Integrate to Speed up Performance

As my last post emphasized --- thinking about how to take advantage of mobile devices will greatly enhance employee productivity.  I'm seeing an increase in integration of existing legacy database business processes such as back end inventory management and customer information.  Kevin Benedict, a mobile strategist has a great blog post about how the blending of old and new technologies creates an amazing work flow process to shorten work flow times and increases communications between service providers and customers. 

This type of blended integration of mobile and enterprise systems is on the rise.  I have no doubt that in less than 5 years we're going to see a dramatic shift in the way in which learning is incorporated into this type of integration as well.  Take a minute to think about what business process in your organization would benefit from this type of blend.

Jave isn't Coffee and Alien isn't an Android

We recently published a white paper to help educate organization on how to think differently when using mobile devices vs. computers for performance support and employee development. Mobile devices will continue to change the way in which we work, play and communicate. Click on this link to see the article which was featured in Business Management magazine

CLO Mag support our IMPROV model

For those of you that don't know this, we teach a class titled "From ADDIE to IMPROV" on a regular basis. This class introduces a new approach to designing training that forces the company to use the business performance as a metric for the success of the training rather than level one evaluations or post test scores.

Yes we know this might seem radical to some of you but recently CLO Magazine posted an article that stated comments found in an article published by ROI Institute "Measuring for Success: What CEOs Really Think About Learning Investments," that states

"96 percent of executives want to see the business impact of learning; yet only 8 percent receive it now. Similarly, 74 percent of executives want to see ROI data, but only 4 percent have it now.”

This is exactly what we try to communicate in this class, figure out how someone will actually perform this task on the job, or how can you really measure that they have made a business impact and then design the training from this point backwards. We also demonstrate ways to accelerate the design process which in turn adds the "stickiness" factor in training and really makes it stick.

So if you're interested in seeing this in action be sure to acces our online catalog to see our upcoming class times.

Halloween Fun

This picture was taken from my house this morning, how fitting for the upcoming Halloween season.


With that in mind I thought I would post a link to a video we posted last year to provide you with information on Feeds, and RSS info but a fun way from one of our staff Allison Black.

Click on this link to see "Tales from the Shift"
http://knowledgeshiftinc.blogspot.com/2008/10/blog-post_09.html

Enjoy!

Training vs. Learning

I found something interesting the other day. We offer a fun and intersting workshop on teaching trainers how to develop and deliver training using a non-ADDIE model labled IMPROV.

One of the key learning points we cover in this workshop is to help the attendee focus the success of the training on what the business results are--not a level one evaluation. At the end of the workshop, we break the class into two groups and they are asked to present an argument for either ADDIE or IMPROV model regardless of their personal beliefs. One group recently stated that the ADDIE model focused more on training than learning. The IMPROV group also stated that they felt this approach to creating training programs really focused more on learning ---- so which one is better training or learning?? Is there a division of one vs. the other? I'd be intersted in hearing your opinions.

What I did on my summer vacation

When the teacher asks their students what they did on their summer vacation, I"m sure none of them will say "converted over 500 video clips to view on my cell phone". Well that's what we've been doing all summer. Early in June, we partnered with SkillSoft to convert several of their QuickTalk videos for deployment on mobile device.

We have heard from several organizations that provide high potential or executive/leadership training that they are hard pressed to provide solid learning and professional development for this group because of travel restrictions and budget cuts. They love the fact that these video clips provide quick sound advice from top knowledge experts that they may have received coaching from in the past or respect as a CEO or top MBA faculty member.

To see a sample page of these programs, you can type in this URL into your mobile browser

http://tiny.cc/cjY6U

As we continue to learn how to provide mobile content to our clients, we learned a lot about optimizing these videos for mobile delivery.

1- Keep each file under 1.5 MB is possible
2- Build mobile web pages that decrease the amount of scrolling the user has to do
3- Build links to easily navigate between pages
4- Testing--testing--testing, the world of mobile is still developing and knowing how well your content works on various devices is critical
5- Deviceanywhere.com is a great service to let you conduct realistic testing of your mobile content on just about any mobile device with any mobile carrier.

So for those of you that went to the beach or went hiking or just kicked back to relax, we were working away learning how to make mobile content better for you :)

Maybe next year we can get out and catch some rays.

Watching Flash on Mobile Devices

Ok someone finally figured this out but not for all mobile devices. SkyFire has created a browser that allows certain mobile devices to play Flash Files. The only downside is that they have to be files that are played without any interactivity required. I think it still has some Kinks but they are well on their way to helping the thousands of us that have lots of great Flash content that can to play on our mobile device without having to download the file to the device.

In fact if you think about it, organizations and publishers that are worried about DRM (Digital Rights Management)should be singing their praises --- no worries about someone downloading content and jeopardizing their copyrights.

I did try this with a YouTube link and it worked great but then I had two other clips on our blog and it didn't work quite too well but the last test I ran was on a standard MP3 audio podcast file that is launched using a Flash tool bar. It worked great and for a long formatted podcasts this is a great way to play longer audio files without downloading them and eating up memory on the card.

It doesn't work with an iPhone, Blackberry and some older WM devices but there are lot of devices that it does support. Go to their site for more info or you can download the browser directly to your devices to launch the browser.