February 16th, 2010 by Robin Green

Two ways that learning management system courses can enrich content and heighten the provided learning experience is with the incorporation of web 2.0 tools and speech technologies. Web 2.0 tools are ubiquitous and fun, and when used correctly, can increase the amount of interactivity for more effective and exciting learning.

That said, the challenges companies and institutions using a learning management system (LMS) often face in integrating web 2.0 technologies in their courseware are numerous. Although both training and educational courses can benefit greatly from incorporating such tools into their programs, the interruptions and distractions often prevent them from being very effective.

Blogs, social networks, discussion boards, wikis, VoIP technology (Skype et al) and podcasts are just a few great tools that more organizations and schools are incorporating into their online learning programs.

It’s a big web 2.0 world with great potentiality for interaction between students and trainees. However, distractions like advertisements are just one downside–especially for schools. When choosing which web 2.0 tools to implement in your online course or training program, choose tools that respect your users. Ads like those used on MySpace are an unfortunate aspect of many social networking and other sites. On MySpace’s login page, for example, it’s nearly impossible to locate the login box in the sea of hypnotically moving ads. But sites like Google and Facebook allow only less aggressive advertisements.

One might argue that difficult economic times make such obtrusive ads more permissible. However, not everyone does it. Companies like Google embody the spirit of user respect and ingenuity, proving that it isn’t necessary to resort to big, obnoxious ads. How does Facebook do it? Creatively, and soliciting the voluntary action of its users.

Facebook uses what it calls “engagement ads” to invite users to comment on videos, attend an event, or send a virtual gift. For instance, last year on election day, Ben & Jerry’s bought an ad that allowed users to send a virtual ice cream cone to their friends, advertising its offer of a real cone to anyone who voted. The ingenuity of social networking sites is the voluntary activity they prompt, and advertising is no exception on Facebook.

Distractions aside, most web 2.0 tools allow learning management system users to have a more interactive and dynamic learning experience.

An LMS offers a host of functions to organize employee and student learning experiences, all without having to pay for gas. And whether it’s in real space or cyberspace, most people would agree that speech is much preferred to typing. An LMS can be integrated with social software programs to give employees a virtual space for collaboration and training practice.

Speech synthesis programs like text-to-speech (TTS) and speech recognition programs are another exciting development to watch unfold. The quality of TTS continues to outshine speech recognition, but recent advancements in speech recognition technologies such as Google’s show a lot of promise. Of course, a functional TTS program is invaluable in meeting the needs of visually impaired learning management system users. But the ability to hear any text that appears on one’s screen is an incredible tool not only for the visually impaired, but for all students.

Speech recognition, however, is the newest hot topic with Google’s newly announced plan to combine Google Voice with Google Translate. Imagine a world in which English abilities are not the be-all and end-all in order to communicate with fellow trainees and students across oceans. Being able to talk seamlessly with people from other countries is an exciting prospect indeed, not only for the development of web 2.0 tools, learning management systems, and online education, but for greater global cooperation on a whole.

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Coggno.com offers world-class online education.

October 14th, 2009 by Robin Green

With less-than-sparkling federal test results making the headlines, the call for public education reform–including better salaries for educators, more federal funding, and the inclusion of more technology such as online course options and LMSs–has become more urgent.

Surprisingly, while education should be and typically is a “recession-proof” area of work, it has not proven to be so in the U.S. during this crisis.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. economy lost 273,000 jobs last month. Of those lost jobs, 29,000 were in state and local education, making the total losses in that category over the past five months 143,000.

Obviously, this reflects a huge change in U.S. educational standards. These standards are ingrained in our cultural heritage and go back to the 19th century, when the U.S. owed its success to the quality and high standards of its education. In the beginning of the 20th century, even more advancement was seen in the U.S. when the “high school revolution” took place. And in the later half of the 20th century, the U.S. established a competitive position in higher education.

However, American educational success was greatly based on the quality of its public schools. These days, state governments, who are responsible for their own public education systems, are in dire straits. And at a time when practically any federal government spending is viewed in a negative light, it’s time for schools to start thinking out of the box.

The need for cost-effective and efficient online tools like LMSs to help educators boost student performance is revealed in the recent math test results.

According to new standardized test results, New York’s state elementary math achievement has fallen for the first time in nearly ten years. This year’s fourth grade test results from federally funded National Assessment of Educational Progress reveal that New York’s scaled scores dropped two points from 2007. The state’s latest average score is 241, on a scale of zero to 500. (National scores have stayed flat, at 239.)

The results came as a bit of an embarrassment to some Albany officials, as it was apparent that even though federal tests of fourth-graders showed no gains in New York from 2007, the state’s own tests show steady improvement.

A major obstacle to overcome is not only how to boost student achievement in math across the board, but to bridge the continued discrepancy between the performance of white students and their black and Hispanic peers.

