Build E-Learning Courses People Need

The training industry likes acronyms so today we’ll revisit one I shared a few years ago to help new course designers remain focused on producing real value.

It starts with the cookie story.

Two people are selling cookies in the neighborhood. One person bakes a bunch of chocolate chip cookies and sells them door-to-door. Unfortunately that person lives in a hipster neighborhood of Keto enthusiasts and those hostile to gluten. Not many want chocolate chip cookies. They prefer cookies that fit better with their diet.

The other person doesn’t start by baking cookies. Instead that person decides to canvas the neighborhood and asks what they neighbors prefer and takes orders specific to their tastes. From there, the person buys the ingredients required for each order, bakes cookies, and delivers them to satisfied customers.

The first person committed valuable resources to a product that many didn’t need or want. The second was able to manage resources by committing them to a product that customers did want.

Build E-learning Courses People Need

There are some lessons in here for us because often the courses we design are made to fit a general need, but not specific enough to provide value to everyone. The main culprits for this are lack of time so we just crank out a course to get it delivered and content-centric courses rather than ones focuses on the user or performance goals.

Training needs to be designed with the end-user in mind. Often we start with content and figure out how to package it into a”course” that we can deliver online. The mistake is that while the content maybe valuable, we tend to focus on delivery of the content as the end-goal. Then we become like the first cookie seller where we peddle a generic product that doesn’t meet real needs.

Here’s a simple cookie-theme acronym to help with working through the course design: OREO

• Objectives. Make a promise to those taking the course that you won’t waste their time. Have clear objectives and build the training to meet them. Build in a way to measure that you met that goal.
• Results. Organizations don’t have a course-deficiency. They hire you and spend money on training because they expect results. Build courses aligned with organizational goals and performance expectations.
• Engaged learners. Craft a great learning experience that engages the person. That means the course needs to be relevant, aesthetically appealing, and appropriately interactive.
• Order-taking. Don’t bake chocolate chip cookies from existing ingredients. Spend time with your audience. Get to know their needs and how the course content helps meet them. You have limited resources and you want to spend them appropriately.

While this isn’t revolutionary content, it is still a good reminder to have clear objectives and manage the resources appropriately. What tips would you share for beginner course designers?

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Build E-Learning Courses People Need original post at The Rapid E-Learning Blog

Here’s an Easy Way to Troubleshoot Courses with Variables

Improving Accessibility Of Virtual Classroom Recordings

Creating equitable opportunities for learning is a key goal for educational institutions.  However, it can be challenging to create an inclusive learning experience when navigating a wide variety of content and technology that hasn’t always been designed to meet the needs of all students.  For this reason, reaching students beyond the traditional borders of the physical classroom often requires a different approach that focuses on accessibility, usability and engagement to foster a truly inclusive environment.

Blackboard Collaborate, our virtual classroom solution, has been built from the ground up with accessibility and education in mind so that everyone – regardless of their abilities or dependency on assistive technologies – can fully engage and participate in the teaching and learning experience.  Blackboard Collaborate’s fully inclusive user experience is designed to adhere to common accessibility standards, provide keyboard shortcuts and navigation, and work well with screen readers.  Even beyond that, there are features in the product that are explicitly intended to provide a truly inclusive experience, such as natively supporting closed captioning during a live session by allowing one or more of the attendees to be designated as captioners.

Often times, however, instructors don’t have the ability to provide live captioning for all of their Blackboard Collaborate sessions and would like to add captions for students watching on-demand recordings.  Captioning is not only for individuals who have hearing loss, but also supports students who prefer other modes of learning.  Oregon State University’s Ecampus and 3Play Media did a national research study on the perception of caption use in institutions of higher education.

Some important findings from the student perspective were:

• 98.6% of all students find captioning helpful
• 71% of students without hearing difficulties use captions at least some of the time
• 66% of ESL students find captions “very” or “extremely” helpful
• Student participants in the study cited closed captions as a valuable learning engagement tool to help them focus, retain and comprehend information, and overcome poor audio quality of videos.  This was particularly useful for students who identified English as their second language.

Some important findings from the institution perspective were:

• 46% of institutions use a third party to create captions for online courses
• The #1 barrier to institutions providing captioning is lack of general awareness

With the July 2018 release of Blackboard Collaborate, instructors and administrators now have the ability to add captions to recordings, even if there wasn’t someone providing them during the original live session.  They also now have the ability to clean up transcription errors from the live session in the recording.

