‘Viewpoints’...

Is it R.I.P. for the e-learning course? Patrick Thomas LINE’s Key Account Director for the Energy Sector discusses.

I can’t recall when a single image has caused such a firestorm. Internally, colleagues were incensed that we were ringing the death knell for our bread-and-butter business. And later in a meeting with a client, they sardonically asked, “If that’s true, where does that leave LINE and the rest?”

We’re doing just fine, thank you.
Read more…

John Helmer reviews the latest report from Towards Maturity.

‘E-learning is not a panacea’: how many times have we seen these words in print? The statement has become a cliché. However, you will find it almost impossible to read the latest report from the benchmarking practice Towards Maturity without it popping into your head.

Because the evidence from the workface presented here, gathered over the past eight years and reflecting the experience of more than 1,800 learning professionals, shows that when it comes to technology-enabled learning, it ain’t what you do (to invoke another rather hoary old cliché) it’s the way that you do it. That’s what gets results.

Technology really can help you get better bottom-line benefits for the business from your learning and development activities, but it takes a bit of work to get there.

Read more…

Piers Lea, CEO, discusses the current and 2012 landscape for mobile learning.

It is nearly two years since I gave the opinion, on this blog, that it was time for organisations to embrace mobile learning. Now in 2012, demand for mobile services is growing, not just for learning, but throughout the enterprise.

A survey we conducted recently among learning professionals shows that 94% of organisations are between the stage of vesting interest in mobile technology and the full implementation stage.
Read more…

According to a study by McAfee and Carnegie Mellon University, 33% of employees keep sensitive information on mobile devices, including smartphones, tablets (such as iPads) and even music players with hard drives (such as iPods). While most organisations (95%) have a mobile device security strategy in place, 65% of employees were unaware of the details of that strategy. More than 8,500 of these same devices were left at UK airports in 2010. These three factors highlight the need for a strong mobile security strategy.

The study above found that mobile security was a two-way problem: employees were using personal mobile devices for work and work-issued devices for personal activities. While many of the latter activities were sanctioned, employees were not aware of the security risks involved.

With more employees demanding access to corporate services on their mobile devices, security should therefore be high on the agenda.

In this brief post, I’d like to highlight three aspects of mobile security:
• Device security
• Security of data
• Security of content
Read more…

Could the key to making L&D fly in your organisation be giving away iPads to every member of staff? Think about it for a minute.

Intense competition in the tablet sector, with Barnes and Noble piling into the market hard on the heels of Amazon and Blackberry, is causing downward price pressure and driving innovation in a scramble to find the most attractive form factor and feature set – against a background of fast-growing consumer demand. We seem to be looking at a future of ubiquity for readers and tablets.

Which for me raises the question, should businesses perhaps hand out free iPads with every induction pack?
Read more…

Katie Hart went to Power of One at Battersea Power Station last Friday. We found out about her day.

LINE: We hear you went to the Power of One. What was that all about then?

Katie: It was a fantastic full day event held at Battersea Power Station, which was an amazing venue. It was focused on motivating and inspiring new ideas and analysing current trends in the tech industry. The day consisted of six talks from some very inspirational speakers, and two panel sessions.
Read more…

There is a quiet sea change occurring in companies’ attitudes to games-based learning. Barely eighteen months ago there was little interest in using serious games for training outside the defence and healthcare sectors. Today, L&D professionals across all industries – not to mention marketing teams, finance and recruitment specialists – are all clamouring for more information on the subject.

And it’s not surprising, when serious games advocates like Intellego’s Andy Hasoon are making claims that 20 minutes of a serious game simulation can be as effective as one hour’s worth of e-learning. However, such claims are notoriously tricky to prove, so how should companies gauge whether the games-based learning approach is right for them?

Read more…

Bruce Woods, Director and Professional Services Lead, outlines LINE’s approach to learning and development within the professional services sector.

It’s getting to be something of a truism to point out that taking a physical-world process like training online, and exposing it to the interactive medium of the web, does not result in like-for-like equivalence. You might start with a physical world format – a course – but what you end up with can be something very different: an assembly of learning experiences in different technologies and modalities, around which human-to-human learning events are organised in a way that has a lot less to do with the classroom. Welcome to the world of learning architectures.

Never has it been more clear to me, this phenomenon of transformation that digital technologies bring about, than in the case of mobile learning. In fact, it might even be the case that mobile delivery will accelerate the changes we are already seeing in organisational learning and communications.

