Instructional Design Skills on Your Team

Creating a world-class training program, like most other big projects, is not the responsibility of a single person; it takes a team to make something great. Think about all the pieces a learner touches when they go through an effective training program — administrators, instructors, online infrastructure, multimedia, online resources, live training, assessments, etc.

Training programs are complex things made up of multimedia, processes, and design and more that require a wide array of skills.

You don’t want one person’s DIY project to represent your entire company’s knowledge, workflows, and best practices; you want the best talent for each job!

Here are some areas of expertise and skills you want on your training team to create an awe-inspiring training program. It’s likely you will find people who can wear multiple hats but it can’t all rest on the shoulders of one person.

Instructional Design

This is an instructional design focused blog so obviously it’s going to be on here. ID is the skill of collecting your learning requirements, designing the end-to-end process of how learners are trained and assessed to meet those requirements. The plan created by the ID determines how all other aspects of the program are produced.

A training program without instructional design might miss the point of training despite doing everything else right. You need instructional design skills to analyze your organization, design curriculum, build training prototypes, create effective assessment strategies, and interpret the results.

Writing

Whether writing scripts for a video, technical documentation, or chapters in a training manual, communicating clearly is essential in training. A training program without good writing is confusing, vague, and a slog to get through. Writers take key points and concepts and convey them in the most effective way regardless of the medium they are writing in.

Presenting

It’s not easy capturing the attention of your audience and delivering your knowledge smoothly and effectively. Having a great presenter means great live seminars, webinars, and recordings that draws in your learners. A training program without good presenters means you might be losing you learner’s attention even though your learning content is solid.

Graphics

Graphics in the form of info-graphics, charts, illustrations, styles, and more take your materials to the next level and helps your learners easily conceptualize, understand, memorize your content. It’s not just about looking good, but taking difficult concepts and bringing them to life (looking good helps too!). A training program without graphics lacks clarity and memorability.

Video filming and editing

Multimedia is a great way to present your learning content with presentations, demonstrations, workflows, animations, and much more. In many cases, multimedia is the best way to teach your lesson (could you teach someone to tie a shoe with written text alone?). Video filming and editing skills open up many possibilities for your training program.

Software development

Programmers make systems work or multiple systems work together. If you need to store data from an online form, automate a process that takes lots of human hours, or create a completely custom workflow, you will need software development skills on your team.

Conclusion

Who is on your training team and how do you divide your tasks based on their skills? Do you have the skills on your team to create a great training program? Identifying the skills required and dividing your roles up optimally means having a great end product for your efforts.

Learn more about Cogcentric and our customizable Fabric LMS!

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Instructional Designers: Assemblers or Directors?

Leave a Comment / LMS / Becky

Instructional designers are not primarily assemblers, although it might be easy to associate instructional designers with some commonly used tools (such as: Captivate, Storyline, Sharepoint, WordPress, Fabric, etc) and assume that’s all they do. These tools are great for assembling concepts, multimedia, quizzes and more into a tangible package, but that is just one piece of an instructional designer’s job.

Most instructional designers know that there’s more to it; but are the other stakeholders on the same page? I think an instruction designer is more like a movie director than a technician. You might not feel like you’re Stanley Kubrick or Steven Spielberg, but let’s look at the similarities.

eLearning content is a creative medium

Your industry might not be as fun as filming Jaws or E.T., but training content is a creative product. There are an infinite number of ways you can design your content to communicate the message you want to tell. It’s your job to invent something that clicks most with your audience. You’ve got to get creative!

Working with a team

Instructional designers are not lone wolves. You need provide direction for your writers, your filming team, your graphic designers, your coders, your Subject Matter Experts, and your acting talent. Imagine a movie written, directors, filmed, and acted by the same person—sounds like a box office bomb.

Using technology

Directors need to be technical even if they aren’t working directly with the technology; you can’t direct without understanding how the cameras, sound, editing, and special effects work. In the same way, an instructional designer might not be filming instructional videos, programming the LMS, or creating the graphics for a course; but they need to understand and be in control of the process.

Making your vision happen

Ultimately, as an instructional designer, your job is not about any one thing but doing whatever it takes to make your vision happen. Your stakeholders might not care what camera you use, what LMS you are publishing on, or what editors you decide to make your content in. Your job isn’t tied to one thing—your job is to make the whole thing come together in the end like a classic movie.

Summary

In the end, instructional design is not the same thing as directing a movie. However, it’s interesting to look at how the role is implemented and perceived in your organization.

Do you feel like your role as an instructional designer has been too “small” or otherwise misunderstood within your organization? Have you been in a situation where you felt like there was too much to do in your role? Have you found creative approaches to making your vision happen? Send us your story, we love to hear from our community!

