edCetra Training

So for those who don’t know an RLO is a Reusable Learning Object. If you haven’t heard this expression before, now is a good time to drop off this conversation. For more info on RLO’s look up Ruth Clark’s RLO/RIO model and read up on SCORM.

I’m taking up this subject because I’ve now heard people disregard the technology behind Intelligent Content as being a rehash of the ‘failed’ RLO experiment. Essentially, can the same piece of content be reused in a different context, separated from its natural place in the flow of a well designed piece of communication. People attribute the intent of RLO’s to being just that and frankly I’m not sure that was what an RLO was or what it was intended to be. Intelligent Content however most certainly wants to allow machines to understand the context of content and allow machines to determine when and how content is to be consumed. This means that yes, content can be moved from context to context and not necessarily as determined by humans, but also determined by machines.

Lets start with RLO’s. Although most people who have never gotten their hands dirty at the programming levels of RLO’s have determined them to be a failure, I’m not sure they have been. But lets not argue that point because the failure to get reuse out of an RLO can be attributed  to many things and the argument is not the purpose of this blog. An RLO is a learning object designed to be self sufficient. It is a nugget of learning that ought not to be dependent on any other nuggets of learning, and if there is some predetermined relationship, then the RLO needs to have the metadata around it to identify that relationship (relationships aren’t dependencies). An RLO is a finished piece of content. It is content already wrapped and packaged in one format or another. Reuse of an RLO isn’t reuse of content in some other medium, or partial reuse of content, it is reuse of the entire object as it is in its final state.

Intelligent Content is not an RLO because Intelligent Content isn’t content that is wrapped as anything, nor does it necessarily have any predetermined organization, such as an ‘object’. Intelligent content has no predetermined criteria of what is a ‘complete’ piece of intelligent content and there can be many instances of the same content written differently but by virtue of it being intelligent, all have relationships with one another. Intelligent content isn ‘t a sentence, it isn’t an image, nor is it a page or section. Intelligent content is content in all its shapes, forms and organizational principles that can communicate to machines all of its aspects, virtues, intents and context use cases. Intelligent content is content backed by a purposeful language that speaks to machines, so that it can be used at the right time in the right context. Not all intelligent content is backed by the same language, yet all the different languages still speak ‘machine’. I work with this technology day in and day out. If you don’t think it ‘works’ its because you’ve never taken a look under the hood.

From somebody who gets their hands dirty working with new technologies focused on ‘intelligent content’ I wish those of you who talk theory and concept from your perch would take a little bit of time to understand the inner workings of what your preaching. Its the ol’ Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance discussion….quality as viewed from the person who gets their hands dirty or from the person who just wants to ride the motorcycle. One is not better than the other, but if you lean to one side, doesn’t hurt to stick your nose in on the other side before you make judgement calls.

For those who don’t know what an API is, its simply a handshake between applications agreeing to work together to pass data from one to another. The idea of content as an API might seem like an odd sentence fragment but let me explain.

I talk alot about ‘structuring content’ and semantic web and all that jazz that nobody really understands. But I think content as an API might be something instructional designers can finally wrap their head around. It is the idea that content is designed to have a handshake with applications like LMS systems, like rapid publishing systems, like performance support systems and can be delivered in all the formats each of these systems support.

So now, I’m sure you’re asking yourself what does it mean to design content with a handshake? It means providing an architecture for the content that is consistently applied to the types of content you are working with, regardless of the content specifics. The architecture is as much about the ‘design’ of content as it is about ‘tagging’ content. Designing content as an API addresses how to use the content if you are going to access it via IPad through the LMS or as a PDF performance support tool. Content as an API can allow games, augmented or alternative reality applications to reach into the pool of content and extract what it needs. Content as an API is content that sits outside of its delivery but has made itself accessible to many formats and many contexts.

If you want personalized learning, adaptive learning, manageable content then you need to start thinking about creating content as an API. For those vendors who dominate our industry, who provide rapid authoring, content management and everything in between, if you don’t start allowing the content produced from your tools to be designed as an API then you will at some point fail. We need you to fall in line with the rest of the technology world and free content to be used how we want, not how you want us to use it. In fact, if you really want to impress me, allow me to use your tool through my content APIs so I don’t have to recreate my content all over again just to use your tool. Thats right, I’m looking at you Articulate, Captivate, Lectora. I’ve seen the fall out from organizations who use your stuff. They wind up with a blob of content that nobody can find and nobody can use outside of how your tool packaged it. Wake up.

Isn’t that something we can wrap our heads around?

Back from DevLearn, one of the first conferences I and edCetra Training ever attended way back when. I remember being in a booth on a small exhibitor floor with maybe 15 other vendors. That conference, that first conference was my favorite until this year. This year had energy, had some interesting sessions and I had a great time meeting and hanging with some very smart people.

