It continues to amaze me how new eLearning can be to some folks. In June I spoke on behalf of a colleague to a group of HR managers, introducing eLearning. I also was interviewed on elearning for a small business magazine in New York in July. Now I’m opening the eLearning Guild’s September Online Forum Introduction to eLearning.
I’ll try to put eLearning into perspective, about how technology gives us new affordances to meet organizational needs, dispel some elearning myths, and of course talk about eLearning strategy. Of course I’ll briefly cover games as part of taking instructional design beyond content-and-quiz or classroom online, and mobile as part of increasing reach.
It’s sometimes hard to realize, when you’ve been using technology to support learning for 30 years, that some people are just coming up to scratch, but that’s the reality, and I do try to live in reality (guided by concept, of course ;). That’s OK, I’m certainly happy to share lessons learned rather than have folks keep making the same mistakes. Maybe we can save them some money now, so they have more for some of the fun stuff that’s just waiting to be done!
If you’re just getting up to speed, I suspect that the Online Forum will be a great way to do it. Hope to see you there!
I’m really looking forward to the next Guild OLF as well. I can’t wait to hear how you present the introduction. I will be doing an intro to Blogs, wikis, and RSS. eLearning in general is still very new to so many and now introducing MORE new technologies can be quite a challenge. BUT the reality is that many orgs actually are just now getting into converting classroom based courses into online content. Here’s another shocker to the elearning community. MOST training departments only do level I and even less to level II assessments of their training. Its shocking to the ISD academics but too those of us living the reality it just seems…well…right on. Connecting learning programs to business drivers just isn’t mainstream as much as we want it too be. So many orgs are just trying to get an LMS installed with the ability to quickly generate a report that says, “our people took all of these courses…seee”.
Once the majority of orgs have that part taken care of then I believe we will begin to see a big push towards the next levels. And everyone will act like its the next big thing even though we’ve all been beating the hell out of that drum for years.
On a brighter note…I love this stuff! And I love talking to leaders about it and helping them make their way through the mess of hype. Its good times to be in eLearning. We’ll learn ’em good, eh? ;-)
Brent, I have been seeing companies, once they take a tactical step into eLearning, looking for guidance to start moving to the ‘next level’, hence my strategy work. It’s more about taking major categorical steps than the smaller things like aligning to organizational goals, but that’s the next step beyond just ‘doing it’ (my *advanced ID* stage).
Good luck with your presentation. You certainly know the ‘blog/wiki/RSS’ stuff!