eLearning Roadtrip

No More Living in Shame

My Saturday mornings are typically spent with a cup of coffee or two or three, surrounded by various screens, catching up on the news of the week. I used to subscribe to a lot of newspapers. These days I subscribe to RSS feeds and I follow some really smart people on Twitter. Long way of saying that I had lots of "reading" to look forward to this morning. And then I got struck by a proverbial bolt of lightning.

Maybe it was finally having the time to simultaneously "background process" on several of the articles I tweeted on Friday (Hint to non-tweeters: click on the link with the http://, it is a shortened url that will take you to the report or article):

• Very nice RT @toddahitchcock: Another gr8 pub from our friends at SREB > Overcoming Doubts about Online Learning -http://bit.ly/6lemYY
  
• Bet this will get a few hearts pumping in higher ed tech circles  - publics taking advice from proprietaries?? http://bit.ly/7LjCdK (PS read the report, not just the Chronicle summary)
  
• RT @eLearnMag: online learning from student view: http://bit.ly/52xGUo. Online students are still living in shame? Hmm. Very bad.
  
  

Maybe it was that I had just competed trip reports describing some of the highlights from several of the of the elearning conferences that I follow most closely. 

Or maybe it was the catalytic effect of the Baily's Irish Cream.

I found myself wondering: if we are all so smart and good and proud and energized about how great elearning/distance learning/ online learning really is....

WHY ARE ONLINE STUDENTS LIVING IN SHAME??

I hadn't planned for yesterday's tweets to be about elearning quality issues, it just happened that way. Which was telling in and of itself. At the very moment elearning in its various forms is finally being seen as a viable alternative to face-to-face learning experiences we are finding the quality question rearing its head with greater and greater frequency, in increasingly critical and pointed ways.

You think I'm kidding? Have you seen this spoof on online learning that played on the US TV program Saturday Night Live this past October??

Go ahead and click on the links, above. You will see that every one of the articles or reports they lead to are pointing to some tough questions about quality in online learning.

So here is my question to you out there in eLearning Land: How is it that we ever-so-smart online learning leaders are allowing our students, our future alumni, our prospective stakeholders - shoot, let's get real, our prospective CUSTOMERS - to be ashamed of online programs and services they buy from us? Could it be that we've been so busy preening and presenting and yipping at each other that we sorta forgot.

Let's get serious. There is no excuse for online students to be living in shame

I guess I know what issue I will be bringing to the WCET strategic planning meetings in Boulder this week.

eLearning Guild DevLearn 2009 Trip Report

I received a very nice direct message from Shanta Rohse (@shantarohse) yesterday, alerting me that she'd used one of my DevLearn 2009 presentation slides in her recently featured blogpost in eLearning Magazine. I am super flattered that my "Hype Cycle Meets the Innovation Adoption Curve" (Think Gartner Hype Cycle meets Everett Rogers) graphic captured Shanta's attention, excited that this simple illustratation captured some of the same unease about where the elearning profession seems to get stuck for her that it does for me. Of course it's fine with me if she wants to share, are you kidding?? Shanta, thank you for the attribution.

I was also very pleased to see that the eLearning Guild Research Report on User Generated Content by two of my Sage Road associates, (Managing Director) Beth Davis and (Research Associate) Dr. Colleen Carmean, was also highlighted in Shanta's blog post. The research report is almost done. Really. I confess that I am holding up the final manuscript as I make some final edits. I want it to be ready for prime time. Look for us around the first of the year,

Anyway, I was so pleased about Shanta's very nice comments that I decided to add a "PS" to my DevLearn Trip Report posting. Imagine my surprise to discover that the post had never made it to the published blog. It was still hanging there, in "DRAFT" form, waiting for me to wrap things up. Apparently with all the excitement of the past few weeks, I had forgotten to toggle, tag and publish. Not as embarrassing as forgetting to include the "D" when sending a direct message to someone on Twitter. (In case you don't tweet...if you don't include the letter "D" and your friend's Twitter name, then you end up sharing your special private message with all followers and Facebook friends.) So many social media faux pas, so little time. 