And the problem isn’t limited to New York. The NAEP (National Assessment of Education Progress (often referred to as “the nation’s report card”) reported that fourth graders have made no learning gains since the last time the NAEP math test was administered in 2007. Despite years of state and federal education reform efforts, less than four out of every 10 U.S. fourth and eighth graders are proficient in mathematics.

As U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said in a statement, these results underscore the need for “reforms that will accelerate student achievement.”

Reforms will require funding, but we can’t afford another fruitless and costly scheme like No Child Left Behind. In fact, it can be done cheaply. If we want our students to graduate with the math skills necessary to compete in an international economy that is increasingly dependent on technology, technology like LMSs and Web 2.0 tools needs to become an integral part of our education system.

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Coggno.com provides world-class online education.

May 29th, 2009 by Robin Green

When I was growing up, educational concepts like eLearning, virtual classrooms, learning management systems (LMSs), and Web 2.0 integration simply did not exist. We had computer class once a week, and then in our tweens AOL instant messaging  was just becoming all the rage.

Technology for educational use wasn’t quite there yet for most of us 80s babies. For example, the option of making a video for class project was always a touchy subject for some of us (like myself.)

I dreaded group projects in elementary, high school and middle school. If your group happened to include a student whose family owned a camcorder, you had it made. If not, there were always boring posters and other visuals you could make…but these weren’t quite as exciting.

Somehow, my group never included one of those hip students with no problems accessing video equipment. Though most middle-class families must have owned camcorders by then, mine did not, and it was always with a mix of gratitude (for sparing us another insufferable poster presentation), enjoyment and envy that I watched the video projects put together by my more high-tech, creative, and, well, usually generally better-off classmates.

Of course, in the fifteen or so years since then, a lot has changed. Video sharing sites and cheap video camera tools allow anyone to become producers of their own movies. And easy-to-use educational tools like LMSs and eLearning software allow educators and course developers to easily create videos to share with students, and resources to share with other educators.

For example, Coggno’s LMS and course creation toolkit offer an easy-to-use video tool with some interesting features for educators and course developers. Its simple format allows video creation with just a few clicks, making it accessible for both educators and students.

Creating and incorporating videos using an LMS can transform lessons, activities and even entire courses. And other robust tools in Coggno’s LMS toolkit offer a check-and-balance system. Learning content featured in videos can be checked for understanding using other course tools like quiz and assessment tools.

And for educators who are looking for a video-sharing website, but are wary of incorporating outside Web 2.0 technologies like YouTube into their classrooms, there are educational video-sharing sites such as TeacherTube.

TeacherTube, created in 2007 by a Texan superintendent, is one example of how Web 2.0 is creeping creatively into our LMS-based and online learning systems.

More and more teachers are using TeacherTube as an aid for lesson plans and a place to post student projects. TeacherTube now has over 50,000 videos posted, and also features activities and competitions for schools such as classroom makeover contests.

A video is an effective tool for prompting LMS students to interpret and analyze instructional material. And why not allow students themselves to create video projects, whether it’s for an online or traditional course?

Studies find that when students are allowed to take a piece of knowledge and create something with it, their understanding of the topic is much more thorough than if they were to simply take in the material.

Moreover, these days camera equipment is less expensive and more accessible to the general public. Using an LMS, students are able to upload their own videos to share their interpretation and creative expression of the learning material with other learners as well as their instructors.

Students can engage in an exciting and collaborative learning activity using LMS video creation tools and/or sites like TeacherTube. Tools provided by LMS systems like Coggno allow students and educators to develop creative and collaborative learning content within a controlled and safe setting. LMSs like Coggno offer a user-friendly video tool for creating engaging instructional videos.

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Coggno.com offers premier e-learning courses.

April 5th, 2009 by Robin Green

With more organizations adopting their own learning management system, the traditional style of creating and distributing knowledge is being redefined.

Whether it’s corporate training or classroom pedagogy, interactive tools like LMSs and Web 2.0 technologies are seeing an end to the days in which one person dominated the floor and simply dispensed information to an all-ears audience. Now learners’ ears can finally join forces with their eyes, mouths and hands.

This isn’t to say that instructional design–the curriculum-based pedagogy in which one person dispenses information and others receive it–has no rightful place in a learning system. While the shift from lectures to hands-on learning and collaboration opens new educational possibilities, straightforward lectures are a vital aspect of any educational format. Lectures lay the framework for students to work their own way through the course material.

In a training course hosted via a learning management system, lectures can be presented in a number of ways. Information can be laid out on a web page, in a downloadable packet, or presented via audio or video. Links to related resources and other websites can be inserted. Short, to-the-point lectures provided in the learning management system create a lesson that both informs learners about the key points, and aids them in finding related information.

Podcasts are one exciting format with an array of educational possibilities. Podcasts are convenient and optimally portable, and appeal to many learning styles. They can be used to supplement and reinforce course learning material, or renew learning activities. They can serve as announcements, reminders, and updates to be heard by everyone using the learning management system.

