Align, Leverage, & Focus: Ensure Content Relevance and Longevity

This post is part two of a series related to a Muzik & Muzik presentation delivered at the Professional Conference and Meetings Association’s (PCMA’s) 2015 Convening Leaders conference in Chicago, January 11–14, 2015.

Titled, “Amplify and Extend the Impact of your Conference Content,” the interactive session focused on a 7-step process (AMPLIFY) for maximizing the digital education assets captured at live conferences and events. AMPLIFY is for anyone who has direct responsibility – or a collaborative partnership with the education team – for content selection, presentation, capture, repurposing, and/or eLearning.

Read the complete listing of the 7 AMPLIFY elements.

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Matching, curating, and filtering content for relevance and longevity 

The 7 AMPLIFY elements aren’t actually chronological. Rather, they can be grouped topically for discussion and context. The first grouping we’ll address — Align, Leverage, and Focus — are all about matching, curating, and filtering content.

ALIGN: Tie one or more session tracks to your org’s strategic plan and enlist your marketing and communication teams in promoting the aligned content before AND after the event.

How to begin:

Become a student of the desired outcomes and supporting motivations behind your organization’s strategic plan. Think about how your organization’s mission statement relates to the strategic plan and convene a lunch meeting or other gathering to learn more about the conversations and discussions that resulted in the final elements of the plan. Your goal is to gain perspective on the role that the capture of conference/event content and resources can play in advancing these strategic outcomes.

Conversations to have:

Education Team: what are they doing now and/or in the future that could be (or should be) tracks at your conference/event? Not all education divisions have representation on conference program committees, even though that is usually logical and desirable! If not, the meetings professional can play a role in convening the related parties and starting the conversation.

Marketing Team: This is a terrific opportunity to talk with MarCom about what you are trying to accomplish. You can bet that they will be very excited to hear that you are taking time to help them do their jobs proactively. A primary complaint among association MarCom folks is that they are always trying to react to things coming their way, rather than being a part of crafting offerings from the beginning. Scoring points with MarCom is always great! Tell them you’re working with the education group to create program alignment, and that you want to ensure that the content generated at the conference lines up. Finally, ask them loads of questions about their planned campaigns for conference promotion and promotion of your org’s education offerings and other products. Their answers will inform, among other things, the formats in which you collect content. Compare their promotional timelines with your conference timelines and see where you can tweak things to create efficiencies.

“Input from MarCom will inform, among other things, the formats in which you collect content.” CLICK TO TWEET 

Timeline: This part is hard, and you might even need to give yourself 2+ cycles to really gain alignment. What you want is to be able to sell your education team on the idea that at least one of the session tracks of your conference should align with the strategic plan. This might mean beginning as much as 18–24 months out from your conference, depending on when you issue your Call for Proposals. You also want to be sure that MarCom has time to develop campaigns that align the conference track offerings with their promotion of the organization and other offerings. Don’t freak out if this doesn’t happen overnight. Keep your eye on the prize and carry on!

Result: If you are successful, you’ve developed a content curation strategy in concert with your education group that ensures that at least some of the content you have potential to collect at your event is strategically aligned with your org’s strategic plan and mission. This gives it weight, correlation, and best of all…authenticity. It is now more likely to be “connectable” to future products and services. It’s also more valuable to your members and attendees. And, you’ve given your MarCom group the ability to actively and effectively promote that alignment in a way that brings greater authenticity to your organization overall.

Prepare to LEVERAGE: Ensure that you collect raw digital files as well as the post-production composite. This will allow your org to repurpose content and manipulate files for use in future promotions. (Psst…Not doing this is one of the primary reasons that digital content stagnates!)

How to begin: Review evaluations and needs assessment data to learn more about what your members want and need. Find out as many details as possible about their technology use patterns, devices used, bandwidth availability, preferred social media channels, etc.. Learn more about their traditional media use as well — do they still read your org’s journal and other publications? How old are your current member/participants and how actively is your org recruiting younger members? Discover everything you can about who you are going to reach with your awesome content — this will tell you a lot about the formats you need to have in place to serve them.

