Calculate Your Training Carbon Footprint

A cool new version of Learning Footprint was mentioned on Jane's E-Learning Pick of the Day today, and it's a tool that's worth checking out.

Measuring a company's carbon footprint is the first step in the drive towards reducing carbon usage in what is now a global movement toward a more environmentally friendly way of running businesses.

The team from HT2 have designed a calculator that measures how much carbon you could save by moving a percentage of face-to-face training to an online training system.

All you have to do is plug in some numbers based on trainee/trainer travel miles, paper usage and car/air travel, and the calculator tells you how many tonnes of CO2 your company is using per year on classroom-based training. It even gives you a nice visual translation like: "This would equate to filling 7.14 Olympic size swimming pools."

These figures are then graphed over 5 years and you can adjust the inputs to see how you can best reduce carbon usage. Finally, the report can be exported to PDF ready to be taken in to that very important meeting, in support of a move to online training.

Why not give it a try - did I mention its free?

@Schnicker

Top Screen Recording Tools

A question I'm often asked when people are putting together their training content, is "What screen recorder should I use?".

I've compiled a short list of screen recorders that I know a bit about. Please do add more detail, plus your own experience and suggestions in the comments section as I know there are a lot more on the market, free or otherwise. These are not product reviews, my post is just intended to make people aware of these products. Each person has a different idea of 'easy to use', so it's worth shopping around and making use of those free trials:

For PC Users:

• JingProject
  Free 5 minute screen recordings with audio and a little Jing branding, which can be exported to .swf. You can also take screen shots which produce as .png. Plus, there's a Pro version for USD$15/yr with no branding, and more options including upload direct to YouTube and produce as MPEG-4 (or .swf). Super easy to use but you're restricted on editing/effects.
  

• Camtasia Studio 6
  Free 30-day trial available. It's quick to get started recording your interaction with the screen be it a PowerPoint or demo. Record or overlay audio, add effects and Picture-in-Picture (PIP) to produce high quality, professional looking videos. Once you get used to the timelines lay-out, they are easy to edit, cut and add to. Output to multiple different formats.

• Adobe Captivate
  Offer a free 30-day trial as well. There's an on-going debate between Camtasia and Captivate users as to which is better. Some say editing is easier in Captivate, but I think it may just come down to personal choice. Captivate is a winner when it comes to creating interactive content and instead of timelines, interactions are stored as a series of screens.
  

For Mac Users:

• Jing
  (As above)
  

• Screenflow
  Built for Mac OS X Leopard, it comes highly recommended for smooth captures and a wide variety of editing tools. Output screen recordings as QuickTime movie. Screenflow is a 'no go' on Power Mac.
  
  
• iShowU HD
  A very powerful piece of software, but has an optional low CPU usage mode. Once created sceencasts can be uploaded directly to YouTube, Blip.TV and other online video services.
  
  
• Copernicus (Danicsoft)
  Free product that captures screen and video, but no audio.
  

Free, web-based screen recorders i.e. nothing to download:

ScreenToaster - designed to capture your screen activity, audio and images, then publish and share in blogs and websites. Works in all browsers.

Screenjelly - allows you to quickly record your screen and voice then share it via a link in Twitter and other social networks

PowerPoint to Flash Converter

iSpring Pro - very cool tool for converting PowerPoint Presentations (including audio tracks and animations) in to Flash files. Free 30-day trial of the software, click here for a little more information.

@Schnicker

Online Learning Complements College Lectures

There's a really interesting article on the Atlanta Journal-Constitution at the moment about how colleges should be adopting some online learning tools to spice up and complement their education programs.

The article entitled "Learning Curve: Lose the tedium in class" focuses on the views of Southern Methodist University's dean of the Meadow School of the Arts, José A Bowen, a long-time champion of smart technology on campus.

