Archive
More than 100 Blatant^ Clients Now Using Mobile eLearning Version of Absorb LMS
January 15, 2013 was a big day at blatant^. That was the date that our first customer, a major global manufacturer and retailer, went live with the new HTML-5, iPad- and iPhone-friendly version of Absorb LMS, code named `Ninja.’ We were confident that this implementation would go smoothly since prior to the official launch, one company had exposed 40,000 learners to a successful Beta preview.
Prior to launching Absorb LMS Ninja, the learning management system featured a Flash-based user interface that wasn’t compatible with Apple iOS devices, but did run on any device that supported Flash.
Absorb LMS Ninja was well received in the industry:
- Bersin by Deloitte bestowed a ‘What Works’ Award in recognition of the innovative new technology.
- Brandon Hall Group gave Absorb LMS a Gold award for “Best Advance in Learning Management Technology for Small and Medium-Sized Businesses” in the Excellence in Technology Awards.
The launch of this new mobile elearning-friendly version of Absorb LMS marked the start of a massive undertaking to migrate hundreds of customers to the new technology. Four months later, 100+ clients are using Absorb LMS Ninja. An additional 150 clients have go-live launch dates in place with the new version.
Absorb LMS: Conversions to new HTML 5 platform
May 9th: Delivering Content in an Increasingly Mobile World
More than half of the phones sold in the U.S. are smartphones, and Gartner predicts that tablet sales will outpace PC sales by 2017. This reality has many organizations rethinking how they approach learning content and environments. What does a mobile-ready environment look like? What content is appropriate for mobile delivery?
David Wentworth
Dan Medakovic
Join David Wentworth, Senior Analyst with Brandon Hall Group and Dan Medakovic, V.P. Learning Solutions, from Blatant Media’s Absorb LMS as they explore the ways mobile delivery can be leveraged for learning and some real-world examples of mobile learning in action.
Key Takeaways:
- An understanding of the current mobile landscape
- A breakdown of different mobile technologies and platforms
- Examples of organizations delivering mobile learning
Registration Now Open for May and June Webinars
Absorb LMS Tips and Tricks
Wednesday, May 22, 2013, 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM MDT (UTC-7)
Join Absorb LMS team members for a fast-paced presentation of their favorite Absorb LMS tips and tricks. Whether you’re an Absorb LMS customer, use a different learning management system, or are considering acquiring your first LMS, this session will likely give you ideas on how you can optimize the management of your learning initiatives to provide a rewarding experience for your learners.
Details and registration form are located here.
Does Your LMS Focus on the User Experience? A Bersin & Blatant Media Webinar
Wednesday, June 20, 2013, Noon – 1:00 PM MDT (UTC-7)
When your employees need to find and access learning content, the experience of doing so should be intuitive, responsive, fast and targeted. Anything less leads to frustration and wasted time. Whether accessed through a desktop, laptop, or mobile device, organizations need an learning management system that helps them become efficient and effective.
Join Dr. Katherine Jones, Lead Analyst, HCM Technology at Bersin by Deloitte, Deloitte Consulting LLP, and Dan Medakovic, Vice President, eLearning Solutions at Blatant Media Corporation for a Webinar that will help you understand how a learning management system that provides a good user experience can reduce wasted time and lessen frustration among end users. You will be presented with:
- The need for, and attributes of, a good user interface
- Strategies for providing end users with fresh, targeted learning content
- Questions to ask when evaluating systems
Details and registration form are located here.
The Learning Management System Feature People Hate the Most
Satisfaction surveys of learning management system administrators invariably identify reporting as the most reviled feature in their platform. Administrators complain about reporting being unintuitive, cumbersome, lacking customizability, not being powerful enough, and just generally being bad at displaying the data administrators want.
So, why aren’t LMS solution providers fixing the problem? The short answer is that it’s really tough to please all system administrators:
- Some administrators want the reporting features to be super easy. They want templates with one button to push.
- For other administrators, one-button-to-push templates with few options are a living hell. They want infinite power and customizability in their LMS reporting capabilities.
For LMS vendors, coming up with reporting features everyone likes is like trying to open a restaurant that serves only one dish. Your cheese lasagna with buffalo mozzarella flown in daily from Italy might be a hit with some customers but the carnivores will complain on Urbanspoon that the recipe should have had meat and the lactose- and gluten-free crowd will tell their friends they were up all night with cramps after eating at your lousy joint.
