You’ll notice a passing resemblance between Tony’s photo and that of chisel-jawed motivational speaker Tony Robbins. I am assured that they are no more related than I am to suave master spy Roger Moore.I've put relevant photos below. Uh Donald, ...
Tony Karrer | Tony Robbins |
Donald Taylor | Roger Moore |
with a Yes/No response. The answer is "yes" unless the vendor is completely off their game. All LMS products support a variety of learning formats. At least clarify what you mean by a learning format. Are you talking different file formats or do you mean classroom vs. virtual classroom vs. asynchronous. And if that's what you mean, then list out the formats and what you mean by supporting the format.
The bottom line here is that there is only one case where a general / generic requirement is acceptable. That case is when it's a well known, well defined function and you DON'T CARE HOW IT'S DONE. In other words, any solution is acceptable. Otherwise, it's a waste of everyone's time to have a generic requirement when you really want something more specific than that.For example in Learning Management Systems (LMS) A Review, one of the example requirements is:
Most of the LMS vendors have the ability to define a course capacity and then put people on waitlists. The specific handling after that is often configurable, possibly at different levels of granularity. There’s notifications. A whole bunch flows off of this. As a vendor, do I guess at what’s important to the prospect? Hopefully, I can find a bunch of marketing text to copy in, but it’s going to be hard to write a response that will help the prospect.
Duh, it lists them and then it shows the course information. Is there something that your company needs that’s not standard?
Cmon - "easy to navigate," "intuitive," "feature rich," "flexible." As a vendor, you had better believe that you are all of these things.
You will need to formulate your own opinions about "easy to use" and "intuitive." This is going to come from demos and testing, not from an RFP response. "Feature rich" and "flexible" are probably a cop-out from writing more explicit requirements.
Increasing evidence abounds that Enterprise 2.0 adoption has begun in earnest with a typical example being Wells Fargo taking the plunge, having rolled out Enterprise 2.0 platforms to 160,000 workers. It has become clear that we’re moving out of the early pioneer phase to a broader acceptance phase. From the production side, a brand new analysis indicates that the business social software market will be nearly $1 billion strong this year and over $3.3 billion by 2011. In these and other ways, such as the growing collection of success stories, Enterprise 2.0 has arrived.Adoption is still sporadic, but it is certainly happening. I would suggest that there's a big difference between tools being purchased and adoption happening in big, meaningful ways. Keep in mind Knowledge Management (KM).
I’m preparing for my part of an upcoming session at DevLearn on LMS selection as part of The Learning Management Systems Symposium. I'm going to prepare for this in a slightly different way. I'm going to create notes in my blog as a series of posts as I think about what I'll present and then I'll turn them into slides. Hopefully, this will:
My selection experience primarily is in corporate environments, but I’ve also been involved in non-profits, foundations and to a lesser extent education and government. My custom implementation experience is generally with specialized content providers. Most of the time, I’m working with larger organizations who have 2,000+ learners and several different constiuents involved. However, most of this applies fairly well across other kinds of organizations.
Reservations:I'm not sure how interesting it will be to walk through the LMS Selection Process. In my experience, most of the definitions of the process are fairly similar. If you go out and search you will quickly find resources like:
To be clear, I do not think that Facebook itself is really a learning environment. It's a large, centralized piece of software that is getting creaky with use (we've seen more outages and the PHP code is once again dumping itself into users' browsers). Its privacy policies are questionable and it is giving out user information to applications willy-nilly. But it is still important, because it reveals many of the features future learning environments (and personal environments in general) will need to have. Something like the social network operating system, maybe. These are nicely captured by this article as Tony Karrer pulls together a number of recent resources on the site to throw out some ideas.Because Stephen and I come from such different environments, perspectives, etc., it's always an interesting data point when he and I are in complete agreement. I also feel like Facebook is a bit creaky and as Thomas Vanderwal's recent post Facebook for Business or LinkedIn Gets More Valuable points out, as you use Facebook more and have more friends, it seems to get harder to use. Linked in doesn't seem to suffer from that.
This is not to say QuickTime and Windows Media are dead technologies. They aren’t by a long shot, but when it comes to putting video on the web, the Flash Player has rapidly become the only game in town.Why has this happened?
Flash video content and MP3s delivered to Flash Player using a normal web server are delivered through progressive download. This content is cached on the end user's hard drive and can be easily accessed—and possibly stolen by the user. By contrast, audio, video, and data streamed to Flash clients using Flash Media Server are not cached on local client machines.The only way around this is to use a Flash Media Server. Of course, the same is true of the other formats. Delivering a file via a standard HTTP request (without a streaming server) will leave the asset available.
Level 3 evaluations measure whether the there was an actual transfer of learning to the actual work setting. This level of evaluation will increase the visibility of learning and development efforts, because successful implementation of Level 3 evaluation
ROI is toast. Use EVA instead.
Training & Support Return on Investment Calculator
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When it comes to e-learning, computing ROI suddenly becomes a complicated procedure requiring thoughtful chinstroking, serious seminar time, and earnest input from consultants and vendors.
Different levels of management make different sorts of decisions, so it's appropriate that they use different measures of ROI.
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ASTD Josh Bersin What to measure: efficiency, effectiveness, compliance
