You would think that social learning (of which mobile learning or m-learning is a part) would be the number one choice among learning professionals for passing on and exchanging corporate knowledge, especially those organizations that have an employee population that travels a lot. But according to our research, fully 40 percent of all training hours are conducted via the traditional instructor-led classroom scenario. E-learning or online methods are certainly competitive with 34 percent of all training hours, and blended learning (traditional ILT plus online training) is also popular with 22 percent of all hours.

Yet those online e-learning numbers are a far cry from what they could — and probably should — be. For all the talk among learning professionals about cutting-edge methodology and technology, those online numbers appear to be lagging.

Perhaps it’s because there’s not a good way to measure how much time employees actually are spending in online training, especially if the learning is self-paced. After all, managers can only take the word of their employees, and it’s only natural to suspect that at least some of that time on line is surfing the Web or not otherwise taking advantage of available training modules.

To hear industry suppliers/vendors talk, virtual classrooms, online meetings and informal social learning are taking off — or at least poised to take off — in popularity. But our most current numbers belie that supposition. Just 25 percent of training hours are self-paced, 19 percent in virtual classrooms or online meetings, and just 10 percent given to social learning. We obviously want to believe our vendors, so we’re assuming that the numbers just haven’t caught up to the actual trends yet. Maybe next year.

For government (including education) and non-profit organizations, the numbers aren’t much different: 41 percent ILT, 33 percent e-learning or online, 23 percent blended learning. And those numbers, too, are somewhat surprising, given the heavy investment that government has been making in telework and information technology.

Certainly, some progressive organizations are making speedy, significant inroads when it comes to e-learning, among them members of our Learning! 100, including Scripps Health, the American Heart Association, the U.S. Department of Defense (especially the Defense Acquisition University), Verizon and others. As their stories are circulated throughout the industry, our hope is that progressive learning methodology — including all e-learning modes — plays a larger and larger role in the overall learning philosophy of more organizations.

To read our original annual research, check out the April/May issue of Elearning! or Government Elearning! magazine. If you don’t get a copy in the mail, the online version is available at http://elmezine.epubxp.com/title/12078.

To find out more about the Learning! 100, visit the website http://2elearning.com/l100/.

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A slippery slope, that.

Yet there are certain aspects of a successful corporate culture that serve everyone, top to bottom, well. Here are some:

Communication. All kinds of information must flow both ways, up and down the corporate hierarchy. While goals and objectives must be dictated from the top, employees can play an important role in determining how they can best (most efficiently and effectively) be achieved.

Appreciation. If lines of communication do flow both ways, there are opportunities for each group (employers and employees) to indicate their mutual admiration, respect and appreciation. (The whole concept has something to do with esteem and belonging as they relate to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, I believe.)

Collaboration. Best encapsulated by the concept of “work together, play together.” Each employee is valued and considered critical to the organization’s success in delivering its shared vision and mission.

Trust. Like a successful marriage, each party must not be afraid that the other will ever, in no way, betray the other. In companies with less than stellar employer-employee relations, this aspect of corporate culture is perhaps the most difficult to attain. A good way to start building that elusive trust is nurturing talent by giving each employee an opportunity to grow, learn, develop skills and pursue goals that will have a direct, positive effect on the entire organization’s success.

It goes without saying that the learning/training department plays a huge role in determining the success of any organization, especially with advancements in learning and talent management systems that incorporate social media. Social methods for sharing information, connecting with others, and liking/rating content have become familiar ways for people to interact online. Organizations use a variety of tools and platforms ranging from intranets to document management and workflow solutions. These initiatives can serve to break down traditional barriers of time, space and functional silos while fostering new levels of productivity at all organizational levels.

Appropriately deployed — especially by learning professionals — social technologies can empower employees and managers alike to engage in purpose-driven communities, fostering the collaboration around work teams, specific topics, and/or departments. That, in turn, can bring the potential of a well-conceived corporate culture to life.

But it ain’t easy, is it?

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She does not believe that IQ alone is a driver in individual success. In that regard, she’s not alone among learning professionals. But she does clarify in a unique way: “It’s FQ (fluidity quotient) and AQ (adversity quotient). It’s much more than just smarts that makes a success.”

Put more succinctly, she believes that people who can survive bad things happening to them and who are adaptible are those whose careers have the potential to really take off.

