also different plug-ins for different media types. Thus, there's much variety.

I think you need to ensure that it is an add-on that has a good community supporting it, and it will survive in the future.

Robin: Do you think there's anything we missed, Jeevan?

Jeevan: No. We’ve done well.

What eLearning developers could learn from Independent Game Developers - Freeplay 2010

Tue, 07 Sep 2010 09:11:00 +0000

A couple of weekends ago, I was at Freeplay which is Australia's independent games festival. This blog post is not meant as a review or summary of Freeplay. It's an attempt to distil some ideas that might be useful in the area of eLearning from a dense and exciting weekend.

1) Make things that have meaning

This is where there is an interesting crossover between Serious Games and Independent Gaming. Serious Games are often talked about as games with meaning. One of the major themes that Freeplay explored is how being an Indie Game developer allows creators to make experiences that have meaning to them and their players.

Many Serious Games are commissioned by an organisation that wants to get a message out there or that wants a change to happen. Indie Games are the complete opposite. The content and the development process are all controlled by the makers.

Learning and development are interesting because they really should be passion-driven not profit-driven, but this commissioning process is often more profit-driven for the developers.

2) It's not all about profits

If we think the budgets for eLearning and Serious Games projects are small, think about doing this type of work with no budget at all. Indie Gaming is fuelled by passion. At Freeplay there was a mix of people interested in games as an art form and people interested in games for profit. One thing that was common across both groups was that they are investing large amounts of time and money into projects before they see any returns.

Maybe this is where eLearning is going wrong. eLearning can improve the productivity of businesses, by reducing cost and increasing skills and knowledge. But can it inspire people? Would a company that is owned by News Corp be in eLearning if the main motivation was making the world a better place?

3) What are the verbs for your course?

One of the sessions I really enjoyed was 101 Things I Learned in Game Design School, and a lot of the rest of this blog post comes from this session.

What are learners doing in a course? What is the verb of the course?

Are they reading, browsing, watching? Or are they building, discussing, planning, dreaming?!

I think this is a key to improving the learning experience. Many of our learning outcomes might have verbs. eLearning developers need to think more about the verbs during the actual courses and make sure they are more active than reading and watching.

4) Race to failure

The idea of early prototyping came up a couple of times, in different forms. Normally I use the line "Fail Fast", but I like the line "Race to Failure" and I might start using that instead. I've been thinking about this a lot recently because a number of our projects are at the prototyping stage, and bits are failing (sort of). We are getting some great feedback.

5) The first and last 10% of a project are linked

There were a couple of things in the "The First and Last 10%" session that I think are really important.

The mistakes that we make in the first 10% of a project when we are designing, planning, and prototyping are what holds up getting the last 10% of the project done.
If you working with a new bit of technology, then you haven't got the first 10% done until you have a working prototype. While the panel was talking about game technology, I think this works for many (perhaps all) other types of digital content development.

6) Play more games

If eLearning is ever going to go beyond screens of bullet points, more people who make, commission, and use eLearning products need to be exposed to different types of complex interactive experiences. Personally I think I need to play more games and think about how to educate my clients about what types of interactive experiences exist.

7) Think beyond screens

When we think about games, we often think about 3D worlds and people moving around shooting the enemy. But there are other types of games for other types of interactions. This includes new types of screens such as mobiles and new types of controllers such as touchscreens and the Wii. Many of these newer interface experiences can create direct personal connection. There are other games like Alternate Reality Games (ARG) that can sometimes be low tech, cheap, and highly engaging.

8) Unity Rocks

A lot of the focus of Freeplay 2010 was on creativity and not technology, but one of the sessions I really enjoyed was the introduction to Unity, by Ben Britten Smith. I've looked at Unity a couple of times and thought about it both for 3D games and for iPhone development. Ben gave a talk that was pitched at the perfect level for someone like me who knows how to code but doesn't know Unity. From the session I got the overview I needed. Unity has an elegance and, once you understand it, an interface that is really powerful.

For me Freeplay was a great weekend. I walked away with a lots of ideas and new information and I'll be back next year.

A couple of the things I've been thinking about recently

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 10:32:00 +0000

When I was planning Sprout Labs, the two technologies that I thought were going to be key to what I was planning were:

games
mobile technology

Games have become an important part of what I've been doing, but I also have had much to do with mobile technology. Currently, it's a bit hard to ignore the fact that smart phones have really come of age, and the iPad and tablet-style computers are changing the way we can access information.