Conversations to have:

MarCom: Straightaway, MarCom is your closest ally in the content repurposing business. They are the ones who will be responsible for pushing teasers out into your marketplace and drawing attention to your content. There is endlessly great content out in the world, but most of it goes unknown because of lack of exposure. Help the MarCom team expose the world to your content by teaming up with them and gathering your goods in formats they are ready to push. They also have their arms around products and services coming out of other divisions within your organization and should be able to draw parallels between offerings.

Your Technical/AV/IT team: The form of this team can vary a lot from org to org. It’s common to have one group responsible for managing in-house IT and resources, and more than one group onsite responsible for capturing, processing, and archiving active content. While you don’t have to always talk to all parties at the same time, you will definitely want to talk to all parties at some point — usually more than once! What you are looking for from the in-house IT group are details about storage capacity, server options, bandwidth, in-house processing capabilities for repurposing, general project load, and priorities (alignment with the strategic plan and executive support can really help here!). The onsite team will moderate your expectations and should ask you lots of questions about how you want to use your content in the future. They will help you know whether there are technical limitations to your collection plan and will also help you communicate parameters to your presenters and MarCom.

Both technical teams need to have the info you’ve collected from the MarCom team and their social media/outreach strategy. You might even convene a small group of representatives from all teams.

Result: Excellent ways to repurpose and leverage your conference content are to bundle it with other offerings from your organization. If you have an online journal and one of your presenters has published an article related to their session topic, include a link in the article to the session archive. Have a member of your publications and/or MarCom team attend sessions strategically to document and record findings and attendee input/responses. In the moment, they can tweet key points and use them as a basis for executive interviews and/or press conferences. Later, they can write articles that tie back to the session AND give it longer life and greater relevance. Video and audio clips from your sessions can be extracted and used for promotional videos, to emphasize research points and build credibility, and to develop brand loyalty and tribal energy among your members. There are even tools now that let you embed them with annotations, comprehension quizzes, and more — thus making them great additions to your organization’s digital education portfolio. All of a sudden, your session archives become sources of industry commentary and year-round CONTENT. Cool!

FOCUS: Target collection efforts to sessions that are closely related to existing educational products and offerings. When sessions can be bundled with related journal articles, certifications, badges, webinars, books, and more, they are more likely to be valued by your members. Down the road, this paves the way for our favorite word…”monetization”!

How to begin: Focusing is another sequential step in your alignment and curation efforts. This is when you take a preliminary look at your final conference program and compare it with your organization’s product/service portfolio. This can be really valuable especially when you are just starting out with the alignment process and despite best efforts, you’re just not really very aligned yet. You have to start somewhere, and in the absence of much input from outside your event bubble, this is a functional jumping off point. Look at the strategic plan also, and see what you can learn about current projects and new things in the near field. In the end, only record/capture stuff that has a tie to products and services that exist or that are about to exist in the near future.

Conversations to have: Talk with MarCom, Education, and Membership groups about topical trends and desired campaigns. If your Membership group, for example, knows that a top concern for your members is an upcoming federal budgetary restriction AND you have one or more session addressing strategies for understanding and dealing with this restriction, you have slam-dunk relevance. If you also have a pending book, webinar, or journal article dealing with the same topic, you have a slam-dunk content bundle on your hands. MarCom can’t wait to join all these resources together in a single email or special offer.

Result: By focusing your attention and budget on only capturing assets that are immediately relevant to your audience and are aligned with your org’s existing and pending offerings, you are maximizing the value and life of your collected content.

What do you think? What’s your experience been with recording and capturing content in your association? Were you successful or did you hit roadblocks? Did you go to the next level and repurpose it in a meaningful way?  Please feel free to comment below!

Amplify and Extend the Impact of your Conference Content: PCMA 2015 Post #1

This post is the first of several related to an upcoming Muzik & Muzik presentation at the Professional Conference and Meetings Association’s (PCMA’s) 2015 Convening Leaders conference taking place in Chicago, January 11–14, 2015.

Titled, “Amplify and Extend the Impact of your Conference Content,” the interactive session focuses on a 7-step process (AMPLIFY) for maximizing the digital education assets captured at live conferences and events. AMPLIFY is for anyone who has direct responsibility – or a collaborative partnership with the education team – for content selection, presentation, capture, repurposing, and/or eLearning.