On the other hand, she says that five “immobilizing myths” (what we call excuses) are walls to personal success:

>> “I don’t have time.”

>> “We’ve got to protect the status quo.”

>> “It’s not my job.”

>> “When you have big expectations, you have big disappointments.”

>> “It’s only for high-potentials, not me.”

She believes that individuals must learn how to “own” their careers, but not in isolation and not without a framework within which to work.

One of the things that people — especially millennials — can do to advance their careers is a simple one: be curious.

“Curiosity is a priority,” Kaye says. “You cannot fake it. You might not have all the answers, but what’s not negotiable is that you have the questions. The greatest sign of respect is when a person is curious about what another person says. The more expert we become, the more we lose our apprentice mentality.”

Also, career-minded people must say good-bye to the so-called “career ladder,” an artifact of the “Mad Men” era.

“Onward and upward have to be replaced with forward and toward,” she concludes. “A learning event alone does not a marriage make. You must learn, apply and talk about it; they are opportunities for managers to capture a few minutes and learn more about the situation. It’s a sign of respect, and millennials are crying for it. These opportunities are a chance to spark something: reflection, insight, commitment, or action.”

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1. 6% of Americans have a Twitter account;
2. 33% of Americans have a Facebook account;
3. 37% of Americans actively use email;
4. 92% of Americans have a cell phone;
5. 98% of those cell phones are text-enabled;
6. 97% of text messages are opened;
7. 95% of those opened text messages are read within 5 minutes of delivery;
8. 70% of consumers [read: students in our case] prefer to receive information & offers by text;
9. 30% of coupon recipients redeem mobile offers;
10. 15% of consumers admit to spending more on a specific brand based on mobile marketing;
11. 33% of Americans acknowledged using a mobile coupon within the past month; and
12. The average ROI with mobile marketing is $10 for every $1 spent.

There you have it, and if any of you would like to add to the list or challenge some of these, please do so.  That’s what these group discussions are all about.

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The opportunities available in this space are also attracting many entrepreneurs.  With expected growth in the LMS industry projected by us to be 10.4%, or more than $1.8 billion dollars from 2012-2013, you can see the attraction.  This is good news for everyone, as there are now many options coming onto the market again, while others are consolidating through mergers and acquisitions.

In looking through many of these advancements, I think there are three emerging trends that we need to pay attention to in our decision process:

1. Learning is open – and now the source code is too.  Back when the LMS industry started taking off, the source code was always proprietary, and in many cases, difficult to integrate with other technologies and applications.  Open source more easily allows an LMS to evolve to fit specific needs, as requirements change.   Features can easily be added, reduced, molded, modified, and tweaked to the specific audience and their enterprise’s goals.
2. Supported by Mobile devices.  In the late 90s, eLearning generally meant sitting at your desktop computer, clicking “next”, and passing a final quiz.   The mass production of laptop computers brought about the first idea of mobile learning, and now smartphones and tablet devices have opened up even more possibilities.  As I pointed out in our magazine, by 2015 mobile will be the predominant delivery modality for learning.  People are busy, but they are always connected. The newer LMS’s assist by enabling everyone to take their training anyplace, anytime, or anywhere. And best of all, the TinCan API allows us to effectively gather metrics on this mobile learning.
3. Adapts quickly to organizational needs or goals. Sometimes companies need to quickly pivot and go in another strategic direction, and so do their support systems.  LMSs that require support calls to add functionality, change layout, swap out content, and so on are not as flexible as some of the newer entries.  Adding functionality, changing branding, and the like are now becoming easier.

You will find that many LMS offerings are starting to contain these characteristics.  One that caught my eye that incorporates these emerging trends was a relative newcomer LearnDash.  I literally did a “double-take” when I found out that it was built on top of the [open-source] WordPress platform.   It never dawned on me that WordPress could be a software platform.  We would love to hear your thoughts on that particular direction.

As always, my caution is to always prioritize the most important features you need, and then base your search on those requirements.  There is always more to a choice than just technology, but with all of the changes on the horizon, technology shouldn’t be taken for granted.  Whatever you choose, ensure that it is well supported and committed to continuous improvement.

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But that’s only a small slice of Alan’s background.  Besides being a pioneer in the field of corporate learning, Alan has served as Chairman, CEO and co-founder of KnowledgePlanet, a company that helped launch the online learning revolution. The company grew to serve millions of people in over 150 countries and amassed more than $150 million in value.  Alan is a true visionary, and I’ve never had more respect for any person’s passion and vision in our field.