The two key things I'm excited about are:

The tablets allow anyone to have easy access to electronic information. I've been working on a number of touch screen projects for easy access to standard operating procedures and other business information. These have been fixed touch screens, normally in workshops. I've got a prototype of one of these working on iPad. I think the iPad and multi-touch screens are really going to be key to making these projects really usable and useful.
Recently I asked myself the question, "What would a cutting edge factual/documentary project look like?" This led me to think about augmented reality technology, like the Layar, where, using a mobile phone with a camera and GPS, digital media can be laid over the view of a place. This offers many possibilities for Just in Time information and new forms of place-based story telling. I've started playing with this and expect to see a prototype soon.

Notes on X|Media|Labs Melbourne 2010

Fri, 06 Aug 2010 11:27:00 +0000

Six things we have learnt about developing branching interactions.

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 10:00:00 +0000

This is the last in a series of posts that came from the talk I gave at the Serious Games BarCamp at AFTRS in Sydney.

The others in the series are:

Why Branching Games (This is a good starting point if you are not sure what a branching interaction is)
How we have been going about developing branching interactions for STE

This is really my first attempt to distil some of what I’ve learnt about branching games with STEM over the last year. It could also be applied to ARED decision trees and other decision tree development systems.

The images are links to the examples I talk about.

1) Reality is boring

I talked Janet Fearns from The Tasmania Skills Institute into doing a STEM interaction for the responsible service of alcohol course, because I thought it would make a great application of branching interactions. Walking into the planning workshop with Janet and a couple experienced teachers, I expected to be making an interaction about choosing whether or not to serve someone that might be drunk. Instead, the teachers made it clear “it’s not that simple”; it’s all about management of the relationship over the whole evening. We ended up planning a scenario where for the first three interactions it was just serving drinks and watching how much someone is consuming. The result was realistic but pretty boring.

What we found was the moment of conflict and critical decision making is most engaging. After the workshop we reworked the interaction to focus just on the critical decision point of whether or not to serve someone.

2) Simple media is often OK

I do a lot video work and Janet was keen with the responsible services of alcohol interaction to see it being done with video, so the learner could pick up nonverbal cues. In reality, shooting branching video and frame matching, while possible (and I did a lot of it during my Ph.D.) is hard. Also, the reality of bandwidth makes it hard to work with video reliably and without preloading. Video does give the rich sensory experience that we associate with games and digital medium, but simple images and text are easy to work with for most clients and keep the time, effort and costs down. In the case of the responsible service of alcohol project, we ended up just using a still image and text. Sound can have great emotional impact and there are bandwidth-friendly possibilities to be explored with sound.

3) Focus on where there is ambiguity between what a novice and expert might choose to do

I’ve found the greatest possibilities for rich interactions are found by focusing on the moments where an expert makes a different choice from what a novice would make. These are the moments and types of choices where the decision is not straightforward, and there might not be a right and wrong answer. A great example is at the start of the conversation about a marketing scheme in the electrical contracting course.

The expert’s responses would be “Tell me more about the ad”; the other responses are OK in some ways, but they are not the expert response. One of the great things we have been able to do with the scoring system in STEM is to provide each response a number of factors, which means that for some answers the learner gets a high score in some areas and a low score in others. With the marketing example, the “Tell me more about the ad” choice gets the highest overall score on all factors.

4) Make feedback part of the conversation not an added extra

With electrical contractor customers there is a simulation where in a conversation the learner has to make a choice that makes the clients happy at this stage but is technically wrong. The electrical distribution company hated the idea that the learner was able make a choice that was wrong. When they saw it their reaction was, “Oh, that has to change.” They didn’t like the idea a learner could make mistakes. They want a form of feedback, maybe a big red message saying this is wrong. STEM can do that, but in reality when we make those sorts of mistakes in conversation, a big red box doesn’t appear. A better way of doing this is like what happened in one of the LifeLine simulations where, when the learner repeatedly makes a bad choice, the client actually says, “I don’t think you are listening to me.”

5) Loop points are good

What do I mean by loop points? These are spots in the interaction where it could be good to return to, from where a series of themes can be explored and where the branches naturally fit together.

In the business compliance interaction for the electrical contractors course, a “To-Do” list was used a number of times for this. Sometimes in 3D games there might be a room with multiple doors that the player keeps coming back to.

Although working this way makes the interactions easier to author, it worries me that the “conversation never ends” and I’m not sure if the learners think it’s boring or find it confusing.

6) Situation it in details

With the business compliance interaction, it was situated in an office and the problems were described in text. This is a classic “decision tree” style of working. It allowed a lot to happen quickly, but it just doesn’t quite feel right.

