For much of the last nine months I’ve been saying to people “I’m working on this amazing project, but I can’t tell you much about it at the moment”. Well, I’m pleased to say that now I can talk about it!

Yesterday the CIPD launched eight FREE online courses – exclusively for their members – based on the eight core behaviours of the new Profession Map!

My colleagues and I at Skills Journey have been working with the amazing team at CIPD to design and develop these courses. We’ve been writing content, creating graphics as well as planning, shooting and editing a lot of videos – with some incredibly talented presenters and subject experts.

Everything has been beautifully assembled by the team at CIPD. Take a look – https://peopleprofession.cipd.org/learning

Recently, Bryan Jones from eLearningArt invited me and 59 other eLearning people to share their single best tip for creating effective eLearning scenarios. The post is now live, and you can check it out here: 13 eLearning Scenario Tips that 60 Experts Agree On

He asked everyone this question:

What’s your #1 tip for creating effective eLearning scenarios?

And, here’s how I responded:

Our scenarios must be realistic but focused on the desired learning outcome.

Scenarios need to be challenging. The learner must have the chance to guide the scenario to an appropriate outcome—and to do so by making choices that require thought. It shouldn’t be easy.

In real life, situations are messy, and we juggle lots of things at the same time. Our scenarios must be realistic but focused on the desired learning outcome. Don’t include other things that might be going on if they aren’t critical to that outcome.

It needs to be authentic and believable. We’ll lose our audience if they can’t picture themselves in the situation.

If you want to see a summary of all 60 tips, you can check out the embedded YouTube video below:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuMWeWroKxA]

Or visit the full scenario tips post to see all the detailed responses.

This week I’ve been running a workshop in which we looked at all aspects of digital learning design. Over lunch, one of the delegates asked who I thought was the right person in an organisation to own the LMS (or VLE, or other learning platform).

Various possibilities were suggested by the group, including Learning and Development, IT, producers of learning content or some combination of the three.

Before I suggest an answer, I have to say I would definitely reject any option which involved shared ownership. While I would agree that there are various groups of stakeholders whose views should be considered, that does not merit having a stake in the ownership of the platform. Any effort to split ownership is more likely to stifle progress than encourage it.

It’s very clear to me who should own any learning platform, although I have no strong views about which department that should be.

For me, the ownership of any platform can only lie with whoever has ownership for supporting those people who use that platform. That is whoever provides the first line of support for learners – who is it that answers their calls and emails?

I’ve been a Mac user for close to ten years, but for the past six months I’ve been splitting my time pretty much equally between a Macbook Pro and Surface Book. So as someone with a foot firmly in each camp I was very interested in the Microsoft and Apple events last week. In the few days since those events there has been a lot of comment, much of it highlighting the innovation coming out of Redmond and the perceived lack of it coming out of Cupertino and in particular Apple’s lack of support for the professional market.

I don’t intend to add a huge amount as so much has already been said, but I do have a view.

As a long time user of Apple products I have often rejected accusations that they are all about style over substance, but I no longer think that’s true. I read two posts on Daring Fireball this morning, in which John Gruber summed up Apple’s approach.

In the first he said:

Apple simply places a higher priority on thinness and lightness than performance-hungry pro users do. Apple is more willing to compromise on performance than on thinness and lightness and battery life.

And in the other:

But the price you pay for the MacBook Pro isn’t about the sum of the components. It’s about getting them into that sleek, lightweight form factor, too. In a word, Apple is optimizing the MacBook lineup for niceness.

If that isn’t a description of style over substance I don’t know what is.

I think this is an indication that Apple is completing its transformation from a computer company to a consumer electronics company. That’s fine – it’s been a very successful strategy for them – but it’s time to accept that’s what they are and stop pretending that they’re the natural home of creative pros.

Most of the time I spend in front of my Mac or PC is focussed on creating things (words, images, videos etc.). I’ve been leaning more and more to the Windows machine lately as it seems to be more reliable, it’s noticeably quicker and I find it just plain nicer to use – and I don’t think this is by accident. It really does appear that Microsoft are more interested in the pro market than Apple are, and they’re making the hardware and software to support them.