Alan was named Inc. Magazine / Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year for High Technology in the late ‘90s.  More recently, he was appointed by Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett to the Higher Education Commission, charged with improving college access and affordability for commonwealth residents.

Alan is a founding member and trustee of Harrisburg University of Science and Technology, the first private non-profit university in Pennsylvania established in over 100 years.  He also serves as a Wharton entrepreneur-in-residence and education entrepreneurship adviser at the Penn Graduate School of Education.

He is a member of the Education Innovation Advisory Board at Arizona State University and a member of the board of advisors of Penn NEST – Networking Education Entrepreneurs for Social Transformation – based at the University of Pennsylvania.  He has also been a trustee at Dickinson College, on the Business Advisory Board at Pennsylvania State University and Messiah College, and has acted as an education advisor to the Saudi royal family.

Alan completed his doctoral coursework and holds a master’s degree from The University of Pennsylvania.  Linked here is a video of Alan at Corp/U: http://video.corpu.com/previews/jgAPg2GV-HBT422Ns.

And here is a 7-minute clip from the panel discussion from ELCE 2102:

To find out more about ELCE 2013, please go to www.ELCEShow.com.

To find out more about the Learning! Professional Certificate Program: http://lpc.2elearning.com/

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Some of the more interesting answers to the question, “How can learners make their own learning content?”:

>> Learners can make YouTube and smartphone videos to show us how to do something, which amounts to free learning for professionals.

>> Learners can share one-minute tips and education on Twitter and Yammer.

>> By posing questions to which learners can seek out research and construct their own knowledge, they gain individual ownership.

>> Sharing user-generated photos, which is limitless, brings new inclusiveness, equity and access.

>> Motivating people to collect their ideas and best practices in social tools, which allows for collaborative improvement.

>> Sharing stories of success and failure.

>> Learners can engage in the learning by seeing themselves in the content.

>> Creating flow charts or mind maps of a process — from the user’s view.

>> It’s sometimes as simple as sending a link to a solution that learners find on an intranet or the World Wide Web.

Benefits of this type of user-generated content are numerous. Among them:

>> Learners get a sense of ownership.

>> Learners are more likely to agree with the conclusions.

>> Learners are often within the context of the subject matter, closest to the best information.

>> Learners get what they want, and it’s not being “pushed” to them.

>> Learners become passionate about their own roles.

>> Learners are more engaged.

>> The process requires training organizations to “let go.”

>> The process helps build a culture of learning.

>> The process eliminates the need for an instructional designer to learn the content in order to design something.

>> The process encourages others to do the same (domino effect).

>> The process creates the best match between competencies and performance deficiencies.

>> The process allows L&D professionals to focus on strategy and performance support rather than building content.

>> The process allows for the fun of discovery.

Even though Twitter responses are limited to 140 characters, this entire lrnchat.com conversation — and others like it — is an example of how social media can be collaborative, instructive and very much enlightening. To join in future regularly scheduled conversations, visit http://lrnchat.com at 5:30 p.m. PDT (8:30 p.m. EDT) every Thursday evening.

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So earlier this week, an edict by CEO Marissa Mayer that orders all her Yahoo employees back into the office on a regular basis took the business and technology worlds by storm.

Here’s an excerpt from the leaked internal memo:

To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side. That is why it is critical that we are all present in our offices. Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings. Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together. Being a Yahoo isn’t just about your day-to-day job, it is about the interactions and experiences that are only possible in our offices.

Maureen Dowd, the opinionated New York Times maven, wrote: “Mayer, with her penthouse atop the San Francisco Four Seasons, her Oscar de la Rentas, and her $117 million five-year contract, seems oblivious to the fact that for many of her less-privileged sisters with young children, telecommuting is a lifeline to a manageable life. The dictatorial decree to work ‘side by side’ had some dubbing Mayer ‘the Stalin of Silicon Valley.’”

Of our magazine’s Learning! 100 in 2012, 70 percent support a remote workforce, a statistical indication that the telework phenomenon is not going away. As a matter of fact, just the opposite is transpiring in the workplace, because knowledge workers and skilled talent require flexibility.

Elliott Masie, chair of The Learning Consortium and host of the Telework 2013 conference, was a bit less critical than Dowd, but critical nonetheless.

