LT2008: Claire Line on choosing the right authoring tool

The final presentation on my training track at LT2008 was a case study from Claire Line of the international law firm Lovells, currently in the process of buying her third e-learning authoring tool. I had not heard Claire deliver a presentation before, but I knew her by reputation. After her presentation, some expressed the view that she had read her presentation, which they found disappointing.

However, I am of the view that the information she shared was potentially very useful to those members of the community at the early stages of adoption, which is why I'm sharing my reflections on her session today.

She openly shared the mistakes she had made when making her first purchase, and highlighted lessons learnt along the way. Claire's willingness to share her experience and hard-learned lessons typify this community and will have done much to signpost the way forward for those venturing out along this path.

She identified the key questions to ask as:

1. What features do I need?
2. What are my priorities?
3. What is my budget?
4. What are my resources (support, etc.)?
   

At Lovells, they undertook a rigorous selection process and would not be rushed into making a decision based on price or limited availability. The final selection had to be fit for purpose, which meant taking into consideration the nature of the content to be produced. Other considerations included:

• nature of audience
• culture
• resources
• IT strategy

In her experience it was vital to engage and involve the stakeholders, including elearning authors (globally), HR professionals, customers and a cross-section of users.

Her tips to those embarking on this journey were:

• talk to people (vendors, other users, people in other firms)
• see it in action and try it out for yourself
• get independent advice - the vendor wants you to buy his product!
• find out what resources you will need to make it work
• engage a professional insturctional designer
• don't confuse graphics design with instructional design
• be prepared to make mistakes and keep learning
• involve the learners as early as possible
• don't rush into a decision

Reflections on LT2008: Jane Hart

I'm finally getting my head above water enough to have put together my thoughts on the sessions I attended at Learning Technologies at the end of January. At the moment I'm restricting myself to the training track sessions, rather than the keynotes - I might get to those in due course.

I thought I'd start with the presentation I found most useful, namely Jane Hart's top 10 tools for learning in 2007.

Jane revealed the results of her survey of the community's top 10 tools for learning. She had received over 100 responses from 21 countries, the first of which came from Jay Cross. The responses had come from a wide range of people: geeks, specialists and coalface practitioners, and showed an even spread across the education and corporate sectors. Over 400 tools were mentioned in total, 100 of them three or more times and a further 50 got two mentions. The top product received 63 nominations.

There was mixed reaction to the news that Firefox took first place overall. The rest of the top 10 were:
#2 del.icio.us
#3 tie Google search and Skype
#5 PowerPoint
#6 Wordpress
#7 tie Googlereader and gMail
#9 Blogger
#10 Word

Jane expressed the view that this revealed that people are personal learners who no longer just look to "go on a course" but seek to create their own learning space. It indicated a move towards self-managed learning. Most delegates had only heard of 3 or 4 of the top 10, opening up many opportunities for them to explore new avenues after the conference.

Jane shared that the top scoring social media tool was Facebook, and that the productivity tools were dominated by Google applications, almost all of which were free. In fact, Jane revealed that free tools took 75% of the nominations overall. She also indicated that tools not specifically designed for learning were being used as such. It seemed the criteria for popularity were that a tool had to be good at its job, customisable, sharable, collaborative, preferably free... and loved by its users.

Jane gave honourable mentions to a few free tools that had scored high, but not made the top 10. These included:
#11 Audacity
#12 tie Moodle (corrected thanks to a pointer from Jane - well spotted!)
#15 Wikispaces
#26 tie SnagIt
#31 tie Ning

Some popular file sharing tools were:
#16 Flickr
#22 tie YouTube
#31 tie Slideshare
#50 tie Scribd
#57 tie Teachertube

Some popular producer tools which are not free included #17 Captivate and #22 tie Articulate.

It is likely that many will have left this session with a to-do list. Certainly the man sitting in front of me was taking frantic notes and made sure that he heard the names of the tools correctly so that he could learn more about them. He wasted no time getting started, either, because when he realised that I had some experience with some of them, he made notes of my recommendations, too. This is what I love about this business - the bit about seeing that light come on and watching a person move to a new place (I think that scrambled metaphor can be attributed to the fact that I am in the throes of moving house!).

Learning Technologies 2008 - initial reaction

I've just returned home after spending two days at the Learning Technologies 2008 conference. I will be giving some more measured feedback over the next few days, but I thought I'd get my initial reactions off my chest right away, which means I am unlikely to be able to give all the links that should - please google any of the names I mention that may be currently unfamiliar to you - you won't regret it!

I was acting as the rapporteur on one of the training tracks - as it happens, I got to report on the track I would have chosen to attend, had I gone to the conference as a paying delegate, namely Learning Technology. As well as the keynote addresses by Jay Cross, Itiel Dror and Nigel Paine, my track consisted of presentations by: Donald Clark, Josie Fraser, Stephen Downes, Joel Greenberg, Sara Bingham & Kirstie Donnelly, Marco Tippmer, Gordon Bull, Andrew Butt, Jane Hart and Claire Line.

I also (and now I'm just showing off) got to go out for dinner with Don Taylor, Jay Cross, Clive Shepherd and Jane Hart. What a pleasure it was to spend an evening in the company of such enthusiastic, passionate, well-past-the-koolaid-point optimists! Wonderful not to be the only one who becomes animated and wild-eyed on the subject of learning and learners.

I came away from the conference with a weird feeling of someone who had taken uppers and downers at the same time: enthused and frustrated, buoyed and depressed. How exciting to discover that my thinking is in tune with that of some of the leaders of our field. How gratifying to discover that I'm not the voice in the wilderness after all. How frustrating that I don't get to put very much of it into practice. I can't remember whether it was George Siemens or me who said this during an exchange of emails, but my feelings are a bit: "okay, so we know what we should be doing, we know when we should be doing it (now), so why aren't we doing it?"