February 17th, 2009 by Robin Green
Although videos can greatly enhance a traditional or LMS-hosted course, it’s important for educators to use videos only as an LMS course complement. Only when educators integrate videos in a goal-oriented, well-prepared, and interactive manner, will videos be effective learning tools. It’s important that teachers not allow students to fall under the spell of passivity.
As the Chinese adage goes: “What I hear I will forget, what I see I will remember, what I do I will understand.”
Once learners come to terms with the fact that video is not an invitation to a lazy Friday afternoon kind of lesson, they realize what a powerful pedagogical tool that it is. Even cheesy, commercially-produced materials can come to life if students are taught to participate in the plots, look for details and comment on them. LMS students are given the opportunity to sharpen their critical watching and listening skills as they learn the material. Additionally, these critical viewing skills will carry them through their lives as they view television and other media.
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February 17th, 2009 by Robin Green
Studies suggest that about 60 percent of the population are strong visual learners. Chris Chappell, an Organizational Development & Training Specialist with the Geisinger Health System, emphasizes the importance of taking visual learning into account for LMS courses. His advice is based on his experience as a content developer.
“When we are infants, we don’t know written or verbal language, and we are limited by our own kinesthetic abilities, so we rely on the sensory stimulus that is strongest: visual cues. Whether it’s the world around us or the facial expressions of those around us, we see, we process, and we learn.” LMS course videos, of course, tap into not only visual learning strengths but audio as well.
However, when using videos as part of an LMS-hosted online course or traditional classroom, it’s important to use videos in a structured, pedagogical manner. Videos should never be used as time-fillers, and there is a danger of students becoming passive viewers. See the next post for suggestions on how to keep video-watching interactive.
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February 17th, 2009 by Robin Green
Like many LMS students around the globe, the first thing I do in the morning is brew a pot of coffee and read the news. But when I say “read the news,” I actually refer to skimming the headlines, reading the biggest two or three stories, then watching video news.
Video news, in my opinion, is the journalistic medium of the future. LMS courseware developers could learn something from this trend. LMS students want to be transported somewhere, to be stimulated and taken up in the information. Short, interesting videos can provide this sensation.
With video news, I can go to China or Israel for ten minutes and hear from politicians, see a protest in snowy London, before jumping over to Australia to see the fire relief efforts. Video news pieces are often short, between five and 15 minutes, but can convey a powerful visual and audio story that regular news cannot.
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February 16th, 2009 by Robin Green
In the January 2009 edition of T+D Magazine, Mark Simon provides some extremely helpful tips for LMS courseware developers. His last piece of advice is to ensure that your learners’ workstation configuration is appropriate. Since you may have a variety of learners working and learning from different places, you’ll want to do some checks to make sure your lesson runs smoothly with different browsers, plugins, etc.
If your lesson runs inside a web browser, test your course in the latest versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Netscape, and Safari. Test that your lesson works on Flash levels lower than that of your own. Run your LMS course on computer screens with different resolutions to check for issues. The more tests you run, the greater confidence you’ll have that your LMS course will be successful wherever learners are taking it.
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February 16th, 2009 by Robin Green
Mark Simon also warns against making your e-learning course too difficult to access. Even though your learners may know how to access the LMS, e-learning courses have different applications and tools that learners may not need to use very often. And we all know what happens when a piece of knowledge isn’t used often–it gets forgotten. Help your LMS learners navigate your course. Simon gives three pieces of advice: be specific, be consistent, and publish smart.
Imagine that your LMS students have never taken an e-learning course before. Be specific and give them all the details and possible ways for getting an e-learning lesson started. Be consistent; keep the access method the same. This will avoid confusion for your learners later on. Publish smart; your LMS administrator should publish the course so that it shows up on the learner’s home page. Make the course easy to find and whenever possible, don’t require the learner to search through a course catalogue for your course.
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February 16th, 2009 by Robin Green
In Mark Simon’s article, “E-Learning NO How: 7 disastrous decisions sure to sink any e-learning implementation,” he covers some common errors of LMS courseware developers and how to avoid them. One common mistake is neglecting to provide instructions for the e-learning interface. Developers often assume that e-learning courses are self-explanatory, while in fact it’s just the opposite.
Although today’s e-learning lessons are, as Simon puts it, “light years ahead of the old ‘page turner’ lessons,” still no standard e-learning interface exists. Even experienced e-learners and LMS users may experience difficulty with your electronic controls. And Simon points out that e-learning courses today include glossaries, quizzes, videos, file attachments, FAQs, interactive and collaborative exercises, simulations, and games. There are a world of functions and controls for LMS users to handle, and they’ll need your support.
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February 13th, 2009 by Robin Green
Another mistake that course developers often make is to forget about the LMS itself. Many developers assume that their job is solely to create–not oversee the rollout of–their online course. However, for an LMS-hosted course to be effective, it’s essential to be familiar with the LMS’s interface, features and tools. “If you ignore the influence of the LMS,” Mark Simon writes, “you are also ignoring one of the most important interfaces for the learner as well as the very first hurdle that she needs to conquer en route to the e-learning course.”
Additionally, it’s not always the case that your online course runs smoothly on the LMS. It’s important to understand the publishing settings that are ideal for your LMS, publish a prototype, and test it in the LMS to make sure the course runs without freezing up or causing any other problems.
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February 13th, 2009 by Robin Green
Mark Simon also advises LMS course developers to be practical about the limitations of their e-learning courses, and help learners out by providing further sources. It would be wonderful to think that your LMS course provides all the answers students will ever need to succeed in their work environment, but this is probably not the case. Studies show that about 80 percent of all learning in a corporate environment is done informally.
When people want to access information from an online course lesson they completed, they aren’t going to want to log on to an LMS, find the course, open it, and search for the section with the relevant information. If you want your online course to succeed, Simon writes, “point your learners to all of the relevant performance support systems and job aids that will help them with their tasks.”
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