Social Learning Systems

Customer Engagement is Key for SaaS

Cultivating Customer Engagement

Cultivating customer engagement requires an organizational culture that focuses on customers and their needs.

1. Know your customers 

It’s easy to fall into the trap of treating your customers as unknown, faceless people. After all, chances are no-one in your organization ever met them. They probably live far away and may even speak a different language. But you can’t afford to do that.

A company must develop or achieve tools that will help them measure customer behaviour on their service. These tools must be capable of presenting the users behaviour once in your application and answer relevant questions such as:

• Have the users tried the service more than once?
• How much time are users investing in your service?
• Which features have they used?
• Have they been exposed to your core features and do they fully understand the value-propositon of  your offerings?
• Is momentum growing or declining within the organization?
• Are they potential buyers?
• Etc.
  
  Read the entire article here.

via blog.totango.com

The eLearning Guild : Rapid eLearning Authoring: Top Tools Report

In this report, author Joseph Ganci discusses which rapid eLearning authoring tools are the most popular and why. Using Guild Research survey data, Joseph also examines how powerful people find these tools, perceived ease of use, how many different tools people use, and trends in tool usage. Joseph also compares features and functions across tools, and closes with a detailed discussion of the top seven tools revealed in the survey.

-- A good look at Captivate, Articulate, Camtasia, etc. --

via www.elearningguild.com

Open Culture

What is Open Culture’s Mission?

Open Culture brings together high-quality cultural & educational media for the worldwide lifelong learning community. Web 2.0 has given us great amounts of intelligent audio and video. It’s all free. It’s all enriching. But it’s also scattered across the web, and not easy to find. Our whole mission is to centralize this content, curate it, and give you access to this high quality content whenever and wherever you want it. Free audio books, free online courses, free movies, free language lessons, free ebooks and other enriching content — it’s all here. Open Culture was founded in 2006.

via www.openculture.com

Training Secrets From Inside The Googleplex | Fast Company

Anyone who’s tried to keep up with the online ad business, especially lately, knows it’s a turbulent tumble of ever-changing products--search, display, video, mobile--with vastly different sets of advantages and potential payoffs. So imagine being one of the poor Google sales agents tasked with keeping up with the company’s dozens of offerings.

Its thousands of agents don’t have to master one or two products, but every single one. That’s why the company has tossed out the old-school, classroom-style of teaching.

Every other Friday, the company hosts a “Product Spotlight,” a dial-in conference call which Learning and Development Manager Debbie Newhouse tells Fast Company is run like a Jon Stewart-style “talk show" (well, minus any adult toy-themed spinning wheels). A moderator interviews a product manager about a particular new feature, as sales agents across the country, and around the world, listen in. Sometimes there are also slides or video to follow along with online, and the agents get to ask questions via chat. Maybe it's more like Leno.

Read the complete article here.

via www.fastcompany.com

Learning in the Cloud - CLO Magazine

A good article on using the Cloud for learning. Advantages include:

• Scalability
• Stability
• Reduced cost
• Improved Usability
  
  
  Read the full article here.

 

Yes, The Khan Academy IS the Future of Education (video) | Singularity Hub

I’m just going to come out and say it: the Khan Academy is the best thing that has happened to education since Socrates. The brainchild of Salman Khan, the Khan Academy became famous by teaching simple math lessons for free through over 2000 YouTube videos. Now, after millions in donations and an expansion of the company, the academy is so much more. The website for the Khan Academy already had exercises you could use to test your understanding of the videos you just watched, but in the past few weeks the website has exploded with wonderful new features. You can create a profile for the site simply by logging in through Google or Facebook. You can track your progress with some wonderful metrics. Teachers (or ‘coaches’) can monitor student progress in groups. Students can earn badges to keep them interested. The list goes on and on and it’s all free. Free, I tell you!

Read the entire article here.

via singularityhub.com

Do You Need An Instructional Design Degree? » The Rapid eLearning Blog

 
If you do want to forego a formal education, here are a few tips to help you get started:

• Read books and apply what you learn to your projects. If you can’t apply them to real projects, create little mini modules where you practice different techniques.  Add them to your portfolio with an explanation of what you did and why.
• Connect with others so you’re always exposed to new ideas and challenged in your thinking.  One of the great things about social media is the access you have to all sorts of expertise.  Be prepared to connect in a genuine way.  People will tune you out if all you do is take.
• Develop a portfolio that demonstrates your understanding of instructional design.  I also recommend combining your portfolio with a blog.  The portfolio could be the formal environment to display your work.  Whereas the blog is like the sandbox where you can flesh out ideas.

You DO Need an Instructional Design Degree

The reality is that many employers require an advance instructional design degree.  If all things are equal, the person with the degree will probably always be considered first.

Whether you like it or not, you’re competing in the marketplace with other qualified instructional designers.  So you want to make sure that your skills and qualifications are equitable.  That means if you don’t have a degree you might never be considered for different jobs. 

via www.articulate.com

Read the entire article here.

Gates Foundation Launches $20M Grant for Online Ed | News & Opinion | PCMag.com

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on Monday announced a $20 million grant program to improve college graduation rates via technology, which will probably be oriented around online education and learning programs.

Next year, the focus will be expanded to K-12 programs, Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft and the co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, said in a conference call.

The initiative, first disclosed last week, will be known as the Next-Generation Learning Challenges, a $20 million "funding round" that will be handed out in grants ranging from $250,000 to $750,000. The request period will run until Nov. 19; the winners will be announced by March 31, the foundation said.

Read the complete article.

via www.pcmag.com

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is doing wonderful things.

How Long Does it Take to Create Learning? (2010 Research)

by Bryan C on September 14, 2010

Research Participants: 249 companies organizations, representing 3,947 learning development professionals, who have created content consumed by 19,875,946 learners.

All results are shown as ratios, showing number of hours of development to create 1 finished hour of learning (output)

 

We just completed a large-scale study and encourage you to use the results to benchmark and help improve your own internal development practices (see below):

How Long Does it Take to Create Learning?

via brandon-hall.com

Direct link

Make sure to check out the newest info on course development ratios. Extremely useful for anyone managing the development of traditional classroom and/or web-based training materials.

eLearn Magazine - A great resource - On Designing, Launching, and Teaching an e-Course

eLearn Magazine is a terrific resource for our industry.

Teaching an e-Course The recent July 1 interview with Linda Formichelli talks about teaching an e-Course. "The benefits are that you get to work one-on-one with students and feel inspired as you watch them learn and succeed. And of course, I can't forget to mention that e-courses do bring in income! "