This session will be a discussion/exchange format that will function best when participants are familiar with the session’s basic foundational assertions and come prepared to offer their own experiences, pitfalls, and successes to the group. Join us!!!

Learner Outcomes

• Leverage your live and recorded event content to maximum benefit
• Articulate the role of the meeting professional in connecting organizational goals with the content curation and collection processes
•  Identify others within your organization with whom you can partner

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Background — What’s the problem???

Most associations today have formal strategic plans. While many complain that the process that staff, executives, and board typically go through is extensive, EXPENSIVE, and often theoretical, the non-profit fashion of looking to the business world for guidance has created a fairly well-known collective understanding of basic strategic planning among those in the association world.

One of my favorite definitions of strategic planning was coined in a post by an anonymous author at Method Frameworks:

Strategic planning is the process of devising a plan of both offensive and defensive actions intended to maintain and build competitive advantage over the competition through strategic and organizational innovation.

Although published nearly 5 years ago, I appreciate how the quote honors the militaristic roots of competitive strategy and the duality of offense and defensive. It also captures the forward momentum and focused attention to innovation that we are all seeking when we undertake a strategic planning process.

But unfortunately, strategic plans are often simply time consuming, navel-gazing exercises that create anxiety-provoking timelines for staff and reporting that does little to actually advance the mission of an organization. They are frequently more about operational efficiency than they are about actual strategy. The Harvard Business Review estimates that traditional planning yields a return on investment (ROI) of less than 34%. And research conducted by Balanced Scorecard founders Kaplan and Nolan suggests that 90% of organizations fail to successfully implement their strategic goals.

Nearly all of us have done it. It’s cathartic, motivating, fun, and empowering. And then we wordsmith our plans to death and enshrine them in binders on shelves in our conference rooms.

Where they collect dust and become irrelevant.

But before you think we at M&M are down on strategic planning, please know that the contrary is true. Strategic planning, when undertaken meaningfully and authentically, can provide an incredible framework and roadmap for organizational success. A solid, mindful strategic plan contains within it all of the tools a staff and executive team need to focus their efforts toward a single, compelling package of tactics that are truly a supporting scaffold for the rest of an organization’s work.
There are kajillions of consultants, sages, and researchers out in the world ready to hold your organization’s hand on your quest for strategic prowess and ultimate competitive advantage.

Ok.

But how does that apply to content and why does the meetings professional care?

Well, the answer is that often times, we are endlessly collecting content at our conferences and events for some ambiguous future use. Remember “sponsored” services offering audiotaping of sessions and the 6′ tables we set up to sell cassette tapes and, later, cassette tape collections? If we were smart, we were sure to contract to receive archival sets of all the sessions captured on tape at our conferences. And then we did this on CD-ROM. And, now these collections sit on a shelf in our organization libraries.

Today’s meetings generate even greater volumes of content, with potential for uses truly unimaginable back in the cassette days. But…

We often use the almighty criteria of “BUDGET” as our one and only guide to deciding what to capture. We can afford to record the content in five, ten, or all 23 meeting rooms. By the time we are identifying in which rooms to place equipment for recording, our program committees have scheduled all of the sessions and assigned them into rooms based on their own criteria (things like potential audience appeal, topic distribution, etc.. come to mind). So, at best, somebody (usually the rare person who has time at the moment) combs through the existing schedule and makes a stab at selecting where to record.

Another way rooms to record get chosen is technical capacity. Where is the network strongest? Where is interference least? What block of rooms is closest to the staff or AV headquarters? In the end, the un-AMPLIFied result is a hodge-podge of session recordings on a wide variety of topics, few of which are actually connected to the immediate educational goals of the presenting organization. Presenters of these sessions may or may not have been prepared to be recorded, and may or may not have conducted their sessions in a manner that lends itself to repurposing.

Further, the technical way in which your sessions are recorded may not be strategic. The technical capacity of facilities, AV teams, and hardware/software has improved tremendously since digital recording began to mainstream in the mid- to late-2000s. As those technical advances have progressed over time, many of us did it because we could, not because we knew really why or what we would do with the results. Many times, we were asked by various association team members in Membership and/or Marketing (for example) to record different sessions for “the future.” The idea, of course, was that an ambiguous “someone” would get a wonderful idea in “the future” and figure out how to use these sessions.