Enough. Sorry about the delay in getting this posted. DevLearn 2009, was a great event. Without further ado, here is my DevLearn 2009 Trip Report.

• The Sage Road Solutions crew spent November 10- 13th in San Jose, CA with more than 1300 DevLearn 2009 attendees (#dl09 for those who care about things like hashtags.) We were busy - Beth Davis and Colleen Carmean presented the results of the LMS Deep Analysis report we recently completed for the eLearning Guild this past October, 2009. Colleen and Beth presented the results of our about to be published analysis report entitled The User Generated Content Revolution. I presented the results of Beth Davis's and my industry overview report entitled Navigating the Learning Technologies Metaverse. Look for this published analysis sometime around the beginning of 2010. Colleen and I were both a part of the Research Panel session along with Analysts Janet Clarey from Brandon Hall Research, David Mallon from Bersin Associates and and Kevin Martin from Aberdeen Research.

• Kudos to the eLearning Guild DevLearn team. Brent Schlenker, Mary Alexander, Juli Balding, and the entire eLearning Guild crew gave us a well organized, well run conference. From program to logistics, things really worked. 

• Yay for eLearning. As someone who has been around the space for a while, there is a prickly, uneasy excitement in the air that we haven't felt in our industry for the last 10 year. Yes we all know that the recession continues and the things will never be the same, and we have to get leaner and meaner and smarter and better. Yes, we know that this means getting serious about improving our own professional skills so that we can better anticipate where our customers stakeholders want us to take them.  Still, as I look at the movement on the merger and acquisition front, and watch what's happening in proprietary education, publishing and personal communications technologies, 2010 looks like is going to be a big and better year for some of us, and NOBODY wants to be left behind.

• Adobe Learning Summit.  Not exactly part of DevLearn, but still an important part of the DevLearn experience in San Jose. This had been one of my signature events when I worked you know where. Would have been super easy to kill it when I left. But thanks to the loud enthusiastic voices of the elearning community  Adobe didn't do that.  Instead, Shantanu Narayan, the CEO of Adobe Systems, Inc. was the featured keynote speaker at this year's ALS. Very, very nice.

• Mark Oehlert and Social Media Camp. It was hard not to stop by on the way to and from other sessions, by virtue of its crossroads location AND because there were always so many people clustered around. 

• Breakfast Bytes. I like the round-table, informal discussion format better than the mini-presentation format we used this year. Aside from this very minor nit I continue to appreciate the opportunity for time that encourages discussion. Even at 7 am.

• Time with Cammy Bean.  Call me old-fashioned. it was great to have some F2F time. I really appreciate the design sensibility that Cammy brings to her work. We are collaborating on research that we'll be presenting at the Learning Solutions conference in March. Stay tuned for more on that.   

• Almost as good as being there. Thanks to our community's increasing facility with social media tools and techniques, one can participate in F2F events from just about anywhere. This year's DevLearn was a perfect example of that. No doubt, we are not a sharing-impaired people. Here are links to several of great summaries of featured DevLearn events and activities from Clark Quinn, Steve Howard, Avron Barr, Aaron Silvers, and Koreen Olbrish. 

• The Twitter Backchannel. Search on #dl09 using your browser - and yes, that is a smaller case d as in dev, smaller case l as in learn - and you will see what I mean.Tracy Hamilton ( @hamtra) has compiled a Tweetbook for your convenience.

• #Lrnchat at DemoFest. I think it is totally funny that Brent Schlenker made accommodations for all the Lrnchatters to get their weekly fix in the midst of DevLearn's big techno-reception. 

The keynotes were great, the sessions engaging, the camaraderie excellent. One of the high points of the autumn 2009 season. Certainly looking forward to Learning Solutions in March, 2010.

WCET 2.0

The team at Sage Road Solutions has taken on a project that is near and dear to my heart. I am pleased to tell you that WICHE (the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education) signed a professional services agreement with my company, naming me as WCET’s new executive director. 