“Telework is going to be a major component of our work lives, whether we or our CEOs like it or not,” he wrote. “The issue is ‘how do we create the best culture for all employees, regardless of location and teleworking options?’

“Yahoo’s teleworking decision overly simplifies the issue of how we work in a distributed, connected and agile world with a changing labor market and work/life balances. I respect Yahoo’s CEO Mayer for her leadership of the company and would hope that she shifts the conversation to the culture rather than locational issue.

“Let’s have the audacity to experiment, evaluate and even openly talk about failures — as we continue the evolution of our workplaces and work lives.”

Collaborating and interfacing online works. Indeed, there are lots of good reasons to allow telecommuting, like saving on real estate and office costs, lower contribution to burning carbon-based fuels, allowing flexibility where it’s sometimes necessary, and cutting down all the wasted time behind a steering wheel going to and from the workplace.

But admittedly, telework cannot always provide as many opportunities for spirited conversations in the office environment. The off-the-wall, brainstorming, team-building conversations that Mayer deems necessary for Yahoo’s success are definitely more likely to occur in face-to-face encounters than on line.

If Mayer made an error, it was not being quite explicit enough in her memo about her purpose and goals for bringing people back to the office. Mayer’s and the Yahoo H.R. Department’s explanations have been pathetically bureacratic so far.

Will the new Yahoo policy result in worker turnover and even revolt? No one has a crystal ball. But it’s a proven fact that creative minds despise bureaucracy and anything that interferes with said creativity. It’s early, so the jury is still out on Ms. Mayer’s edict, but it’s not really a policy that you would expect from one of the world’s largest technology-based companies.

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“It’s when companies create narrow groups of courses or topics, like teaching about copyright protection instead of business law, or covering a subject for a limited time, or using only a certain process, like flash cards or listening devices,” says Tom Bishop of KnowledgeVision.

According to Wikipedia, “micro-learning focuses on the design of micro-learning activities through micro- steps in digital media environments, which already is a daily reality for today’s knowledge workers. These activities can be incorporated in learner’s daily routines and tasks. Unlike traditional e-learning approaches, micro-learning often tends towards push technology through push media, which reduces the cognitive load on the learners.”

Learning processes can cover a span from some seconds (e.g. in mobile learning) to 15 minutes (learning objects sent as emails). Today, organizations are considering how to systematically use micro-messaging, an emerging communications channel, made possible by Twitter and tools like it, to connect with the people they care about most through what is becoming defined as micro-learning. It allows organizations to reach people’s desktops, laptops, and devices already in pockets and purses without any dependency on local email servers or a phone tree.

Small steps of learning content are provided by a server-based smart client system. Thus, you can receive your contents on time wherever you have access to your laptop, your workstation or your mobile device. By learning and repeating step by step the content learned will be secured in your long-term memory. Thus, learning is easy, unobtrusive and sustained.

When companies like Google tie in its Google+ social platform into certain types of micro-learning, the concept really has a chance to be integrated into e-learning culture.

Bishop outlines a specific approach to maximizing micro-learning:

1) Determine what kind of schedule you’d like to fill—daily, weekly, monthly, etc.

2) Decide whether to use a course management platform.

3) Create a number of topics to cover.

4) Get people on board who can present and keep people listening.

5) Create the materials.

6) Publish it.

“Micro-learning tools are online and easily searchable, so nobody has an excuse for missing or not finding it,” Bishop concludes.

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This infographic was designed by Sarah Chapman, our very talented Virtual Engagement Manager.  The data is pulled from Elearning! magazine’s in-depth research on the corporate segment of the learning marketplace.  This survey included over 600 respondents, including 145 from the public sector.  Of special note was the unprecedented 240% growth of e-learning in the corporate arena.  What you will discover by reading the research is how very large a chunk of the total learning budget that represents.

If you click on the picture or the link that follows, they are both hyperlinked to our full research documents on E-Learning Trends: E-learning User Study: Corporate Segment, as well as many other research and white papers.  All of these are free to download, once you are a registered subscriber.  And, as always registation for all of our publications is free to learning professionals in either the public or private sectors.

If you’d like to download a full-size copy of the infographic as a PDF, click here: Infographic_Learning Technology 3.

If you would like to join our over 55,000 followers on Twitter, click on this link: http://Twitter.com/2Elearning.

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