One obstacle I’ve run into personally is finding that our session recordings could no longer be edited. Our service provider had run them through a post-production software product that eliminated the raw files. On the plus side, these files were optimized and took up much less digital space than the raw files. Unfortunately, this also meant that the files had to be used as-is, and could not be effectively excerpted for future use. Because nobody knew really how or why the recordings would be used at the time they were captured and processed, no one was able to give our provider parameters or better guidance. And we were left with what we had. Which was not really very useful except as used in their entirety.

Insert sad-face emoticon here. Meh.

Other typical obstacles include things like a lack of in-house time and/or expertise to manage, catalog, and edit session recordings. Sometimes the content recorded is no longer (or never was) relevant to current organizational efforts and/or products. Sometimes, the relevance of the topic itself ends before the session content is actually posted and/or repurposed.

For whatever the reason, your content still sits, now captured on terabyte hard drives, on shelves next to the cassette tapes of yesteryear.

Why? Because chances are, your approach is neither strategic nor aligned.

Here’s where AMPLIFY can help

This session will outline and provide opportunity to discuss seven straight-forward ways we’ve identified that meeting professionals can embrace this challenge, support their associations’ educational goals, AND take a leadership role in driving strategic content curation and collection at their events:

1. ALIGN: Tie one or more session tracks with your org’s strategic plan and enlist your marketing and communication teams in promoting the aligned content before AND after the event.
2. MOTIVATE: Get your presenters involved in the solution. Invite them to write related guest blog posts before and after your event. They can be the best promotional voice you have and elevate strategic topics in the minds of your members.
3. Be PROACTIVE: Involve your org’s education director to match your call for proposals with your org’s education goals. By asking for specifically-oriented content from the get-go, you are already curating and filtering!
4. Prepare to LEVERAGE: Ensure that you collect raw digital files as well as the post-production composite. This will allow your org to repurpose content and manipulate files for use in future promotions. (Psst…Not doing this is one of the primary reasons that digital content stagnates!)
5. INFORM: Inform your program committee’s session selection process by providing them with learner-focused data from pre-conference surveys, immediate post-conference surveys, and follow-up post-conference surveys.
6. FOCUS: Target collection efforts to sessions that are closely related to existing educational products and offerings. When sessions can be bundled with related journal articles, certifications, badges, webinars, books, and more, they are more likely to be valued by your members. Down the road, this paves the way for our favorite word…”monetization”!
7. Think YEAR-ROUND: Educate presenters about how to make their presentation content relevant and evergreen. Also give them tips and/or training about how presenting for the long-haul is different from presenting “just live.”

What do you think? What’s your experience been with recording and capturing content in your association? Please feel free to comment below, and sign up to follow future posts to the blog series over the next few days that dig into each of the 7-steps in depth!

A great snapshot of what digital badging and micro-credentialing have to offer

M&M is kind of a sucker for motivations and enticements. Not Pavlovian really, but those little rewards that reinforce behavior. Ok. So maybe that IS Pavlovian. Anyhoo, the point is: whether it’s racking up frequent flyer miles to watch the little orange bar on your dashboard progress towards the goal, earning merit badges toward an Eagle Scout, or meeting milestones along a project timeline, most of us enjoy — and are motivated by — rewards for our achievements.

The entire wearables industry is gamifying everything from fitness to dieting to our sleep patterns. Why not gamify our learning? 

Digital badges are blissful because not only are they fun…they are practical, tangible, and immediately useful. M&M recently signed up for a MOOC administered via Canvas that also incorporated a scaffold of badges. This scaffold led to the ultimate badge at the course’s completion that represented a micro-credential for having achieved the necessary skills and objectives outlined in the course. This badge could then be used by achievers to augment their digital CVs, profiles, and more. One of the royal “us” was extremely addicted to getting these badges, and knocked out days worth of coursework in record time…JUST TO GET MORE BADGES!! 