WCET is a membership cooperative of institutions and organizations dedicated to advancing access and excellence in higher education through the innovative use of technology. WCET has been in business for 21 years. We used to be the Western Cooperative for Educational Telecommunications, from back in the days when we in the western US were trying to figure out things like how to cross a LATA line. Things have evolved since those early days. Now, as they say, WCET doesn't mean anything. 

Grrrrr. I KNOW that what people mean to say is that WCET is not an acronym. But it still really rubs me the wrong way to ever hear it said that WCET means nothing. Because it has mattered to me, in a variety of ways, for a very long time. 

Just how long, the chorus asks in unison??

Since my assistant professor days at the University of Northern Colorado. Back when I ran the new distance learning institute for UNC's college of continuing education. Again, after working at WCET as a visiting scholar and project director during my university sabbatical. When I left higher education it offered me a safe haven for staying plugged in to the needs and issues of educational technology practitioners. When I came back to WCET as a member of Macromedia's corporate marketing team I was welcomed anyway. That’s kind of a joke, but as many corporate members will affirm, higher education membership associations can be lonely places for their corporate members. But not so at WCET. They elected me to serve as a member of the Executive Council – and even gave me a lifetime achievement award, the Richard Jonsen Award, in 2008.

After all that, you really didn’t really think I could stay away, did you?

I am especially pleased that the terms of our engagement mean that my Sage Road business partner, Beth Davis, will also be participating in the “new” WCET as our business strategist. Many of my WCET colleagues don't come from the world of software so they may not understand what a really big deal this is. Until I mention Dreamweaver, the HTML tool that transformed the Web. Beth introduced Dreamweaver to the world. Dreamweaver was her first step on her way to being a general manager of the products business at Macromedia. Needless to say, but I will anyway - she is wicked smart about identifying, defining and capitalizing on new market opportunities. 

In the spirit of the new economy, we made a proposal to WICHE President David Longanecker that we focus on renewal, refocusing and re-engaging in the learning tech communities. We asked for a one year contract, designed for flexibility in a time of economic uncertainly. Sage Road will provide executive leadership oversight and management for the next calendar year on a renewable contract. We will be responsible for very specific deliverables that ensure WCET is positioned for success in the post-recession world of post-secondary services and support.

We will be bringing you a first look at WCET 2.0 next month, January 2010. We believe there is a unique place for a community of academic learning technology professionals and the vendors that serve them. Between now and them we have a lot of work to do to make sure that focus on  places where we maximize value and impact. 

Given the consequence of inaction, how could we do anything else?

Online Educa Berlin Trip Report

There's nothing like a quick three day trip from California to Germany and back to sharpen one's appreciation for"anywhere, anytime" distributed communications technologies. 

Even so, #OEB2009 was excellent this year - worth a little jet lag, which was easily cured with a few extra hours of sleep, some aspirin and a good soak in the hot tub.

This was the 10th anniversary of my first OEB, which is now in its 15th year. I've attended seven times. Online learning has done a lot of growing up during the past decade, and OEB has grown right along. Today it is the largest international conference dedicated entirely to online learning in the world. It's an energetic, occasionally seething mix of academic researchers, non-governmental organizations, large global enterprises, small innovative businesses, ministries of education, labor and defense. More than 2000 delegates from 92 different countries. Eye-opening and inspiring.

I know we can read the papers and view the presentations, follow the #oeb2009 tweets and retweet what others are saying. We can reach out and virtually touch someone in a webinar.  But you know...and I know I am speaking heresy here...but sometimes being there, in person, really is better.

<Waiting for lightning to strike....>

Here is my top line summary from this year's OEB trip report:

Opening plenary: Lord Puttnam on education, climate change and the the role of moving pictures and virtual worlds and the future of learning. Brian Durran on the London Grid for Learning. Zenna Atkins from Social Solutions asks if education institutions will lead the news ways of learning or if learners will lead by demand.

The Internet Time Alliance brings us Creating the New Era of Corporate Learning - Jay Cross, Charles Jennings, and Jane Hart in person, Harold Jarche and Jon Husband via Connect from Canada. Jerry Michalski and Jay Cross. Barcamps and Unconferences. Excellent.

