Celebrations sparked out all over the Capital last night as LINE London emerged 11-9 winners over Sheffield in the inter-office football match at the Westway Sports Centre.
Played shortly before LINE’s Christmas party, it was the most hotly anticipated festive battle between rivals since the Christmas game in the trenches in 1914. Playing in honour of his military ancestors was Major Roy Evans. He might have shocked his forebears, however, when he controversially switched sides from Sheffield to London to even the numbers. The home team would have struggled without him as Nigerian international, Niyi Ademosu, was still getting changed at kick-off. Read more…
Kaffia Clouden, Marketing Assistant, attended a recent LINE Lunch Forum in Zurich, which explored learning strategies for leadership development.
Urs Hofmann, founder of the Credit Suisse Business School, hosted the event. Urs opened the lunch by discussing his role and the business challenge facing Credit Suisse in light of the recession. Read more…
Just to let you know, our London team has grown too big for our current office and in the New Year we will be moving to our brand new HQ in Paddington!
From 1st January, our new address will be:
LINE Communications
63-65 North Wharf Road
London
W2 1LA
Tel: +44 (0)2074021554
The annual LINE survey is always a great chance to see what the Learning & Development community has on its mind. This year, according to our research, it is clearly thinking quite hard about mobile learning – unsurprisingly, perhaps – but also about learning architectures. And while practitioners value the expertise and original thinking they get from their supplier community, they clearly have a problem with those who fail to understand their business and brand.
Here are some highlights from the research… Read more…
Andrew Joly, Design Director, and Bruce Woods, Director and Professional Services Sector Lead, address mobile learning. What learning needs does mobile learning address well? How is mobile learning different from desktop learning? How does mobile learning integrate into a broader learning architecture?
Over the last 12 months we have found ourselves discussing and proposing a view of learning that encompasses the myriad of different channels, tools, content types and strategies that we now have available to us as we design effective learning solutions for our clients.
We have called this approach ‘Learning Architectures’, and continue to evolve our thinking with the welcome input from our clients and colleagues in the industry. The ultimate plan has always been to codify the way different elements are best used in conjunction with one another to bring results in different sectors, or relating to specific learning challenges (like Induction or Compliance, say). Professional Services, being a sector we have known well for many years, remains one of our focuses and brings its own specific challenges. Read more…
You are, right now, in the business of staying connected and informed whilst on the move. The mobile revolution has happened and mobile usage as a work tool is only going one way. LINE did a survey of 200 companies in which 76% see themselves adopting mobile learning in the next two years (up from 36% in 2010) and Professional and Business Services, as a sector, are right up there to take advantage of the opportunities innovative mobile learning and development can bring. However, it’s still complex navigating the various strategic options available to you, against a background of growing demands from the user and customer. Read more…
As one of Europe’s leading providers of learning and communications solutions, we’re proud to announce the commencement of our operations in Germany with effect from 1st October 2011. Our presence in Germany will be led by two well known and experienced learning professionals.
Klaus Löper and Robert Hohmann will open up opportunities for clients to benefit from the unique range of LINE services directly in Germany. Their particular focus will be on the German corporate market. Löper and Hohmann join LINE with over two decades of industry experience having worked together previously for many years. Read more…
We are proud to be Founding Ambassadors for Towards Maturity. Organisations looking to improve business performance, increase take up and increase efficiency through learning innovation are invited to take part in The 2011 Towards Maturity Benchmark Survey which was launched on the 6th of June and is open until 31st July.
You may have read Nick Barker’s blog about his trip to Salisbury Plain with Radio 1 Newsbeat to see LINE’s Fire Control Orders app on the iPad in action.
Here is British Forces News’ take on the day:
“Now you can learn how to fire heavy weaponry on the iPad. The Army’s just begun using iPads for training soldiers. Forces News reporter James Hirst has been to see it in action at the Royal School of Artillery on Salisbury Plain.”
Ed Lines attended the awards ceremony of LINE’s internal video and photo competition. With such an array of creative talent the judges had some difficult decisions to make.
People say that the Academy Awards are the final chapter in the entertainment awards season. But they’d be wrong.
For all the glamour and red carpets of Hollywood, the one gong missing from the mantelpieces of Messrs Firth and Portman, the one that they can’t get their mitts on no matter how well they portray a stuttering monarch or a dark-sided ballerina is a LINETube Award. Well technically they could actually, but to do so they’d have drop acting and become learning designers, or project managers, or graphic designers, or developers, or something, at the creative hub that is LINE Communications. Read more…
LINE went to Learning Technologies 2011 in London’s Olympia. Andrew Joly and Steve Ash informed packed audiences about new dimensions in learning and the possibilities of multi-platform delivery.
