Litmos will be at LearnX Sydney in June

I'm heading over to Sydney in June for the LearnX Asia Pacific E-Learning & Training Solutions Conference and Expo and it would be great to meet up with anyone else who is going to be there.

Keynoting Day 1 of the conference is the lovely Jane Bozarth all the way from North Carolina. I would thoroughly recommend coming along, even just to hear her speak. Jane is one of the ringleaders of the #Lrnchat group on Twitter so I've had the privilege of being part of many a heated discussion about eLearning, corporate training, ROI, course design - you name it, we've talked about it. Jane is one of the most knowledgeable yet down-to-earth eLearning gurus around with a wicked sense of humor to match, and I'm positive she will set the tone for an awesome LearnX 2010. You can check out her blog here.

If you are going to be at LearnX please leave a comment here or look out for me walking around - I'm friendly and would love to stop for a chat.

Nicole Fougère
AKA @Schnicker

Litmos a Finalist in the 2010 NZ Hi-Tech Awards

Last night the finalists for the 2010 NZ Hi-Tech Awards were announced and we are extremely proud to say that Litmos is among four companies who made it to the finals in the Innovative Service category! Just for making the finals we get that cool badge on the right that we can now use all over the place.

The next step from here is to present to a panel of International judges in about 2 weeks time, then the winners of each category will be announced at a gala dinner on the 7th of May. Here's a blurb from the Hi-Tech Awards website on what's in store for us:

"Finalists in most categories will now undergo face-to-face judging from a line up of local judges as well as being scrutinised by the global panel of international judges including Michael Dell, the founder of Dell computers, Howard Charney, senior vice president of Cisco, and Andy Lark (vice-president of global marketing at Dell). Pat Kenealy, who runs IDG Ventures, Richard Keyse, the chair of the NZTE Beachheads Europe, and Vernon Turner, senior vice president of IDC Research are also on the elite judging panel."

We're so excited to have the opportunity to introduce Litmos to such an all-star panel and know we have our work cut out getting ready for that presentation. Our goal has always been to create an intuitive, fresh and easy-to-navigate Learning Management System (LMS) that people really love to use. This is definitely a step in the right direction towards achieving that goal!

For more information on the Hi-Tech Awards see this article from Computerworld.

@Schnicker

eLearning Content Authoring Tools: Articulate

This is the first post in a series I'm doing on eLearning content authoring tools. I should clarify that I'm not affiliated with any of the products I have included in this series.

Founded in 2002 by Adam Schwartz, eLearning company Articulate has grown over the years to offer a full suite of eLearning authoring tools which can be purchased together as 'Articulate Studio' or separately as outlined below:

• Articulate Presenter '09 - Presenter is a PowerPoint plug-in that allows you to instantly and easily add narration, animations, Flash movie and interactions to your PowerPoint presentation then publish it to Flash. Presenter also enables the integration of quizzes from Quizmaker (below). With SCORM and AICC output for Learning Management Systems (LMSs) this is the perfect tool to liven up your presentations and really involve your learners.
  
  
• Articulate Quizmaker '09 - This is Articulate's quiz building offering with which you can create interactive, multi-lingual quizzes and surveys filled with multi-choice, fill in the gap, drag 'n drop, image hot spots and many more types of assessment scenarios. To make quizzes more exciting you can incorporate slide designs and color schemes. All of your essentials are there: question randomization, time limits, passmarks and more. When you're happy with the end result quizzes can be published to the web directly or connected to an AICC or SCORM-compliant LMS. As mentioned above, quizzes can also be integrated in to Articulate Presenter to be a part of a more comprehensive learning module.
  
  
• Articulate Engage '09 - The specialty of Engage is creating interactive models to explain processes and concepts. The best part is you don't have to create them from scratch! Engage opens with 10 options for interactions ranging from a process, labeled graphic, circle diagram, time-line and more. Once again, the finished interactions can be integrated in to a PowerPoint Presentation to be published to Flash using Presenter.
  
  
• Articulate Video Encoder '09 - This highly useful tool allows you to record new or convert current rich media video files to .FLV format. During the process you can add in narration, trim and crop the media, brand the content with your logo, and tweak visual and audio settings.
  

These guys also offer an LMS called Articulate Online which can be used to deploy and track content created using their proprietary tools only.

I have always liked the Articulate brand, but I haven't used their products until recently. What I've always liked about them is they have a thriving and friendly online community. It is definitely a huge resource to take advantage of should you decide to go with Articulate. In fact, they have just published a great list of resources called "How to Get Articulate Support, Training and Tutorials" which just demonstrates how much they want you to succeed.

Finally, with a whole page on their website dedicated to the numerous awards their products have won (see here), it's no surprise that Articulate has 'more than 15,000 organizations in 115 countries' using their products.