Here are my thoughts after completing week 4 (the final week) of the Learn xAPI MOOC. This week is titled “Final Challenge and Post Conference Drinks” and it brings together the technical and strategy tracks.

There are three key questions:

Discussion Point: Learning analytics is too important for L&D to own

I was surprised (and chuffed) to see that the first question was inspired by the blog post I wrote on 28th May. This was a response to a post on learning analytics written by Mark Aberdour.

There were great comments from everyone and I’m really pleased to have contributed to the debate.

Due to semantics (or perhaps just me not being clear in the first place) there were some comments around responsibility and accountability. To clarify – I believe 100% that L&D needs to take ownership for results and to some extent that will include learning analytics.

My point was more that if organisations are going invest in employing data scientists (as Mark suggested in the original post to which I was responding) they need to do their work at a level above L&D (and every other department). If the measurement and the analysis of the data remains within L&D there is a very high risk that all we end up measuring is our own performance in the context of our own measures (was it a good piece of learning material?) rather than the impact we are having (did it make any difference to workplace performance?).

L&D certainly needs to be involved involved in learning analytics. The alignment of learning analytics to performance outcomes is something that should begin at the earliest stages of design.

One of the hardest part of analysing any data is working out what it actually means. I’m less sure that L&D should be the ones who decide what the data means – that’s where a data scientist (or whoever) looking at this at an organisational level comes in.

Discussion point: Most L&D teams lack the skills and mindset to make effective use of meaningful data. Do you think L&D teams have the potential to develop the necessary skills and will their organisations give them the opportunity to develop them?

This is the question that I was asking myself at the end of week 2.

First of all, this isn’t a question of capability – I expect any good L&D team would be capable of developing the skills. To what degree they should develop these skills will probably depend largely on the size of the team (in small teams it may be more about mindset and understanding rather than deep skills).

Whether they will have the opportunity is harder to answer and this will probably depend on how they are perceived by the organisation. My thinking has moved on a bit since week 2. Back then I was wondering if L&D will be given the opportunity. Now I think that opportunity isn’t something they should wait for – they should own this and get on with developing those skills.

Discussion point: How do we make sure that we don’t get carried away with what’s possible and instead focus on what is valuable? And lastly who is it valuable to?

I think these are the big questions and the ones that I’ve been thinking about since week one.

Focussing on the valuable rather than the possible must be one of the most common challenges facing anyone who works with technology and learning. The only way we do this is by understanding what is valuable to the organisation.

That means going beyond being order takers who simply satisfy the needs of the immediate stakeholder who comes to us for a solution. We need to be able to consider everything we do in the context of the organisation’s goals and, when necessary, challenge the stakeholder if they demand the wrong solution.

The rest of the week’s content was focussed on practical activity around, visualisations and telling stories with data.

Summary of my thoughts after four weeks

I haven’t reached a definitive conclusion about xAPI, but that wasn’t my expectation, and my ideas will continue to evolve. Here is a snapshot at week 4:

• I’m interested in xAPI in that it changes the technical tools we have for measuring activity. If we really need to track activity, xAPI goes beyond many of the limitations of SCORM (such as tracking activity on mobiles and in apps).
• Whether or not we need to measure activity is another thing entirely. I’m not against measurement, but it needs to be the right measurement and it needs to be actionable.
• I’d be surprised if we really see many organisations tracking anything other than activity.
• I fear that clumsy attempts to use xAPI too widely will degrade the experience for learners.
• After four weeks I still can’t see how the learner benefits from xAPI. The benefits are to L&D and maybe to the wider organisation if they get the data analysis side of it right.
• xAPI tracks activity (albeit a wider range of activity than SCORM) but it does not track learning.
• The name is terrible. Domain specific acronyms make communication difficult and put people off by making them outsiders. See here.
• People seem keen to use it outside L&D, but I think that may be difficult given that it is designed by L&D people, for L&D people to solve the problems that L&D people have.