One of the more interesting things about this conference for me personally is I finally see more people trying to break free from the shackles of an academically oriented corporate training paradigm, to one more focused on ‘performance’. I’m seeing conversations about ‘curation’, XML, DITA and learners taking control. These are all things edCetra Training has been involved with since 2002 having pioneered a very different approach to design and development from other companies like us.

We have never bought into rapid development tools, or into the idea of combining instructional design skills with development skills. Great if you got it, but NOT what an instructional designer brings to the table in terms of value. Our company has been playing with, researching and promoting XML as a base for developing eLearning simply because it is a smarter, more efficient way to deploy content and one that is consistent with the evolution of web technology.

The one opportunity we saw with how we were developing content which we have been plugging away at, has been the notion of delivering personalized information to learners in real time, through dynamic processing of XML. I don’t know how many times I heard it at DevLearn, but the idea of delivering personalized learning experiences, is no longer secret. It is the holy grail these days, and is something that will never happen as long as people keep investing in technology and not content. In other words, if your going to invest your money, invest it in technology that facilitates the management of content separate from delivery as opposed to technology that delivers content.

Yesterday’s news by Adobe dropping its development on its mobile flash plugin has all kinds of people talking. Most of these people haven’t learned the lesson I’m trying to teach now. Ths is a quote by Upside Learning’s blog:
“Is this the beginning of a mass-migration of content, authoring environments and other tools to the HTML5 standard? Only time will tell, and we’ll be watching closely.”

Here’s the point: If your one of those that are going to migrate all your stuff over to HTML5, what are you going to do once HTML5 is replaced? When are you going to learn that HTML5 is not the technology you want to use for authoring content! It may be how you want to deliver it, but those two things aren’t necessarily attached to one another.

Its nice to see conversations about personalized learning experiences. Now all we gotta do is get people educated on how you can do that.

Imagine this:
There is a pool of content sitting somewhere that covers a wide range of common business issues and policies, such as ‘Customer Service’, ‘Handling Objections on a sales call’, ‘Conflict Resolution’, etc. The content is sitting in a delivery agnostic way. In other words, it is not in a PDF, it is not in eLearning, its not in Mobile, it just is. Imagine if you will that your organization has a very unique way of delivering content in an eLearning format. You believe whether rightly or wrongly, that your audience needs content that has some whizz bang, includes avatars, includes every trick under the elearning sun. This pool of content around handling objections, is ok, but it must be delivered YOUR way. Imagine if there was a way, that you are able to for the most part grab the content you need from the pool of content and somehow transform it in a way that fits YOUR way. Imagine that you could add proprietary content that remained private and have that content magically look and feel the way the content you brought in looks and feels.

Now imagine there is another company who needs the same content you do, but does classroom training and self study only. Imagine they can somehow grab exactly the same content you did but when they brought it into their organization, it magically transformed into classroom materials with job aids.

Now imagine there is another company…..

Now imagine as new content becomes available in the pool of content and it is relevant for your business, you are alerted, you can search through it and pull what you need and have it magically transform into YOUR way.

Now imagine there is another company….

Imagine how much time and effort all companies will save.

All you need is a language and A semantic web…welcome!

I feel like I’ve been hitting my head against a brick wall for 9 years…oh wait…I have been. I write alot about it, I speak alot about it, but really I’ve made very little difference in the eLearning world and thats ok. My message: Stop building training, instruction, learning, whatever in a vacuum. Deploy technologies that integrate the abstraction of content for training/education purposes from a larger set of content so that the little department in these large organizations are no longer some useless orphan of the organization, but rather ‘plugged into’ the main tap of enabling people to perform their jobs…OPERATIONS! Thats right…training departments are useless. The organization could get by without them. Thats because we purposely abstract what we need out of the organization and wrap it in our own little pieces of crap technology, create fictional theory about why our animations produce greater retention and build an ROI model that is distinctively different than our organization’s fiscal reporting mechanisms. Anyways…I digress. My point – most people have it wrong.

I have hope. I’ve decided to stop trying to force a tidal wave in the opposite direction by blowing on it. I’m going to sequester experiential learning, I’m going to build on some ideas that bode well for my sequestering and try to divert part of the tidal wave in a new direction.

Experiential learning = learning through experience. At the end of the day, all I really should care about is whether I can get my people, my employees to perform what I need them to perform to the levels I need them to perform so that my organization achieves its own performance objectives. I shouldn’t care whether my employees have ‘learned’ what they need to do, only that their doing it.

Doing it = experiencing it. I need my employees to experience the doing. Eventually they have to succeed, but they won’t know whether they can do anything successfully until they try it, and then succeed at it. Failing it, is all part of the experience.