Learn more about Cogcentric and our customizable Fabric LMS!

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What’s the Deal with SCORM?

Leave a Comment / LMS / Becky

Everyone working in eLearning should be aware of SCORM and xAPI even if you don’t work directly with eLearning tools or code. That’s because SCORM (and xAPI) is not a specific tool or technology but a big-picture set of standards that ensure eLearning content is shareable and reusable.

What is SCORM?

SCORM (which stands for Shareable Content Object Reference Model) is a set of standards for creating training materials that was developed by the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Initiative from the Office of the United States Secretary of Defence. It was introduced as a guideline to creating eLearning content that is modular and reusable across multiple systems. That means that a SCORM lesson doesn’t have to be tied to a single course, learning management system, department, or organization. The ADL (and many other organizations) realized that this was hugely important when creating, maintaining, and tracking large amounts eLearning materials.

Imagine you build an awesome new training lesson as a PDF (not exactly eLearning but its digital). Your lesson is so great that another organization wants to use it for their training as well. You can easily give them your PDF files but you’d also need to give them a lot more information if they want to successfully use your lesson as part of their program.

What are all the parts of the lesson (videos, images, documents, etc)? In what order should a learner complete the lessons? Who records that a learner has completed the lesson? These are the kinds of problems that SCORM tries to solve. SCORM itself is not tied to any single company, content, or tool.

How does it work?

There are 2 parts to making SCORM work: the LMS and the eLearning content. Both need to be speaking the same language.

The LMS needs to know what to do with SCORM content that it is given. It also needs to listen for important events from the content as the learner is using it (“Quiz passed!”, “Quiz failed!”, etc). On the flip side, eLearning content needs to clearly indicate how it is meant to be deployed and it also needs to send the important messages to the LMS.

SCORM standards tell LMS developers and eLearning designers EXACTLY how this information must be communicated so they can each build their own piece and know that they will work perfectly together.

A few technical details

The primary technology used by SCORM is Javascript, the main language used to control behaviours in web browsers. A SCORM compliant LMS listens for specific instructions in javascript from the learning content.

The most common instructions include Initialize (get ready to receive data), Terminate/Finish (store the completed data), Set Value (set a specific variable to a given value), and Get Value (get a saved value back). The values you save are the key to storing data in SCORM. Some of the most important variables to record are the Completion Status (completed vs incomplete) and a Score. Developers can also store individual question responses or time spent on the content.

A SCORM complaint LMS is responsible for listening, storing, and retrieving this data for later use.

How can I create SCORM content?

You probably don’t need to worry about the LMS side of SCORM but you and any content creators you work with are in control of ensuring the content you create is SCORM compliant.

Design: it all starts with design. When creating content, you are in control of the tools and methods you use to create your content ensuring that it is SCORM compliant. This includes both the technologies you choose and the instructional design you implement. Learning content that meets all the technical requirements to be SCORM compliant but doesn’t make sense outside a specific context is not shareable or reusable!

Configuration and tools: many authoring tools such as Adobe Captivate or Articulate Storyline include SCORM support — you just have ensure you set up and export your content with the appropriate SCORM settings. These tools ensure the content you export is speaking the right language.

Programming: SCORM is not tied to any particular tool and any eLearning content can be made SCORM compliant by programming it to communicate with an LMS.

SCORM started with version 1.0 in 1999 and since then has evolved; the most recent incarnation of SCORM is called Experience API (or xAPI). While the details of the technology have changed, the underlying idea has stayed the same: setting a standard for LMS’s and eLearning content to speak the same language and ensuring eLearning content is sharable, reusable, and trackable.

Learn more about Cogcentric and our customizable Fabric LMS!

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CMS vs LMS: What’s the Difference?

Leave a Comment / LMS / Becky

Ever since the internet came and took over our lives and our work, programmers have been creating online management systems. Customer relationship management, content management, learning management, and so on.

Each management system did something unique that made it specialized for its purpose. But the number of systems that became available diluted the meaning and made it hard for users and organizations to determine what’s best for them. Let’s take a quick look at Learning Management Systems (LMS) and what makes them specialized for learning apart from other management systems such as Content Management Systems (CMS).

The always connected nature of the internet made it perfect for centralizing important data for storage and collaboration. Data could mean anything from text articles, multimedia, inventory, personal information, and more. For all this data, or content, there had to be a way to get it into and out of the system and the amount of content could grow to be massive. Manually coding your static website to publish all this content became impossible so content management systems were created.

Today, 38.4% of all websites are run on WordPress, you might have heard of it. Shoppify, Joomla and Drupal make up 2.9%, 2.3%, and 1.5% of sites respectively. For many companies, Microsoft Sharepoint is the go to content management system internally. It turns out that all this content on the internet needs to be managed somehow!

