Audio Narration in Training

Cathy Moore does some very neat demos. One of her latest demo's is on the use of audio narration in training. Definitely worth checking out - great work Cathy.

How to get blog comments easily

Many of us often wonder how we can get more participation from our readers. Well I found one sure fire way - criticize Brett Favre. Yip, mention the words Favre and hype in one sentence and you'll get PLENTY of feedback alright! All I can say is at 8-1 the old man looks pretty impressive from my couch.

For those of you who don't like sport maybe you can write a post about why Bill Gates isn't a genius - seems to me it would be the same as saying that Favre is hyped. On a side note why hasn't anyone written and article about why Favre is pronounced Farv?

eLearning: Selling while educating

I often find myself in the precarious position of being both a salesman and an educator when going on a sales call. I was wondering if this is a norm in the eLearning industry or whether I am just in a unique position, as I deal with both the sales and marketing side as well as the development side. This may put me in a position where I am more familiar with the nuts and bolts of the industry, unlike your ‘typical’ sales person. I said precarious because I sometimes feel like I am the first person who educates the customer on the development cycle of an eLearning project and the amount of work that is involved from both the vendor as well as the customer’s side. In addition, some potential customers seem shocked by the average price of developing eLearning programs.

I sometimes wonder whether this realization scares the customer off, but at the same time you want to be as honest and upfront as possible. I would love to year from other people in the field to see whether my experience resonates with them. Have you had a similar experience? Is the duality of sales and educating necessarily a bad thing? Is this duality unique to eLearning or does it translate to other industries? Is this duality the result of the relative ‘youth’ of the eLearning industry? Your thoughts would be appreciated.

Narcotic elearning anyone?

I came across a very timely blog post from Cathy Moore regarding the amount of boring eLearning content out there. It is very timely because I was asked that exact question by a potential customer yesterday. My reponse was right in line with Cathy post:

No clear goal: We don’t look closely enough at the business reason for the course.
The wrong tool: We’re using elearning when another method would work better.
Too much telling: We think, “We know things that the learners don’t! We must tell the learners these things!”
Not enough time: Feeling pressured? You’re not alone. Several respondents to Elliott Masie’s 2005 survey mentioned problems like “ever faster development cycles that make it difficult to maintain minimum quality standards”
Lack of internal standards: Rigorous, written standards for elearning materials don’t appear to be wildly popular.
Fear of creativity: We’re sometimes afraid not only of humor but even of “safer” ideas like dialog, scenarios, simulations, “discovery” approaches, and the many other ways to show instead of tell.

I'm gonna add a few more ideas at Cathy's blog so make sure to check it out.

Is copyright causing a conundrum for trainers?

With the proliferation of applications that allow anybody to create content, where do we draw the line as far as copyright? Blogs are loaded with content that was not created by the author especially images. Is this an issue or are blogs different from other training/informational materials developed within your organization? Where do we as eLearning developers draw the line in terms of incorporating content that is available in the 'public' sphere e.g. Youtube?

Youtube videos are littered with copyrighted material that the content creator has manipulated/edited into a new format. Can we/should we reference these videos? Is copyright becoming less of an issue because of the fluid nature of content on the internet? Clearly the music industry is still battling the peer to peer applications, although most of it has not been terribly successful. Music sharing is not a new thing. Back in the day kids used to copy cassettes from each other. With the advent of the internet and peer to peer applications you can now share files with another person in Mongolia in mere minutes.

So some of the questions I would like you to think about are:

• Where does copyright begin and end in the web 2.0 era?
• Have the rules changed with the advent web applications like blogs, Wikipedia, Facebook, Youtube etc?
• Are the rules different for learning programs vs. blogs?
• Is there a difference between music rights and copyright on images/video?
• Can copyright be an enforced with the advent of the internet, does this matter?