Like much of today’s learning, 90% of learning events occur outside an eLearning course or in an instructor-led classroom event. They occur in an informal environment. Project Tin Can, the next iteration of SCORM, can capture and track these informal items as learning events.
What makes Tin Can so unique? It goes beyond the types of data we receive from traditional eLearning. It allows you to track activities you may have previously thought weren’t trackable.
For those of you that are looking at mobile devices as a way to enhance your learning environments for you clients or employees, here is a little something to keep your eye on.
Khan Academy Partners with Samsung
I have written about Kahn Acacdemy in the past and its impact it is having on the K-12 education system in the US.
They just announced a new partnership with Samsung that will provide the Galaxy Note tablets as part of a pilot program to Mountain View Whisman School District in California. The tablets will ship with a pre-loaded Khan Academy app that provides direct access to their extensive library of instructional videos.
The electronic device market has truely affected how we access information and thus how we learn and collaborate. The logical next step in this progression is moving this technology and its capabilities to our education system and making it available as a tool for our teachers to better educate our youth for the next generation of careers.
As a side note to this story, let’s clarify the picture a little for you. This story appeared this morning in USA Today: Shift to Mobile Devices Causes Concern. The crux of this story is about how the shift in internet access from the desktop to the mobile device has created a serious wave that many of the current tech companies are having issues keeping up with. For example, Dell, HP, Intel, and Microsoft are all behind the curve when it comes to mobile devices – they are rooted deeply in the desktop or laptop environment. Google and Facebook were able to conquer the online web space…in a desktop environment. However, both these companies have a revenue model that is weighted heavily on selling online ads. When you move to the mobile device, the screens are so much smaller, that you can’t just fill the screen with ads and both these companies have apps that launch what you need without ads. Now, new tech companies may step in to fill this void and figure out how to actually make money in this new space.
Personally, I find it very interesting how mobile devices have been able to completely change the world we live in. In this author’s humble opinion, we are about to see a new tech boom, much like in the 90’s around the web and in the 2000’s around search and social media. My prediction – apps and connectivity to learning content. I am pretty sure I am not the first to say this though.
I was listening to an audio book that really caught my attention. It is a book about some basic strategies and thought processes that go into being a leader that makes a difference. The book is called Great by Choice. It was written by Jim Collins and Morton Hansen.
The book is basically a study they performed on a series of companies during the time periods of the late 70’s to right around 2001. One set of companies (which they call 10X’ers) were compared to a comparable company during that time. 10X’ers are companies that surpassed the market by 10 times. Only 7 companies out of over 20,000 companies passed the test. So, the 10X’er company would be Microsoft and the comparable would be Apple (which was a 10X’er, fell without Steve Jobs, and became a 10X’er again when he came back). Another was Intel, compared to AMD. Yet one last example was Southwest Air compared to PS Air (which isn’t even around anymore).
The question laid out was “in a time of uncertainty, turmoil, and chaos, how come some companies thrive and yet others in the same market with a lot of the same capabilities fail?”.
They found some interesting patterns.
Today, I saw an article in USA Today that was interesting and could be a game changer down the road. Here is a sampling from the article.
MOOCs have the potential to be a “pivotal development” that can revolutionize higher education. Questions remain whether these online courses can be profitable and whether traditional colleges will award credit for them. But if successful, MOOCs could lead to lower costs for families and access to higher-quality instruction for anyone in the world who has Internet access.
“The industry has operated more or less along the same business model and even the same technology for hundreds of years,” says John Nelson, managing director of Moody’s Higher Education. “MOOCS represent a rapidly developing and emerging change and that is very, very rare.”
Read full story: College May Never Be The Same
This Area of Expertise (AOE) is about providing leadership in developing human capital to fulfill an organizations strategy. This skill set incorporates:
You will find about 9% of the CPLP questions involve this AOE.
Something that is important for any training professional to recognize is that training is not always the solution to an employee performance issue. Training managers should always conduct a needs analysis to attempt to save their company time and money. The best way to do this is from the top down, rather than focusing on individuals. Your role is to know the elements of a needs assessment. This includes gap analysis, priority identification, causes, solutions, and opportunities.
This is a summary of an article from the magazine, Chief Learning Officer.
Are you so busy focusing on the next “fire” or today’s business that you don’t take the time to prepare for the future? Short-term planning is great for incremental change, but if you want to thrive in a world that has a ton of change happening, you can’t think one step at a time. You need to make the future tangible, so you can work with something imaginable and real.
CREATING SCENARIOS
You can envision your businesses future by creating alternative futures so you have some idea of what the future might hold. Scenarios are not predictors of the future, nor are they projections of what will actually happen. However, they provide an alternate view, so you can think and prepare for what might come to fruition. They simply allow you to think out beyond the next “crisis” you have to deal with and create some strategies.
This is something I heard about while I was at the Learning Solutions conference a few weeks ago. This is not just a crisis in the Central Florida market, but across the United States.
STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math. These are areas of expertise considered to be critical to our community and our country’s future.
In Orlando, this is an important thing, since we have a large employment sector that deals in engineering, defense, and the training of these career professionals.
Here is a link to the Orlando Science Center and several articles that discuss this topic:
http://www.osc.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=126&Itemid=206
These are two videos of Dr. Ioannis N. Miaoulis, President and Director of the Museum of Science, Boston speaking in at the Orlando Science Center about this topic.
ATD - Central Florida Chapter Blog 