Why do I think this? Well let me give you an example …
Read more…

Bruce Woods, Director at LINE, looks at the adoption of technology-enabled learning in the professional services sector and finds that, while being an early adopter in learning innovation brings many advantages, it also has consequences – which many firms are now dealing with.

Professional services is a large and diverse industry, containing many different types of organisations. Despite their diversity, however, organisations in the sector have many common issues; issues which have driven them, in the main, to become early and enthusiastic adopters of new learning technologies. For this reason, it’s probably fair to say that one tends to see more examples of mature use of learning innovation in this sector than elsewhere.

At the same time, there are drawbacks that can come with being an early adopter, and professional service firms are finding that they have to do some refocusing of their learning strategies as technology-supported learning moves out of its initial, pioneering phase and becomes ‘business-as-usual’.
Read more…

Patrick Thomas, LINE’s Key Account Director for the Energy Sector offers a summary of Martin Anderson’s article on Behavioural Safety and Major Accident Hazards: Magic Bullet or Shot in the Dark?

Why is it that companies with good statistics on personal safety still have major accidents? Clearly, interventions aimed at the individual are not a sufficient barrier to preventing latent weaknesses that cause major accidents. Yet, many organisations continue to deliver behaviour modification safety training programmes to front line personnel in the hope that training front line personnel will prevent major accidents.
Read more…

Sales and Marketing Director, Steve Ash, has been at LINE for over six years during which time he’s seen a fair amount of change in the industry.
Read more…

Andrew Joly, Design Director at LINE shares his views on the foundations and principles behind an effective Learning Architecture.

What does it mean to think about learning architecturally?

In a previous article for this magazine, I wrote about this important change we see happening in the way people are thinking about learning. It’s a change that’s happening in many organisations already; generally in those organisations whose use of learning innovation and technology can be characterised as more ‘mature’. It’s a very fundamental change, and one where, increasingly, we are seeing evidence that it links to improved results; greater cost savings, faster time-to-competence, better take-up and improved staff satisfaction*.

My article about the design aspect of this change had a good response, but also raised questions. Enough questions that it’s well worth getting a little further in to the detail of what we mean when we talk about a ‘Learning Architecture’. I’d like to develop this theme a little here by focusing on what I see as the fundamental difference about this way of thinking from what has come before, and what the foundations and principles behind an effective Learning Architecture are.
Read more…

Adam Fox, Senior Mobile Architect at LINE, outlines some of the recent technology developments that point to a bright future for mobile learning and communications.

One of the major barriers to the growth of m-learning, previously, has been the problem of developing for multiple devices. Even with the degree of rationalisation offered by the growth of Android, a cross-platform OS for smartphones, organisations wishing to develop mobile learning still faced a plethora of competing computer languages, operating systems and app stores. The result of this profusion, up to as little as a year ago, was a fairly stark choice between two alternative routes – develop native apps or make your mobile learning browser-based – each of which had its upsides and downsides. Browser-based apps operate better across different mobile platforms, for instance, but don’t make use of onboard functions like accelerometer, camera, audio, etc. Native apps do this job better, but have to be rebuilt from scratch for each different device and platform, multiplying development costs.

Now a third route has emerged – hybrid – together with new cross-platform development tools, all at once the future looks a whole lot brighter for m-learning.
Read more…

You’re at work, you’re compiling a spreadsheet in Excel and you get stuck when you need the programme to automatically calculate the VAT on the department’s monthly expenditure. You’re devising a new marketing campaign and plan to use a QR code as a measurable way of directing traffic from your printed ads to a purchase page on your website but you’re not sure how. At home, in no particular order, you need to repair a water-damaged door frame, tie a bow-tie, fix a lawn-mower, learn a tricky guitar riff and make a Thai curry. With knowledge gaps as diverse as this, what do you do?
Read more…

Kaffia Clouden attended a recent LINE Lunch Forum in Zurich to explore what a successful learning strategy will look like in the coming years.

Maturity delivers results

Laura Overton, Managing Director of Towards Maturity, a not for profit benchmark practice that provides independent advice and support in using learning innovation to accelerate business performance, was the first to deliver her presentation.

Laura launched the forum lunch with a picture of the vegetable garden at Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons, Raymond Blanc’s Michelin star restaurant located in Oxfordshire. Maturity, as she described it, is much like a garden. It requires investment. The mature gardener responds to changes in the environment by adjusting and adapting as necessary – and consequently a mature learning solution will be different according to what you set out to achieve.
Read more…

Sean Nugent, LINE’s Account Director gives a summary of his day at the recent Learning & Skills Group Conference in Olympia.