So, the bottom line is that in designing their platforms, LMS solution providers are constantly walking the fine line between ease-of-use and how powerful and customizable to make their reporting features.
If you’re looking to acquire your first learning management system, or if your needs have changed and you are considering switching systems, here are some things to look for in evaluating the reporting features of LMS.
- Report templates—Your LMS administrator may be a geek with a capital G who likes to create all reports from scratch by typing SQL commands into fields. That’s great! …until that person leaves your organization and someone else needs to step in and take over the work. You want a system that contains basic templates that can be customized to quickly display the information you need.
- Consistent user experience across all report templates—You shouldn’t have to learn to create a report, and then need to learn how to create a different report. You should be able to learn how to use one report and then apply those skills to all other reports. Whether you are creating a report showing the progress of a group of learners in a curriculum, or a report showing a list of learners on a waiting list for a classroom-based course, getting to the data using similar features will significantly reduce the learning curve for administrators.
- The ability to show, hide, and rearrange the order of columns in reports—Sometimes, you want to show more, or less, of the information contained in your system’s databases in a way that’s clear and easily understood.
- The ability to query the fields in a report—Whether you want a listing of learners in a specific city, a list of people who scored less than 70 per cent on a recent exam, people who have completed a course within a given time period, etc., you want to be able to search for—and display—the data you need.
- The ability to automatically e-mail reports—I guarantee you, there will be at some point in your learning initiative, a need for a manager or team leader to monitor the progress of a group of learners. Sure, you can give that individual access to the LMS’s admin features and ask her to get her own darn report and leave you alone, but a simpler and more politically astute approach is simply to have a report automatically e-mailed to the individual. She’ll love the fact that the report is sitting in her inbox when she gets to work on Mondays. She’ll say nice things about you to others. You’ll be a rock star.
- The ability to export data—Sometimes, you just want to play around with data outside of the LMS. Or, perhaps you’ll want to archive some information you feel you no longer need.
- The ability to save and retrieve a report you’ve created—It’s a major waste of time to have to recreate the same report over and over again. If it’s been saved, it will take one second to call up the information you want.
In closing, the best way to assess the reporting features of a learning management system is to decide what reports you might need and ask the vendor to demonstrate the creation of those reports. If the person demonstrating the platform can’t create the reports you require within a few minutes, chances are your satisfaction with the platform will be low once the initial honeymoon phase has passed. Save yourself some heartache and be disciplined about evaluating this critical component of LMS technology.
APRIL WEBINAR: A Step-by-Step Guide to Setting Up Your Learning Management System
It’s been quite a few months since we presented our popular Webinar on the topic of configuring a learning management system. Since then, many of you have likely started using a new platform. Consequently, we’re repeating this popular session.
Whether you’re acquiring your first learning management system or replacing an existing system, this session will present a structured approach to configuring your LMS that will make managing your learning programs a breeze. We’ll examine:
- How to organize learners into groups
- How to structure your content
- How to create learning plans
- How to provide learners with a way to select the types of learning events they prefer
- Creating communication templates that reflect your organization’s culture
- How to manage venues for instructor-led learning
- Defining administrators
- How to create reports that give you and others the information they need
- And more.
We only have room for 100 attendees so sign up early. I hope to see you there!
A Step-by-Step Guide to Setting Up Your Learning Management System
Wednesday, April 24, 2013, 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM MDT (UTC-6)
Details and registration form are located here.
How to Use a Learning Management System to Solve the I-Didn’t-Get-the-Memo Problem
Somewhere among the hundreds or perhaps thousands of e-mails in your inbox, somewhere in the skyscraper-high piles of paper on the corner of your desk, is something really really important. This might be an urgent policy or procedural change. If you work in emergency response, healthcare, security, transportation, among many other industries, people’s safety may be compromised if you don’t get and act on this information.
E-mail has been and continues to be the primary communication media in the workplace. Consequently, many organizations turn to e-mail for such updates. They’ll send out an e-mail blast with the words `IMPORTANT‘ or `URGENT‘ in the title to the people who need to be informed. Perhaps the sender will click the little checkboxes in their mail client for delivery and read notifications to be returned, but, if you’ve sent the notice to more than just a few recipients, manually tracking who has opened the e-mail is a headache.