Keith Downes found he was rushed off his feet all day answering questions about LINE’s mobile capabilities.
We also found Towards Maturity’s Laura Overton who told us what she’d discovered at this year’s show. Speaking of discoveries, Towards Maturity launched a treasure map that conference delegates could follow to find various ‘treasures’, some of which LINE provided (in the form of a mobile learning whitepaper). To get your copy click here
And of course, happy LINE faces were there with a brand new stand – the structure of which would have impressed Sir Norman Foster!
In the first of two installments, Paul Brown, LINE’s Technical Director, and Ed Lines survey the broad range of challenges taken on by LINE’s technology team in equipping clients with effective tools and systems for learning and communications.
The LINE technology team has been building innovative technical solutions for many years now, but over the past few years we’ve seen a real change in the type and sophistication of the challenges we are called on to address. Client organisations are maturing in their use of technology, and as they move onwards from straight like-for-like replacement of stand-up training with self-paced online courses for every occasion, they open the door to a much wider, more diverse range of technology tools and solutions.
At the same time, the technology landscape is undergoing continuous seismic change. You only have to look at the average smartphone on the market now to see this: just compare its gaming and graphic capabilities to the games console you might have used in your home only a few years ago – what you hold in your hand now is probably better. Organisations that have to cope with learner expectations conditioned by this sort of trajectory simply can’t afford to let their learning infrastructures fall behind the curve.
We’ll be dealing with mobile delivery and how that is affecting learning technology in a further post on this blog, but for now let’s focus on the basic building blocks of the learning infrastructure, LMS and Content Management. Though well established now in L&D departments, as you’ll see, they certainly aren’t standing still! Read more…
My blog post on the Learning and Skills Group conference seems to have caused something of a furore, with a lot of debate both online and particularly offline – so much so that I feel it is worth devoting a little more time and space to my reasons for saying what I did, and to share some of the reflections I have had on the subject since. Read more…
What have Star Wars, the BBC and a seminal work of comparative mythology got to do with scenario-based learning? Steve Ash describes the genesis of DCF, LINE’s new solution to the problem of creating hi-end, immersive learning at scale.
Story-based learning is a proven and powerful way to transfer knowledge, skills and behaviours. Generation Y is not alone in preferring this type of immersive learning: it has wide appeal across all age groups. In the past, scenario-based online learning has been expensive and time consuming to create, and difficult to design and develop in a scalable manner. The LINE Dynamic Content Framework (DCF) addresses these challenges, offering an innovative and cost effective approach to scenario-based learning. Read more…
If you are responsible for implementing learning technologies in your workplace and are under pressure to accelerate their impact, then we invite you to get involved in the 4th Towards Maturity Learning Technology Benchmark.
The Towards Maturity benchmark survey is now considered the most comprehensive, independent and authoritative review on the use of Learning Technologies in the workplace in the UK. At LINE we are great supporters of this research and we would like to recommend that you take part in their 2010 benchmark. Read more…
John Helmer reports on LINE’s contribution to the second annual Royal School of Military Engineering (RSME) Training Transformation Symposium
A great deal of interest has been generated within the defence sector by the UK Army’s recent unveiling of a LINE-developed learning app for iPad (see British Army takes the lead with new application for Apple iPad). A recent defence conference provided an opportunity for LINE, together with two members of the Royal Artillery Training Development Team who commissioned the piece, to show more of this innovative learning programme – and to place it within the context of LINE’s wider work with Defence colleges in training transformation. Read more…
Spain’s hard fought victory over the Netherlands on Sunday signified not only the end of the World Cup, but also LINE’s World Cup Sweepstake. Paul Nebel claimed the top prize of £108.50 and generously pledged half of his winnings to charity. Kamelia Fattahi and Niyi Ademosu claimed second and third prizes respectively after their Dutch and German teams came within touching distance of the greatest prize in sport. Read more…
Steve Ash, LINE’s Director of Sales and Marketing, reviews the day’s events at the Learning and Skills Group Conference.
It was a sunny day in London when around 400 people gathered at Olympia to take part in the Learning and Skills Group Conference – a free event for Learning Technologies 2010 delegates and Learning and Skills Group members. The summer conference is designed to explore the themes of the January conference in more detail. Read more…
As technology-supported learning loses its air of novelty and becomes business-as-usual for many large organisations, the scale and complexity of the individual programmes that companies in our industry are being called upon to address is increasing.