The Learning and Skills Group conference comes around pretty quickly, and is a good chance to follow up on the themes of the Learning Technologies Conference in January. The format of the conference works really well, and as always with any event organised by the Learning Technologies team is well planned. The event is fairly informal and the schedule allows plenty of time for networking. LINE were well represented with both myself and Kaleem Bhatti attending, plus quite a few other familiar faces from LINE associates and clients, including Roy Evans, Katherine Chapman and Andy Tedd.
Read more…

Steve Ash, Sales and Marketing Director at LINE travelled to Tanzania to attend e-Learning Africa.

LINE has attended the annual Online Educa event in Berlin for many years sending both visitors and conference speakers to what is billed as the ‘largest global e-learning conference for the corporate, education and public service sectors’. This year, for the first time, we attended the sister event, e-Learning Africa. 2011 will see the 17th Online Educa event in Berlin, whereas e-Learning Africa is comparatively new, this year being only the 6th year that the event has been held.
Read more…

Pete Brown, Learning Designer at LINE, conducted an experiment using QR codes to investigate the use of mobiles for learning in a work environment.

I don’t like new stuff. Old age and cranky genes make me cynical toward change. I’ve seen too many technologies fall, whimpering, off the back-end of the Hype Curve. Mobile technologies for learning? Pish posh!

But fighting my natural urge to rail against progress and the desire to take the easy, dismissal route, I gave it some thought. Maybe there is something in mobiles for learning. Not by shoehorning conventional e-learning into a smaller form factor, but by using mobile for what it is good for, i.e. having it with you in the field, where and when it’s most needed.
Read more…

Charlotte Marshall, Defence Business Development and Support Manager, reports on the Sheffield Half Marathon and raising money for Help for Heroes.

Have you ever stood on a running track at 8am on a Sunday morning with the daunting prospect of running 13.1 miles and asked yourself, ‘Why aren’t I in bed?’ Well, a LINE team, consisting of Keith Downes, Ed Lines, and myself accompanied by Keith’s daughter Julia Downes and Geoff Draper (ex Colonel) were doing just that on Sunday 8th May. The reason we were gathered at the Don Valley running track, stretching limbs and adjusting attractive sweatbands as opposed to counting sheep was to raise money for a fantastic charity – Help for Heroes.
Read more…

As organisations mature in their use of learning innovation, they tend to embrace a more architectural, joined-up approach informed by the 70/20/10 model. It is now clear that mature organisations are achieving some impressive results through these methods. However, with this maturity comes some grown-up issues. Looking at learning this way brings L&D into interaction with the business in new ways. In particular, with middle management.

These are findings that arose from the latest of LINE’s forum lunches, when senior learning and development professionals from corporate and public sector organisations met together in London recently to discuss the question of learning maturity.
Read more…

Back from New York, Kaleem Bhatti, Key Account Director, shares his views on iVentiv Learning Futures Executive Knowledge Exchange.

“Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy.” Thesis #7, the Cluetrain Manifesto

Life is tension. Freedom vs. Security, Cooperation vs Control, Progressive vs. Traditional, Intuition vs. Analysis, Organic vs. GM, Tailored vs. Off-the -shelf, Informal vs. Formal… the list goes on. Needless to say, depending on the context, easing these tensions usually lies somewhere in-between these pure extremes – an uncertain landscape unfamiliar to the clash-of-opposites rhetoric posed by mass-media.

Read more…

Andrew Joly, Design Director at LINE shares his views on the concept of learning architectures and its importance when designing and implementing effective learning in a 70/20/10 world.

We are at a moment in the evolving practice of learning where there is huge opportunity. Opportunity but also, for many in our business, uncertainty and fear. The cause of this state of affairs is a new way of thinking about learning strategies in the 70/20/10 world that has been accompanied by the rise of interest in informal learning.

Read more…

British Airways fully embraced Campaign for Learning’s Learning at Work Day this year by staging an event for its staff. During their lunch break, employees were encouraged to attend interactive seminars, learn new skills such as juggling or plate spinning and had the chance to see what various learning suppliers had to offer on ‘The Street’. As a long term supplier to British Airways, LINE was on hand to see if BA employees felt social media could have a positive impact on their learning at work. Ed Lines was at the Waterside HQ to find out.
Read more…

Patrick Thomas, Key Account Director Energy and Mining, shares his views on the importance of learning from safety incidences in the Energy sector.

