MindLeaders: Fueling the Learning Revolution

Recalling Our Not-so-Distant Past

Where would your e-Learning program be, today, if not for the Internet? Imagine the frustration that would be visited upon your company if it was suddenly reliant (again) on local data networks, mainframes and physically distributed media for executing its training, learning and organizational development initiatives! Technology has advanced at such a blinding pace that we’re at risk of losing sight of just how recently theses profound advances have come.

Earlier this month, The Science Channel premiered a 4-part documentary, Download: The True Story of the Internet. The series is scheduled for rebroadcast (2 episodes per date) on April 5 & 6.

The series is hosted by John Heilemann who covered the meteoric rise of the Internet and the World Wide Web as a Silicon Valley columnist for Wired magazine. You might also recognize John for his current reporting of the 2008 national presidential races for New York magazine. Below, we’re publishing the Science Channel’s synopsis of the series:

Download: The True Story of the Internet is about a revolution -- the technological, cultural, commercial and social revolution that has radically changed our lives.

And for the first time on television, we hear how it happened from the men and women who made it possible.

From the founders of eBay, Yahoo, Amazon, Netscape, Google and many others, we hear amazing stories of how, in ten short years, the Internet took over our lives. These extraordinary men and women tell us how they went from being geeky, computer obsessed nerds to being 21st-century visionaries in the time it takes most people to get their first promotion. And, how they made untold billions along the way.

The style of the story-telling is up close and personal. With first-hand testimony from the people that matter, we tell a story that has all the excitement of a thriller -- full of battles and back-stabbing, moments of genius and moments of sheer hilarity. You will never surf the net in the same way again.

Download is hosted by technology journalist John Heilemann. He's an edgy, combative, hi-energy New Yorker who never takes anything at face value. He's also a personal friend of most of Silicon Valley's most important characters and he revels in craziness of it all. After all, this is a story in which 20-year-olds become overnight billionaires, create, destroy and re-create more wealth in ten years than the human race has ever seen.

http://science.discovery.com/tv/download/download.html

The effect of web standards and Internet Explorer on e-Learning

Does your online training follow web standards, or Internet Explorer standards? Currently, if you're building something for the web, you have to make that choice. Internet Explorer does not follow the same web standards that Firefox, Macintosh Safari, and other browsers use.

Internet Explorer, by most current counts, holds somewhere around 75-83% of the browser market. That number is probably even higher among corporations, which tend to frown on their people wandering to other software packages on their systems.

At MindLeaders, we know these numbers and watch them closely. Our courses are built in such a way that can't use both the open web standards and the Internet Explorer-specific standards. With as much market share as Internet Explorer holds, we choose to build our courses for IE. We sure feel for - and do hear from! - that 17-25% of people who prefer other browsers.

Microsoft made a big announcement this month: Internet Explorer 8, which released its first beta on March 5, will conform to the same web standards that almost everybody else is using. I'm posting about it for two reasons:

• MindLeaders' courses will continue to work in IE8 when it's released. There are some codes we can use so that Internet Explorer 8 will display our courses using the old IE standards. In the bigger picture, this means that we can begin (we're in the figuring-it-all-out stage now) to build our courses in web standards that will be accessible from all standards-compliant browsers. It won't happen right away, but it will be a cool day when it does!

• This Internet Explorer change means that everyone will need to take the same hard look at any online web materials they've built to see if it's currently Internet Explorer-specific. Are there any changes you'll need to consider for your web-based learning?

No release date has been announced for IE 8 yet, but a second, wider beta is expected in the summer.

How to implement 360-degree training evaluation

I was reading articles today, including one about handling receiving 360-degree feedback. I started thinking about how that would apply to training programs.

In training, our feedback is usually done through evaluations. Most often, we use smile sheets/end-of-course forms to get immediate feedback.

