College Graduate Interview

Are you a recent college graduate who is going to be competing for a new job with the rest of the world?  Then you might want to practice conducting an interview.

Click this link to access three different types of job interviews.

How to Handle your Psycho Boss

Here is a fun role-play.  Have you ever had one of those bosses that just seems a little crazy?  Now you can practice having a conversation with them.

Click this link to enter your phone number to begin this role play

Answering Sales Objections

In this RolePlay you can practice handling a series of sales objections

Click this link to enter your phone number to begin

ADDIE Sucks?

I belong to the E-Learning Guild group in Linked-In and one of the most popular discussions right now is on whether or not ADDIE Sucks.  There seems to be a consensus that it is still a good tool for designing and developing training.  I sometimes think of this as the PowerPoint tool.  When PowerPoint was built, it took a look at how most presentation are constructed and then built a template around it:

First - Begin with title
Second - Agenda
Third Section One etc.

What if you were giving a presentation and not only didn't user PowerPoint but started off with asking the audience a series of questions?  Then taking their feedback and then delivering a presentation based upon the input you received from them as it related to the purpose of the presentation?

How might this change the experience and the impact to the audience - I"m guessing it would be something very different.

This is why we have developed the IMPROV model as another approach to designing and developing training, it forces the presenter and audience to approach the process differently.  I'm not saying you through ADDIE out the window but I think sometime it forces us approach a training project in a way that begins to look similar and therefor expect similar results or behaviors vs. challenging how we approach solving a training issue --- that may lead to a revelation that it's not a training issue at all.

Replacing you LMS w/ SharePoint

We teach a lot of live on-line classes for trainers on how to use various rapid e-learning tools, mobile learning etc. Late last year we began to add a class on how to use SharePoint. We noticed a lot of our clients using this as a way to manage scripts, and content reviews but also they began to use folders and libraries to manage training content too.

If you think about it, for the basic functions that an LMS provides, managing user's access to content, scheduling classes, posting discussion boards, SharePoint can do all of this and it allows for a more collaborative exchange in an a platform that most users are comfortable with.

So we thought-- hmmm I wonder if you could configure a plug in of some sort to piggy-back into SharePoint to create a more robust LMS application. Well guess what somebody already has. We found two providers that have this type of product.

One is from eLearning Force and another is from Xerceo

I have not tested either of these but a lot of folks in our class state that they don't have an LMS so why not investigate if this will support the functionality that you need.

If you're interested in our live virtual classes go to this link.

Using Improv Artists to Demo Mobi-RolePlay

We had a blast, we did a live demonstration of our Mobi-RolePlay tool (you can demo this on this link) on Tuesday March 1st. We used professional improv actors to demonstrate poor examples of situations in which using a role-playing tool to practice with would have avoided some bad customer situations.

Then in true improv form, we asked the audience to provide us with input to build a role-play on the fly. The improvisors were given 15 minutes to come up w/ 1/2 of the role-play -- record it--- and upload into our IVR studio. Then a volunteer from the audience would call the role-play simulator when they were done.

This worked great! and the audience had a lot of fun. I think we've created a new art form.

Here are two samples from what was created.

Selling the London Bridge to Donald Trump

Selling babies to Dingos

Needless to say we had a lot of fun but what we were there to demonstrate was getting people involved in a more "human" connection and getting the audience involved at an emotional level was key. How often do we strip out emotions or human interactions with training? Probably a lot these days.

Apps, WAP and All That

There seems to be an “app” for everything these days.  Among some of them you can find are apps for shopping, games and musical instruments.  And although these are fun for the user, the developer community is a different story.  The average e-Learning developer or instructional designer will stop dead in their tracks when asked to develop and app for their organization.  Unlike some of the rapid tool design tools for online training, apps are not easy to build and require a SDK (software developer kit) for each type of mobile device.  On top of this the development costs can range from $25-40,000. 

The alternative has been to develop mobile web content or WAP hosted content.  This is a great alternative but does pose some inconveniences in speed of content moving from one page to the next or downloading times. 

For the last 4 years we have been using the Hot Lava content creation tool LMA (learning mobile author) and a hosted WAP server.  The great thing about this tool is that it allowed us to create content and publish for any mobile device as well a JAVA application.  What this means is, we could create content that devices like Blackberrys could download and install like an app.  We’re not uber-programmers and would go running from anything that was too complicated.  So this has worked out very well.  The only real downside to this was that if you want to create a series of courses or special JAVA applications it required you to install multiple files on your hand-held device which sometimes causes anxiety attacks with IT departments.

But do not fear!  There is a new and improved way to deploy mobile content that really does combine the best of both worlds.  OutStart has just released a Blackberry viewer that installs directly onto the mobile device.  It allows you to create content in PowerPoint (easy) and then publish to a hosted server that will push the content directly to the Blackberry player on your mobile device.  It becomes and app w/ WAP hosted modules that are managed by the user.  All user activity and data collection is managed remotely but the content displays quickly and easily (see video below)  and it a great way to push content to your users that they may need access to on the fly regardless if they are connected to a mobile tower or not.  They will be releasing and iPhone and Android player as well so all of us that are somewhat programming challenged can brag about our abilities to create Apps, from WAP and all that!