I came across this mind map by Cammy Bean which covers nearly all the tools available for creating/authoring eLearning content. She tries to find answers to three simple questions regarding each tools mentioned in the mind map –

- When do I use it?
- What do I like about it?
- What do I not like about it?

I am pleased to share that our flagship and award-winning Learning Management System, UpsideLMS, has been named as one of the “Five Emerging Learning Management Systems (LMSs) to Watch” by Brandon Hall,  chairman of Brandon Hall Research in Chief Learning Officer magazine’s July 2010 edition.  UpsideLMS is a fully-featured social learning management system offering integrated support for formal and informal learning.

Idea picked up from Twitter

Ever so often I get asked what’s so great about games and learning using games. An answer I use just as often is that it’s all about ‘play’. In this video Dr. Jaak Panskepp talks about his research into play and its benefits. While in this context it doesn’t directly tie to eLearning, I felt this tiny video would be interesting to post to our blog. Take a look:

The iPhone’s revolutionary user interface has changed the way we look at mobile devices. The iPhone SDK let’s you create native applications for the device. To assist the development of applications, Apple has provided the user interface guidelines document which provides information about types of applications you can develop and user interface guidelines to make effective applications.

Last week I attended a day-long certificate workshop at the inaugural mLearnCon in San Diego titled Creating a successful m-learning strategy: From Planning to Implementation conducted by Judy Brown, Rovy Branon, Jason Haag, and Chris Raasch. The workshop was well designed and gave a wide range of information along with templates and charts that could be useful for the beginners and the slightly more experienced professionals in the field.

Mobile is surely the future of learning. I believe that and have written about it earlier – here and here. The advent of 3G (with 4G looming on the horizon) and the prevalence of powerful handheld devices have made me believe that rich media is the way to go for m-learning.

I attended mLearnCon at San Diego earlier this week expecting to see what’s being done with all the bandwidth and device capabilities at hand.

After a few years of hype, mobile learning has now started flourishing; the advent of new generation of mobile devices, high-speed network access, powerful mobile browsers and better native apps are all contributing to this. There is still a lack of standardization across devices and amongst networks across geographical areas resulting in mlearning content development being somewhat constrained.

Before beginning to develop mLearning on their own, they should keep in mind some technical considerations. Earlier we’ve mentioned some tools that can assist you in mLearning applications. However, each one needs a fair bit of knowledge and skills before they can actually implement solutions using these tools.

The LMS has been a hot discussion topic for some time now. There have been posts discussing its survival and a few posts before that discussing its future – Jane Hart posted what is the future of the lms reviewing useful of LMS, followed up by a similar post by Harold Jarche suggesting LMS is no longer the centre of the universe. Clark Quinn brought in a little balance by highlighting what the LMS could be used for and to what extent in his post – a case for the LMS.

I wanted to do a quick SWOT analysis of the LMS to get some understanding on the LMS scenario today.

Here is a very quick SWOT analysis of the LMS:

Yes, I’ve not been blogging as regularly as I might have liked to. I’ve been busy with projects – bread and butter.

We’ve always focused on instructional design being essential to the design of courseware. That’s certainly true, it’s the first step to make a learning solution instructionally sound. The next in line is to make it interesting, engaging, interactive. Too many solutions fail at that crucial stage. I’ve seen too many hours of what is commonly termed ‘shovelware’ that result from this failure.