In January the report Deepwater Horizon: Report to the President was made public with clearly damning criticism of the Energy industry’s ability to learn from previous mistakes.  And by mistakes, I don’t only mean the huge headline-making catastrophes, also known as “low probability, high impact events.” Crucially, this industry has failed to learn from those all-too-common “high probability low impact incidences” that can be precursors to major catastrophic events such as operators taking short cuts when starting equipment, evacuation practice procedures not being carried out, tripped alarms that kept going off, or that small blip in data that doesn’t make any sense so it is discarded.  By themselves, they are seemingly innocuous incidences that represent annoyances to the individual.  When they occur regularly, these high probability incidents can line up to create that one improbable event that results in injury or death.
Read more…

Steve Ash, Sales and Marketing Director and Ade Derbyshire-Moore, General Manager Zurich, review the latest iVentiv event which took place in Dusseldorf.

The waterfront location of the Hyatt Regency hotel in Dusseldorf was spectacular. However, not as impressive as the assembly of senior Learning and Development executives attending the 3rd Annual iVentiv Learning Technologies Executive Knowledge Exchange.

LINE has sponsored these international events every year since 2009 and they never fail to attract a highly informed and energetic crowd of senior, global L&D professionals for two days of informed debate, exchange and networking.
Read more…

Ford asked us to present some ideas about the future of training and e-learning. We all know that mobiles are going to play an increasingly important role (if not the leading role) in digital communications and training. But so far we haven’t seen solutions that take advantage of the fact that we’re using phones. Lots of apps simply replicate PC-like experiences. Augmented reality, in which a layer of information is superimposed upon a view of a place or object, seems like the obvious way to go. This means the whole world can instantly become a learning environment.

We mocked up this video to give our clients a taste of what the near future could be like. Could augmented reality work for you? The technology is available and we’re looking for an opportunity to transform your organisation’s learning experiences.

Keith Downes, Director & Defence Lead at LINE, illustrates the importance of embedding a combination of technologies to achieve effective learning in defence.

LINE’s involvement in the defence sector started in 2003 as the outcomes of the Defence Training Review (DTR) were taking effect. Principally, for LINE at least, in our then small part of Defence Training, this was about the use of e-learning to deliver training: quicker, better, faster. LINE was an e-learning provider creating discrete e-learning programmes (usually measured in hours of learning time) delivered via the Defence Learning Portal (DLP) and managed on a Learning Management System (LMS) hosted on DLP.

In the DTR context LINE provided e-learning and technology centric learning solutions to help defence training be more cost efficient; more for less. It was mandated through a strange metric that 20% of 80% of training had to be e-learning.

From this starting point, eight years ago, our presence in developing and delivering Defence training has grown. I’d like to think LINE has been a leader in moving from just e-learning to a greater level of blend – weaving technology into the fabric of defence learning. It’s certainly true today that LINE’s capability has changed. We are still a technology centric company but now more an end to end learning services provider and while still an important part of what we offer, e-learning is now a much smaller part of the overall mix.
Read more…

Paul Brown, LINE’s Technical Director, and Ed Lines continue their survey of the broad range of challenges taken on by LINE’s technology team in equipping clients with effective tools and systems for learning and communications.

We’ve been innovating technical solutions for many years. Our clients trust us for our robust approach to solving real problems, for real users with quick, pragmatic solutions. But as the use of technologies for learning and communications has become more mainstream, the type of problems that we’ve been called upon to address has changed. Many of the challenges we focus on now have to do with scale: the particular issues that large, geographically dispersed organisations find themselves grappling with as they move to apply technology-enabled learning innovation in a concerted way, as part of business-as-usual, across the enterprise.
Read more…

‘Kill the courses, shut down the training department’: has that really been the response of organisations to the advent of informal learning? John Helmer, senior consultant with LINE communications, charts its rise and describes how the 70/20/10 model is being practically applied within organisations.

Over the last decade, there has been a ferment of debate and discussion about what learning should look like in the 21st Century. Much of the energy in that debate, as far as e-learning is concerned, has gone into questioning the academic and theoretical underpinnings of instructional techniques, and incorporating new insights from the field of brain science. This focus on design has surely led to a quality improvement in the effectiveness of online learning. However, at a higher level of granularity, there has also been a growing interest in the role of informal learning, and a sense that rooting our enquiry too narrowly in how best to structure self-paced online courses risks overlooking the greater value that technology innovation can bring to the business of educating and developing people, looked at in the round.

