Inspired by the Lectora End-to-end eLearning Solution

This week two of my team members and I attended the Lectora User’s Conference in Cincinnati. (Lectora is an elearning development tool from Trivantis.) It has been a few years since I last attended this conference. It has certainly grown. There was double the number of attendees at this year’s event, which was a bit surprising. The last Lectora conference I attended was held in Las Vegas, a place that certainly offers more to do in the off hours. But it was the tool, not the location that compelled me to return to this event. Before the end of 2010, I purchased a few licenses for Trivantis’s then new release: Lectora Inspire. The Inspire version of Lectora improved on what was already a great tool for authoring elearning by including the ability to launch and use flypaper, Camtasia and Snagit right from inside the software. My team members and I wanted to attend this conference to get ideas from both the folks at Trivantis and the other conference-goers, on how to take advantage of these great new capabilities. We got that and much, much more.

The Trivantis team put together a terrific event that included captivating keynote addresses from Elliott Masie, on key learning trends, and Tim Ferguson, CIO at Northern Kentucky University, on the explosion of mobile learning. Each day, these were followed by practical, informative sessions and workshops on how to use the new tools built into Lectora Inspire.

But the biggest news from the conference was the four announcements from Trivantis:

1. They’ve entered into an agreement to acquire flypaper, a tool that allows you to add interactivity to your courses by creating flash animations and effects simply, without having to be a flash developer.  This should lead to even more capabilities in future versions of the Lectora tool.
2. They introduced Snap! by Lectora, a PowerPoint-to-elearning tool to serve the same needs as Articulate and Adobe Presenter at the low cost of $99.  From the looks of it in the demonstration, they are going to give the other guys a run for their money.
3. They launched WeLearn, a new social eLearning network. They tried something similar a few years ago, but didn’t get much traction with it. WeLearn is a retooled approach that is currently in Beta.
4. They introduced CourseMill Express, a lower end version of their CourseMill Learning Management System that should be helpful for small businesses that don’t have the funds to invest in a full-blown LMS.

All-in-all, this was quite an event. It gives someone like me, who leads an enterprise team of instructional designers and course developers, a lot to think about. The Lectora line up now creates a strong end-to-end solution with Snap! at one end and Inspire (including flypaper, Snag-it and Camtasia) at the other. I could outfit my team members with the tools they need based on their level, but have them all working across the same platform.

Note:  To read messages from the conference-goers on twitter, search on #2011LUC. 

Social Media at Conferences, Revisited

In September 2009, I wrote this blog entry: Tweeting at Conferences: Etiquette vs. Impact about whether or not it was rude to tweet at conferences.  As someone who was new to social media at the time, my perspective was that when listening to a speaker at a conference, the polite thing to do was to put your handheld device away and give the speaker your full attention. What a difference a year and a half of experience can make. Now my view is that, as long as you are discreet and don't create distractions, it is not only complimentary to the speaker to share messages about what is being presented it is also valuable to do so, in a number of ways.

This week I attended a kick-off meeting in Dallas for my company's most important business unit.  Business leaders, managers and people from key staff functions spent four days together discussing strategy and tactics for 2011.  This was a business meeting not a learning event, so my team members and I mostly had time to experience the conference from a participant's point-of-view.  I had the good fortune to be able to listen, absorb, and share a lot of what I was experiencing through our company microblogging tool: Yammer, which is very similar to Twitter, only access is restricted solely to my company's employees.

Over the course of the four days, I posted messages that included direct quotes from business leaders, summaries of presentations, my thoughts about the implications of some of the things I heard, and general updates about what we were doing, the atmosphere, and the mood in the room. I really had four goals in mind as I was doing this:

1. Share information with other team members - I manage a remote team that is scattered about the US.  Not all of them were able to attend the conference.  I wanted the team members who weren't able to be there to get as much real-time information as possible about the strategy so they could begin thinking about how it would impact their work.
2. Exchange thoughts and impressions with other conference goers - Using social media is still relatively new in my company.  There were only a few other people at the conference who were also posting updates on Yammer.  But it was nice to connect with others in the room this way and jointly share our thoughts through discussion threads.
3. Share information with others in the company - One of the conference goers who is also one of my yammer followers saw my yammer posts and came up to during the conference to say, "What a great idea: actually sharing our strategy with as many people in the company as possible, as early as possible."
4. Create an archive of notes - I attached the hashtag (#) "Dallas" to all of the messages I posted during the conference so that I - and anyone else who might be interested - could easily retrieve them when needed after the event. 

On all counts I was successful.  And the messaging was not just one-way.  Team members and others who were not at the event responded to my posts with questions and comments that encouraged me to share more information, provide clarifications, and go into more depth on the topics that were of most interest. 

This Week at the Technology Assisted Learning Conference...

I spent the first half of this week in Chicago at Corporate University's Technology Assisted Learning Conference.  The conference was small, but impactful.  It provided a nice mix of presentations by industry thought leaders pointing out near-horizon future directions, and case examples from practitioners who are making good use of currently available technologies for their learners today.  As an added benefit, the conference was co-located with Social Media for Recruitment. Both conferences' schedules were aligned to allow for networking.   And although the conference was small, it did attract a wide range of attendees, including participants from a variety of industries (Finance, Real Estate, Technology) and geographies (Saudi Arabia, The Netherlands).  I was proud to be listed among a great group of speakers that included Allison Rossett, Tony O'Driscoll, and Charles Beckham each of whom delivered presentations that lived up to expectations to be the highlights of the event.

Dr. Rossett started things off with a keynote address on creating engaging elearning.  She shared practical advice organized into a list of "5 Essentials" which I summarized in my notes as:  The Right Stuff (relevant content), Guidance (providing certainty through clear navigation and instructions), Active (setting the level of challenge in the zone of proximal development), Relationships and Connectivity (capturing the power of the social experience), and There When Needed (clear, accessible, nothing unrelated).  Shortly afterwards, Tony O'Driscoll took the podium to bring us all into the immersive world of Learning in 3D as described in the book he co-authored with Karl Kapp (who's pre-conference workshop I unfortunately missed.)  Towards the end of the day Charles Beckham walked us through applications for the new social learning community platform, Jambok.

These were the expected highlights of the event.   However, sandwiched in and around these presentations were case studies highlighting technology applications in learning from a variety of companies.  I got to kick things off in the opening slot on day two with a case on our virtual approach to onboarding.  It was such a pleasure to be able to share the work we are doing with others in the learning community.  With that out of the way, I enjoyed presentations highlighting practices at The Nielsen Company (global learning community of practice), Harley Davidson (global elearning translation and deployment - and very high on the cool factor), excellRx, Inc. (using avatars - without making them too creepy!), AIMCO (creating cheap, effective, viral video) and others.

All in all, it was a blast.  This was Corporate University's first Technology Assisted Learning Conference.  I have a feeling it is an event that will grow in popularity over time.