We have talked with a variety of people about badges since getting to know them (badges not people) better this spring, and it has been very interesting to listen to how different populations respond:

• We had dinner with a “regular Joe” couple recently who have no daily connection to education, pedagogy, or learning science — yet immediately, they seized on the potential for helping with employment issues. Both for people seeking jobs and for employers seeking to find qualified employees;
• we met with very different people last month — this time association leaders — to discuss education goals for their programs — and they were also intrigued by badges. They see the potential in being able to a.) inspire the internal creation of curriculum structure, AND b.) excite their members and help them chart their own learning paths to specific outcomes;
• the well-known Khan Academy just launched an onboard badging system for some of its math courses this spring;
• and finally, companies who offer training, talent management (the new HR), incentives, and/or sales will benefit from badging scaffolds also.

Academyofmine.com compiled this fantastic summary post. It’s a great primer for those just wanting to get started understanding the 5 Ws of badging.

Do you have an organization, club, business, online course, or training program that you think would benefit from incorporating badges? Give us a shout to discuss how Muzik & Muzik and help you develop one!

 

Form follows Function: Creating the Knowledge Ecology

This is quite a lovely turn of phrase.

“What do you do for a living?”

“Why, I’m part of creating the knowledge ecology.”

Doesn’t that sound lofty and philanthropic? A mix of brainy and organic, benevolent and smart.

Canadian George Siemens, writer, educator, philosopher, and father of Connectivism theory is quoted in this week’s readings, and coined this phrase in the context of a larger discussion about the role of instruction and instructors in supporting the non-linear aspects of learning. He goes on to say that instruction should focus less on presenting information and more on engaging the learner’s ability to navigate information and draw accurate conclusions from it.

Thinking of the teaching and learning process as an organic ecology is a wonderful metaphor for those of us working to create relevant, contextual, engaging, and memorable learning environments. Recognizing that all of the parts of learning impact all of the other parts of learning is a tremendous first step in creating educational opportunities that more closely resemble the developmental, constructivist learning process that all human beings progress through as they live. It’s an acknowledgment of the spirit and practice of life long learning that “online learning,” “learning,” “MOOCs,” etc. are facilitating and igniting worldwide.

Further, an ecological approach to learning amplifies American architect Louis Sullivan’s 1896 axiom “form follows function.” To create authentic learning experiences, we must take into consideration the context for the learning and the desired outcomes. Who is the learner? What are the ongoing objectives? What is the environment? What are the available resources? And finally, what is the result supposed to be? When design answers those questions, we create learner-centered, teacher guided, student-collaborative environments that are ultimately successful. Rereading the source quote for the well-used phrase

“It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic, of all things physical and metaphysical, of all things human and all things superhuman, of all true manifestations of the head, of the heart, of the soul, that the life is recognizable in its expression, that form ever follows function. This is the law.“

 

is inspirational in that it lends itself to a sense of inherent “rightness” about moving forward in such a vein. Productivity and lifestyle guru Steven R. Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People taps into this in Habit #2, “Begin with the end in mind.” This habit is all about defining what you want to happen (“the end” -or “function”), then setting everything else into place (“the form”) in a manner consistent with getting there. It feels so grounded to create and develop with the certainty that if the desired function of something is well-understood, then the steps needed to get there will reveal themselves.

We are so lucky as learners today to have access to technology tools and resources that connect us to others without much effort. We can access a smorgasbord of reference materials and opinions, primary sources of research, assessment tools, and online diaries of the experiences of our peers and mentors. The promise of blended learning is that in the hands of skilled developers, facilitators, and educators, this knowledge ecology can not only thrive. It can respond enthusiastically to the true needs of 21st century learners for years to come.

#connectivism #formfollowsfunction #knowledgeecology #blendkit2014

Overview: Reflections on Week 1 of the Blended Learning Toolkit 2014

This week, M&M started our first MOOC. This isn’t a first online course experience for either of us, but it is our first official entry into the MOOC experience as learners. Delivered by a partnership via the University of Central Florida (UCF)‘s Center for Distributed Learning and EDUCAUSE, this course lasts 5 weeks and is designed to use blended learning formats to demonstrate and teach best practices in BL course design/development. The LMS being used is Canvas, with additional technical support from Adobe Connect (“live” session delivery), Google docs, and more.

