In November 1959, Donald Kirkpatrick published a series of seminal articles on training evaluation in the ‘Journal of the ASTD’. In the fifty years since, his thoughts (Reaction, Learning, Behavior, and Results) have gone on to evolve into the legendary Kirkpatrick’s Four Level Evaluation Model and become the basis on which learning & development departments can show the value of training to the business. How has the model evolved over fifty years, is it still relevant? As designers of learning, have we applied the model with Don’s intent?
Selecting an LMS is a challenging task and that’s just because it takes care of an important business function and needs to work well. The web today holds a great deal of information on how to select an LMS, LMS Selection tools, directories of leading LMS systems, sample RFIs, and a whole lot of other very useful and handy information. However it is equally important for the decision makers to know what NOT to do while (before and during) selecting an LMS as many of these things aren’t clearly highlighted elsewhere. More so, the don’ts leave a deeper impression!
Mozilla’s Firefox is a preferred web browser for many. Since its last major release in June 2009 it has already crossed one billion downloads and to celebrate that Mozilla Foundation has even launched this website http://www.onebillionplusyou.com.
I’ve been occupied with writing a paper to promote the adoption of mobile learning amongst corporates and enterprises. While trawling through multiple web-links, a pattern of myths about mobile learning emerges. Quite a bit of back and forth about these myths – I’m taking the liberty of listing and describing the five that struck me as odd, and am attempting to debunk them to an extent. I’ll be the first to admit there is always an element of truth behind myths; but with the rate of technological change, quite a few of those ‘truths’ would seem like falsehoods today.
Note: This post has been edited to include some more eLearning and Workplace Learning blogs to the original list and now features 74 blogs in all.
Soon after I posted These are Not Serious Games on the blog and as a discussion on Linked-In, there was a flurry of comments over a couple of days that quickly covered some thoughts about Serious Games.
It seems more and more like this recession will further enhance the position of eLearning amongst various training options an organization could choose from for their learning and development initiatives. In March earlier this year I wrote – ‘while the times are tough, they are on our side’ (by ‘our’ I meant all technology enabled learning solution providers). Then In May I’d posted about the growth of eLearning outsourcing as projected by an India-based research agency – Valuenotes and more recently about how training companies are adopting eLearning using us as their training back-office. All of these lead upto what I have always believed in – that this downturn will lead to renewed growth in eLearning industry. Here’s more to support that thought.
Recently I’ve been consulting with a customer on the design of a series of digital learning games for sales training. Most clients have done their research online about serious games, and find the whole gamut of samples, demos, etc. Clients typically have some thoughts about what they feel are serious games and whose game-play and mechanics they intended to emulate. Just one look at their collated ‘portfolio’ was enough to tell me that none of the content in the portfolio was really a serious game. What followed was the diplomatic squashing preconceived ideas about what serious games were in their (client’s) training context.
The economic meltdown in the last 12-18 months has hit training companies hard. Corporate training budgets have been slashed and travel expenditure has been cut. The pressure on reducing costs has never been greater.