Read more…

Andrew Joly, LINE’s Head of Design, focuses on the role of working relationships within the 70/20/10 model of organisational learning.

70/20/10 has become a much-bandied-around term within large organisations – almost a mantra in some quarters. But people in L&D are becoming more and more conscious that the mere reciting of three numbers is not going to act as an ‘open sesame’ to a new world of learning. They need structure, they need practical guidance – and at very fundamental level they need to know where best to target their efforts to bring about real change in learning behaviours within their organisations.

A series of interesting conversations that I’ve been having recently with LINE clients around our new  ‘Learning Architectures’ concept have made me realise that it is the often overlooked ‘twenty’ within that formula – the area of communication and relationships – that is the key to changing behaviours regarding learning.  It is only by carefully considering and addressing learning cultures and attitudes to learning that we are going to bring about the changes we often talk about.  Get the ten right, get the seventy right, but nothing will happen unless you get the twenty right.

Here are five reasons why …

Read more…

Analysing two reports, John Helmer gives a retrospective view of e-learning in 2010.

Accelerating Performance: Towards Maturity 2010-11 Benchmark Full report
Laura Overton, Howard Hills, Genny Dixon; Towards Maturity

The UK e-learning market 2010
David Patterson, Glynn Jung, Gill Broadhead, Renate Halton; Learning Light

As we brace ourselves for the choppy and somewhat chill economic waters of 2011, e-learning is looking to be a fairly shipshape vessel with a bright future ahead of it – according to these two reports, at least. General training budgets may be contracting, causing uncertainty and a deal of localised pain, but at the same time an increasing amount of spend appears to be moving online, as organisations look to ‘e’ to help them in delivering more for less.

Adoption is pretty much mainstream: the CIPD revealed this year (when pressed) that 85% of respondents to its annual Learning and Development survey are now making some use of e-learning*. And the industry can point to some solid successes at last. Mature users of technology-enabled learning are achieving cost efficiencies, reduced time to competence and wider access to learning within their organisations.

But there are some worrying indicators too. Is the practitioner community in danger of making a knee-jerk reaction to recession; adopting an outdated model of e-learning which is unlikely to produce results and can only lead to more of the negative perceptions that have dogged e-learning in its short history?

At the same time, is the supplier industry in tune with the real needs of its clients? Is it merely supplying what those clients ask for, or forging partnership relationships to provide appropriate support and guidance in meeting business objectives with the help of learning innovation?
Read more…

Sean Nugent, Account Manager at LINE reviews Online Educa which was held in frosty Berlin, a stark contrast in weather conditions compared to Keith Downes in sunny Florida.

After various travel delays due to snow in the UK, I arrived late in the evening in Berlin, expecting it to be a bit on the chilly side, I must admit I hadn’t quite prepared myself for the -17 degrees as I stepped out of the airport. After a short walk to the venue the next morning I was glad to arrive at the Security and Defence learning pre-conference workshop without suffering frostbite!
Read more…

Steve Barden, Lead Consultant at LINE Communications, continues his series of articles on what learning maturity means to organisations.

Organisational culture is a subject about which it is extraordinarily difficult to generalize. Nothing is more individual, more local and more specific to an organisation than its culture.

This diversity is one of the major reasons why maturity in the use of learning technologies varies so widely from organisation to organisation, from sector to sector – and why new ideas that take root fairly easily within one type of company work less easily within another.

We see this clearly when we look at one of the key principles of second-generation learning – the self-directed learner.
Read more…

John Helmer, reviews the 70/20/10 model and highlights its adoption within organisations.

McCall, Eichinger and Lombard’s 70/20/10 model has been highly influential in spreading awareness of the importance of informal learning, and is now becoming something of a touchstone for organisational development. But have some people got a bit carried away with it? Has what started out as a useful observation about how people learn been deployed too proscriptively in some quarters, leading to its use as a strategy in itself?

Last month, senior learning and development professionals from a number of corporate and public sector organisations met together at the LINE London Forum to discuss this and other issues in Learning Design. In an age where we recognise that 90% of learning is informal, what is the proper role for Learning Design?
Read more…

Whilst the UK was blanketed with ice and snow, Keith Downes describes his week in sunny Florida for the world’s largest modelling, simulation & training conference.

To say I chose the right week to be in Florida is an understatement. While I/ITSEC and was bathed in Orlando sunshine, the UK was suffering the worst snow in years – ‘it’s a great shame I’m not at home to clear the drive’ I told my wife – I’m not sure she appreciated it.
Read more…

Ade Derbyshire-Moore, LINE’s General Manager in Zurich, describes our one-step-at-a-time approach to expanding the business into Europe.