What LMSs Bring to the Table

Learning management evolved into a different specialization from content management. This is where systems like Moodle, Canvas, Blackboard, Absorb, and Fabric stepped up. What did these programs add to the mixture that made them especially suited for learning?

Content Structure

LMS developers realized that learning content simply is not structured like a website or blog. Your math textbook was not organized into categories with articles sorted by most likes. No, it was structured into chapters and lessons and started with foundational concepts that increased in complexity. Learning management systems needed to provide ways to structure content to improve learning, not encourage casual reading.

Progress Tracking

The management part of learning means that there must be some record keeping on who has learned what. In schools this is done through certificates, diplomas, and degrees—you get a physical piece of paper that signifies that you have successfully learned a specific set of skills and knowledge. This proof is necessary to show other people what you are able to do (e.g. get hired). An LMS needs to do the same thing if it’s going to be useful.

Assessment and Marking

The other part of managing learning is assessing how the content was learned through assessment. We remember these from school as exams and report cards and, whether we liked it or not, they were an important part of our learning experience. It gave both students and teachers a tool to identify areas where the student needed help or where they could be challenged more. These functions are as useful in the workplace as they are in an academic setting.

Conclusion: The Right Tool for the Job

Training departments that try to build their training programs on Sharepoint or WordPress will quickly run into problems when it comes to structuring their content in an optimal way for learning, providing proof that the training program has been completed, and recording how well the learners internalized the knowledge. The results from these attempts are often kludgy and inefficient.

Learning management systems provide critical features that are specialized for learning in the areas of content structure, progress tracking, and assessment. They saw that content management systems were not equipped to handle learning and added features based on best practices in education and academia that everyone is familiar with like certificates, report cards, and text books.

That said, many technologies evolve and content management systems that allow other developers to build extensions like WordPress and Joomla are able to have LMS features added on to the base CMS. Regardless, it is the fundamental features and the design of the product that make it a fit for your learning purposes.

Have you tried using a content management tool as a learning management system in your organization before? How did it go?

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eLearning and Scaffolding

Leave a Comment / LMS / Becky

Making your eLearning materials interactive always sounds great at the beginning of a project. Interactivity has become synonymous with engaging and fun.

But there’s a catch. Interactivity can be very tricky to execute, especially if you don’t have a deliberate and realistic design to implement right at the start. How should we design eLearning materials that are also interactive?

Interactivity for the sake of interactivity?

In many cases interactivity starts out as a suggestion to make materials less boring. This is not wrong, but should interactivity really be the ultimate goal when designing learning content?

In my experience, I’ve seen a simple desire for interactivity blow up into difficult projects that, in the end, did not see the light of day. When eLearning authors start down the path of creating content for the sake of interactivity, they risk the following outcomes:

The activity is not fun and is not used
The activity requires too much resources and is never finished
The activity is finished but underdeveloped and doesn’t work
The activity does not improve learning and wastes time
Interactivity is risky because it doesn’t state a specific goal you are working towards, it’s just a feeling

You might design and develop in circles trying to capture a “fun” feeling but as instructional designers we usually have compliance, assessments, ROI’s, and other things to worry about!

Effective learning should be your goal, not just interactivity. If you are looking to make your content more engaging, I suggest you start with the concept of scaffolding instead of delving into the depths of “interactivity”—and you’ll likely end up adding interactive elements along the way.

Scaffolding in eLearning

Scaffolding is the concept of providing learning supports for your learners and gradually removing those supports as the learner progresses.

Think of these supports as training wheels on a bike that are eventually taken off when the rider can balance themselves; or a teacher that teaches addition with real apples until the students have mastered the skill of apple counting.

Educators over time have found numerous creative ways to use scaffolding in their teaching, reading out loud the same lines from a textbook over and over can only go so far.

In eLearning, scaffolding can be applied in a digital medium through helpful tables, questions, info graphics, hints, all the way up to complex games. We start with the goal of reinforcing the learning and think of the best method to do that. Sometimes it doesn’t have to be “interactive” in a traditional sense. The idiom “lefty loosey, righty tighty” is a mostly true mnemonic device to help you remember which direction loosens or tightens a screw or bolt (or many other practical items).

This minor device can be a big help to students (e.g. in carpentry or auto repair); they might be able to complete example repair tasks faster or be less likely to “screw up” and feel more confident in their abilities.

Let’s say “Lefty loosey, righty tighty” is now a scaffold we want to introduce in our eLearning. It can be presented online very simply with text (maybe spice it up with some font styles or graphics). We can use animations to demonstrate the idea. We can even build an interactive game where users have to click and drag a virtual socket wrench on screen. When we start with the scaffold, we start with an idea that will help the learner learn. From there we can use text, multimedia, or interactivity to get our point across but the focus is always on the learning.