A learning management system (LMS) can provide an effective way to monitor who has viewed such important information and who may need a follow-up telephone call. Here’s how:
1. Create a `course’ that contains the critical information embedded as a PDF document. PDF is a nice file format for something like this because it will display on many different devices, including iPads and other tablets, phones, etc.
2. Create the e-mail that will be sent when people are enrolled in the course as well as the reminder e-mail. Make sure these e-mails communicate the urgency of this information. If you can set the frequency of the reminder e-mails, don’t be shy about nagging the individual daily.
3. Enroll the individuals who should get this important update into this `course.’ The system will send out the enrolment e-mail and depending on your LMS, a message to the learner’s LMS dashboard.
Learning management systems typically provide feedback to learners on their progress. For the learner, this is like crossing an item off their TO-DO list, which provides happy feelings of accomplishment.
4. Track who has accessed the document using your LMS’s reporting features. In the example below, British singer/songwriter Laura Marling and ex Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page have accessed the important update. The others have not.
The purpose of tracking who has accessed such important information isn’t to lay blame. There are many extremely valid reasons why people may not have read important updates: spam filters, off the Internet grid due to travel or meetings, illness, etc. The real purpose of tracking access is to identify who may require a secondary attempt through means other than e-mail, perhaps a phone call.
How Mobile Devices are Influencing User Interface Design
“Dear Doctor,
I’m concerned about Stanley. He has developed an unusual growth between his left thumb and index finger. The growth is the size of an average hardcover book, yet thinner. One side is silver and emblazoned with the image of an apple. The other glows with an iridescent light.
Stanley does not appear to be in any pain. Nevertheless, I know he’s concerned since he stares and taps at the growth constantly.
Sincerely,
—Concerned”
“Dear Concerned,
Please rest assured that we in the medical community are keeping close watch of this condition, which is reaching global epidemic proportions. So far, it appears to be benign and may in fact result in heightened curiosity, increased knowledge, and new skills.
—Your caring doctor”
Computer tablet sales are in 2013 predicted to outpace sales of traditional computers. There are currently almost as many mobile phones on the planet as there are people. These devices are becoming extensions of ourselves, rarely leaving our hands.
Futurists say we’re on the cusp of becoming cyborgs. We laugh and think this is crazy… until we misplace our mobile device and have to deal with the resulting separation anxiety.
The fact that people increasingly use mobile devices to communicate, collaborate, and access Web content is having a huge impact on the design of user interfaces for enterprise software applications. Here are some examples.
- Rather than shrinking down a traditional computer user interface to fit the smaller screens of mobile devices, smart designers create interfaces that adapt or `respond’ to different screen sizes as well as vertical and horizontal orientations. In the example below, interface elements are resized and rearranged to best display on an Apple iPhone and iPad.
- Prior to the mobile revolution, many web sites were designed with a navigation menu that runs along the top of the screen. That works fine using conventional computers but is a poor choice for devices such as tablets which you typically cradle in both hands. Having a thumb touch the top middle of the screen is awkward on larger touch screens. Smart mobile interface design places navigation elements within comfortable range of human thumbs.
- Attempting to click tiny hyperlinks on small touch screens using human fingers is frustrating. Below is a screen capture from a popular garden supply company. This site looks really nice on my iPad. Unfortunately, whenever I attempt to add eggplant to my shopping cart, I get cucumber. The links are simply too close together for my fingers to select what I need without zooming in. (I wonder if my family would notice if I substituted cucumber for eggplant in my famous eggplant parmigiana recipe?)
Smart designers create user interfaces where all clickable elements such as hyperlinks and buttons are large enough to be selected with fingertips.
Tablets and phones are now ubiquitous so software designers and content providers need to assume that people will be accessing their content on a mobile device. What might look great on a traditional computer monitor may be completely unusable on a phone or tablet.
Course-of-the-Month Club: Using a Learning Management System to Sell Subscriptions to Learning Content
It seems as if almost every organization I speak to wants to use a learning management system (LMS) in a different way. One company I recently met with uses a magazine subscription-like business model to sell bundles of courses:
- A customer signs up for an annual subscription.
- The person immediately gets access to some courses.
- In the second month of the subscription, they get access to new courses and can continue to access the courses from month one.