Quality time with Jane Hart. I'm a fan of Jane's Pick of the Day. I follow her on Twitter, I read her C4LPT blog, I admire her work with the eLearning Guild. I'm glad we were Battling Bloggers together. More on that in a bit.

The Online Educa Debate. Wow. It's an artform. Nothing like my weinie debate experiences from high school. No offense to my high school.

The Adobe eLearning Suite and Solutions exhibition stand. Okay, I admit it. The Adobe eLearning Suite fell short of what I had hoped to accomplish when I was at Adobe Systems. But I have to say, when I saw the trade show stand featuring "my baby", I was very proud to have been a part of bringing that product to market.

Happy birthday, Jerry Michalski!

Time with Eric Shepherd from Questionmark and discovering my new favorite blog.

Hindsight, Insight Foresight, Oversight: Learning Futures plenary. Professor Gilly Salmon from the University of Leicester, and Aaron Porter, National Union of Students, Artur Dyro from Young Digital Planet and Lisbeth Goodman from FutureLabs. Yours Truly as session chair.

Battle of the Bloggers. Donald Clark and Jane Hart and Clive Shepherd and Bert De Coutere and me. Wow. How very cool for me to share the session with these well known elearning leaders. Thankfully, we didn't really battle - I would have been shredded in a true debate.I am very glad to have met these luminaries in person and am looking forward to ongoing future conversation. Hopefully over beers.

Best of all - reconnections with friends from around the world. Sometimes when I get tired and cranky I think about all these amazing people from all over the world, doing amazing things with learning technologies. Have to say, then I don't feel so tired and cranky.

So, now. We have a new roadtrip in the works.

On to Boulder. It's time for WCET 2.0

Preparing for Battle

Tomorrow afternoon I will be participating in Online Educa Berlin's (#oeb2009) Battle of the Bloggers. Have to say, it will be a real treat to join Jane Hart, Clive Shepherd, Donald Clark as one of the "battling bloggers". I am a regular reader of each one of these UK-based international elearning rock stars, so the opportunity to be sharing the podium with some of my social media heros is pretty darn cool. 

Bert De Coutere, the chair for the session, has already warned that he will be making sure the four of us mix things up a bit, and hopefully cause a little bit of an uproar by saying controversial things. Have to say, Bert looked positively gleeful this afternoon as he shared some of his ideas for getting us to get feisty. I suppose from a audience participant point of view it would be pretty boring if all four of us were completely agreeable. 

So I am finding myself sitting here tonight trying to figure out what I can say to show just how feisty I can be. Okay, those of you who DO know me, quit laughing. I'm talking about being feisty in public. Professionally. Eloquently. With a smile. 

It's not that I don't have really strong opinions about learning and technology, crossing the chasm, accelerating adoption of innovation and the like. It's just that, as someone who has often found herself in the role of evangelist/change agent/cat herder, I have learned the hard way that if I want to persuade people to my point of view that it's not particularly effective when I tell 'em how dumb they are. 

So. Okay, maybe that's one of the things we can disagree about. I know that we need more tough love and truth-telling in our industry to achieve the kinds of big things we want to achieve.

Maybe it's because I'm a former teacher. Big on empowering learning and learners. You know, as in "There ARE no dumb questions". 

Or maybe it's because in my heart of hearts I really do just want us all to get along. Let's battle bigotry and stupidity, not each other. Sigh. And now I really do sound like a northern Californian. Group hug, everybody!! 

Here's looking forward to a fun and interesting debate. Will let you know how it goes.

Vorwärts zu Online Educa Berlin

The Roadtrip gets to take a break from the non-stop travel of the past month to catch up on things at both work and home. My next big adventure comes with this year's Thanksgiving  celebration.  I am thrilled to be hosting Thanksgiving dinner for several of my wildly adventuresome friends, including Wayne Hodgins and John Alonso. @WWWayne has recent returned from 11 months at sea (including a direct encounter with the tsunami in Samoa a few months ago), during which time he has sailed from Bodega Bay CA to Whangarei, New Zealand.  John Alonso and crew are about to take off on an amazing race  through Baja California. I am looking forward to hearing all about their adventures, safely settled here in Sonoma at fireside.