One of us is a former colleague of several former UCF distributed learning and ed tech faculty, and as such has high expectations for the quality of this course. The connection with EDUCAUSE, a leading ed tech association supporting higher education, was also a selling point for this MOOC, and only serves to add to collective expectations.

The “Ms.” half of M&M is one tough customer and is the one with the expectation mountain:

I was surprised that the very first “live” session had technical difficulties and was an hour late in starting. This really emphasized a difference from my previous experiences with classes and meetings, namely the etiquette codes of “don’t be late” and “being late lets people know you think your time is worth more than theirs.” Ouch. Further, there was an operating limit on the number of  participants allowed into the online “classroom.” A limit of 100. For an enrollment of 2,100+. Am I totally unrealistic to think that this is a really awkward ratio? Perhaps it will be a self-fulfilling prophecy: no course history indicates the room needs to be bigger than 100, because once learners try one or two times to get in unsuccessfully, they stop trying. Demand meets supply.

Some important notes: free course, free course, free course. I think I would be willing to pay if I could be guaranteed a log-in until 15 minutes in. Something I hope that future iterations might consider, if the room can’t be expanded to accommodate a greater percentage of participants. Also, the readings weren’t available yet, and it’s interesting how the old habits from traditional learning die hard: “Come to class prepared!”  The time set aside for the weekly webinar somehow felt like a colossal waste of time, although I did manage to knit an entire slipper and unsubscribe from a dozen mailing lists while waiting.

The course features different modalities for participation and does a good job of outlining these in advance. As most people tracking the MOOC trend know, it’s super common for learners to sign up and check out. We read somewhere recently that only 11% of MOOC participants ever complete their courses.

Even more dramatic, a 2014 working paper drafted by researchers at both Harvard and MIT, and quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education, reported only 5% of their nearly 900k participants completed their courses, and 35% never even looked at the course materials. The designers of Blended Learning Toolkit 2014 definitely understand this dynamic and go out of their way to emphasis that the decision to participate (and at what level) lies in the hands of the individual learners. No guilt. Just accountability. In fact, the one “ask” made to all learners is to decide for ourselves the level at which we can participate and to “calendar” our participation. This is a great idea and really gets at the heart of low completion levels for self-paced/self-directed learning endeavors…time slips away!

The mix/blend of learning modalities that have surfaced so far include:

• A weekly, 30-minute live session (same day/time each week, featuring guest speakers),
• recordings of the weekly, 30-minute sessions for those who can’t get in or for whom the time doesn’t work,
• contributions to the information stream (Tweeting and/or posting relevant resources to social media),
• the ability to earn badges for learning milestones along the way,
• reading reactions (to blog or other text formats), and
• the readings themselves (in PDF and HTML forms).

Readers of this blog will see a series of reflective entries and musings over the next few weeks. First up will be a response to readings focused on the role of blended learning in higher education and design challenges facing the blended learning instructor/designer.

Question: What are your pet peeves with online/blended learning formats and/or MOOCs? What warts are you willing to accept and how is that different from what you accept in other learning environments (i.e. f2f classes, meetings, trainings, conferences)?

 

 

Attend, connect, refresh: F2F conferencing continues its value

In March, M&M attended a couple of edtech conferences on the West coast. The first was NCCE 2014, hosted by the Northwest Consortium for Computers in Education in Seattle, WA (~2,000 attendees). The second was CUE, hosted by California’s Computer Using Educators in Palm Springs, CA (~5,300 attendees). The primary audience for both events is educators working in K–12 public school educational settings, from classrooms to administration.

Our focus on adult learning put us in a take-from-this-what-we can mode, and it was very interesting talking with the exhibitor/vendors at both conferences. A huge issue for public education in the US is the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), and adapting curriculum to meet these standards in a formal, measurable way. As a result many sessions were specifically presented and titled with this in mind, kind of a drag for those of us who could care less. What was very powerful, however, was a distinct shift toward accountability and ensuring that products, pedagogy, and innovations had a concrete purpose — the destination had become important, not just the ride.