- This continues monthly until the subscription expires after 12 months. The customer is then given the option to renew.
Understandably, the company providing this course-of-the-month subscription service doesn’t want the headache of managing all this manually. They want the process automated within the learning management system so that it’s scalable when the business takes off and they have tens of thousands of learners. They also want to spend their time and energy on creating great content rather than managing course access.
Here’s how to support this business model using a learning management system. For the sake of this example, let’s assume that this commercial course provider sells courses related to mandolin playing.
Ok, full disclosure. In the hope of receiving a gift of a mandolin, I’ve been dropping hints around the house: pictures of mandolins on the fridge, Chris Thile mandolin music streaming on Grooveshark, visibly spending time on the LinkedIn Mandolin Players and Enjoyers Group (yes, this really does exist.) Add this Blog post to this shameless hint list.
Your LMS requires the following features to support this business model:
- A shopping cart through which a customer can purchase a subscription
- The ability to bundle courses into groups
- The ability to automatically make content expire
- The ability to automatically provide new courses every month
STEP 1: Bundle together the courses you want to provide in the first month of the subscription. Give this course collection a name. Set as the price of this course bundle whatever you want to charge for the 12-month subscription. For example:
Course bundle name: The Very Exciting World of Mandolins
12-month subscription price: $150
Courses provided in month one:
- Mandolin Care
- Tuning Your Mandolin
- Your First Mandolin Tutorial
STEP 2: Specify that this bundle of courses will automatically expire after 30 days.
STEP 3: Create a second bundle of courses that includes all the courses from bundle 1. For example:
Bundle name: The Very Exciting World of Mandolins (Month 2)
Courses provided in month two:
- Mandolin Care
- Tuning Your Mandolin
- Your First Mandolin Tutorial
- Strumming Exercises (New!)
- Basic Chord Patterns (New!)
- Scales and Arpeggios (New!)
STEP 4: Specify that 30 days after a learner gets access to the first course bundle—the date they placed their subscription order—they’ll automatically be given access to the second course bundle.
Repeat STEPS 3 and 4 above for months three to 11 of the subscription. Each month’s course bundle should contain the courses from all previous months along with new courses. Also, each month’s course bundle should automatically expire after 30 days but simultaneously provide access to the next bundle.
Since this is a 12-month subscription, the last month should automatically send an e-mail to the customer encouraging renewal and pointing them to where they can purchase a second year membership. That membership will contain all the courses from year one and the process above will resume. If the customer does not renew, the content from the final course bundle will expire and be removed from the customer’s portal.
The course-of-the-month club can be a potentially effective business model, especially if the content being provided is timeless and doesn’t become obsolete. The customer is motivated to renew their subscription since the value of the subscription grows each month as more courses are added to their library.
If this course subscription model existed for mandolin-related content, I’d sign up in a minute.
How to Use a Learning Management System for Performance Support
About a dozen years ago, learning and development professionals thought performance support was bigger than Tom Hanks, Meryl Streep, and The Beatles all rolled into one. Conferences about performance support were filled to capacity. Help authoring tools such as Robohelp and Doc-to-Help were selling like hotcakes. Electronic performance support systems (EPSS) were the rage.
Performance support was so hot that some gurus and pundits predicted that courses were on their deathbeds. Why bother having people take courses to learn things they’ll soon forget? A better strategy is simply to provide individuals with the information they need at the precise moment that they need to perform a task. Rather than attempting to improve skills, the focus became how to integrate support into daily activities.
Gartner’s Hype Cycle provides an accurate description of the rise, fall, and current state of opinion regarding performance support.
That time a dozen years ago certainly marked the Peak of Inflated Expectations. This was followed a couple years later by a deep Trough of Disillusionment. During this trough phase, people starting thinking that maybe skills really do matter. Also, software and hardware makers realized that more people would buy their products if they made them easier to use. Intuitive design became a higher priority. A software application or gadget shipped with a user guide suggested a failure of design. The best designed stuff was self-explanatory.
We’re likely now approaching the Plateau of Productivity for performance support. Learning professionals have realized that conventional learning events such as courses can co-exist peacefully with performance support resources. Not only can these two strategies mesh, they can, in fact, leverage the same environment and content.
