The other day, I was listening to an audiobook, and the author spoke about ideas. He noted that they are either good or bad, yet most folks only think about the good ones. I thought about this, as you can tell, and said to myself, okay, let’s write a post where the e-learning history and thus learning systems, authoring tools, and alike are intertwined with good and bad ideas. I decided to go further with good, great, bad, and poor ideas. There is always one person who comes up with the idea in the workplace or out of it, for that matter. Sure, others may get involved (the usual case at a comp ..read more

Every time I write about the course standards, whether on my blog or, lately, on LinkedIn, I receive a lot of responses, feedback, and folks wanting to know more. SCORM is not easy to learn. I worked at a large F50 company, where there was one person dedicated only to SCORM because of the heavy load of knowing it all and keeping up to date. Some vendors won’t use SCORM because it takes time to add and implement it. SCORM’s premise, not what it can or cannot do, was its huge premise of interoperability—far more so than AICC. The idea was that you have content in SCORM and add it to your learnin ..read more

There are two types of learning systems. I’m not talking about an LMS, LXP, combo, TDP, or EXP (drop the name on that), learning platform, or “We are not an LMS, and anyway, they are a dying breed” (I’ve written that is far from true). What I am referring to, is commercial or in-house. In-house is really popular, among many companies, academia (Moodle was originally designed for academia, and is heavily used there, still), organizations, associations, even 3rd party content publishers. Commercial is fee-based. It is built by a vendor – you pay to “buy the system” which really means you are lea ..read more

It is often a challenge to find the pioneers of instructional design for not only e-learning, but also the days of CBT (Computer-Based Training) and before that when we had LANs and WANs with text driven content that went out to the masses. Anyone who grew up during those days, remembers when office computers, and even home, had a monochrome screen. In the mid 80’s, modems showed up, with a whopping 2.2Kbs (Prodigy) and you might be lucky to have a color screen. We are talking floppy disks (5 and a quarter inch) and no hard drive. I had one for grad school. It was the latest with dual floppy d ..read more

This quarterly addition focuses on the reskilling vs skilling question, educational institutions and e-learning, what to look for in a consultant when seeking learning technology and/or learning systems; and what I see as relevant when looking at a learning system. Q: I read that you are a proponent of the idea of reskilling over upskilling. Why is that? A: I believe that the premise of focusing on upskilling in employee development in 2024 and moving forward is the wrong approach. AI is here. It’s at a very early stage, and you can read articles that say, more jobs will be created, and other ..read more

A funny thing happened on the way to using GPT-4 last week, which I suspect that the vendors who have implemented GPT-4 and are using it as a statement/Q and A to the learners were not paying attention to. Equally, my vibe says that companies and organizations that use Enterprise GPT (GPT-4) may have been unaware because the bug also hit there. The bug caused anyone who was asking questions or statements in GPT-4 to receive outputs of garbage, bizarre, and just downright weird. The bug did not appear in either GPT 3.5 or 3.5 Turbo, which many vendors use that have OpenAI. As I wrote on LinkedI ..read more

If you have never experienced what I am about to cover, and you currently have a LMS, LXP, Learning Platform or any other type of learning system, heck even a talent management system with learning as a component, this little ditty will at some point come into play. For those of us, who have gone through this, not one, but multiple times, you know how it works and feels. There isn’t a lot of joy here – well, if you love your system, then yes, joy to renew – but for those who complain about the system, how much they hate it or they are in a conglomerate where the King decides to keep the one yo ..read more

Do you remember your first love? Your first true love? If you met them in high school and are still together, good for you, but that first true love is no more for the rest of us. Hence, it is first and not still. What was the first meeting like? Seeing them? Catching a glance? Chatting nonchalantly, acting as though you were just chilling when, in fact, you wanted a date? Do you remember where you were that first time? I surmise you do.  I remember. I had heard about them. Never met. But I was intrigued enough to want to get to know them and everything about them. We caught each other’s eyes ..read more

I just read (1-31-24) that during the Pandemic, students (EdTech, K-12, Higher Education) went down something like 4% in learning. That’s not good. I blame it on two areas – that seem to reverberate that e-learning isn’t as effective (I disagree).  The first? Professors and teachers only do synchronous-based learning (which I believe isn’t as effective unless you add some parameters such as activities, deep thinking, etc.). The second? The Bore Factor – as in professors, teachers, heavily (in some cases, all the time) on the screen using a web conference solution (edtech often refers to it as ..read more

Let me pose this scenario to you. You need to see your doctor. You have an appointment to see them. It’s been confirmed. You get there, you check in, and you pay any fees required. You sit down and wait. And wait. And wait. Finally, you are ready to be seen by your doctor. The desk person asks to see you. There is a slight problem.  Your doctor is not there today. You can’t believe it, but are there any other doctors available to see me, you say? They say, let us check. They respond that there are no other doctors available. You seemed surprised. What? Oh, does this mean they are all booked? I ..read more