We recognize that allowing the manual upload of caption files for Blackboard Collaborate recordings is a very important step in our accessibility journey, but we are by no means resting on our laurels or declaring victory.  The need to continuously improve our products and workflows to allow for even greater inclusivity and accessibility is a driving force in our roadmap and our product planning efforts.  This release is a milestone that we’re proud of and will serve as the foundation for continued work in this area.  Our ultimate goal is to be able to remove the burden of having to manually caption recordings and provide a mechanism by which they can be automatically captioned using built-in speech-to-text capabilities.  Since the automatic speech recognition technology today doesn’t always provide the needed level of transcription accuracy, it is also important for us to provide convenient ways for our clients to easily make corrections.  This will be our focus as we look to expand on the work completed thus far, and drive efforts into and through 2019.

The post Improving Accessibility Of Virtual Classroom Recordings appeared first on Blackboard Blog.

Improving Accessibility Of Virtual Classroom Recordings original post at Blackboard Blog

The Answer to the Community’s Number 1 E-Learning Question

Analytics Don’t Make Your Job Easier – They Make it Better

Contrary to popular belief, the truth about analytics is that they don’t actually make your life easier.

Analytics have value because they automate tasks that take a lot of time, are prone to human error, and most of us don’t like very much. We are fully capable of digging through rows of activity stream data, aggregating that data into concepts, and visualizing the resulting information as patterns. There’s nothing about analytics that we couldn’t do manually. It’s just counting. It’s just math.

The problem with doing this work on our own is that it actually doesn’t require a whole lot of cognitive effort. Yes, it takes time. But, quite frankly, this low-level information processing is kind of beneath us. If it can be automated using technology, then it isn’t a capability that is unique to us humans. The wonderful thing about analytics is that they free us from mundane tasks and open up opportunities for us to engage with problems of a higher order.

Liberated from the task of simply describing what the data are, analytics allow us to focus on more important questions about what they mean, and what we should doabout them.

An Analytics Analogy

Without help from the right technology, basic information processing tasks might take a lot of time and effort. But so does removing boulders from a field. Processing information and moving rocks are both important tasks, but they are only important because of what they make possible—making decisions and growing crops, respectively.

In farming, moving rocks is a critical task, but isn’t a cognitively challenging one. It can more easily be performed by a workhorse or a heavy machine. Successfully growing a crop, on the other hand, is something that requires the kind of wisdom that only comes through experience.

The same is true in a college or university. No institution wants to ‘do analytics.’ They want to make evidence-based decisions. Without automation, however, an institution may spend significant time and effort on manual reporting tasks, on the manual act of ‘computing.’ Or they just resign themselves to decision-making on the basis of anecdote alone, much like a farmer resolving to cultivating rocky soil.

The true value of analytics is what comes afterthe calculations have been made: the strategic decision-making and high-impact activities that happen when human wisdom is brought to bear on rich information. Institutions are complex, which means that asking questions about what data mean relative to a myriad of other factors is hard to do. Thinking through the implications of what data mean relative to institutional strategy is event harder. Acting on data to effectively execute on institutional strategy is harder still. But the results are hugely rewarding.

Cases in Point

Focusing on the ‘thinking’ side of analytics rather than the ‘doing’ side of it is what we saw in each and every one of the analytics presentations at BbWorld18:

• Indian River State College, for example, has all but closed its online-in person achievement gap thanks to a data-driven approach to instructional design.
• Concordia University Wisconsin has increased its student retention rate by 10% because of a thoughtful approach to intensive advising.
• Charles Darwin University is aligning reports to different moments in the teaching and learning lifecycle, while Concordia University Nebraska and Drake University are using Blackboard Intelligence to understand instructional costs and inform academic decision making.

The work that analytics makes possible is incredibly valuable. But it is also challenging. It is in recognition of this fact that Blackboard has adopted a new approach to analytics product development.

Collaborative Product Development

At BbWorld 2018, we announced a new analytics platform called Blackboard Data, which will aggregate data and surface insights from across the Blackboard portfolio. We are building it by working closely with our community.

Blackboard Data Collaboratives are comprised of customers and developers who are tasked with informing feature development AND creating white papers that describe strategies for ensuring the high-impact adoption of those features. The first collaborative has already been formed, and I look forward to sharing the exciting results of this effort in the coming months. Interested in joining a Blackboard Data Collaborative? Learn more and register here.

The post Analytics Don’t Make Your Job Easier – They Make it Better appeared first on Blackboard Blog.

Analytics Don’t Make Your Job Easier – They Make it Better original post at Blackboard Blog

Three Ways to Make Your E-Learning Content Meaningful