Doctorate Degree Online

Monday, 29 October 2012

Online Systems for Behavior Change

I've always believe that to truly have impact on performance, we need to be experts at Behavior Change. I've written a few times over the years on aspects of solutions that ultimately drive a change in behavior that leads to performance improvement. I'm now working on an very interesting project that is designed to lead to some important changes in behavior that has already had dramatic impacts. But we want to push for more, so ultimately this post is asking for help, please comment or tweet (add @tonykarrer) on:

What online systems have you seen that ultimately drive behavior change?

What do these systems do that leads to behavior change?

For example, there are solutions out there like:

that look to be interesting - although I don't have insights into specifics. I would love to compile a list of other such solutions. I also would love to hear about aspects of these systems that you feel drive behavior change.

Going back through my own writing/thoughts, it's remained fairly consistent over the years. In Data Driven, I said:

If you want to really improve the numbers via a performance improvement initiative then you need to start and end with the data.

This solution relies heavily on humans to push each other to ultimately change behavior. Using data as a means of assessing how you are doing from an action and results standpoint is an important aspect.

This is reinforced by Goals Accountability and Social Support for Big Impact where I used the responses to a monthly Big Question to arrive at the following as the basis for driving behavior change:

Guide through setting meaningful personal goals
Teach how you can hold yourself accountable to those goals
Help the user set up social support
Teach the social supporters how they can help hold the personal accountable
Send lots of reminders to the individual and the supporters

When I've looked at other articles on Behavior Change, I found similar kinds of conclusions.

Need to Change Behavior? Just Follow the Wizard

Most of the behavior change strategies, however, boil down to the following three “levers”:

Increase the number of triggers leading to the desirable behavior.

Enhance ability to perform the behavior (make it easier to do)

Amplify motivation for doing the behavior with intrinsic and extrinsic motivators.

I'm definitely a big fan of The Power of Habit book. I think there's a lot to be learned. But for right now, I'm most interested in how these translate into online solutions that change behavior.

Please contribute and I will post back more on this.

Wednesday, 12 September 2012

Training Magazine Network Now Bringing You eLearning Learning

I'm really excited today. We get to finally announce that eLearning Learning has partnered with Training Magazine Network. These two industry leaders in online learning and training bring together their extensive content and community offerings to form the largest eLearning offering on the Web.

When you visit the eLearning Learning site, you probably won't notice that much different. You see a new logo. But the important thing is that there's still great content on the site every day - oh hey, Karl Kapp just wrote about Gamification - hold on, let me check that out. And if you are like me, you can't visit the site all the time, so you should sign up for a Personalized Newsletter on the right.

The bigger change is described by Ray Jimenez, CEO of Training Magazine Network, a fellow blogger and likely someone many of you know. He tells us:

Online learning and training is a dynamic and growing industry. It’s not easy for our industry professionals to stay current on all of the important analysis, information and how-to pieces available. A critical element of our value is providing the kind of in-depth thinking and research that is brought together in eLearingLearning’s site and newsletter. Our members need this kind of information to stay at the top of their game, and eLearningLearning.com is the best place for them to do just that.

Ray is now putting eLearning Learning content front and center on their site and in newsletters. You can see it in action below. There's Karl's post.

Looking forward to more great things for eLearning Learning.

Tuesday, 12 June 2012

What's Wrong with Traditional Stock Photography Sources for eLearning

Back in 2007, I provided a long list of sources of stock photography for eLearning. And there are lots of other posts available on eLearning Learning Stock Photography. But I really missed something important: traditional stock photo sources are often a pain for eLearning.

I had coffee with Bryan Jones, the founder of eLearningArt,last week in Los Angeles, and it led to a discussion about images/stock photography and eLearning. At the start of the conversation, I wasn't quite sure why a company would focus on stock photography specifically aimed at eLearning. But Bryan was really good at pointing out the pain that goes with getting stock photography from traditional sources and trying to use it for eLearning.