My personal preference about what to consider.

Where is the experience happening and make the media reflect that.
What are the events that are going to happen in the space.

In many ways, what has been somewhat easy about many of the STEM interactions that I’ve done so far are that they are conversations. The locations are really simple and the events are really just the natural flow of a conversation.

For the business compliance interaction to work really well, the images need to be changing all the time, which would have meant a location-based shoot, props and actors, if it was being done photographically or maybe it all could have all been done as 3D renders.

In the near future I hope to put together a full guide and tutorial about how to develop a branching interaction. If you have been making these sorts of branching stories and decision trees, it would be great to hear what your tips are in the comments.

One of our touch screen projects running on ipad

Sun, 04 Jul 2010 15:11:00 +0000

Just had a bit of a play with an iPad and one of the touch screen projects we have been working on. Tablets have many great possibilities in training. I’ve been thinking about them as great devices for accessing and consuming information, and I really surprised how well the keyboard works.

These types of devices are going to be great for anywhere access to information and reference material and procedures, for a wide group of learners. They are simple to use - you really don’t need many IT skills to use them.

Now I need to buy an Android tablet, that is a third of the cost of an iPad and easier to develop secure applications for!!!

How we have been going about developing branching interactions for STEM

Tue, 01 Jun 2010 10:33:00 +0000

I’ve been holding back on developing an authoring tool for STEM, mainly because I want to develop more experience in planning, writing and developing these interactions.

The first couple I developed focus on using sticky notes on a whiteboard. This had some positives and negatives.

Positives	Negatives
The workshop sessions are a lot of fun	The results had to be written up afterwards.
You have a restricted amount of space. This means that you can’t explode into hundreds of branches.	The restricted space often meant that the interaction ended up being too simple.
There was a lot flexibility, e.g. to make a ‘looping branching’ it was just a matter of drawing a line.	The final whiteboard often ended up becoming a mess.

Using role-play

Lifeline Tasmania was interested in how STEM could be used for training and consulting. During a meeting with them I sat there and said “we need to map this all out” and their response was “no we can do with role-plays”. At this stage, I really wasn’t too sure about how this was going. I turned up with a video camera, because I was willing to give it a try. A lot of Lifeline’s training is done with role-playing.

The way we went about this was:

I explained to the participants the idea of the branching stories and how it was going to be used.
The client acted out his problem, and the telephone counselling used 1 of 4 different styles of responses. I videotaped this with the plan of just using the audio.
What was really amazing was that when it came to doing the other different styles of response the person that was role-playing the client developed a “structure” to the conversation, like making repeated statements. This made it achievable to weave the 4 different styles of responses together, into a structure where the learner could move between each of the styles of approaches.

With interactions around conversations, e.g. customer service and other people skills, I think role-playing is great, and it can be used as research tool and as a core part of the development. It may not be a process that can be used to develop every branching interaction.

The process we now use is

Explore some big picture questions
- Where is the experience going to happen?
- What are the critical decision points?
- What are the possible outcomes? It’s better to direct everyone down one
- path instead of having a single ‘right way’ and ‘wrong way’.

Depending on the content at this point, I’ve been able to develop the interactions from just that knowledge for the subject matter experts to check.

Fill in the details.
The details of the branches and choices are developed into a mind-mapping tool. I have been using Freemind. We colour-code the bits that are statements and the bits that are choices and draw lines or make notes where non-linear linkages are.

What has been great about this is that I’m now 100% sure that the authoring tool needs to work like common mind-mapping tools. I thought that this might be the case, but it’s good to be sure.

STEM - Why branching stories

Tue, 25 May 2010 10:05:00 +0000

Back when I started thinking about working with games and learning I got excited about the possibilities. I got an Individual Learnscope project to build the Blue Skies. This was a Flash-based game for people in the fields of design and craft to explore the link between markets and product development. This was always built for different applications and customisation. The idea with the engine is that a user would be able to research a problem and then explore how different solutions solved that specific problem. BUT when I attempted to explain how it worked to trainers and teachers, it just appeared to be too complex for them.

Back to the drawing board

It was back to drawing board to search for other solutions that could be easier for the majority of educators. You remember those “Choose Your Own Adventure” books? They where one of the most popular children's books during the 80’s and 90’s with over 250 millions copies sold. These books must have gotten something right. One way to look at most stories and narratives in computers games is by branching stories.

With Serious Games there are a lot possibilities, but solutions such as 3D worlds are just beyond the budgets of what most of the clients I work with have. These clients are often just excited when there e-learning authoring software allows them to be able to make a quiz.