So the question really is, is how do I increase the risk of success in the experience for my employees. How do I get them to ‘feel’ success so that its internalized. I bet the day you figured out the quadratic equation is the day you forgot why you couldn’t do it before. My answer – infuse the experience with the tools and resources that will help an employee through the experience. Infuse the experience using all the existing knowledge and content within the organization that is applicable to the experience and run it through a faucet. Let the learner turn the tap more on or off.

I’m not a alternative reality guy, not into second life, but Koreen Olbrish has some good ideas about augmented reality and alternative reality technologies. I don’t subscribe fully, but do believe in the value that can be brought into a situation if we choose the technology carefully. Aaron Silvers has a great ‘manifesto’ on Experiential Learning that was very influential. Where I think I may be the oddball here though, is for me there is an imperative to plug into the main repository of stuff that already exists in an organization and avoid at all costs the need to have a separate pool of content unique to training.

So when I hear debates of Flash vs. HTML5 or what have you, I just think this is stupid. Because at the end of the day, what we’re doing is finding a technology that can serve to validate why ‘training’ is unique. We validate our need to ‘design interactivity to increase engagement and student retention’ but in truth there aint a stat out there that is going to empirically show this to be true. In fact, Google has shown this to be pure hogwash! In any case, we don’t need to worry about development platforms. We can let our devices figure out how to send content. Flash, HTML5, they are delivery platforms not development platforms – stop fussing over which is better to design your ‘interaction’. Figure out how you can support the experience and then figure out how that looks in all the ways the experience can be supported.

In the end, its me blowin in the wind once again…How many roads must a man walk down….

Its been a while….

A long long while….

But during that time I’ve seen some amazing things and have had the pleasure of turning a concept into reality and then letting that reality steep in…wait for it…reality. Thats right, my reality has been steeping in other people’s reality and this my friends is helping us at edCetra Training get ‘real’.

Lets talk about some of the amazing things I’ve seen. A couple of weeks ago, I was introduced to a company called Mark Logic at their annual Mark Logic User Conference. I thought I was going to check out some new fancy content management system that played nice with XML, and instead saw a revolution in database technology. Mark Logic is a non-relational database built for dealing with today’s unstructured Big Data problem. In brief, all the stuff thats out there in social networks, blogs, data capture in analytics tools, intelligence data doesn’t necessarily fit all that well in a relational database since the data is all structured differently and has no inherent relationship. Using Mark Logic technology, there is now a way of curating all of this stuff and keying in relationships and normalizing ‘stuff’ so that there is a fuzzy network of relationships between everything. I’m probably explaining this like an instructional designer having gone to a programming conference….but hey….you get what you pay for. I also saw neat little tools at the User Conference like a tool that can scan web pages and somehow find names, places, etc and begin to catalog and index where the content appears and then allowing it to be discoverable in bite size chunks. Combine that with Mark Logic database and now you have an engine that can scan, curate and store information with very little human intervention. Kevin Kelly once said that the real impediment to the semantic web was someone needs to go through the web page by page and catalog all the information within it, so that we can build a taxonomy that fits everything….not so Mr. Kelly. I’ve seen the future and it looks promising.

Now, onto concept to reality steeped in reality so that we can get real. Its never made sense to me, that training and development people haven’t tuned into technologies that leverage existing content within organizations and exposing it using XML so that the transformation from legacy content to new wonderful eLearning/mLearning content is an XSLT away. The one thing that the Mark Logic conference taught me was that my intuition about where companies are investing their big dollars is indeed in leveraging existing content and that the underlying technology to that is XML. Tie that into what simple observation shows us, which is Google is a far better learning tool than any of the eLearning systems we use today, and a far better paradigm for organizational learning emerges. This new paradigm is one in which courses are assembled at run time, within context of the user who is publishing the content, at the users request and specific for the device on which it is published. It starts of course, with a simple search.

I am a learner. I am at point A and I need to get to point B. I look it up. I see that there are some videos, images, flash assets, user generated content and some text on getting to point B. I am on my mobile so I choose first some text, and then a quick video and hit a button to publish this content to my phone. It happens right there and then. I feel confident I can get to point B, but I review the user generated content by having that published to my phone. I learn a great tip and remind myself that when I get back to the office I should create a job aid with the user generated content I just read. I get back to the office having completed my task. I go back to the system, do the same search, find my user generated content and say publish to PDF. It does it, right there and then. I decide this is really valuable for my team, so I tweet what I’ve just created. Now others can download the PDF I created right there and then. This is fantastic!

This people is real! It can be done. I’d love to see this bake in reality longer and make it really real. What a trip!

Its really just one topic in my mind.