The best way to illustrate the point is with an example. Let’s say I’m creating some eLearning to teach people sales skills. I want to create scenarios where I use characters to walk through common issues that come up when a sales rep meets with customers. For that I need:

1 character to represent my sales rep
2 characters to represent different customers
Multiple poses of the sales rep and characters interacting with each other

If I go to a traditional stock photography site and search for business characters, I’ll find:

Lots of characters in a suit and tie, but not many in business casual, like my sales reps and customers wear
A single, finished shot, but not multiple shots of the characters together in the poses I need
Isolated characters only face the camera, so they’re not good to use in an interactive scene
People that look more like models than my customers
Millions of images to sort through, but very few that are relevant to me

Bryan explained that the issues above are why he created eLearningArt. He highlights that, as an eLearning developer, you would ideally have:

Characters shot in isolation, with the backgrounds removed, and in many poses. You can then build your own scene by inserting the character s in the poses you want onto any background.
“Real” looking characters of various ages and ethnicities that look like people you work with
Characters facing both forward for use in reaction shots, avatars, etc., as well as facing away from the camera to be used in scenarios and conversations
Photos organized by outfits and characters. For example, if I want an Asian male doctor, I can look under medical images, find the character I want, and know that there will be dozens of images in that pack. This greatly reduces image search time.
Access to other files, such as background images, other stock photos, and templates all formatted for eLearning

That’s not to say that traditional stock sites have no value. There are plenty of images on these sites that are useful. However, the needs of the eLearning developer are often unique, and a site that focuses on eLearning stock photography now makes a lot of sense to me.

Bryan's not the only one doing eLearning related stock photography. Here's a bit more information on a few of these types of sites:

	One Time Purchase Price (average per image)	Subscription Price (Annual per user)	Unlimited downloads	Characters by industry	Other products
eLearningArt	About $1 per	$240	Yes	Business casual, casual, suits, on the phone, medical, industrial, casual	Templates, stock photos, background images
eLearningStock	$1-$5 based on size	Not sure on this	No (credit system)	Professional, business, phone, medical	Animated characters, templates
eLearningTemplates	About $2 per	$2,500	Yes	Business, casual, industrial, medical	Games, activities, skins, templates, interactions, stock photos

Saturday, 21 April 2012

Go to College?

When you graduate from high school, you have the option to go directly to work or go on to university or college. There are some things you should consider so that you succeed in the future because the choice of majors or skills you have can be obtained at the university. You can consider several factors as mentioned below:

1. Factor of yourself
a. Interest
Factor of interest is the main factor that you should know before choosing a university, because this factor is the trigger to complete your studies. Surely it would be a burden for you to go to college if it interests you to go to college does not exist. Since it is unlikely you will complete the study only with the encouragement of parents only.

b. Cost
The cost factor is the biggest reason why many people who could not continue her studies in college. Because during the course of our parents certainly would spend more money to support the costs of your education. So do not ever waste your hard work and toil of our parents.
2. Factors from the University
a. Reputation Companies would prefer a candidate who is an alumnus of the University who has a good reputation. And of course, would be proud if we become college alumnus who has a good reputation is not it?

b. Future Prospects Assess the direction that you choose, whether good future prospects, are absorbed by the world of work or help you become self-employed. Calculate carefully from now on.

c. Accreditation
Make sure you choose the University has accreditation, accreditation status is to determine a course of independence in carrying out the teaching and learning program. Accreditati college girl, college student, earn college degree, study distance learning

college girl, college student, earn college degree, study distance learning

on status granted to an organized program of study.

d. Educational Facilities
Make sure that you select universities that have education support facilities such as laboratories, internet room, library etc.
e. Link or cooperation
Now there are many companies that joined hands with the University to recruit human resources at its disposal. Surely it would make it easier for you to get a job if you are viewing has a campus job with a company that you might dream of.
Perhaps you want to study online, so you can work part time while studying at the university is open, or a bachelor's degree from online college. It's also a good choice because it has many online campus that has a good reputation.

Hopefully you are successful when studying on campus and can have a great career while working or as an entrepreneur.

Note: Find The BEST ONLINE UNIVERSITY now

Monday, 2 January 2012

eLearning Learning Adds Personalized Subscriptions

Aggregage, the platform that powers eLearning Learning has added a powerful personalization engine. That means that eLearning Learning now allows users to sign-up and have their content personalized based on their interests.

