In continuation to our weekly roundup of the best links shared on Twitter and Facebook, here is a collection of our top 15 links from the last week, each accompanied by a quick brief.

1. Learning Management System Acquisition Statistics
More organizations are looking to invest in Learning Management Systems as the economy slowly improves. This article on the Brandon Hall blog mentions new statistics on this new technology.
Read it here

I attended the CLO Summit in Mumbai last week and listened to some wonderful speakers over the course of the two day event. I felt one speaker that really delivered a punch, was Bhavdeep Singh, CEO Fortis Healthcare. His session titled “Learning and Development – an integral competency of a CEO” was full of very powerful messages for CLOs, L&D professionals, and other CEOs.  He has implemented several L&D initiatives successfully including a mentoring program at Fortis, so whatever he says is based on his first-hand experience. This is from the real-world, not preaching from the pulpit.

As a learning organization, we understand the importance of keeping our ears and minds open to new knowledge and ideas. And with our blog, this had been more possible than ever.

Over the period of 21 months, since the inception of our blog, we have not just shared our knowledge, but have gained much more in return. Through your comments, your suggestions, your answers – we have experienced ‘learning’ and beyond!

Each week sees us sharing interesting articles (including news, reports, statistics etc.) from various spheres of learning and technology on varied social networking platforms. While many of you follow us on Twitter and Facebook, we do realize that keeping a track of all the tweets/ posts, given the high proliferation and dynamic nature of information, is difficult, to say the least. Hence, to ensure that you do not miss out on all the great links we share and also with a view to building a knowledge repository, every week, we shall be publishing a quick summary post of our best shared material from the week before. Read it, share it or bookmark it.

Spent the day Friday attending the CLO Summit India, a day well spent with some nice presentations and as is the wont with such conferences, some not-so-nice presentations. While it didn’t behoove such a conference to include sales pitches, it didn’t surprise me all that much. I’d rather focus on the interesting bits, and perhaps the most interesting was a presentation made by Dilip Chenoy, CEO and MD of the National Skill Development Corporation of India .

This week I focus on how a basic understanding of the Gestalt principles can help create harmonious design and improve the odds that the intended message is conveyed to the learners we design for.

The Theory
The Gestalt theory suggests that when a person looks at an intricate combination of elements, the “whole” is perceived before its “individual” parts. Consequently, the “whole” also becomes more than the sum of its parts. To put it simply, the theory refers to how visual input is perceived by humans.

We’ve had our fair share of digital learning game development projects; and a recent one threw a spoke in our design wheels like never before. Thought I should share the top five things we learned from our experience.

1. Be absolutely certain about the game objective; what must the player do to win? – We had varied ideas and that resulted in a multitude of win-states, not nice for a learning game. Make sure to tie down to a singular objective, and one that is achievable given the game mechanics. Eliminate game mechanics that do not explicitly tie to the outcome.

Upside has always prided ourselves on being tech and web-savvy. Our capabilities in both spheres reflect in our website. Our revamped website was recently featured in a CSS mania gallery.

Earlier today, I stumbled on this bit of research on the Gartner site; while it dates back to August there’s some interesting speculation about the Future of Work.

“People will swarm more often and work solo less. They’ll work with others with whom they have few links, and teams will include people outside the control of the organization,”

“In addition, simulation, visualization and unification technologies, working across yottabytes of data per second, will demand an emphasis on new perceptual skills.”

-       Tom Austin, Vice President and Gartner Fellow

The LMS market has evolved significantly over the last decade or so. And there probably are more than 250 LMS systems in circulation around the world. While the large LMS systems are simply out-of-reach of a majority of businesses, most of the small LMS systems don’t necessarily have all the necessary features your business needs for efficient and effective learning management – be it for internal staff or for your customers. To top it all, varied and complicated pricing models make it nothing short of a herculean task to identify and select the right LMS – one that has the necessary and also forward-looking features, is available as a SaaS and is priced with you in mind.

When was the last time you were so involved in what you were doing that you forgot yourself? You lost track of time? You were ‘in the zone’?

All of us can recall such moments – while reading a book, listening to music, playing a sport, in an online computer game. But I wonder how many of us have felt this during an online course, or inside a classroom when being taught?

In continuation to our series of monthly roundup posts, here is a collection of our top 5 posts for October, each accompanied by a quick brief.

1. Moving To eLearning
Lists and explains some of the key change factors that lead organizations to adopt eLearning, stand-alone and as a part of the training blend. While some of these factors simply translate to ‘Business Needs’, others determine the ‘Readiness of the Organization’ to adapt to eLearning.