Bowen is of the opinion that current on-campus lectures are 'terrible', and most of the content being delivered will soon be available online for a lesser price tag anyway. He urges professors to "teach naked" and "shed classroom computers, tedious PowerPoints and long-winded lectures" and instead re-invent their courses and allow as much of the content as possible to go online and in to podcasts. Bowen suggests a blended learning approach where professors really use the lecture time to deliver the real punch of their lessons; the wow-factor that you only get if you are on campus, in that room.

He's got a good point. People pay a lot of money to go to college, stay in dorms and get in to the lifestyle. If students or parents realise that for considerably less money their kids can study online and not really miss out on anything, then the campus could be at risk of becoming obsolete for some faculties.

In support of the online components, Bowen says studies have shown students will listen to podcasts a few times and actually get more out of them, therefore performing better in tests:

'Research also suggests that students may actually retain more from basic college lectures delivered via podcasts. A study by the State University of New York in Fredonia — “iTunes University and the classroom: Can podcasts replace professors?” — found that students who downloaded a podcast lecture and took notes earned much higher test scores on the material than peers who attended a traditional lecture.'

To read the full article check it out here Learning Curve: Lose the Tedium in Class

Litmos Upgrade To Rackspace a Success

The Litmos server upgrade to Rackspace over the weekend was a huge success and in the end the website was only offline for 25 minutes - exceptional!

Rackspace Hosting have already proved that they are a pleasure to work with; when they registered the term Fanatical Support® they weren't kidding! Our future with Rackspace is looking very strong and bright.

Thank you once again to all Litmos customers for your patience in this upgrade.

Onwards and upwards!
@Schnicker

Litmos Server Upgrade to Rackspace

Dear Litmos Customers,

The number of happy customers and end users has been growing steadily over the past year - which is great news. Along with all of this growth comes the need to increase our capacity to ensure that we can continue to deliver an excellent level of up-time, service and support.

With this in mind, we are moving our Litmos servers to Rackspace, which is recognized as the leading data center in the US and possibly even the world. Click here for more information about the Rackspace data center.

To perform this upgrade we do need to take Litmos offline for a short period of time. We anticipate the upgrade to take approximately 3 hours, but during this time you and your students will not be able to access Litmos.

The upgrade will begin on: Saturday, July 25, 2009 at 5:00:00 PM PST (Click here to find out your local time)

We're looking forward to moving to a premium host that will offer a greater level of support and enable us to continue this amazing growth.

Thank you for your patience!

- The team @Litmos

5 Tips for Presenting Training Information

As a follow on to my last post on writing effective training material, these are some simple ideas that anyone can incorporate in to their writing to make emails, documents and training information more concise and effective for the audience.

5 Helpful Tips for Presenting Information:

• Establish a flow for your document so the information unfolds for the reader in a logical order that is easy to follow
  
  
• Keep fonts clean and simple
  
  
• Add headings, bullet points, diagrams and tables to your document so it is easy for the reader to find the information they're looking for
  
  
• Whether it's an email or a formal document, the information you include should be what the audience needs to know, not what you want to tell them
  
  
• Avoid too much duplication of information (your readers may think it's a reflection on their intelligence!)

Check here for more posts on training course design.

@Schnicker

Writing Effective Training Material

I went to a talk today on Information Mapping® presented by Jennie Martins of Tactics. The approach she advocates has been around for 40+ years and is used to transform business or technical information in to effective documents, including training materials.

By definition Information Mapping® is a 'systematic approach to analysing, organising and presenting written information, based on your audience's needs and the purpose of the information'. The process was originally created by researcher, educator and entrepreneur Robert E. Horn in 1967, and is built around principles of how people think, learn, and process information. These days Horn is a distinguished visiting scholar at Stanford University.

Horn's approach is in 3 distinct steps:

1. Analysis - What is the purpose of the information? What effect should it achieve? Who is the audience and what are their needs?
   
2. Organization - Structuring the information based on the analysis
   
3. Presentation - Formatting the information visually

There are several unique tools during each step to break it down further to help create high quality content that delivers with clarity and impact. It's all about taking a bunch of information and transforming it in to something that is easy for the audience to decipher, navigate and use.