Scaffolding doesn’t specify how interactive the device is, it can be a single graphic or a full-fledged 3D simulation, it is just concerned about helping the learner in a specific situation to move on. In eLearning, we can’t hover over the learner and speak directly to them. We have to make our scaffolding activities part of the content — ask probing questions, present mnemonic devices, play a video, or more. Check if the learner gets the material and if not, provide more tools to help them get it. Engage the learner first by providing them content to help them learn (assume the learner wants to learn the materials and not struggle), then design interactive elements where appropriate.

Conclusion

When you receive the next stack of source materials to turn into an eLearning course, resist the urge to make it interactive just for the sake of interactivity (however dry the materials may be). Instead, do what teachers have been doing for ages — think about the materials and ways that you can clarify, demonstrate, and reinforce the core concepts. The difference for an eLearning instructional designer is to consider the tools you have to build and deliver the activity — they might look quite different from a teacher in the classroom but the approach is very much the same.

Are you an instructional designer looking for the cleanest and easiest way to build scaffolded eLearning content online? Get in touch with us!

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5 Tips for Instructional Designers Without Formal Training

Leave a Comment / LMS / Becky

It is becoming more and more common for businesses to dedicate specialized resources to organizational learning.

As such, more workers are getting degrees in fields such as educational technology, educational psychology, instructional design and more to fill this need. A degree, diploma or certificate in an education related field, while very useful, it’s not necessary to work in instructional design. In fact, some of the best educators I have had a chance to work with did not have formal training but were experts in their own field that adapted to an educational role through experience and self-study.

Here are some tips if you are working in an instructional design role without formal training. These are attitudes and approaches that often come as a result of formal training that might not be explicitly stated.

1. Catch up on some best practices

Instructional design is an area with lots of history and lessons learned (and documented) over time. Check out some best practices before you jump into your first project! Instructional designers have found concepts like ADDIE (a framework for creating educational content), Learning Objectives (the practice of specifying specific objectives when creating educational content), Bloom’s taxonomy (a categorization of types of knowledge) and more to be useful in the creation of training programs.

Don’t know what these terms mean? Check your nearest search engine for a rundown of these concepts or sign up to Fabric. However you choose to get this knowledge, it is a great place to start getting into instructional design.

2. Treat every project like an experiment

One of the most important parts of formal training in instructional design or educational technology is a focus on research methods and experimentation. Don’t assume anything to be true without evidence. Determine the results you are aiming for, collect data, measure the outcomes, and iterate – keep improving your content. You might just learn something new about your audience, your content, your strategies and learning in general!

If you think a particular video or activity is going to really help your learners, build it! But don’t forget to analyze the results in the form of assessment results, surveys and business metrics to check that your training has the intended impact. What you learn about your organization will inform how to improve your current content and make your future content even better.

3. Defend your statements and decisions

Instructional designers must have an attitude of always asking “why?” about their own content. Every decision you make about your training program should be justified; and if not, maybe you should investigate if the current solution really is the best way to do things.

There is no magic bullet that will solve all of your training problems on the first try. Even solutions that have worked elsewhere might not be the best fit in your specific situation. When you start working as an instructional designer, your job is not just to do what you’re told, you need to come up with the direction of your training program yourself and be able to defend your work!

4. Check the literature before making design decisions

Just because you’re not in school doesn’t mean you can start avoiding readings altogether. Formal training will always cover a lot of content to give you a starting point for informing your decisions. Knowing how many things the average person can remember in short-term memory or how quickly they might forget a new fact can help you design better training programs.

A formal course might cover hundreds of these useful tidbits but that’s just a starting point. This information is available without formal training too, you just need to look for it. When designing a specific portion of a training program whether it’s the use of multimedia, gamification, or assessment, take some time to read up on the research in that area to make the most informed decision possible.

5. Design holistically

A good training program should work as a whole; it’s not just one really impressive piece. When your learning content, multimedia, activities, assessments, surveys, and data collection all work together, you get great training with the numbers to prove it. Experts who come from fields other than education tend to focus on the areas that they are comfortable (demonstrations, presentations, one-on-one meetings, etc) but to launch a successful training program, every aspect must be functioning properly.

Sometimes certain parts must be simplified or cut in order to make sure other parts are working. Many managers who are used to in-person training may find that time spent doing in-person training can be better put towards producing reusable videos on the subject. Designing holistically means considering your training program as a whole and not sticking to just the things you are most comfortable with.

Conclusion

Formal training in instructional design is not contained in a single book or practice; it is a foundation for how you think about your job. But this foundation is not exclusively provided by colleges and universities – it is an ongoing attitude and practice that can be applied by anyone working in instructional design. But don’t just take my word for it, explore it for yourself!