I was giving an online presentation last week for the eLearning Guild’s online forums, and my topic was ‘How the netbook is changing learning’. The gist of the presentation was about looking at technology trends and matching those trends with what I believe is a better model to support learning and development in organizations, namely changing the paradigm of training to performance support. I spoke about losing the language of performance support as a tool in our L&D toolbelt and instead making performance support ‘the’ toolbelt itself. Moving content into a cloud based architecture facilitates this paradigm shift and enables a very powerful potential in technology based training which is to this day unrealized: On Demand. On Demand training is not a replacement for event or packaged based training (conventional). However; the technology to enable on demand can also enable packaged training as well. The technology, cloud based architectures IS a replacment for all the toolsets we currently use in eLearning since it has the capacity to produce the same results as the tools we use, but not vice versa. So when a participant told me that she sees this technology as another tool she can use, I made it very clear that this technology isn’t meant to be another tool. It will be THE tool whether the eLearning world fights it or not. This is how technology is trending. Feed the web and let the web be your platform.

Some interessting projects caught my eye today. One in particular is the OpenCyc project which is a knowledge and reasoning engine. The engine includes a natural language database that can help the web figure out the difference between statements like:

Fred saw a plane flying over Zurich

Fred saw a mountain flying over Zurich

The OpenCyc engine understands that mountains can’t fly and therefore inherently understands the second sentence as Fred was flying over Zurich when he saw a mountain. If you plug into OpenCyc and reference this sentence it will know what makes sense within its understood context and disregard all non sensical inferences.

Imagine that…..Imagine ‘the web’ understands context in that way. Imagine you can plug into OpenCyc by feeding it content and then processing only the parts you need for your organization and make it secure. Reach for the clouds baby!

The question here is whether the e-Learning development methods of today will be relevant in the future.

I firmly believe that web based applications and content will always use the base HTML markup similar to what they use today.  I don’t see any major revision of the markup that would render any work already done obsolete.  This, I believe, will always be backward compatible.

However, I see the rich-media development methods changing over time.  With more and more penetration of mobile apps and web applications that use raw content, the development model will need to change a bit.  I don’t see a future with all content stored in databases and being accessed from applications, but, I do see a whole lot of content being stored outside of the HTML / DOC / PPT format, accessible through web services and delivered to both Internet and application environments.   This content will be ultimately reusable and will not be confined to the Internet-browsed-by-a-PC world many still develop for.   Many of us are already there using XML for content storage and definition and real-time transformation based on requested output.  The non-proprietary content is marked up with some semantic structure and it becomes truly portable to any digital format to be then processed, viewed, printed…   This is what the future holds for content.

The last thing that will need some rethinking is Flash.  What place in the development environment of tomorrow will Flash have?  I’m not supporting the idea to abolish it, I like Flash, it’s lightweight, fast, rich, relatively easy to use.  However, Flash is becoming more of a game/presentation tool and less of an integrated style thing.   Gone are the days, or should I say, going are the days of Flash menus, titles, and entirely Flash developed websites.  They’re still pretty, but there are too many limitations with regard to portability.  jQuery and other such frameworks can handle all the interface wow-factor that user’s can endure and can add movement that Flash was once champion of.  The added advantage of these frameworks is that they take advantage of HTML markup and leave the content readable by braille readers and search engine robots.  This becomes a make it/break it point for the new internet landscape that is highly reliant on the semantic and social associations within content.

All-in-all, I’m not a great teller of fortune or a seer into the future, but this is my opinion.  I’ve started to modify my development environment to deal with these issues.  Perhaps I’m trying to “create” the future in the way that I envision it?  Perhaps.  Of course I am, it’s not just going to happen that way on it’s own.

For those of you who know us, we do things differently. I thought I would share something that I think even if you don’t do things different, you can do this one thing differently and still stick to the way you do things.

#1) Instead of imbedding key messages directly into your video through video editing software, try XML for this one thing. A simple XML structure like <VideoAsset><TimeIn><message><TimeOut> gives you the ability to play a video, and dictate to something like the .flv format when a message comes in to the video based on a time variable and when the message goes out based on a time variable. Add multiple <TimeIn><message><TimeOut> capabilities and now you can embed and control text in video outside of video editing software.

#2) If your working with a restrictive budget, use images and audio in a sequenced order instead of video. Again using XML, structure how you want your images and audio sequences timed and control each item independently. Something like <interaction><TimeInImage><ImageAsset><TimeInAudio><AudioAsset><TimeOutAudio><TimeOutImage> gives you full control over bringing different images in, leaving them on screen for a certain amount of time, sequencing audio whether voice or sound and playing around with the timing for all of it.

As a last word, don’t use video as a way to spruce up your course. Use video because you need to demonstrate body language, involve someone emotionally in a scenario, or some other valid instructional reason.