Being responsible for LINE’s Zurich office has meant that I play a large part in our expansion into continental Europe. Notice I say continental Europe as the UK is still part of Europe but as a nation, we are good at forgetting that!
Read more…

Charlotte Marshall, LINE’s Defence Business Development Manager, was amongst a team who attended the Force Development Training (FDT) Conference in Warminster.

LINE was amongst the select few companies invited to exhibit at the Conference at the Land Warfare Centre, Warminster last week. Over 150 delegates attended including senior commanders and heads of establishment and it gave LINE an opportunity to update key decision makers on our most recent content and mobile apps.
Read more…

Steve Barden, Lead Consultant, continues his series of articles on what learning maturity means to organisations.

In these articles, I’m looking at learning maturity under three headings; learning structure, learning technology and finally the skills, knowledge and attitudes of the workforce that together define learning culture.

This time it’s the turn of technology. With examples drawn from our own work with clients, I’ll be addressing the following questions:
• What do we mean by a mature use of learning technologies?
• What are the important shifts in technology use that have happened between the initial, first generation of adoption within organisations and the emerging next generation?
• Where is this progress headed in the future?
Read more…

John Helmer points out some common misconceptions about serious games and highlights a range of case studies where they are generating real results for organisations.

Serious games have a serious image problem in some quarters. But there is a growing body of evidence that game-based learning can be highly successful in driving business results, and a variety of drivers are making it harder and harder to ignore as a candidate medium where deep and immersive learning needs to be delivered online. So should you be taking serious games more seriously?
Read more…

John Helmer assesses the latest technology supported learning and communications trends in the wake of a recent survey prepared by LINE.

Organisations value highly, it seems, the specialised expertise they get from providers of technology-supported learning and communications, and the external perspective such companies bring on learning and communications problems. Such was the finding of recent LINE research. However, the research also indicated that suppliers sometimes fail to understand the sector, brand, values, culture, process, and project objectives of their clients.
Read more…

John Helmer reviews the state of the technology supported learning market in reaction to the British Computer Society’s annual league table.

I was surprised, recently, to hear one of LINE’s clients tell me that the company isn’t seen, within his organisation at least, as an e-learning supplier. This is probably because LINE’s initial involvement with this particular client had been as part of a high-level consultancy effort looking at people development challenges in a holistic, strategic way – taking a helicopter view that was firmly delivery-method-agnostic.

His comment undoubtedly reflects the highly varied nature of LINE’s work, and the breadth of expertise and resources the company can deploy. Nevertheless, it is highly gratifying for LINE to be officially recognised, for the second consecutive year, as the UK market leader in bespoke e-learning content development by the BCS.

As well as consolidating LINE’s market leadership in this area, however, the BCS e-learning top tables, published in IT Training Magazine, also have interesting things to tell us about the state of the industry in general.
Read more…

Nick Barker, Project Manager, at LINE gives his personal slant on the launch of an innovative iPad learning programme for the Royal Artillery.

I’d just delivered 20 iPads to the Royal School of Artillery at Larkhill Camp in Wiltshire. On each of these was an app which LINE had jointly developed with Major Rich Gill of the Army’s Training Development Branch.

I felt a double helping of anticipation that morning. First there was the fact that a group of soldiers were about to use our iPad version of their Fire Control Orders training for the first time as part of user trials – What would they think? Would they be engaged with it? Would they really love it? Or would they want to stick it up against a wall and fire a salvo from a 105mm Light Gun through its beautiful 9.7 inch touch screen?
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…

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…

John Helmer reviews the CIPD Learning and Development surveys 2007-2010 to see what they have to say about technology and learning

‘E-learning is the learning and talent development practice that has increased the most, with six in ten (62%) organisations saying they use it more than in 2009.’

The CIPD Learning and Development survey has been an annual event for the past twelve years. I’ve been reading it fairly closely for the last four of those, chiefly with an eye to what it might have to say about technology-supported learning.

Read more…

Design Director, Andrew Joly, looks at the opportunities learning designers now have in creating learning for mobile devices and puts M-Learning in its ‘historical’ context.

Design for Mobile Learning – where are we?