If you are an instructional designer (with or without a formal educational background) interested in learning more about instructional design tools and practices, get in touch with us!

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Build vs Buy: Learning Management Systems

Leave a Comment / LMS / Becky

It’s a question I’ve been asked many times as an eLearning consultant and as a developer: is it better to build your own LMS or buy one off the shelf?

Having worked in organizations that bought, built, and eventually sold LMSs, I’ve been lucky to see some of the good and bad outcomes from each case. Let’s take a look at each option and see when they might be appropriate.

Building

Building means hiring developers and designers to create the LMS for your organization. When the product is done, you will own the code you created outright. You and your team create the system from the ground up including: provisioning servers, selecting a platform to build on, writing the code, producing the graphics, and more.

Things to consider:

Who to hire to design and develop?
When do you need to launch?
Where will the LMS be hosted?
How will you maintain the LMS long term?
After building the LMS, you still need to create content!

Pros

Designed and built according to your exact requirements to fit your organization no matter how specific they are.
Expandable in the future; as long as you have developers you can keep adding to your system.
Totally controlled by you; no other company can change or remove features from your system.

Cons

Expensive and time consuming; developing and maintaining software takes special skills and a lot time so it’s not going to be cheap!
Uncertainty and risk; what you set out to build doesn’t always come out exactly as planned at the price you estimated.
No existing documentation or support; because your LMS is completely custom built, you won’t have a community or support team to help, it’s just you.

Buying

There are many companies out there that provide LMS as a service. These are owned and maintained by the company and licensed out for their customers. Although the product is already built, you will usually find options to customize how the product looks and functions, with some limitations. When buying an LMS service, you will never own the code itself; think of it more as renting an LMS.

Things to consider

Which LMS is right for you?
What customizations will you require?
Besides the LMS itself, what else does the company provide (e.g. training, documentation, support, etc)?

Pros

Faster and cheaper to deploy with less development cost or time needed (just your customizations).
Already designed and developed for existing requirements; you can judge the final result for yourself while know the system has been implemented and working in other situations (ideally similar to yours).
Development and maintenance are handled for you; you don’t need to hire a team long-term to perform basic maintenance on the LMS.
Existing support, documentation, and community; expert help is just an email away.

Cons

It can be difficult to change or add features; if your LMS is managed by another company who have many other clients to worry about, new features are prioritized according to their schedule, not yours.
Your product is dependent on the LMS company; changes to their company may affect your system.

Making the Decision

The choice of whether to build or buy comes down to your specific situation.

Building is great if you have the time, resources, and expertise to create and maintain a new product (in addition to the rest of your responsibilities). For companies that have very specific training requirements, building might be necessary to meet those needs. Companies who are heavily training focused (e.g. online education programs) can also find value in building their own platform that they own and control so their product won’t be disrupted or depend on an external company with different goals. Keep in mind that programming an LMS and designing instructional materials are two completely different jobs and you’ll need to plan for both!

Buying is appropriate if you don’t want to focus resources on developing the LMS and just want to get your training program launched in the shortest possible time for the lowest cost. When surveying the market, you’ll find that each LMS is specialized for specific use cases with insights that might take you years to figure out when developing yourself. There might be an LMS out there that is a perfect fit for you! Once you have chosen an LMS to buy, you need to get you and the team trained and ready to start producing materials. You may find that your resources are best spent making the training materials as good as can be.

Ultimately when making a decision, it’s best to explore a bit of both options beforehand. First, document your organization’s training requirements. Do any existing LMSs meet your requirements (maybe with some customization)? What features do you see in the market that you like? Do you have the resources and expertise to build an LMS in-house? Who in your organization will manage the LMS long-term? Do you have a plan on where to hire or contract programmers and designers for the job?

Conclusion

Whether to build or buy your LMS is a tough choice that depends on many factors. Take the time to analyze your own organization and what’s available out there. There are many things to consider but the main thing is to have a vision for your training program and to choose the path that’s most likely to make it come to life.

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What’s the Deal with Tin Can and xAPI?

Leave a Comment / LMS / Becky

The first thing to get out of the way when we discuss Tin Can or Experience API (xAPI) is that they are the same thing.

“Project Tin Can” was just the name of the original research project that resulted in xAPI. So that’s one less term you need to look up.

xAPI is a standard format for communicating and storing learning data. It tells everyone what data to store and how to write it down whenever a learner completes a learning experience. Storing individual experiences, not just quiz scores, is the driving factor of xAPI and Tin Can. But where does xAPI fit with the rest of the educational technologies out there including SCORM? Is it a replacement for SCORM? We’ll find out more as we dig into this topic!

Background

xAPI was created by the Advanced Digital Learning Initiative (https://www.adlnet.gov/), a program of the US government to promote best practices in digital learning. They knew that a common language that allowed many different learning software to communicate with each other were crucial for the industry.