Podcasts can be used to distribute interviews and discussions, or to inform learners what to expect in the next lesson or activity. They are easy to create, produce, and share, and listeners don’t need an iPod to listen to them. Podcasts are typically in the form of mp3 files, making them accessible to all learners.

What are the criteria for a good podcast? Topics depend on the learning content of your course or the functions you’ve assigned to the podcasts within your learning management system.

Especially if the content is more technical or number-oriented, keep each podcast at 5 to 10 minutes. Many listeners who don’t have an excessive amount of time to spare generally avoid long texts, courses, etc. Small installments of learning content are ideal.

The content of a podcast depends on the course material. Providing intriguing material that piques listeners’ interest is essential to any podcast. Otherwise, your listeners’ attention will begin to slip. True, choosing material that’s interesting is a matter of taste and opinion, but the way in which you present the information can make or break your podcast’s effectiveness.

Remember that listeners respond well to audio information that varies in texture and tone. Interspersing music, pieces of interviews, sound bites, etc. throughout is a great way to lend texture and continuity to your podcast. Additionally, make sure the speaker doesn’t sound like he or she is reading from a script. The dialogue should sound conversational. The listener should feel like the podcaster is speaking directly to him or her.

Interested in adding podcasts to your course material? Creating a podcast is easy using Apple’s Podcast Producer, a simple and automatic audio editing program. Using group communication such as Google groups, social networking sites and wikis, in combination with a learning management system, trainers have an array of tools at hand.

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Coggno.com provides premier online training.

March 24th, 2009 by Robin Green

The incorporation of Twitter into corporate learning systems hasn’t happened exclusively in media companies like BusinessWeek. Salesforce has recently constructed a CRM application for Twitter.

The purpose of the Twitter-response tool is to help companies locate and assist customers who for whatever reason (like bad experiences in the past with customer service) are likelier to use the Twitter community as a learning system for product support than to call customer service. Using the Twitter-response tool, service reps from companies including Comcast, European telecom co. Orange, and Dell are able to monitor the Twitter stream for messages that mention their brand.

Salesforce’s social networking approach to customer learning systems was introduced in January, when Salesforce unveiled its Service Cloud. The Service Cloud is the new name for its customer-service app line that includes not only call centers, email, and instant messaging, but also an application to allow companies to use Facebook to find and help customers with product problems.

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Coggno.com provides high-quality online training courses.

March 13th, 2009 by Robin Green

“What’s in the workflow is what gets used,” the McKinsey Quarterly writers of “Six ways to make Web 2.0 work” tell us.

In the past, technologies like LMSs often simply succeeded the tools employees used to perform tasks. So the use of Web 2.0 and collaborative learning systems and work communities became simply another mandatory task. The fact is that Web 2.0 technologies have a better chance of enhancing creative and collaborative learning systems when incorporated into a user’s daily work schedule.

Appealing to users’ egos and needs (rather than just rewarding monetarily) is also an important aspect of successfully incorporating Web 2.0 technologies into learning systems. “A more effective approach,” the McKinsey authors write, “plays to the web’s ethos and participants’ desire for recognition: bolstering the reputation of participants in relevant communities, rewarding enthusiasm, or acknowledging the quality and usefulness of contributions.”

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Coggno.com provides high-quality online education.

March 13th, 2009 by Robin Green

What’s the secret to successfully incorporating Web 2.0 into an organization or learning system?

As in any learning system, guidance essential. The most imaginative, productive and efficient methods of Web 2.0 internalization come from the users themselves, but they require some help to scale. As the McKinsey writers tell us, “the transformation to a bottom-up culture needs help from the top.” Senior executives often take on the roles of informal leaders and role models for trainees using Web 2.0 technologies to collaborate in an LMS or learning system.

Another piece of advice the writers give is that executives should watch and see what’s working, and then scale it up. Too often, managers try to impose their own concepts of how Web 2.0 technologies should be used in a learning system. This may fulfill a certain need and perform a specific function, but will not help advance the use of these technologies.

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Coggno.com offers premier e-learning education.

March 13th, 2009 by Robin Green

The integration of Web 2.0 technologies in a company learning system can be a time-consuming and difficult endeavor, riddled with obstacles.

In last month’s McKinsey Quarterly, Michael Chui, Andy Miller, and Roger P. Roberts provided an article on “Six ways to make Web 2.0 work” for LMS-hosted and company learning systems trying out Web 2.0 technologies.

“We have found that, unless a number of success factors are present, Web 2.0 efforts often fail to launch or reach expected heights of usage. Executives who are suspicious or uncomfortable with perceived changes or risks often call off these efforts. Others fail because managers simply don’t know how to encourage the type of participation that will produce meaningful results,” they write. (See the next post.)

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Coggno.com offers a wide variety of online training courses.