Learning Technologies 2009 was held in London, from 28th to 29th of January, 2009. The conference was well attended by around 3000 learning professionals primarily from UK. I was interested to see how the learning and development world was coping with the struggling economic environment and if any trends were emerging in coping with the same. It was heartening to see that the industry was well represented through participation by Adobe, SumTotal, Trivantis, TechSmith, OutStart, NIIT, Tata Interactive, Atlantic Link, KINEO along with a host of new players in authoring, conferencing and content creation.
The conference kicked off with the keynote from Tony Buzan, the pioneer behind mindmaps. Tony, though did not dwell on mindmaps, but talked about the need for a paradigm shift in how the L&D departments look at their customers (knowledge workers within their organizations) and their content. The brain according to him is heavily under-utilized, and we need to find out ways and means to unlock its power. While Tony did not explicitly state it, he did indicate that effectively designed learning initiatives can help in developing and challenging new “intelligences” within a workforce. He strongly urged organizations to rethink before downsizing learning departments in a knee-jerk manner to respond to the current economic crisis; instead look at those leaders in the industry who have effectively used learning organizations to work out of similar troubles in the past. “Become an intellectual capitalist”.
Spend some time at the session titled “Social Media and Marketing”.It was cool to see how and independent consultant like Jane Hart uses Web 2.0/eL 2.0 technologies to keep themselves abreast with the information explosion that is going on around her, as well as keep in touch with people who are relevant to her life. For people who read her posts regularly, we had seen a lot of it in her blog posts. But, to a lot of folks who are still look at Web 2.0 from outside looking in, this was great stuff. Andy Tedd, spoke about his consultancy project with BBC and the impact prudent usage of web 2.0 technologies had on his audience.
The other interesting session I attended was on “Rapid Development in the Real World” chaired by Clive Shepherd, Nick Shackleton-Jones from BBC, Gareth Wellings, Deloitte and Dr. Anthony ‘Skip’ Basiel from Middlesex University were the panel members and addressed the various aspects to rapid development and deployment. But the discussions turned lively, once Clive turned over the floor to the audience with the question “What do you mean by rapid eleaning”? Everyone associated “rapid” with some form of “speed”. However, as discussions progressed, it appeared that “rapid/speed” has 3 axis viz. authoring, review and deployment.
So what is rapid authoring? It cannot ONLY refer to the speed of development, as that is so subjective. Someone with years of experience in Adobe Flash could possibly develop a course in Adobe Flash faster than he can do in a a rapid tool like Adobe Captivate or Lectora. It was believed that rapid tools generally help reduce authoring time frames for most people. My suggestion that rapid tools democratize the authoring space by allowing knowledge workers without scripting background to create engaging courses found a lot of backers. A suggestion was made that as organizations move to maintain more of the courses themselves (is that another impact of the economy ?), they will need to look at rapid tools as maintaining high-end authoring skills within an organization may prove too expensive. I think it was Skip who mentioned that the new feature in Adobe Captivate 4 to expedite the review process is very interesting. Skip bought discussions to a close by saying that as of now eLearning professionals will use a basket tools in their work, and will continue to do do in the foreseeable future – so rapid tools and traditional tools will coexists with each other and authors will use rapid and traditional methodologies as their project demands. Though I came away with the feeling that more people will be looking to do more with rapid tools in the coming years.
Adobe had a large stall with demonstrations on Connect and eLearning Suite held every alternate hour. The sessions were well received and it was great to see that the sessions on eLearning Suite and Adobe Captivate had crowds standing rows deep spilling into the common area. Most of the people that we talked to were surprised at the sophistication of the projects that you could author with a rapid authoring tool like Captivate, and the workflows that have been put in place between the products in the suite. While most expressed their happiness with the suite pricing, some expressed disappointment that Adobe did not announce the suite earlier, so that they could have purchased this suite instead of some in the Creative Suite4 family.
Jayashree and I conducted a open session on “Create and Manage Visually-Rich and Engaging eLearning content” which was attended 120-150 people. We spoke about the importance of interaction and rich media in eLearning content to keep the learners engaged, and how organizations can move up the engagement ladder one step at a time at their own pace. The presentation takes simple PowerPoint content and using Captivate gradually enriches the content incrementally through the use of audio, interactivity and video. We also demonstrated how project templates can extend the authoring activity beyond the L&D department to the knowledge workers and SMEs, and the use the Review Application to improve the efficiency of communication between the two groups.