This, friends, is an exciting trend. There are so many low-cost and free strategies and services available in the K–12 education realm that would benefit adult learners and those designing systems to support them. A revived focus on outcomes positions these products perfectly to be bogarted for association and training use. They now have accountability structures built into them, and many of them can be customized. Pricing also remains very, very (almost obscenely) friendly, and puts some of the big dog LMS’ a bit to shame. Woof-woof, you know who you are.

Two of the best things we saw/heard that have applications for adult learning:

Badges for learning achievement: whether you equate these with gamification or scouting, electronic badging has huge potential for informal learning. Also referred to as micro-credentialling, badges are earned for reaching specific milestones and can be created/issued by any entity.  Mozilla’s OpenBadges platform allows users to create badges and distribute them to learners — and because the badge graphics contain special meta-data (doesn’t that sound smart?!), they can be verified for authenticity. Imagine adding them to your Linked In profile and digital CV. While not every badge issuer has the same credibility as Stanford or MIT, within industries and specific training programs, badges can be a fun source of gathering and displaying credentials, giving credence to learning achievements of all shapes and sizes AND inspiring friendly competition. Read this thought-provoking article from Pixelfountain’s game-based learning blog for more about the role of gamification in life-long learning. It’s kind of exciting 🙂

Built-in annotations for print and video media: We all have them: archives upon archives upon archives of digital content that we started collecting as soon as it was cheap and easy to do so. We recorded endless numbers of conference sessions and digitally-archived every journal article, publication, white paper, and proposal abstract we received. And we now have servers filled with this stuff, waiting to be tagged, curated, bundled, and otherwise REPURPOSED. Doesn’t that sound positive? REPURPOSED!

But how?

New advances in annotation software from providers like Curriculet (for PDFs and other printed-word media) and Zaption (for video) let content developers embed questions, comments, exams, supporting media, collaboration tools, and more into existing content. Teachers are using these tools to enhance the usability of multimedia in support of project-based learning (PBL). And in the adult context, they can be used to extend the usefulness of critical media in training materials, credentialing support, CEUs, course development, content monetization strategies, etc.. This is the cool and exciting part. Imagine being able to take a still-relevant conference session and layer a mask of questions before and after key points. Test for comprehension. Ensure that viewers really are viewing by limiting advancement through the video/book/white paper unless specific criteria have been met. And guess what? There are awesome analytics associated with all of these tools. How many members meeting description X bailed out before completing? What is the average education level of the members who watched session Y?

It’s almost overwhelming.

To summarize, M&M loved attending both of these events. Our co-attendees were engaged, excited, and focused on learning. Talking with people from different backgrounds and different concerns was enlightening and motivating. We saw old friends and made some new ones, we got caught up on innovations in the field and were able to easily survey many tech providers all at once. NCCE sessions were focused on the application of technology to progressive teaching pedagogy and learning science. CUE sessions were very tech-y and focused on specific how-tos using specific pieces of software and hardware. Both were incredibly complementary events to attend. For all of the online opportunities and webinars that are available, it felt somehow important to be meeting face to face again with our cohorts and asking real people real questions in real time. We even saw the Khan Academy‘s Sal Khan and got to hear his story first-hand.

In a way it was like the best of all learning opportunities. Diverse, with the ability to use all of the analog and digital tools at hand to gain meaning, understanding, and perspective. Now that we are back in our metaphorical cave, digesting and implementing the things we learned in the field, the natural ebb and flow of the learning lifestyle washes over us, refreshing attitudes, determination, and commitment.

QUESTION: Do you still like conferencing and meeting face-to-face? How has the availability of online learning changed what f2f means to you? How often do you attend conferences and learning events? 

Article: Engaging Flexible Learning #bcdl2014

Please give this a read, transcripted from edtech journalist Audrey Watters’ recent keynote appearance at the British Columbia Distributed Learning Conference (BCDL 2104). I always enjoy hearing Ms. Watters’ warnings and concerns. She keeps me from running after band wagons full tilt.

Engaging Flexible Learning #bcdl2014

http://hackeducation.com/2014/04/09/bc-digital-learning-conference-2014/

Pigeon-holes, PLNs, and Community, oh my!