@Schnicker

Litmos is now a SCORM 1.2 Certified LMS

When you take on the task of building a Learning Management System (LMS) from scratch you're actually designing and building a system to manage content, training courses, people and reporting information. A great deal of planning, design, analysis, testing, time, energy, sweat, re-building, re-designing, and re-testing goes in to it, and it's fair to say that it is a large scale project.

With that one nailed, we moved on to the next challenge: becoming SCORM conformant.

When it came to - what we now know as the 'rather large' undertaking of - adopting the SCORM eLearning standard, we accepted the challenge throwing all caution to the wind. Although, in retrospect we must have had some idea of what we were in for, as it did take the better part of a year to convince our development team to go for it.

Now only five months on, we can officially announce that Litmos has been certified by ADL as a SCORM 1.2 Learning Management System! You can see our name on their list of certified products here.

I hope you will take a moment to read today's press release for more details on what this all means.

Right, now on to the next challenge...

@Schnicker

Another Great Litmos Customer Testimonial

We love hearing great feedback from our customers about our Learning Management System and last week we received this wonderful comment that's definitely worth sharing:

"Using Litmos as our online training host provider has been a wonderful experience. Your responsiveness to all of our questions has been outstanding.  An even greater surprise has been your migration to a SCORM compliant format in advance of us expressing that secondary need.  The total experience (system offering, support, responsiveness) has been outstanding.”

Willie Anderson, Partner LIM LLC, www.LIMglobal.net

Leadership in Management LLC: LIM’s Mission is to develop leaders and teams so that they better understand themselves and others, and as a result make a positive impact on their businesses, organizations, society and environment. The LIM network includes over 35 trained Learning Coaches with license relationships in Mexico, Singapore and the Philippines with alliances in the USA, Sweden and Venezuela.

@Schnicker

What Will Disrupt Literacy Learning/Instruction as We Know it?

'By 2020 over 50% of all courses will be delivered online' - Dr. Cathy Mincberg

This was the statistic that Dr Cathy Mincberg, Vice President and Chief Academic Officer at KC Distance Learning, ended her presentation with at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation event "Creating a Literacy Spine by Design" in Santa Monica on February 19, 2010.

As part of the panel discussing the topic "What Will Disrupt Literacy Learning/Instruction as We Know it?", Mincberg delivered a presentation focused on what Clayton M. Christensen termed 'disruptive technology'. In other words, technology or innovations that 'improve a product or service in ways that the market does not expect, typically by being lower priced or designed for a different set of consumers' (Wikipedia). She believes that online learning is one of those things:

"Online learning is a disruptive innovation, which has found a market in students who are not being served well [...] by the old bricks and mortar model of education. Today there are 50 million public school students in the US. 1 million students are online - increasing at the rate of 20% a year."

With the predictions for the future of online learning being increasingly positive it really does open up education opportunities for under-served youth and communities. I wish I could have heard the rest of the discussion that followed but you can download Mincberg's slides and read her presentation here: Is Online Learning a Solution in Search of a Problem?

Here are links to the slideshows for the other three panelists:

• Akili Lee, Director, Digital Youth Network: Social Learning Networks
• Laurence Holt, Chief  Product Officer and Executive Vice President, Wireless Generation: Presentation
• Katie Culp, Sr. Research Scientist, Education Development Center: Center for Children & Technology

@Schnicker

Wainhouse Research Report: eLearning, web conferencing and video

Wainhouse Research has released results of a report conducted by profiling a group of big vendors in the eLearning, web conferencing and video space. Some pretty huge growth is estimated in these areas for the next few years, some of which is mentioned below:

• Wainhouse Research estimates the overall educational and training market for interactive whiteboard solutions (manufacturer revenue) will grow from $886.5 million in 2009 (the majority portion of a $1.01 billion market) to $1.98 billion in 2014, at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 17.5%.
  
  
• Overall educational and training market for web conferencing will grow from $678.1 million in 2009 to $1.16 billion in 2014, at a CAGR of 11.5%. The $678.1 million figure represents approximately 38% of the overall web conferencing market of $1.7 billion we have forecast in several other reports.
  
  
• Interactive whiteboards have gained traction, though some variations exist by geography and segment. Corporate training and higher education have adopted the technologies fairly consistently yet to varying degrees; primary/secondary education has been a big adopter, most notably in the UK, where a government initiative has led to placement in 98% to 100% of all primary and secondary schools.
  
  
  • China, Australia and New Zealand, Japan, and the Nordic countries have also adopted aggressively. North America has been inconsistent in adoption: Canada has been strong, but interactive whiteboard adoption in the US and Mexico has been regional and not consistent across the board.

@Schnicker