At the time Tin Can was first imagined, around 2010, the internet was evolving and new web development principles were emerging. 2 examples that we see applied in the xAPI architecture are client-server separation (a web app should separate storage and interface so that they are independent on each other—thus xAPI focused only on storage) and statelessness (the data in each request should contain all the information required to understand the request without additional info from the server—thus xAPI includes many more variables in the stored data). Part of the need for xAPI was to keep up with modern best practices.

Like SCORM, xAPI provides a standard for the communication of learning data between systems. It further recognized that learning can happen formally or informally in many different contexts and formats; simply recording that something is “complete” or “incomplete” is not enough anymore. Educators want to know if it was a live seminar, an online quiz, an observational assessment, or more. All these experiences are significant to a learner’s journey so why not record them all?

xAPI stores each learning experience (whether it’s answering a question, completing a quiz, attending a seminar, or completing a course) as a “statement” encoded in a format called Javascript Object Notation (JSON). A statement can include some or all of the following information:

Actor: who is doing the learning? This includes a name and an email to identify the learner.
Verb: what did they accomplish? xAPI includes many possible verbs to describe what the learner did (for example: passed, failed, completed, attempted, attended, commented, and more).
Object: a reference to the learning content including a URI to the resource.
Context: is the activity a part of something bigger?
Result: Did they pass or fail? What was their score?
Timestamp: when did the learner complete the experience?
Authority: who is providing the training activity?
Extensions: if there is any relevant data that doesn’t fit in the areas above, put them here.

A learner’s records could include hundreds or thousands of statements and these need to be stored in a Learning Record Store (LRS) to be used later. The end result of xAPI is meaningful data about a user’s learning experiences. Having all of the information above on a learner would give you a very thorough picture of what they have learned so far!

It’s important to note that xAPI is only concerned about the format of the data, not the technology used to listen in so it seeks to cover a broad set of learning situations, not just LMSs and Elearning.

xAPI (Tin Can) vs SCORM

To talk about how xAPI is different from SCORM, we need to revisit certain factors about SCORM. In our previous post, we described how SCORM defined standards for interactions between an LMS and the learning content. SCORM focused on questions, passing grades, and scores specifically in eLearning modules. It listened for when the learner started a module, entered a question response, and ended a module.

Compare that with what xAPI stores above—xAPI is designed to handle many more situations than SCORM. Data collected with xAPI is also much more descriptive; that’s useful if the data needs to be shared across companies, organizations, or schools. A key point to understand is that xAPI is a format for storing data, not an end-to-end tool that does it for you.

So does xAPI replace SCORM altogether? Not exactly. As we mentioned, xAPI is a format for recording data that goes way beyond SCORM, it does not tell you how to listen for that data or interact with learning content at run-time. SCORM requires javascript to interact with content while xAPI leaves it up to the developers and authors to handle those interactions. Technically, you could use SCORM to listen for user data and store that data in an xAPI format, you would just be limited to the variables available in SCORM. It is most likely that the creators intended for developers to come up with their own solutions for handling interactivity beyond SCORM but to store it in a standard format.

Pros and Cons of xAPI

xAPI made changes to the SCORM concept in order to expand on the kinds of learning data that can be captured in standard set of records. It provides:

More robust details on learning activity
Records that can be shared between different contexts
Flexibility to fit more learning situations

However, with more power and flexibility comes more work. xAPI provides many more ways to store learning data but it is up to instructional designers and programmers to make use of them. It is great to be able to store the results of observational assessments, but it means that developers must create tools that would enable that since many existing elearning authoring tools are not yet equipped for it.

Ultimately, that is the challenge of xAPI. SCORM provided 8 standard functions that LMSs and learning content authoring tools had to account for. Once those were programmed into these products, instructional designers could create whatever content they liked knowing those functions would be handled without any additional codes. However, with the unlimited possibilities of xAPI and less restricting requirements, it is much more likely that it involves some coding.

How to start using xAPI

OK, you are sold on xAPI but how can you actually start using it in a real world setting? Just like with SCORM, xAPI requires the LMS and learning content to be compliant.

First, you’ll need to set up a Learning Record Store (LRS). This is where the data is sent, stored, and then retrieved for reports. This will need to be part of your LMS or at least integrated with it. Look out for LMSs that support xAPI or build an LRS yourself.

Next, you’ll need to ensure the content you published sends xAPI data to your LRS. This can be configured through a content authoring tool (that supports xAPI) or custom developed with your learning content (e.g. a web page that submits data to the LRS on completion).