M&M recently joined the eLearningGuild, a 63k+-member organization designed to connect and support professionals in the eLearning space. Particularly delightful about this organization (so far!) is that they seem to go out of their way to avoid pigeon-holing and/or “labeling” professionals in our field. Here at M&M, we’ve been recently discussing what defines an educator and what it really means. We just got back to Vienna after attending two US-based education conferences (CUE 2014 and NCCE 2014), both of which serve primarily the K–12 education team for their respective regions (CUE for California and NCCE for the Pacific Northwest). As a result, most of our fellow attendees were career educators, with formal public school classroom and/or administration experience. The humble would call themselves simply, “teachers.” We were often asked what district we are from and/or what software our schools used. Our response was that we’re actually not from a district/school, but that we are “in adult learning, helping organizations and businesses develop their educational and eLearning strategies.” “Ah,” we heard, “so you’re not really teachers.” Cue failure buzzer sound, then insert sad face. Wahnt-waaaah. Meh.

We’ll post a comprehensive follow-up post about what we learned at these conferences and the supremely cool awesome stuff that is going on in educational technology right now. But for today, a link to the eLearning Guild is what we offer, and an invitation to join us there for discussion, best practices, camaraderie, and learning more about our eLearning passions and what fuels them. Each eLearning specialist, informational designer, instructional designer, content curator, and staff developer is in the practice of educating. Let’s continue to engage and learn from one another as we spread better teaching and learning techniques worldwide.

Feel free to share your personal favorite online hangouts for community and informal learning!

#cue14 #ncce2014 #elearning #edchat #edtech #pln #adultlearning

SCORM Under 4: Not just for Programmers Anymore

Standards and interoperability can be totally dry and boring topics. But if you and your organization are researching and trying to select new course creation and/or LMS systems for your education program, they are pretty important.

Interoperability is something I first learned about when my friend and colleague Tim Magner took a job as the Executive Director of edtech’s Software Interoperability Framework (SIF). I’m trying now to draw a bead on exactly when this was, but my best guess is around 2003. In education, this coincided with a huge push toward “accountability” and “infrastructure” overhauls. Another keyword thrown around at the time was “data-driven decision-making.” As a result, many administrators and school systems were seeking administrative software solutions in epic proportions. At any rate, SIF was working to create awareness about interoperability and the benefits of structuring technical systems in such a way that components by different providers could “talk” to each other. Cool! This is an idea that seemed like a great big whopping “DUH” — a concept that seemed far from rocket science.

More than 10 years later, technology systems and software backend are a daily part of our lives. If we work in businesses and organizations, the struggle of how to make what we have with what we need/want next is a regular guest at the table. Interoperability is a big part of the answer. What I love about the “Shareable Content Object Reference Model” (SCORM) is that it puts the topic out front and frames it within the eLearning environment. This video, put together by #KMI Learning, is a great overview. And it’s under 4 minutes long.

M&M met with a staff member for a major European medical society a few weeks ago. One of her biggest pain points was having received a top-down directive to “implement eLearning,” then invested in an LMS, then had no time or available resources to take that LMS beyond the initial baby steps. Been there? The commitment to make a purchase is huge and requires big financial and political investment. If that system doesn’t play well with others, you could end up even more stuck than you were before you started. Because, after all, you have just lobbied for (and spent) a huge chunk of change — potentially the lion’s share of your eLearning/education budget.

Beyond the technical interoperability issues involved with creating online courses, SCORM also establishes technical standards for course structure and course progression/completion. Most programmers in eLearning spaces know SCORM, but Instructional and Curriculum Designers don’t yet. Is this you? It’s worth learning more.

SCORM.

SCORM.

SCORM.

Ensuring SCORM compliance in your systems is a critical first step in your software evaluation process.

SCORM.

Say it until you say it in your sleep.

SCORM 2004 4th Edition (User Guide for Instructional Designers)

#SIF #edchat #SCORM

#Roojoom Closes $600K Seed To Push Its Online Tutorial-Builder At More Businesses

What a fantastic tool! This seems to have potential to really take those who love to teach to the next level. I can imagine using this to teach a volunteer committee how to work with a new database. I can also imagine using this to teach someone to make corn tortillas from scratch. Can’t wait to give it a go myself! What tools are you using right now…and do you see #Roojoom taking root with how you educate? #edchat #diy