Tag Archives: LMS
What is Your Training Plan B?

What is Your Training Plan B?

by on July 25, 2011 in Instructional Design

In Minnesota we say that we have two seasons—winter and road construction.  Added to that is the extreme congestion during morning and evening rush hours and the building of a light rail system between Minneapolis and St. Paul. All of this, of course, adds inordinate amounts of time to my drive between the two cities and to and from the suburbs.

Last winter I decided to take my life back and come up with a Plan B.  I looked at maps and spent hours trying out different routes for when I needed to circumvent construction or get off icy congested freeways quickly and get to my destination another way.

So on Friday when I was watching an interview with Russian tennis star Maria Sharapova—and she said that when she found that her strategy wasn’t working, she switched to Plan B—a light went on in my head.

I started thinking about …

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The Lonely eLearner: Creating Social Learning Anchors

The Lonely eLearner: Creating Social Learning Anchors

by on March 9, 2011 in blended learning, eLearning, feedback, LMS (Learning Management System), social learning

The other day, I ran across Clive Shepherd’s recent blog post  The New Social Learning  – a review and I was struck by an observation he made there. The gist of it was that even though we have an enormous amount of tools available to enable social learning across far reaching boundaries, the self-study type of eLearning seen in so many workplaces today can potentially cut learners off from any type of social interaction during the course of the learning. This can be detrimental to learners who need that interaction to assess their new skills against others, discuss ideas, and gain new perspectives.

I agree with Clive’s observations on this topic. In my opinion, giving a learner a self-study eLearning program as their only form of training or support is not much different than handing them a manual to read with some exercises.  In this lonely form of learning, there is …

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The Freemium Three: Three Free Tools That Will Work Wonders For Your Next Training Project.

The Freemium Three: Three Free Tools That Will Work Wonders For Your Next Training Project.

by on January 19, 2011 in Informal Learning, LMS (Learning Management System), Project Management/Project Delivery, Reviews, social learning, Wikis

Like many of us, I don’t like spending money when it’s not necessary, and being a good project manager means being especially tight fisted with your client’s dime.  So, when budgets are tight and the dollars can’t be found for more expensive tools – here are three freemium products I’ve recently discovered that can help get your enterprise training project rolling on next-to-nothing.

 Bookwhen.com

  • This online registration system proved its worth a thousand times recently when we had to scratch plans for a learning management system (LMS) at the last minute, after the client had to pare back the budget on a series of instructor-led training classes being rolled out to 3000 employees at multiple locations.  Following some careful product reviews and some alpha-testing we settled on this system and never looked back.  It was easy to customize, easy for our client’s employees to use, and handled a number of changes

    • …

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Facebook or Kanye West: Which Pop Icon Has a Future in Enterprise Learning?

Facebook or Kanye West: Which Pop Icon Has a Future in Enterprise Learning?

by on January 7, 2011 in LMS (Learning Management System), social learning

People love to learn.  It’s true.  Have you ever heard someone say, “I hate learning!”?  (I wrote about the love of learning and mobile phones in a blog a few weeks back if you want to take a look).  For example, I’m watching Storytellers: Kanye West on Palladia a couple nights ago (a great TV channel if you love music; and like learning, everyone loves music).  During the performance Kanye starts freestyling about how he creates lyrics.  He mentions that he loves movies and often uses movie quotes in songs.  Kanye then proclaims that he hates reading and brags about never reading books, choosing instead to learn from those around him (check out Jon’s post on peer-to-peer learning here).  This is without a doubt the first time I’ve ever heard anyone say they hate reading.  Some prefer other activities to reading and many can’t find the time to read, …

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