This scale hike can put serious strain on boutique operations used to dealing with rather limited programmes of e-learning content production. Larger programmes are almost always blended, involve dispersed and sometimes very diverse audiences, and typically last over a much longer period. They can take years rather than months. As a company that has tended to be awarded some of the larger programmes, LINE is uniquely placed to comment on the differences involved in servicing these larger-scale requirements.
So what are the important considerations in dealing with learning and communications at scale? What are the most common challenges in undertaking a large project or programme of work, and how should these be dealt with?
Steve Barden, Lead Consultant, kicks off a series of posts on what learning maturity means to organisations. By considering the factors that are fundamental to the way an organisation can define its position on the road to more effective learning; it is possible to highlight where there are drivers for change.
The last ten years have seen tumultuous change in the business of what we used to call training and now, as a result of these developments, more often refer to as learning. This change in nomenclature is itself indicative of the fact that we have seen not only a transformation of the means by which we can deliver learning to learners – with technology dramatically widening the range of options available – but also a fairly seismic shift in the conceptual landscape.
As the decade turns, therefore, it is worth reflecting on where organisations are in their adoption of new learning approaches and new technologies, in order to help with defining some explicit benchmarks for maturity. It’s a big issue. To do it justice, I’d like to tackle it under three headings; learning structure, learning technology and finally the skills, knowledge and attitudes of the workforce that together define what is learning culture.
Irene Murphy, Organisational Development Consultant of LINE argues that learning and communications programmes need to deal with the human issues at an appropriate level of depth in order to get real results, whether they are face-to-face delivered or blended.
Piers Lea, CEO of LINE Communications, gives a personal perspective on how the e-learning industry can respond to current economic gloom. It means working together, so even if you don’t read this whole article please go straight to the last paragraph and take action now! Read more…
Etz isch fertig luschtig! – The party’s over! Many a time I hear this from the mouth of an exasperated Swiss parent on my local train as they try to bring order to their child swinging from the metal poles or climbing over the chairs. Read more…
Looking back now, I realise I knew very little about e-learning when I joined LINE’s ‘Design Academy’ graduate development programme just eight months ago. I still don’t know how to capitalise it. Read more…
Several months back when a client came to us and asked, “Does audio in e-learning improve the learning process?” our initial reaction was that finding the research would be a no-brainer.Read more…
Not long ago an article in the Guardian caught my eye: apparently, the British are the most enthusiastic social networkers in the world after the Canadians, clocking in at 5.3 hours a month.Read more…
In 2008, European companies are expected to spend over 1 billion Euro on developing and procuring e-learning content. This investment will be fundamental part of workforce training across the continent – but there’s a problem: most of this investment will be ‘locked down’ on Learning Management Systems (LMSs). Read more…
Of course I should count myself lucky. Here I am, a native speaker of English, and so many of my major European clients use English as their business language, even for training. Read more…
Ian Leader and Paul Nebel look at the tools available for publishing e-learning content and propose an unlikely tool many of us use on a daily basis.
Before Apple’s iPod brought us PodCasting, there was no universally accepted way to get rich media content from the server where it was produced to the people or systems that would actually use it. You would have to search web sites, or maybe you would get email notifications that new documents of other media were available.
Only then could you download the content from the web site and put it wherever it needed to go). PodCasting (based on the open RSS standard) changed the way we found rich media by allowing users of iPods to subscribe to ‘feeds’ that contained audio and video files. These are automatically downloaded and copied to the users’ iPod or other audio device)
The same evolution has been playing out in the e-learning world. There are many tools for creating e-learning but most learners interact with e-learning through a Learning Management System (LMS), which delivers the content and tracks the learner’s progress through it. We are seeing organisations increasingly adopt Learning Content Management Systems (LCMS) to author their e-learning, or manage content authored in other tools. There are numerous benefits to using an LCMS, including version management and better work flow, but their use does raise one problem: how to get content from the LCMS (similar to the website in the PodCasting example above) into the LMS (analogous to the iPod).
To solve this problem a standard called PENS (Package Exchange Notification Services) was created by the AICC to define a standard way for LCMSs to publish content to LMSs. PENS defines a way for an LCMS to tell an LMS that a piece of content is ready for deployment, and where this content can be found. PENS adopts a centralised ‘push’ model (see diagram below):
An administrator on the LCMS must enter the details of each system which might want to be notified of the presence of new or updated content. When content is published, the LCMS sends a message (in the form of an ‘HTTP request’) to all of these systems. This message tells them various things about the content, including from where to download it.