The solution I settled on was branching interactions that can be used for decision trees, branching stories or simple simulations.

I think about desktop-based interactive design as being a continuum from basic text and quizzes to immersive 3D worlds.

There is a lot that can't be done with these types of branching interactions but it is a start to going beyond pages of text and quizzes.

I’ve called the system STEM. It is Flash-based and runs on most desktop browsers and a lot of educational developers use Flash. It’s open source so everyone can use it and have control over it. At the moment changing a simple XML file does authoring. One day soon there will be an authoring system.

An example

A good example is from the Electrical Contractors project last year that Sprout Labs worked on. The focus of this course was about business skills for electrical contractors.

The original marketing pages for the course are shown below

This was reworked into the following activity where the learner is put into the role of being a business coach.

The reworking isn’t just about the technology. A major part of what was done was rethinking it as “an experience”. This meant switching resources from a being an information dump to coming up with problems that Electrical Contractors face on a daily basis and exploring those. These where practice activities before the learners moved on to developing their own business plans. These are the types of interactions that Cathy Moore talks about a great deal.

As Ralph (one of teachers and experts involved in the project) said, “Yes, the students could just read all that stuff but they wouldn’t get and be so engaged.”

What is really great is that I’m finding that educators have no problem understanding how to design and develop these interactions.

To download STEM see http://www.sproutlabs.com.au/stem/

Brain Science and Learning Design - notes on the TFLN session

Sun, 16 May 2010 17:09:00 +0000

Wow, for me the Brain Science and Learning Design session by Tasmania Flexible Learning Network (TFLN) was great. It nice to spark idea’s for people, and this blog post is write up of what I talked about, with a few added bit and pieces and a summary of the discussion.

Why Brain Science?

One of my heroes is Kathy Serria, the founder of, and thinker behind, the Head First series of books. Back when she was writing the Create Passionate Users blog, I become interested in how her books were working, and why a simple textbook was so engaging as a learning experience. I love that my hero of learning design is actually a book designer and writer and not an e-learning developer. One of Kathy’s main interests is Brain Science.

When I started to look into the area of Brain Science, what I found is a more concrete understanding of how we learn than what a lot learning theories give us. In my consulting work it’s easier to say, “we need to be this way because that is the way the brain works”, than saying, “Constructivism learning theory says we need to offer experience-based learning.”

I’m not an expert in the area Brain Science but I find it’s a useful way to think about learning and learning design practice. One of the reasons I was interested in doing the session is that I saw it as a chance to explore and think about some of issues. The session had a lot of great ideas, and some of them may even be wrong! Hopefully, I’ve written them all up here.

Learning Design

Learning design is a process, it’s not a set of rules. What might work for one group of learners might not work in another context or with another group of learners. One of the worst examples I’ve seen of the use of learning design guidelines is in the Toolbox development process, where the quality assurance process basically says, “The course should focus on learner tasks” . In reality, what this often means is drag and drop style “busy” interactions that are a waste of time. Please don’t think of these ideas and thoughts as guidelines that should be ticked off. Please use them to help inform the design phase of the learning design process.

The sessions focus on four areas.

1) The brain is a map of connections

It’s almost bland to talk about the fact that the brain is series of connected neurons. Each thought we have is a chain of electrical pulses firing in brain. Leaning is literally the building of new connections. For learning to take place, the brain need spots to start building these connections from. It builds on what we already know. The best way to think about this is to consider the brain as a series of maps.

There are a couple of other things that are useful to know as well.

We try to hardwire these maps. This hardwiring is actually the forming of a new habits and behaviour.
Once a map is hardwired, it’s almost impossible to change that map. It’s easier to build a new map than change an existing map in our brain.
What I didn’t talk about during session was that building new maps take quite bit of energy.