Lastly, you need a way to get your xAPI data back out from your LRS as useful reports. This should be part of the LMS but, as always, you can build it yourself.

xAPI is most powerful in the hands of developers, so if you really want to make the most of the learning data you collect, you might want to look into a developer or development team for your project.

Are you looking to implement xAPI or SCORM in your organization or want to just learn more about it? Get in touch with us!

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Technical Knowledge Instructional Designers Didn’t Know They Needed: Servers and Clients

Leave a Comment / LMS / Becky

One of the things I enjoy about working as both an instructional designer and as a programmer is using technical knowledge to come up with new instructional design solutions and showing them to other instructional designers.

While technical knowledge is not a must-have in an instructional design role, it definitely helps when planning an organization-wide training program or trying to use the right terms at an I.T. meeting.

In this post we’ll cover the idea of web servers and clients, one of the key concepts of the world wide web, and how it impacts the development of Elearning.

Elearning is very dependent on the internet. Although there are still non-connected elearning programs out there, they are now few and far between (remember when MS Encarta encyclopedias came on CDs?). Web developers use the concept of server side versus client side when designing and maintaining their applications and sites. This concept separates the many different technologies used on the world wide web into 2 categories that are made for very different purposes.

The server–side technologies are used to publish content on the internet; they are like libraries making their books available to everyone. Client-side technologies are those used to access data on the servers; they are like members borrowing books from the library. Although we would call all the pieces involved either “programs” or “computers”, they each have different specializations to consider.

In general, server-side technologies are best for dealing with data that is universal to everyone. Client-side technologies are great at creating an experience for the user. This difference can be helpful for any internet application and eLearning.

Web Servers

Web servers are not a single technology but a whole bunch of technologies working together in an interconnected way. The machines behind our web servers today are faster and hold more data than ever but the main idea remains the same: putting your content and communications online so other users can access them. Each web server is a computer with specialized software to store lots of data, run scripts, and make content available to an audience over the internet. These specialized software include operating systems, web server software, databases, scripting languages, and file systems.

Every web server on the internet has an Internet Protocol (IP) address, a set of numbers and letters that act as an address. Domains are user friendly names that point to a specific IP address so users can type in names instead of what feels like random characters to get to their destination (like “Cogcentric.com”). Universal Resource Locators (URLs) are text that points to a specific resource “https://cogcentric.wordpress.com/” including the domain name, the protocol (e.g. “https” hypertext transfer protocol secure), and potential more information to specify a certain page or file to open. The URL is what you would type in the address bar of your browser.

How are web servers useful in instructional design?

As an instructional designer, you will constantly find yourself needing to make your content available on the internet whether it is an interactive SCORM file or a PDF file you want your learners to download. On the internet, these files are stored on a web server so your users are just one click away from accessing their training through the use of URLs, domains, and IP addresses.

Commonly a Learning Management System software is installed on the web server to add even more capabilities for your training program such as content publishing and record keeping. Software that provide services for everyone that accesses the system is usually stored on the server side.

Devices and Browsers

In the old days, a connected device meant a big desktop computer that plugs into the internet. Now, there are many more devices that can connect to the internet through a wired or wireless connection. Desktops, laptops, tablets, and phones are everywhere now and each one can be used to effectively deliver eLearning content. Regardless what kind of device it is, its purpose is to connect to the web servers and bring information to the end user. These devices that connect to web servers are often classified as client side and they use specialized software to retrieve data, interpret data, and display data in human-friendly ways.

One of the most important software on a client side device is an internet browser. Browsers such as Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Safari, and more are responsible for accessing web content form a server and either downloading them or converting them into media like displaying text, images, videos, and more. Other client side software might include email clients (that send and receive emails) and File Transfer Protocol (FTP) clients (get download and upload files).

How is knowledge of devices and browsers useful in instructional design?

How your content displays to the learner entirely depends on client-side technology and whether you are publishing your content as HTML, video, or even Flash (a technology that dominated elearning and web games for a decade). Considering client-side technology means identifying the tools your learners will use to access your elearning and building accordingly.

It can be hard to keep up with all the ways learners might be accessing eLearning content but it is important! Make sure to track the statistics on what devices your learners are using to access your online resources. Are your learners using large screens or small screens? Do they have touchscreens or mice? Do they have a camera and microphone enabled? These are client-side technologies that can shape the elearning approaches you might plan and implement.

Conclusion: know the difference between client and server side

Understanding the difference between client and server technologies makes a big difference in how you plan and troubleshoot your eLearning technology.

Example 1 | client vs server online assessments: When planning how to deploy an online assessment, you might consider options that mark the user’s answers on the client side or server side. If marking is done on the client side (such as an Articulate Storyline output), all the marking information will need to be sent to the client’s device. Tech-savvy users might take advantage of this to look through the codes sent and find ways to cheat. Marking handled on the server side might be a bit more secure. The answer are never sent to the client, only the client’s result are sent to the client.