M-Learning. It’s the topic of so many learning articles and blog posts right now – quite a few of them on this blog. From a design perspective, I’ve seen and been involved in mobile solutions for more than 10 years. Some ideas have come and gone, and some have influenced the next steps we’ve taken. It’s been an interesting journey, but what might recent changes in mobile technology mean for the future of mobile learning design?
Read more…

Keith Downes, Director, Defence Lead, assesses LINE’s presence at the largest Defence Training and Simulation Conference and Exhibition in Europe.

LINE has been exhibiting at ITEC, Europe’s largest Defence Training and Simulation Conference and Exhibition, for five years now, and I can honestly say that this was our busiest and best year so far. There is a lot of excitement and interest around mobile learning in Defence at the moment, and LINE was in a position to be able to show some cutting-edge examples; showcasing course content that we have developed for the Apple iPhone, iPod Touch and on a brand-spanking-new iPad.
Read more…

Ed Lines assesses the potential for learning with Apps on mobile devices and gives 10 examples that are changing the way we learn.

The App Factor

“There’s an App for that” is such a loathsomely catchy slogan from Apple, and it is quickly becoming an everyday quip for people in response to a friend’s wish for something that might help them perform a menial household task – as I discovered recently, during a slothful moment:

Me: I wish there was something that could iron my shirt for me.
Flatmate: There’s an App for that!

As annoying as this was, it made me realise is how prevalent the App factor has become. I read recently that the iPhone App Store will soon hold more items than an individual store at world’s largest retailer, Wal-mart, which carries approximately 100,000 items [Flurry]. In fact, the App ‘industry’ is expected to generate £3.8bn from downloads in 2010 [Gartner].
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?

Read more…

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.

Read more…

Paul Buchheit, probably best known as the creator and lead developer of Google’s Gmail, recently blogged that “If your product is great, it doesn’t need to be good”. His point is that really great products will start out by focusing on a small number of really important features, and not try to tick every box in the competition’s feature list. This approach lets you focus on what’s really important to start with, and then to evolve the product with the really important ‘missing’ features.

Read more…

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.

Read more…

Piers Lea, CEO of LINE Communications, gives the reasons why now is the moment for mobile learning and communications

To say that mobile delivery for learning and communications is a hot talking point at the moment is not to say a great deal. Mobile had been a hot talking point in e-learning circles for at least the last five years. And LINE has been designing and delivering mobile solutions since 2001. M-learning has had many false dawns. Read more…

Gareth Jones, Lead Learning Consultant, describes how low-cost video can help in bringing techniques from change management to bear on the design of learning programmes.

Technology and innovation go hand in hand at LINE. But technology isn’t by any means the sole driver of innovation in our work with clients. Sometimes it plays a more indirect, supporting role. Take the case of video, fast becoming a very widely used tool in learning as production costs have plummeted and bandwidth availability has moved rapidly in the opposite direction.

Read more…

Gareth Jones, Lead Learning Consultant, gives his personal viewpoint on the usefulness or otherwise of Apple’s new iPad as a learning device.

The iPad has been described as the most talked-about tablet since Moses came down from Mount Sinai with a couple of stone ones bearing the Ten Commandments. But for the world of technology-supported learning, the January launch of Apple’s device was only the beginning of a fierce debate. Is this the breakthrough device for mobile learning – or is it too limited in its functionality (no multi-tasking, no webcam, etc.) – to be any use for anything, let alone as a learning device? Is its limitation a virtue, increasing its usability and minimising support issues? Or just a complete showstopper?

Read more…

Drawing inspiration from the world of classic rock, we bring you the e-learning trends for 2010: what up, what’s down – and what’s coming back for a second time around.

This isn’t completely a matter of personal prejudice.

We’ve taken as a starting point the Gartner hype curve, which charts emerging technologies as they ascend the Peak of Inflated Expectations, plunge into the Trough of Disillusionment, then haul their way painfully back up the Slope of Enlightenment – finally reaching the Plateau of Productivity. We’ve simply selected the technologies most relevant to e-learning, and added a few others based on our own experience (and personal prejudices!).

Read more…

LINE is 21 this month. Piers Lea reviews 21 years at the helm.