Following the long holiday weekend, I'll be taking the Roadtrip to Online Educa Berlin. I attended my first OEB 10 years ago, and have had the good fortune to attend many of the years since that time. It is, without a doubt, my favorite international conference. I'm very pleased that I'll be participating in this year's program  - as chair of the Friday morning plenary session entitled "Hindsight, Insight, Foresight, Oversight: A Call for Learning Futures" and, along with Clive Shepherd, Donald Clark and Jane Hart,  as  one of the participants in this year's OEB Battle of the Bloggers. Here is a link to a column that appeared in the current issue of Checkpoint eLearning where I had a chance to reflect on the upcoming "battle".Given the new partnership that Sage Road has forged with the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, I will be attending this year's OEB in two capacities - first as a Partner and Principal Analyst for Sage Road Solutions, where I will be keeping an eye out for news and trends to share with eLearning practitioners in the US. Secondly I will be observing the conference as the newly appointed Executive Director of WCET, so I will be keenly interested in learning more about consortial activities affecting higher education enterprises around the world. (This last bit of news is going to be the featured story in my next blogpost, so stay tuned!)

Dinner with @marciamarcia

Last Thursday evening, as scores of learning professionals clustered around their keyboards to participate in #Lrnchat, I was sitting down to dinner with the creative spark behind the popular social media event.  Marcia Conner, known in the Twitter-sphere as @marciamarcia, had been in San Francisco for a couple of days, engaging with various social media gurus at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. I returned to SFO from Denver's EDUCAUSE conference a few hours before Marcia was to fly back to Virginia, so I was thrilled to be able to spend a couple of hours of quality face-to-face time with her. 

Marcia and I have been friends since back in the dot.com days when the possibilities for learning and technologies were starting to set the world on fire. I still have the copy of Dr. Seuss's If I Ran the Zoo that Marcia sent me as I was struggling to figure out enterprise decision-making. We have learned together, from each other, informally and formally, F2F and distributed, for more than a decade. 

It's been a great deal of fun for me watching Marcia's impact and influence on the learning and social media world grow and spread over the years. So in addition to catching up on the news of our mutual friends I had a chance to hear about her new work - including the social media book that she is doing with Tony Bingham - and perhaps best of all we had a chance to talk about some of the common misperceptions that social media can be constrained, now that the so-called cat is out of the bag.

We reflected on recent statistics reporting that more than 54% of today's enterprises limit employee access to social media while on the job. Marcia told me that one thing that EVERY enterprise executive needs to understand is that there is no way to block social media in the workplace. Unless, of course people are forbidden to use their personal mobile devices, their personal instant messenger account accounts, and the like. As if.

This was particularly amusing to me, having lived through the period of elearning history where Flash was a "bad" plug-in. Back in the day, one of the companies I worked for even forbade us from using Flash, even though our elearning customers asked for it.  Eventually Flash prevailed and the company I worked for vanished along with others that didn't give their customers what they wanted. (And yes, I thought it particular delicious that I ended up working at the "Flash company". But I digress...)

Marcia told me that social media in general and Twitter in particular are some of the best things to happen to learning in a long time. Watching how she gets groups of people to engage, interact and inspire each other using fewer than 140 characters, regardless of location, time of day and connecting device, I have to agree.

If you have never had a chance to see what happens when learning professions get their hands on Twitter technologies you owe it to yourself to check out a session of #Lrnchat. Thursday nights. 5:30 - 7:00 PST. If' you've never done this before....Go online, download a copy of Tweetgrid. Put in the search term #Lrnchat. Kick back and watch the tweets roll. When u get brave enough, jump on in and post a thought or two. (and remember to read the "drinking game" rules - it will explain why there are occasional moments of hilarity when certain phrases make their way across the screen......) 

Happy Birthday Internet

Happy 40th birthday, Internet!  In 1969 a UCLA team sent the first message over ARPANET, the computer network that later became known as the Internet. That event, which took place on 29 October 1969, is celebrated by many as the moment the Internet was born.  