PENS is a fairly simple standard – the requirement is fairly simple after all, but we wonder why the authors didn’t use an existing and widely used format: Really Simple Syndication (RSS)? RSS is a ubiquitous de-facto standard for syndicating (or pushing out) information on the web. Virtually every blog, news site, or other web site that is regularly updated has an ‘RSS feed’. Using an RSS reader you can subscribe to these feeds, and get a notification when there is a new blog post, breaking news, or an update to a site. (Visit this YouTubeVideo for a great explanation of RSS). RSS is also used to deliver Podcasts and Video Podcasts – the format is extensible, and additional fields were added by Apple so that it could be used to push audio and video files to iPods (and most other audio player devices). We designed an alternative implementation of PENS based on RSS/Podcasting, which we call ‘PENCasting’. The architecture is shown in the diagram below:
Case Study: DfES Adoption Act Training
In 2005 LINE provided a turn-key solution to the DfES to train a diverse audience of approximately 10,000 learners in the implementation of the new UK Adoption Act. As well as developing e-learning content, we provided a delivery and tracking system by partnering with e2train. As project deadlines were extremely tight we decided to follow the ‘Agile’ development practice of ‘release early and often’. We developed an integration between our content production environment and e2train’s Kallidus LMS so that each time changes were made to the content, it would be automatically transferred to the Kallidus LMS. This meant that any problems with the content or its integration with the LMS were spotted early on, rather than being discovered days before the final release! The DfES Adoption Act Training example shows that the benefits of integration between content authoring and content delivery environments extend well beyond the delivery of signed-off content at the end of the production process.
We believe that there are several advantages to using PENCasting rather than the existing PENS architecture:
Because RSS and Podcasting are so widely used, and a de-facto standard, they are already well understood by developers and users. Moreoever, there are existing (free and open source) code-libraries which make implementation and testing quicker and easier.
PENCasting is more scalable. In PENS a central administrator of the LCMS has to set up and maintain a list of web addresses to which notifications are sent. The subscription model of PENCasting lets recipients subscribe to the feed themselves just like any other RSS feed. What’s more, this approach makes it easy for LMSs to choose what kind of information they wish to subscribe to: an LCMS could publish several different PENCasting feeds (e.g. sales training, after sales training and technical training). By just subscribing to the relevant feed, an LMS would only pick up content that was relevant to the audience it served.
RSS allows you to retrieve historical publications as easily as new ones. What happens if you deploy a new system, or a system is down when the content notification is sent by PENS? RSS feeds typically provide some history; so, even if a system is down for a whole day, it can catch up once it’s back on line. You can also provide two RSS feeds: one which has, say, a week’s worth of announcements, the other with a full history that can be used to ‘seed’ a new system.
RSS works transparently through firewalls. An LMS behind an organisation’s firewall can receive notifications from a hosted LCMS outside, whereas PENS needs HTTP access in both directions.
You can monitor new content publications using standard tools (the ubiquitous RSS reader) – so anyone can stay informed of new publications and download them if they desire.
The final point is perhaps the most exciting: we already use Podcasting to grab audio and video material from multiple sources and download it for use on iPods and other mobile devices at our convenience. As mobile phones get smarter with better user interfaces and display capabilities, driven by the popularity of the iPhone and Google’s Android initiative, why shouldn’t we get our e-learning content delivered the same way as well? Why not get content from whatever sources we want, whenever it’s ready, and delivered straight to our desktop, phone or PDA?
by Ian Leader & Paul Nebel
This article was planned, researched and written collaboratively in London and Zurich using Google docs and Skype. When we weren’t working together in real-time, we used the RSS feature of Google Docs to keep us notified of changes the other author had been making.
So what would the RSS files for PENCasting look like? The following table maps the key fields from the PENS standard onto elements and attributes or RSS (some standard, some extensions we have added in the ‘pens’ namespace). Some fields are not required and have not been mapped. The main example is authentication information, which is not required as subscribing systems would use the same credentials to download content that they had already used to access the PENcasting RSS feed . In any case, it’s not best practice from a security perspective to be passing around username and password pairs in plain text.
Element
Value
Description
Equivalent PENS attribute
<pens:package/>
Enclosing tag.
