Courses by Wire and our client Hydro One Networks Inc. have won a 2008 Brandon Hall award for excellence in online learning. The Brandon Hall awards page lists the awards and the receipients.
You can read the press release announcing the award here.
A picture of Brian and Pat with the award is here.
The recently published Newsbywire newsletter #19 on the subject of "E-Learning and DVD Parallel Delivery" can be found here. Instructions for subscribing to (or unsubscribing from) the news letter can be found at the newsbywire web page.
I am not sure I understand any of the logic but despite claiming the Producer would not be available for PowerPoint 2007 ever, Microsoft have announced a beta for an updated Producer.
Maybe some powerful customer built a fire under them, maybe somebody won an internal battle. Who knows? I suspect many of the Producer users (after enduring more than a year of Microsoft not doing anything visible) have moved to Articulate, Acrobat Breeze or some other similar tool.
From Athabasca University (Alberta University that is a specialist in distance learning) - a comprehensive downloadable ebook "The Theory and Practice of Online Learning".
I have been spending a fair amount of time lately using various online Social Network tools (Twitter, Pownce - the top two microblogging sites, Facebook and Flickr - a social oriented photo site) and have been contemplating how they or sites like them could fit into the corporate training scene.
From a personal point of view I like Twitter (and to a lesser extent Pownce -- a nicer implementation of microblogging but with fewer users) much better than Facebook -- whose "application" addons are mostly childish but I can see where something like Facebook (maybe not Facebook itself) would function much easier in the corporate milieu -- it could be a sort of corporate portal site.
In terms of capturing and distributing Vital Knowledge within an organization though I am not sure about any of them. Potential but translating that to reality? They all require enthusiastic users across the board (or at least a seed of enthusiastic users). I am not sure how you would initiate that within an organization. It would require for most organizations a seachange of corporate culture -- and selling that or exciting such a change is akin to "herding cats".
In the lawsuit going on for a number of years Desire2Learn is ruled to have tread on Blackboard's patent and ordered to pay 3.1 million dollars and recently ordered not to sell their product in the United States.
In a more recent ruling the Patent Office is proposing to invalidate all of Blackboard's patents in this area.
Stay tuned... this is not over yet.
SumTotal Systems has announced that Toolbook 9.5 will produce e-Learning for the Safari browser and the Iphone/Ipod.
I am not totally sure what this means -- will audio/video content be supported? Will AICC, SCORM 1.2 and SCORM 2004 packages be created? The initial information does not make it obvious. I am guessing "no" to the first question, "yes" to the second.
I will certainly be watching the activity.
I downloaded the demo version of Wildform Flair to have a look. I like Articulate a lot but am frustrated by its inability (for video) or clumsiness (audio) in handing a prerecorded audio or audio/video track as the time line.
What would be a straightforward production of a prerecorded presentation in Producer becomes a massive job in Articulate.
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