You can sign-up via the "Personalize Your Content" button on the right side of the interface shown to the right of the red arrow below. Or put another way, just above and right of the picture of Justin Bieber.

By the way, I should point out that the four top articles on the site when I took the screen shot were all great:

It's what I love about the site. It always has great, fresh content from a wide variety of industry professionals. Every time I visit it, I find something that I missed that was really good content.

Now with personalization it's even better. The picture below gives a sense of what's happening:

Curators handle finding the best sources of content. The system then uses social signals such as those coming from Facebook, twitter, LinkedIn, delicious as well as clicks and views. These are compared to averages for the source and also looks at who is providing the signal, how often they signal things, how often they signal for that particular source, etc. Those aspects existed before and it does a good job of finding great content. You can read a bit more about these aspects in eLearning Learning Launches New Features.

What's new now is that the site allows you to sign up and provide your Twitter and LinkedIn information. The site will look at your activity on these sites and the content of what you share. It will use that to find interests as well as to cluster you with other users who are like you based on interests and sharing. You can partially control your interests via the Subscription page as shown below:

This will change over time based on your LinkedIn and twitter activity. You can always visit and manually select interests as well. You can read a bit more here: Personalization Explained.

The system then can combine three pieces of information to figure out what will be most interesting to you:

Social signal score – are people in the audience finding it interesting
Topic match – does it match up with your interests
Like sharing – are individuals who are like you sharing this

The system uses these to both rank things on the site and to generate Daily and Weekly newsletters.

The reason that I'm most exited about this is that I partly use eLearning Learning to make sure I don't miss things that is good content that is relevant to me. Now with personalization, it is even less likely that something will sneak by.

I also personally like the format of the new newsletter.

Give it a try and let me know what you think.

Monday, 14 November 2011

Flash Dead for eLearning

I've been warning about this since January 2010 in Still No Flash, and called it out further as the signs became more serious in May 2010 with Beginning of Long Slow Death of Flash. My words then:

We are hitting a tipping point where you have to question building anything that uses Flash as the delivery mechanism.

In February of 2011, Mobile Learning and the Continuing Death of Flash, I pointed to the smart moves by Rapid Intake to work around this problem. And said,

The death of Flash is continuing.

Well, I believe we've seen continuing signs of this with Adobe moving its tools towards HTML 5. And now, Adobe Admits: Apple Won, Flash For Mobile is Done, HTML5 is the Future.

What does all of this mean? No More Fence Sitting!

Content Creators => you can no longer build content in Flash as a delivery vehicle. You must adopt tools that do not rely on Flash as a delivery mechanism or at least delivery solutions to Flash and HTML 5.

Authoring Tool Companies => you must immediately talk to your product roadmap and how you will be able to deliver HTML 5 content. You must look at how media will be handled going forward.

This may seem like a shock, but we've gone through this transition before as we move from desktop to web-based delivery. Really Flash was part of that last wave. It won't be part of the next wave.

Of course, that still leaves some really hard questions about how you design for all the different mobile platforms with widely different screen sizes and their non-standard inputs and widely varying connection speeds. This is a great opportunity for mobile authoring tools to take a bite out of a much larger market much like the Director to Flash transition did back in the day.

I'll be curious to hear comments on this.

Thursday, 13 October 2011

LMS Low-Cost Webinars Hosted eCommerce Subscriptions

I was talking with a startup that has an existing audience and now want to provide a monthly subscription for access to training to this audience. They will only convert a portion of the audience to the new service. The learners will get access to webinars, recorded webinars, videos, and other online content that they will author separately.

They don't really have a tech team, so going with a hosted solution that would live at a subdomain would be best, i.e., subscribers would go to: learn.company.com in order to sign up, pay, and get access to webinars, content, etc.

They are early stage, so low-cost would be good. And it would be nice if it was a Rapid LMS.

I'm a little concerned how well LMS solutions will handle the webinar integration and the subscriptions.

What would you recommend they research as possible options?

Here are some resources that I found that may help: