Moodle Frustrations

I am seriously considering bringing on Moodle as our company’s first LMS but I am a little nervous about setup and support. I recently had a discussion with a high school teacher going through the aches and pains of using Moodle with his classes and he is having a much harder time getting other teachers in his district to take advantage of Moodle.

Although I work in the corporate sector, I work with a team of “Trainers” that could be described as Teachers. I have a hard time getting the Trainers to take advantage of any technology that might be a little complicated. If they become frustrated on their first experience there is a rare opportunity for a second chance. I would hate for this to happen with any LMS.

So, how do you overcome the support hurdles that may come along with an open source solution such as Moodle? I referred the Teacher to Moodle.com for outsourced support but I wasn’t able to give him any kind of cost estimate.

I’m coming to the conclusion that I need to give some of the more expensive options a second and third look. Although they are more expensive at startup it may be cheaper than occurring expenses at each roadblock with a Moodle implementation.

Any nuggets of wisdom out there?

Management Training Program

Now that the tide towards eLearning has turned I am getting ready to begin the biggest eLearning project I’ve worked on. It’s actually two projects for the same course. This would be small beans for experienced Instructional designers but I am new to the party and I am still trying to find my way so I am looking forward to getting started.

The first project is to revamp our current “Manager Training Program” aka “MTP” certification course. Prior to becoming a manager we require that the employee is certified through the Management Training Program which is currently a 5 day, 100% instructor led course. We are looking to drop this to 3 days by converting select topics to eLearning modules that they can take during slow times at the store. There are several topics that would be ideal for eLearning but the entire course cannot be converted because some of the topics are much more effectively covered through instructor led training.

The second part of the project is to develop a MTP re certification course that will be 100% eLearning with a follow up day in the classroom to bring it all together. We require that managers get re certified in the course every 2 years and up until now we put them back through the same 5 day course that new managers go through. This is a hassle for experienced managers because it’s old hat and they want to learn something new as well as brush up on some of the important aspects of the course. The veteran managers will love this and it will be a big money saver because we will drastically reduce the amount of days we are paying them to sit in a classroom.

Now comes the hard part! Executing these plans and receiving better results than we do in the current ILT courses. We are in the preliminary stages of planning so everything I have described is very flexible. I am starting out my research by going through the current version of the course as a participant next week. It’s been years since I have taught or been a part of it so I need to refresh my memory. With everything I have learned over the past couple of years I am sure I will see the course in a whole new light.

The tide is turning

I work for an organization that has heavily depended on Instructor Led training and has experienced great success with ILT over the last 20 years. I am the computer geek of the training dept and have been working hard to bring our systems into the 21st century by gravitating towards a blended format of training. It has been a tough battle due to the resistance to change. However I have been experiencing some “Wins” of late by supplementing our current ILT with small eLearning projects that have been used as pre and post work. The facilitators have been giving me rave reviews because they have been able to cover the material in much more detail because of the knowledge that the participants have already gained through the pre work. On top of that, using some kind of an eLearning assignment as post work has been helping with transference back on the job.

Yesterday I sat in a meeting to plan the Training Dept objectives and goals for 2008. Turns out the main objective for 2008 is to make a large leap towards a blended learning format. The eLearning tide has turned now that I have gained support and the economic belt is tightening more than ever. My Task list just got very full!

First day of school

I started my first class in the ed tech program at SDSU and the first discussion topic is simply “Why are you here?” We are getting to know each other by explaining what lead us to enrolling in this program. Simple, but interesting.

The one sentence answer for me is; “I want to do better at my job.” I fell into a career that I get a kick out of and I want to make the most out of it. I love working in the field of training and performance improvement and I want to take my skills to the next level.

Up to this point I have taught myself everything I know related to educational technology by reading books and researching on the internet. I’m starving for more knowledge and the Masters in Ed Tech is my buffet of knowledge. I would like to advance my career in this field and I believe this is a very important step in doing so.

In my current position I have the opportunity to move a training dept into the 21st century by taking it from 100% instructor led training to a blended format. By strengthening my skills in educational technology I can make a big difference to the bottom line of the company and I would like to seize that opportunity.

In addition to strengthening my skills for my current position I would like to improve my marketability in the Educational Tech field. Don’t get me wrong, I love the company I work for but I am intrigued by the opportunities in the ed tech field outside of my organization. I am interested in the consulting field and look forward to opportunities to explore that career path.

Serious Games

If you have read my previous posts Proving ROI in Training and One small step for eLearning, a giant step for the company you know that we are focusing on improving product knowledge amongst our sales staff. One of the methods I decided to implement to improve this deficit in product knowledge is online games. Luckily I don’t work for one of those organizations scared of the word “Game” so I did not have to overcome that objection.

I used Quia to create a few games that resemble “Who wants to be a millionaire” and “Jeopardy” which turned out to be a smash hit amongst the sales staff. Prior to the games it was always memorizing info from documents and flash cards then being tested on it. They loved the fact that they didn’t have to read the same thing over and over in an effort to memorize the information, to only find out that they didn’t retain much come test time.

Being that sales people are generally competitive, they loved that they were able to challenge each other to a game. They were so distracted with beating their co worker that they forgot they were actually studying and learning. Several inventive sales leaders developed round robin tournaments and awarded the winner with a free lunch. Overall it was a smash hit because it was a fun and different way to approach a boring subject.

I received several emails on the first day of the games being available asking when I was going to add new questions and games since they almost have all of the current questions memorized. I wasn’t expecting this but the games were so popular that they are already stale after just a couple of days.

So I am already to the point where I need to create more games and freshen up the current ones with new questions. The only problem is that it was not easy coming up with the questions and it’s going to be hard for me to come up with more.

I have decided that I can kill 2 birds with 1 stone by having the sales staff come up with the questions and submit them to me so I can use them for more games. Not only does this make it easy for me but they will retain more by creating the questions then they will by playing the games. The process of thinking it through and coming up with questions is sure to help them memorize the information.

But how do I get them to put in the effort to create new questions that are of high quality? What’s in it for them? Being that they are commission driven sales people it may be most effective to compensate them somehow. I am pondering devising some kind of contest or reward system to incentivize it. But, is that even necessary? Is there a way I can motivate them to put in the effort required to create new questions without rewarding them monetarily?

Once I figure out a way to motivate sales people to submit questions to me I will be looking into expanding my game creating from just Quia to other resources listed at the link below. I came across this link from a post on Brent Schlenkers blog Corporate eLearning Strategies and Development blog
http://mashable.com/2008/01/04/20-tools-for-creating-your-own-games/

Who's the guy with the blue head?

Recently, the organization I work for acquired another company within the same industry. Because the acquired company is very successful in their own right, all employees were retained and we are currently sharing best practices and working towards integrating what is now two separate divisions within a larger company. The end goal is to implement the best practices from each division, companywide. For the purposes of this article I will refer to the acquiring company as “Division A,” and the acquired division as “Division B.”

As human nature dictates, each division believes that there way is the best way and that any change would be counterproductive. However, senior management see’s the big picture and has done a great job of uncovering the best practices from each division. The first major change we are going to implement is integrating Division B into Division A’s Information Systems. This is going to be a big project for me because I am the guy from Division A, who trains everybody on the Information Systems. Therefore, I will be the guy who trains everybody from Division B on the new information systems being implemented in their organization.

In order to develop a training plan I needed to familiarize myself with Division B so that I know who to train on what and to get to know my audience so I can start thinking about what the best delivery methods may be. So, I put on my consultant hat and made a trip up to Seattle to spend a day in Division B’s corporate office for a scouting trip.

Boy did I feel like the guy with a blue face in Division B’s corporate office. I could hear the whispers of “Who’s that guy?” “What’s he doing here?” “Ohhhh! He’s from Division A!” There is definitely a level of resentment rooting from fear in Division B towards Division A. Although Division A retained all of the employees from Division B and gave them more perks then they had before there is still a fear of the impending changes. Because I come from Division A and play a key role in implementing these changes I am not exactly welcomed with open arms.

Prior to this scouting trip I thought my biggest challenge was going to be the timeline we are working on. Little did I know I was in for a rude awakening. I now know that my biggest challenge will be establishing credibility and overcoming Division B’s fear of the change. I can have the best training plan in the world but that won’t make any difference if I cannot gain their acceptance of the change.

This leads me into territory I am not familiar with. In my role I have a history of implementing change in Division A but that change was usually welcomed with open arms because they know I am there to make their job easier. Unfortunately my batting average doesn’t mean squat to Division B. Division B doesn’t have the understanding that this change will make them more efficient and is a huge improvement for the company as a whole.

At this point I need to come up with a plan for overcoming this fear and helping the general staff of Division B to see the big picture. If I can sell them on the benefits of these changes then my training efforts will go much smoother. This project is giving me a good taste of what an external consultant goes through when trying to sell their services to a client. I am usually the client so hopefully I can track down advice from somebody who feels my pain : )

Cheat Sheets

I stumbled upon Tim’s Blog which is chock full of “One Page Guides” that are simple, one page job aids covering a variety of topics. Browsing through these one page guides reminded me that simpler is better most of the time. A well designed job aid such as the one page guides can be much more effective than a day long training course.

I routinely create PDF’s similar to the one page guides and make them available on the company intranet which works out great but after looking at the one page guides I know I can do better. By keeping the job aids down to one page and laying out the information in a more user friendly format I can get much better results. Keeping these principles in mind, I am going to start creating one page “Cheat Sheets,” rather than long documents covering everything under the sun regarding the topic.

Here are a couple of my favorite one page guides from Tim’s Blog:
Online Video Editing
Introducing Wikis