Example 2 | client vs server side troubleshooting: If you troubleshoot an issue for a user, it’s always crucial to find out what device and browser they are using. A client-side problem can occur if a particular piece of functionality doesn’t work with a particular browser or device. Internet Explorer was the bane of many web developers because they interpreted web content so differently from the other browsers resulting in client specific problems. Server-side problems usually affect everyone equally. This can help you narrow down the problem to something happening in your content or an issue with your LMS.

I hope this post helps you join in the discussion on what client-side vs server-side with regards to eLearning technology. If the web developers have designed around this paradigm for decades, why shouldn’t instructional designers? What technologies do you implement in your training programs? Does it separate server and client functionality in a way that works best for you?

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3 Common Attitudes of Instructional Designers

Leave a Comment / LMS / Becky

Instructional designers, like everyone else, have tendencies and habits and I can’t help but notice commonalities between them. Ultimately the goal of eLearning is to teach something but there are just so many ways to do it and everyone brings their own background and experiences with them.

In this regard, I often see these three attitudes of instructional designers out in the field and thought it would be interesting to compare notes with the community!

Feelers

I think many instructional designers start a new project with feelings; they focus primarily on how they would like their product to make others feel. Not just happy, sad, or angry, but the impression the product leaves with the learner. Do learners feel at ease or nervous when completing the content? Do they feel confident in the information and ready to apply their knowledge? Are learners curious to find out more or are they bored? Feelers often describe their goals for the project in these terms.

The feel of the content is incredibly important and feelers have the right idea; most humans make emotional judgments about the content they consume. It is important to set the right tone and use emotions to best communicate your message. That’s why dramatic movies can be so memorable or video games can be so addicting. The feel of the system also provides other benefits such as establishing the culture of an organization.

Feelers might run into problems creating content that achieves the feeling they want to impart to the learner. They might set their sights a little too high and have a hard time reaching their goals. Or they missed out on the details along the way. Often times, feelers have a hard time describing the steps needed to achieve their goals, they just know where they want their big picture to end up. This might lead to messy development processes and a convoluted end result.

Technicians

Another attitude is focusing on ensuring your project meets all the requirements. I call this attitude the “Technician” for their emphasis on practical steps to solve a problem. Creating a plan and following the necessary steps with as little deviation as possible is the route to success. Goals are measured quantitatively or in yes/no answers. The most important factors of a project are time and cost estimates versus actual results. Technicians think about instructional design like software engineering.

Technicians are most concerned with whether the learning materials they create checks all the right boxes. Did they cover all of the key points and concepts? Do the assessments test the correct knowledge? Are the examples accurate? This is a great way to verify that your materials followed the stated objectives. Approaching a project in this way helps to keep the project focused, on budget, and on schedule.

A technical approach might run into problems when human learners don’t behave as expected or the knowledge needs a little massage to be more human-friendly. Teaching requires a little bit of creativity. If users are not getting something, repeating the same information over and over like a robot might not be the best way forward! It’s also possible that overly technical content might miss opportunities to make learning more efficient with levity, humour, fun, or more. Lastly, a technical approach assumes that all the requirements and how to achieve them can be set out perfectly from the start, but we know from experience that there are often improvements and optimizations we find along the way and designers need to be a bit flexible.

Visionaries

Sometimes I run into instructional designers, training professionals, or content creators that just seem to have the whole process of creating their project in their heads from beginning to end. They even have the potential problems mapped out and are always ready with a backup route. Ultimately, they have a vision for what they want to produce and that vision is thorough enough that you can ask them how and why and they would have an answer for almost every little detail.

Visionaries tend to overlap with Feelers and Technicians because they think about how they want their audience to feel but they also predict the steps to get there. This attitude towards instructional design tends to create the most thorough, effective, and creative systems that fit their environments.

This does not mean that visionaries are perfect, no one can be. Their vision, even perfectly executed, might still miss the mark. Or execution might turn out to be more difficult than expected. In some situations, a visionary attitude is simply not needed and the status quo works (why fix what isn’t broken?).

Conclusion: understand yourself and take inspiration from others

Are you more of a feeler, a technician, a visionary, or none of the above? There is no right answer and a diverse set of perspectives is important to every project! Knowing our own tendencies helps each of us identify our strengths and weaknesses. If you care most about the feel of your project, can you thoroughly describe your steps to get there? If you find yourself most worried about preplanned requirements, have you considered alternatives that arose during planning or from learner feedback? Seeing these tendencies in our teammates might allow us to provide new input into a project.

This is an opinion and not a rigorously researched hypothesis. I’m curious: what patterns do other instructional designers see in the field when it comes to attitudes about training, instruction and eLearning?

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