I'm only just skimming the surface of a very in-depth process but you can find out more if you check out the Information Mapping® website.

@Schnicker

Top 3 Ideas for a Successful Training Program

Carolyn Blunt, Founder of Real Results Training wrote an article a few months back that has some great ideas for building a successful call centre training program. Her ideas are not just relevant to call centres, but can be applied across most types of training program. I went through an picked out 3 ideas that I really liked and felt were important:

1. Learning Styles - survey your trainees to find out how they learn best
   'We all favour learning in one or two of four different ways or ‘learning styles’ (Honey & Mumford 1992): Activist[..] Pragmatist[..] Theorist[..] and Reflector[..].Training should therefore be well designed in order to account for all these preferences. Unless you put all trainees through a learning styles questionnaire there is no way of knowing what mix of styles are in any one training group; so it is best practice to allow for all four.
   
   
2. Media Rich Content - appeal to more than one of the senses
   'Confucius is reputed to have said: “Tell me and I will forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I will understand.” This underpins the theory of ‘Accelerated Learning’ which is the idea that when we engage both hemispheres of our neo-cortex (or frontal brain) we can take in more information. The left hemisphere is known to favour logic and language while the right favours colour and imagery. By appealing to all the senses we can ‘speed up’ or accelerate the learning process and help information to be pushed into long-term memory.'
   
   
3. Fresh and Relevant Courses - update information regularly
   'If something is not working in a training course, change it! Training modules should not be left alone simply because no one has complained. Keep adapting them to keep them fresh for both the delegates and for the trainer who is delivering. At least once a year the training module should have a complete review.'
   

Click here for the complete article How to design a call centre training programme

@Schnicker

Share Screencasts with Screenjelly

Today on TechCrunch there's a review of a cool new browser-based app called Screen Jelly that has just launched today.

It's from the same people that brought us ScreenToaster and it allows you to record and share short screencasts. You can capture 3 minutes of screen content (video & audio) which you can then tweet out a link to or you can use the link to put content in to your Litmos online courses.

@Schnicker

Online Learning More Effective than Face to Face

The results of a new Meta-Analysis & Review of Online Studies released June 26th 2009 by the U.S. Department of Education suggests that online learning at a higher education level, is more effective than face to face learning.

"The overall finding of the meta-analysis is that classes with online learning (whether taught completely online or blended) on average produce stronger student learning outcomes than do classes with solely face-to-face instruction." (pg.18)

Students in the study completed the same courses online and under face to face instruction and while online learning proved highly successful, the most effective of all was a "blended learning" solution combining elements of both online and face to face. Three factors emerged as variables in the contrasting types of learning: time, pedagogy and curriculum.

'Time' was one reason why online learning proves to be so successful, because it allows for students to go at their own pace instead of one pace for the whole group. The report states: "Studies in which learners in the online condition spent more time on task than students in the face-to-face condition found a greater benefit for online learning" (xv).

Another pattern that emerged was that video and quizzes in online learning did not seem to increase learning effectiveness. However, more interactive media and objects where the student was in the driver seat did: "Online learning can be enhanced by giving learners control of their interactions with media and prompting learner reflection." (xvi)

There are far too many interesting findings for me to list here, but for a nice summary of the meta-analysis take a look at Scott Jaschik's article The Evidence on Online Education, or click here for the full 93-page report.

@Schnicker

Top 5 Online Learning Posts for 2009 (so far)

Now that the first half of the year is over, I thought I'd take a look at our stats and see which blog posts written in 2009, have been most popular so far.

So here are they are in order the Top 5 Blog Posts of 2009 (so far):

1. Top 10 Best Practices for Teaching Online
   
   
2. Top 6 Tips on Course Design from an Instructional Designer
   
   
3. Top 5 tips on Course Design from an Interaction Designer
   
   
4. 7 things to Avoid in Online Training Video Design
   
   
5. Fundamental Shift in the Way we Conduct Learning
   5th equal with Calling all Learning Professionals on Twitter
   

@Schnicker