LINE’s business today is about helping clients find their feet in a world where clever use of technology and learning innovation is critical to business success. Read more…

Viewpoint by John Helmer

If you were to judge solely from the blogs, tweets and webinars of learning gurus, from the articles in trade magazines and from talks at conferences, you might believe that the mould has been broken in training. Surely we are now in a new world where learning is all technology-enabled, informal, networked, Web 2.0 literate, blended.
Read more…

Viewpoint by Steve Ash & John Helmer

As the use of technology to enable and transform learning becomes more commonplace within organisations, e-learning is increasingly being asked to address the large-scale challenges that face organisations today. And it is rising to the challenge – with a greater diversity of learning programmes than was ever available before.
Read more…

Piers Lea explains why evaluation should be part of the strategy

In an earlier article published on the LINE website and in E-learning Age Magazine, we issued a call to action for organisations to contribute their stories and evidence of success. A call for our industry to focus on what has been achieved, and how it has been achieved, rather than solely on the efficacy or otherwise of particular technology tools and conceptual models.
Read more…

Donald Clark gives a personal opinion

The recent research report from the US Department of Education, Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning is a landmark in learning technologies. At last we get a rigorous, well-scoped piece of research by top quality advisors, people like Richard Clark and Dexter Fletcher, which gives solid, empirical evidence for the effectiveness of e-learning.
Read more…

Each month e.learning age talks to someone carving out a career in the industry. This month, Archana Venkatraman talks to Piers Lea.
Read more…

If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well.

As far as compliance learning is concerned, this old adage has probably never been more true. Organisations face serious consequences for failing to provide adequate training in compliance-related subjects – and too much compliance training is simply not up to the task. Read more…

Donald Clark gives a personal opinion

This first anniversary of the credit crunch pushed 9/11 memories out of the schedules this autumn. In place of the usual sad scenes of that horrific event, we were treated to the stressed, distressed and finally disbelieving faces of a bunch of bankers in Brooks Brothers suits as they watched the global banking system go into meltdown – a disaster they had each in some part helped to precipitate.

Read more…

In characterising Employee Engagement as a ‘challenge’ for HR, the MacLeod Review seems to be using the language of euphemism so beloved by that people-friendly function; which begs the question: is HR ‘challenged’ when it comes to Employee Engagement?

According to the Economist Intelligence Unit, quoted in the Report, engagement is exactly the type of people issue that HR tends to get separated from (ironically):
Read more…

Hold the front page: happy employees are more productive and more innovative. Hardly a shocker perhaps, but given the continuing need of organisations in today’s climate of globalisation and constant change to get better performance from all levels of staff and management, it’s surely worth focusing on what makes for a happy employee. Read more…

Training in Defence is huge. It’s geared to constantly improving operational capability so that the UK’s armed forces are the best prepared in the modern operational theatre – which arguably they are.

Read more…

Early adopters of e-learning faced many problems: poor uptake of courses, low completion rates, complaints about low levels of interactivity, difficulty of access to courses…While the situation has improved, there are still many challenges ahead.

Read more…

Piers Lea, CEO of LINE, on the importance of seeing e-learning within a vision of learning which fits a company’s culture.

It is becoming generally accepted that in order for an e-learning strategy to succeed there are five main success factors – the five Cs: content, capability, cost, clients – and most importantly, culture.

Read more…

Adopt this list to make the procurement process pain-free

Poor procurement can be the root cause of disaster in many projects. A dodgy start will ensure a dodgy conclusion. The trick is to get things right from the start.

Read more…

Professor Guy Claxton has been doing research into the use of language in learning. His findings are rather worrying. In one observational study, teachers were found to use the word ‘work’ far more often than ‘learning’ (98% to 2%). By simply shifting towards the language of ‘learning’ (learnish) you can see a whole change in attitude by teachers and learners.
Read more…

As learning initiatives grapple with ever more complex challenges, the supplier-buyer relationship needs to change.

The role of e-learning is changing. And with this change of role, a number of assumptions about how e-learning is designed and produced, and who produces it, are being swept away.

Read more…

I’m often challenged by teachers and trainers to provide a list of useful pieces of scientific theory which can be used to change current practice, so here goes. (Note that I had real trouble whittling it down to just ten.)
Read more…

Piers Lea reviews a new report analysing what it means to be “smart”
Have you ever wondered about IQ and what it means?

I don’t think anyone has ever suggested that a high IQ and success in the workplace go hand-in-hand. But if so, how would you measure IQ?

Read more…

Something’s worrying the military in the US and UK at the moment, and they’re right to be worried. Young people – the soldiers, sailors and airmen of the future – are individualistic, soaked in games culture (often military in nature), multitasking, culturally diverse, tolerant and open minded. This is Generation Y, the Millennials, unready for being bossed about within the military command-and-control culture. It’s a face off, with Facebook in the middle.
Read more…

Piers Lea and Donald Clark on how our industry needs to be courageous in taking the next step and deft at encouraging those we work for to do the same.

Read more…