The Learning Strategist

This is the first step towards the success of my blogging effort and I'm really excited about it. I thank all of you in the community for your support and I hope to keep writing good stuff that you all can make use of. elearninglearning is a very useful website (and topic hub) that features good blogs related to elearning. It has been a really satisfying journey till here since I started off seriously from January 2009. My posts so far are: Social Learning? Audience Analysis? Social Learning Adoption? Call for elearning Demonstrations by Tony Karrer Instructional Designers Community of India Should you share information? How to make social learning work? Suggestions to measure social learning Beyond Kirkpatrick? April's Big Question: OMG I'm Stuck! Collaborative Learning with Trek Earth Long Live ILT? Whats the point here? Best Practices and Design Patterns Action Mapping in Action March Big Question: Workplace Learning in 10 years Kirkpatrick's Four Level Evaluation M

Social learning is known by many names - social learning, collaborative learning or informal learning . For many years we considered formal training to be the only way to make people learn. Formal training required people to be present all at one location. As technologies evolved, people could remotely hear and speak to a teacher in a classroom from any location. But these options were still quite expensive. Then elearning came by and we had people making loads of self-paced courses. Somehow even this seemed insufficient after some time and people started exploring blended-learning strategies. There was a need to provide more support and information to people on-the-job. As people kept looking for new ways of teaching and learning they realized that that learning happens in other ways too. You learn when you speak to like-minded people and people sharing similar interests and professions. During this time social networking tools came by and people found new ways of connecting with eac

I've found a lot of useful blogs on what constitutes audience analysis and the whys and hows of audience analysis . So, I choose not to repeat these points as they have been well explained. What I will do instead is look at it from a bigger perspective and drill down to how it relates to the rest of the process of developing a course . At a high level, audience analysis needs to be done for any product or service that you create or provide. Let's say you make a product. In order for the product to be successful, you would have to: Ensure that the product is simple and easy to use, like limits the user to have to fill just one page with customer information and submit, and the system takes care of the rest. Simplifies and accurately addresses a problem that a user has, like helps a user to effectively take and manage orders. The question is, how would you do any of the above? The answer; by knowing the user who is your audience! Reinforcing why audience analysis? Any

Wikis in plain English, another very good resource I found thanks to Frank Bradley . The video explains the use of a wiki in a very simple day to day real-life scenario. I'm currently working on how we can use the wiki in my team to leverage on and share product knowledge. We have a sizable team that is distributed across various locations, and I think it would be valuable if my team members could use the wiki and the forum to share knowledge across this globally distributed team. At the current stage, there are just a couple of designated people who update process and standards information on the wiki, and the knowledge there is limited only to these topics. The challenges I see though are: - Having people change their working style and go looking for information on the wiki or post queries into the forum. Currently, people are not used to visiting these sites as part of their day's work. - Deciding what kind of knowledge will benefit others, besides what we document and creat

Tony Karrer is organizing a session on elearning on May 21st between 9 AM to noon pacific time. He is looking for people to present examples of practical solutions to common problems to leading edge solutions. Some example areas that he quotes: Self-Paced Courses Performance Support Tools Mobile Learning Collaborative Learning Social / Network Learning 3D Learning Games Toolkits Interesting Tools If you are interested, please send me an email ( akarrer@techempower.com ) with: A brief description A couple of example screen shots He is expecting to have more examples than we can show and discuss in the 3 hours and will try to choose a variety of different examples that represent effective patterns .