According to the principles of 360-degree feedback, in order to get a complete picture of our training program's performance, we must widen that scope. We need feedback from the students, but we also need feedback from:

• The students' managers, to asses impact on the job
• The students' subordinates (if the class was about leadership or management)
• Other trainers in the company, to get some peer review

The best way to do this is to do an initial survey after the class, and then to also follow up, just like you do with the student, a month or two down the road to see the effects that the training program has had once it's gone into the wild.

The biggest challenge with ideal feedback/evaluation implementation is follow-through, keeping up with all the different surveys and follow-ups that need to be done on all the different training programs that are running.

An annual or semi-annual survey might be the simplest way to cover all those bases. The survey could ask some evergreen questions about training needs within your audience, and then also follow up on each of the training programs that have been run since the last survey to ask for feedback from anyone who has seen an impact or has thoughts/suggestions about them.

What do you do to help keep the evaluation ball rolling? Who else could you involve in your evaluations to wide the angle closer to 360 degrees?

It's course release day at MindLeaders!

MindLeaders has released a whopping 186 new courses today! We're in the midst of a big push for the first half of 2008 to cover a huge number of certifications. And that's in addition to our Office 2007 coverage and our latest business skills series on Communicating with Power and Project Management from a People Perspective.

Our development department is looking a little shell-shocked, but they sure have the goods to show for it!

• Cisco Related Series by MindLeaders CCDA 640-863
• Cisco Related Series by MindLeaders CCNA 640-802
• Cisco Related Series by MindLeaders ICND1 640-822
• Cisco Related Series by MindLeaders ICND2 640-816
• Communicating with Power
• CompTIA A+ Depot Technician 220-604
• CompTIA A+ Essentials 220-601
• CompTIA A+ IT Technician 220-602
• CompTIA A+ Remote Support Technician 220-603
• ITIL Version 2 Foundation Certificate EX0-100
• Java 2 5.0 Programmer Certification 310-055
• Microsoft .NET 2.0 Distributed Apps MCTS 70-529
• Microsoft .NET 2.0 Web Development MCTS 70-528
• Microsoft .NET 2.0 Windows Development MCTS 70-526
• Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 MCTS 70-236
• Microsoft Office Project 2007 MCTS 70-632
• Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007 MCTS 70-630
• Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Admin MCITP 70-444
• Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Data Access MCITP 70-442
• Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Design MCITP 70-443
• Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Solutions MCITP 70-441
• Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Upgrade MCITP 70-447
• Oracle 10g Database Administration II 1Z0-043
• Oracle9i Database Fundamentals II 1Z0-032
• Oracle9i Database Performance Tuning 1Z0-033
• Outlook 2007
• PowerPoint 2007
• Project Management from a People Perspective
• SharePoint 2007
• Windows Vista Configuration MCTS 70-620

To see what else is on the horizon, drop by our development schedule. And as always, we love to hear any suggestions and requests for your top training needs; drop a line to your account executive, in a course evaluation, or in a comment on this blog.

Presentraining - The Blending of Presenting and Training

Last week was occupied in these parts by our all-company meeting. The two days of meetings and conferences brought up something I've been batting around in my head for a few weeks now: the gray, fuzzy line between presentations and training.

I'm defining a "presentation" as any talk that seeks to persuade its listeners about an opinion or fact, and "training" as any meeting that wants to teach its attendees something. Frequently, presentations also seek to teach. And more often than not, training must convince the student to care enough to learn. There are exceptions to the rule, as I've listed in the diagram below, but in reality, most times we stand up in front of a group, it's a presentraining. We have to convince and we have to teach.

This is why Presentation Zen has been on my must-read RSS feed for a while now. Black-and-white bullet points, whether in instructor-led training or e-learning, don't cut it. And in presentations, focusing on the two or three nuggets you want your listeners to walk away with is critical.

I live with one foot in each of these worlds, and I see instructional design and presentation design heading in convergent directions. I think they'll both make much faster headway the more they borrow from each other. What do you think - where do you see these two fields coming together, and where do you see them standing apart?