Specifies a content package. It has 4 required sub-elements:
type
version
id
url
It has one optional sub-element:
url-expiry
N/A
<pens:type/>
string (required)
Allowable types of content packages: AICC assignable unit (aicc-au), SCORM package (scorm-pif) or IMS package (ims-qti).
package-type
<pens:version/>
string (required)
Identifies the version of the packaging specification relevant to the package to be processed, e.g., for ADL SCORM “scorm-pif” packages, a system might use “1.2″ or “2004″.
package-type-version
<pens:id/>
string (required)
Unique identifier required for package. ID is a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) conforming to RFC standard 2396 and consisting of two parts; a globally unique namespace taken from the url associated with the LCMS generating the ID, plus an ID unique within the LCMS itself.
package-id
<pens:url/>
string (required)
Location of package archive ready for download (this will be a url).
package-url
<pens:urlExpiry/>
string
The content package is expected to be available for processing until at least the date and time specified (this will be a Coordinated Universal Time – UTC – conforming to ISO standard 8601).
package-url-expiry
<textInput>
string
This is a standard (but often overlooked) RSS field used to provide a simple text input form for subscribers to respond to feeds. We propose that this would be used as the mechanism for responding to the LCMS with alerts.
alerts
And here is what the code looks like:
Note that the URL used to define the namespace definition (http://www.pens.org/pencast/) is hypothetical and does not exist.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:pencast="http://www.pens.org/pencast/">
<channel>
<title>Making Soup</title>
<link>http://www.goodsoup.com</link>
<description>Learn how to make great soup from professional chefs.
</description>
<pubDate>Fri, 25 Apr 2008 13:00:00 +0100</pubDate>
<item>
<title>Soup making techniques explained</title>
<description>Learn how to make any kind of soup using the
techniques employes by top soup makers.
</description>
<pubDate>Fri, 25 Apr 2008 13:00:00 +0100</pubDate>
<enclosure url="http://learning.goodsoup.com/scorm/cooking/techniques/
makingsoup.zip" length="5259231" type="application/zip" >
<pencast:package>
<pencast:id>
http://learning.goodsoup.com:2631e419-1573-4720-b4c6-8701f960
</pencast:id>
<pencast:version>1.0</pencast:version>
<pencast:type>scorm-pif</pencast:type>
<pencast:url>http://myauthoringtool/makingsoup.zip</pencast:url>
<pencast:urlExpiry>2008-07-22T06:51:29</pencast:url-expiry>
</pencast:package>
</enclosure>
</item>
<textInput>
<description>Please provide an update alert</description>
<name>alert</name>
<title>Update alert</title>
<link>http://learning.goodsoup.com/alerts/receiveAlert.php</link>
</textInput>
</channel>
</rss>
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Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) has been around since the 70′s but has been gaining significant momentum in the last ten years thanks to a number of high profile success stories. These include the Mozilla Firefox web browser, the Apache web server, the Linux operating system and the OpenOffice productivity suite. Read more…
Nick Barker discusses the potential benefits of podcasting – even fan mail
There’s a saying: “Think of any word and you’ll probably find somewhere in the world named after it.” of course there are always exceptions to these things. Read more…
Because our developers need to keep up to date on what’s happening in their industry, The Register, the IT world’s equivalent to Reuters, offers various news feeds to suit their taste: applications, software, mobile, data, etc.Read more…
As government spend on Information Communications Technology (ICT) in schools racks up, our politicians are keen to see if it has any effect on academic attainment, as defined by results in national tests and exams.Read more…
Driving brand thinking through an organisation can be hard at the best of times. The language and ideas of branding agencies can seem distant and irrelevant to people trying to get on with the real work, with many feeling that it’s product that counts, rather than some kind of over expensive creative ideas that will become outdated in a few months anyway.
Kaffia Clouden, Marketing Assistant, attended a recent LINE Lunch Forum in Zurich, which explored learning strategies for leadership development.
The annual LINE survey is always a great chance to see what the Learning & Development community has on its mind. This year, according to our research, it is clearly thinking quite hard about mobile learning – unsurprisingly, perhaps – but also about learning architectures. And while practitioners value the expertise and original thinking they get from their supplier community, they clearly have a problem with those who fail to understand their business and brand.
John Helmer reports on LINE’s contribution to the second annual Royal School of Military Engineering (RSME) Training Transformation Symposium
As technology-supported learning loses its air of novelty and becomes business-as-usual for many large organisations, the scale and complexity of the individual programmes that companies in our industry are being called upon to address is increasing.
Steve Barden, Lead Consultant, kicks off a series of posts on what learning maturity means to organisations. By considering the factors that are fundamental to the way an organisation can define its position on the road to more effective learning; it is possible to highlight where there are drivers for change.
Irene Murphy, Organisational Development Consultant of LINE argues that learning and communications programmes need to deal with the human issues at an appropriate level of depth in order to get real results, whether they are face-to-face delivered or blended.