I've embedded a link to the blogpost from Cathy Davidson, Duke University, that reflects on what this has meant for the world as we know it.

And for those of you who snickered at Al Gore for saying that *he* invented the internet, I have included a link to an ERIC document that describes the authorization of NREN, the National Research and Education Network. Let it be known that legislation authorizing the creation of what has been referred to as an electronic "information superhighway" was first introduced by Senator Albert Gore in 1988. 

The National Research and Education Network, signed into law in early 1991, was hailed as an expansion of the still private, mostly military Internet to educational researchers, teachers and students. I was still teaching at the time this happened, and remember that the prospects were quite exciting but the reality not so good - it was still a bit dicey to get email addresses for ourselves and for students. Huh. And now we're talking about farming student email services off to third party providers. My how time flies.

When Publishers Buy LMS Companies

I'm pleased about Sage Road's recent collaboration with the eLearning Guild on their new "Deep Analysis" Report on the Evolving LMS. You need to be an eLearning Guild member to get a copy of this report; Might I suggest that now is as good a time as any to join if you are not a member. 

The Report is a brief summary of top issues that eLearning practitioners are likely to encounter where LMSs are concerned in the next 18 months. It is not meant to size the LMS market  - or evaluate LMS platforms  - or to identify Moodle Service Providers. It IS meant to give people in the trenches a look at the biggest issues they will mostly likely encounter where LMSs are concerned, to get a head start on planning for how these trends are likely to affect their elearning business.

So, with this in mind, one of the trends we did NOT discuss in the recent LMS report was an observation from the world of educational publishing.  Educational publishers such as Pearson have acquired LMS companies such as eCollege (Pearson acquired eCollege in 2007) and Fronter (acquired by Pearson in 2009) and publishing houses like Thomson's Cengage forge LMS relationships with companies like Angel (now part of Blackboard). 

This week's announcement about Sungard and Epsilen's new partnership is raising a flag on the horizon that eLearning practitioners might want to observe over the next several months - specifically, keeping and eye on what publishers and LMS vendors are doing together related to strategic partnerships and market consolidation.  

Higher education publishers and administrative management systems companies appear to be exerting their influence in the area of higher education learning management services provision. In addition to helping to carve out a new learning resources management niche NOT completely dominated by Blackboard, publisher/LMS partnerships are looking for ways that make it easier to cluster, bundle and (eventually monetize) digital learning content assets, giving publishers a new digital revenue stream.  

eLearning content authors may find that they may be increasingly caught between a rock (commercial publishers who are deconstructing professionally produced content assets and buying LMS companies to help take that content to market in new ways) and a hard place (the user-generated content producers, who are creating "good enough" video, audio and apps that are relatively easy to find and share on the open web). 

MacArthur Funds Cal-Irvine Digital Media Learning Research Hub

A newly-created Digital Media and Learning Research Hub located at the University of California-Irvine will provide a international center to nurture exploration of and build evidence around the impact of digital media on young people's learning and its potential for transforming education. Funded through a $2.97 million grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Center was announced on October 27th at a national forum at Google headquarter that brought together leading thinkers around the challenge of reasserting American global leadership in education.

Through study of how youth are using digital media, researchers will seek to understand the implications inherent in how this generation of youth - unlike any previous one - is embracing the online world to access information, socialize, and engage in public life. Research is expected to help schools, libraries, museums and other institutions engaged in teaching and learning better prepare students for the 21st century workforce.

With a physical office at UC Irvine and a new virtual destination -- www.dmlcentral.net -- the Center will support emerging research on digital media and learning by hosting international conferences, facilitating workshops and working groups, and bringing together researchers, practitioners, policymakers, industry leaders and others working on related projects. It will also house related research initiatives of the MacArthur Foundation's digital media and learning initiative.  Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society and the nonprofit research group FutureLab are partnering with UC Irvine on Hub activities.

More information about the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub can be found by clicking this active link.

For more about the  MacArthur Foundation please click this active link. These people are amazing.