A learning management system (LMS) can be used as a performance support platform if it can quickly provide access to the small bits of content required to performing a task. If someone needs to log into a LMS, find and enroll in a course, and navigate through a long lesson, the individual will think `this sucks` and will look for alternatives to get the required information.
Consider the following in using your learning management system for performance support:
- Speed of access to information should be your primary consideration. Make a poster to remind you of this and put it on your wall. Or, consider a tattoo.
- Keep lessons and resources short. If the answer to a question is located midway through a long course or on page 12 of a 20-page PDF, learners will give up and e-mail a colleague for help.
- Consider implementing single sign on (SSO) between whatever applications an individual is using and your LMS. This will eliminate the need for people to log into the LMS when accessing performance support materials.
- Instead of forcing people to search for the content they need, use `deep links` to point learners directly to the appropriate material.
What’s a deep link?
Rather than pointing a learner to their LMS dashboard, a deep link takes a learner directly to the information they need within the LMS, whether that be a course or a lesson within a course. For example:
- A link such as http://www.mylearningsite.com would take the learner to their main dashboard
- A link such as http://www.mylearningsite.com/u/?_cid=122532* would take the person to a course
- A link such as http://www.mylearningsite.com/u/?_lid=412353 would take a person to a specific lesson within a course
- A link such as http://www.mylearningsite.com/u/?_rid=652351 would take a person to a specific resource such as a PDF document
By embedding deep links in the applications an individual works with each day (Intranet, custom software applications, CRMs, etc.), or by sending deep links via e-mail, a learner can be taken directly the information the need immediately. Upon clicking a deep link, the learner could, for instance, see something like this:
*The syntax for deep links differs between different LMS. Contact your vendor for details on how to deep link within your platform.
Using a Learning Management System to Gather Good Ideas
There’s a winding, two-lane highway in Quebec that has a telephone/electrical pole standing in the middle. This isn’t a joke. I’ve inserted a photo from a reputable news source below to show you that this really exists.
How did this happen? Apparently, a road crew was sent to pave the road and they worked around the pole, rather than coordinating with a crew from the electrical company to remove the pole first. You can read about this here and here.
We can all breathe more easily, however, because:
“The pole has not caused any harm, so far…the problem will be fixed by the end of the month”
CAPTION: An electric pole stands in the middle of a road in Johnville, Que. on Monday Nov. 19, 2012. The ministry of Transport fixed a dangerous curve in the road issue this summer, but Quebec’s public utility apparently failed to coordinate its timetable with the roadwork. Jocelyn Riendeau / Canadian Press / Sherbrooke La Tribune
Well that’s a relief.
It seems very unlikely that no one on the road crew mentioned paving around the pole might be a bad idea. At the very least, I would expect that the person operating the heavy equipment that flattens the asphalt to say “paving this stretch of road would be a lot easier if this pole weren’t in my way.”
This is the type of thing that happens in organizations that are either deaf to the input of workers, or have a culture where people are scared to speak up.
I’m certain that there’s a diagram somewhere at a Quebec government office showing that there’s a telephone pole in the middle of the highway. But, this is surely easier to be overlooked by an engineer sitting in a distant office than by a member of road crew leaning against it.
Input from those on the ground, doing the actual work, is critically important to the success of any organization. What works in theory may not work in practice.
Here’s an idea:
Since organizations typically use learning management systems to show people how to better do their jobs, why not use learning management systems to gather input from workers on how the work they do can:
- Be safer
- Be done more efficiently
- Be less expensive
- Be more rewarding and stimulating
- Generate better products and services
Here are some ways to do this:
- Include a task after a lesson that invites the learner to submit improvements via a wiki, Google Doc, or other online editor.
- Or, for each course related to an internal process, add as a resource a link to an online, editable document to which learners can contribute.
- You could even create a course specifically designed to improve a process. Rather than showing learners how a process is currently done, simply enrol a project team into a course that contains one objective: the completion of a document describing their best collective thinking on how to complete the initiative.
Gathering input from learners is only a start. Decision makers and managers must review the information submitted and provide feedback, ideally directly in the online document, stating which suggestions will be implemented and providing reasons for why those that won’t be implemented were refused.
Input from workers can’t fall on deaf ears, otherwise learners will stop contributing good ideas. Then, morale will drop and poles might appear in the middle of highways.
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