The discussion

We then started to discuss and explore example

Ask learners what they already know at the start of a course.
This could be a forum post, that is, “What do you know about ...”
It could be task where learners do mind maps about what they know..
Give the learner an experience
Instead of the classic “Tell/show and then practise”, get the students to try and practise and experience first, and then to discuss and explore afterwards.
If it’s an experience that involves a risk, and just starting to practise and explore is impossible, some of the solutions could be:
- Tell a story about the experience.
- Give the learner a case study to work with. Making the case study come “alive” will engage the learner more. Some ways to make the case study more alive include interviews, video and other rich media.
- Use scenarios. This is partly related to the case study. I think what was meant by this in the session was more an interactive experience where the learner is given a problem and then can make a series of choices. Which is more like our branching interaction system STEM.
Then at the end, ask the learner to ‘map’ the experience. This is a classic reflection activity
Some of things we talked about included:
- Visualising the experience, by drawing diagrams.
  Telling a story about the experience; this could be a journal or a photo journal. These could be use technologies like blogs and Flickr.
- One nice example that I think came up at this stage, was the idea of giving everyone an image of river, and then people ‘telling the story of where they are on their journey down a river’. I quite liked this idea of combining a visual with a story. It’s maybe a bit too poetic for a lot training sessions. It’s an idea I’ve used in community arts projects in the past.
- I’m going add a few other things here that could work face to face or online:
  - Preparing a report that talks about what happened and what they learnt.
  - Giving a presentation about the experience.
  - If it’s step by step content, getting the student to develop a Standard Operation Procedure.

What is interesting about all these idea’s is most of them are not content heavy. They don’t involved developing complex media, and we didn’t talk about quizes or drag and drop interactions.

2) Everyone’s maps are different.

In our brains, these maps are organised differently for everyone. During the session, I talked about how, during a face to face session, a student might not ‘get something’ and then another student might explain it in a different way. The teacher’s map wasn’t anything like the student’s, and the other student’s map was useful for that student.

I talked about how hard this is to do online. Someone pointed out that it’s not really that hard in an online course that has a strong facilitation model and that uses technologies like discussions and other social media.

In the Head First books, they do this by presenting the same information in multiple ways, often in multiple contexts. This means a concept might be woven into a diagram and also used in a story. When you are reading the books, this can be really useful if you having trouble with a concept, at other times it can drive you crazy.

The discussion

An nice example that came up during the discussion was using a document viewer during video conferences.
One of the important points from the discussion was that using multiple media can be overdone. It’s always best to choose the right media for the content and context.

3) What we call thinking is activity in activity in the prefrontal cortex.

This part of the session was inspired by the first part of David Rock’s new book “Your Brain At Work”, which focuses on the limitations and strengths of the prefrontal cortex. He uses a great metaphor of it being like a stage, where actors come and go. I personally understand this type of brain activity as the ‘voice in the head’ .

The important points for learning design are:

The stage is quite small, and actors (thoughts) can come and go quite quickly if we are not careful.
While this part of brain is responsible for decision-making, it doesn’t handle complexity well.

Research has repeatedly shown that we can only remember between four to seven things at one time. The way I’ve working with this is by trying to cut down the number of sections in a course and reducing the options learners have at each stage.
Philip E. Rose, in his research, found that expert chess players remember moves and chunk information together, and it’s been found by chunking and grouping information together in a visual way can allow us to deal with more complexity.

The discussion

Breaking experiences and information down into discrete parts aids learning.
Putting related information together and grouping the information to what we already know assists learning.

4) The default state for our brain is the “Narrative Circuit”

Norman Farbin, while research mindfullness and mediation, divided our brain activity into two types. One is the “experience circuit”. This is the moment when the chatter in our heads has become quiet, and our focus is on our direct, sensory experience. Most of the time, our minds are actually in a default state, where they are chattering - Farbin called this the “narrative circuit”. When we are involved in narrative thinking, the pre-frontal part of the brain is being used and the hippocampus The hippocampus is where we store memories.

During the day, as we have new experiences and new thoughts, how does the brain decide what to store? It stores what is emotionally important.

It wasn’t that long ago that we were hunters and gatherers and lived in caves. Our brains are really still wired for that life. For the moment, imagine one day you go out of the cave and head towards the sun. After a while you come across a lion pack that you have never seen before. Your heart starts beating, and you know this is a life or death moment. Luckily for you, the lions don’t see you. You will remember where those lions are because it’s important to you. When you get back the cave, you tell the story of how you found the new lion pack. Because it’s important for everyone in tribe, they will also remember your story.

The key ideas to this are:

We remember what is important to us and what has an emotional impact.
Your memories are stored as stories.

Some of the approaches to the ideas we talked about:

Start a course with a story that grabs the attention of the learners. Things like % of people that get things wrong, what are the nightmare that can go wrong if you get this wrong.
Make sure the stories have an emotional impact.
Get the learners to develop their own stories and story maps.
What is interesting is these ideas start to loop back to many of the ideas in the first part of the discussion.

What we talked about in the session, and in this blog post, are just four things from Brain Science that help can inform learning and instructional design. There’s a lot more we can learn from Brain Science, and I hope to think and write about more in this blog in the future.