1st Webinar a Success

I hosted our first webinar yesterday and it seems to have been quite successful. I didn't have a huge participation level, but I think that is a good thing for the first time. Had it failed miserably it would have been very embarrassing if there were tens of participants trying to get in.

We used GoToMeeting as it gave us room for 15 people during the trial phase. Although we were not collaborating during the webinar those features seemed decent and my trials with friends and functioned very well. I've participated in many different webinars and I would say the only thing I wasn't really keen on is that the chat area seemed "thin" and I could not expand it horizontally so that I could see more responses. It could be a few lines thicker.

As an organizer it seemed to function well. I was able to give controls to the presenter and them use them seamlessly to present their slides. I had 2 PowerPoint screens open on one of my monitors and the actual slide show opened on my other monitor. I flipped from my opening slides to the presenter's slides, previously gave them mouse control and she began immediately. I may try this slightly different the next time, but it seemed to work well.

Since the presenter was my supervisor, when she started referencing other documents I was able to open them up and drag them onto the screen for the participants to see as well. That was a great feature. Instead of her just walking through it on her side and the participants looking at the document on their side, I brought it up and continued to point to the items she was addressing. (This is the entire point of being able to do a webinar obviously.) It was simple to be able to share other documents other than just a slide show.

I had tried DimDim also as a trial with a colleague, but she could not hear my mic for some reason. I thought thought that it's interface was really nice, simple and user friendly. I may retry it again in the future. I also sat in on a WebEx webinar today and really liked it's platform as well. I guess it comes down to budget and which one falls within yours.

A few comments to remember when hosting. We started of the session with me explaining that we would be communicating through the chat, but because some people joined late and had dialed in they assumed that they could talk over the phone to the group. I'm not sure how to avoid this confusion as the presented did ask the participants during her presentation to type their answers in to the chat area. One person emailed us today and was wondering why no one was answer her when she talked. (Important for participants to show up early to webinar and make sure they get the instructions and can connect.)

I had one person have trouble dialling in to the conference number. She called my phone directly and told me that it kept telling her the line was disconnected. I didn't' know how to respond to her because I could see that others had been able to dial in to the session. I could only tell her to continue to try. She did eventually get connected. (Important for participants to show up early to webinar and make sure they get the instructions and can connect.)

I'm doing another session on July 14th so I'll see if any other developments come out of that one. For now we are thrilled with the results and believe we will try to host several others for our teams.

Learning Management Systems - Trends and Issues (Brandon Hall Research) Webinar

My notes taken during today's webinar.

Presented by Tom Werner & Richard Nantel

What do they do?

Automate the administration of training.

What do they contain?

Databases: learners, course offerings, content, progress.

Quick History:

1980 - paper age

• catalog, approvals, registrations, class info (all manually)
• attendance, evaluations, tests (all manually)
• count, charge-backs, reporting (all manually)
• process is dependent on people (admin staff)
• trainer dependent (collect and hand out materials)
• supervisor depended (boss had to tell you of courses available)
• measured by productivity or # of hours of training
• training very decentralized

1984 - Training Management Systems

1990 - Internet

1990s - Amazon, Yahoo, Ebay, Google

• online training started being just courses posted on line, then moved to tracking who was taking them

2001 - Learning Management Systems (term coined)

7 Trends

1. Still many different LMS vendors (Brandon Hall tracks 92 of them, adding appx 15-20 each year since 5 years ago when they began. To be in the Brandon Hall report systems do not pay to be in it, but do have to answer an extremely detailed questionnaire. Updated every 12 -18 months.)

• consolidate? No it does not appear to be occurring, but is a continuing rumour.
• why so many? Good customer service generally. Once they have a customer they often don't lose them. Continue to innovate. There has not been a "Microsoft" or "Google" type of enterprise to buy up smaller companies.

2. So many features

• 88% have built in test systems
• 80% offer more than just English
• 80% offer many portals
• 78% offer classroom management
• 74% track certificate deadlines
• 64% have built in authoring
• 60% have LCMS features
• 50% handle e-Commerce

3. Interoperability with content (how lms and content within talk to one another)

• early standards were AICC
• standard now is SCORM (military pushed), This is a collection of standards including AICC. This is important to look for in a system.
• 87% are compliant,
• 86% are SCORM 1.2 (look for this as a minimum)
• 48% SCORM 2004 compliant (most recent version of SCORM).
• Just because it is compliant does not mean it will definitely run perfectly in your LMS. LMSs will tell you if they have tested with interoperability. (eg. tested with a vitural classroom, or with a SkillSoft course)

4. Integration with other large systems

• 43% have connected with PeopleSoft
• 40% with SAP (both of these are large HR employee tracking systems)
• 34% with Oracle

5. Software Hosting (SaaS)

• 68% of vendors say that more then 50% of their implementations are hosted
• hosting used to seem as an unsecure way to go, but not so much now as more banks and governments have gone to hosted solutions.

6. Talent Management

• many systems call themselves "Talent Development Systems" now
• (paper age - people issues were in silos e.g. career path, separate from training, separate from goals, etc) Now these can all be melded together.
• 60% of LMS they are tracking ..... (item missed)
• 38% offer feedback
• 38% offer succession planning

7. Web 2.0

• 2 way training, not just the trainer creating content but learners are too (Facebook, blogs, twitter, etc)
• Need to understand that there is learning then as a designed activity and that there is just generally keeping up with subjects (newspaper, rss, tv, blogs, journals) keeping up with information sources
• People are now learning on Google - search, amazon - recommendations, cnn - snippets, youtube - sharing, facebook/twitter - belonging
• (debate is this learning or not continues)
• 42% of systems allow searches
• 40% ... slide 116 (item missed)
• 26% peer ratings
• 20% blogs
• 17% wikis

Three Current Issues

1. LMSs for small and medium businesses

• needed affordable, minimal IT, limited training staff

2. Open source systems

• most know - Moodle, Sakai, Claroline, dokeos, OLAT, ilias, eFront

3. LMS's place in the "ecosystem"

• LMS as a piece of a larger system or collaborative learning environment
• Does it contain all the stuf, or is it a piece of a bigger environment

What's New for July 2009

Well frankly, not much is new at all, hence my reasoning for not posting anything in quite some time. My LMS pilot came and went. I'm now waiting for the vendor to complete the second phase of changes to the system. I was given a first set to review, did so and gave more feedback. As soon as the next set comes then we'll be very close to being able to launch the system for real onto the organization.

That is a very frightening thought. This has been one of my key areas of focus for the last 2 years and now it's finally coming to and end. Launching the LMS is going to be an entirely new problem. So many of our staff are not very computer savvy. There is a large lack of computers in the organization for staff to use so we're going to have to rely on them using them at home. However, the LMS isn't precisely available that way so a band aid solution of some sort will need to be created. Oh my head is spinning already.

To divert myself from this headache I've taken on hosting 2 webinars from our office. We've never done this before so I find it quite exciting. The only issue I see so far though is lack of registration. Only 16 staff were invited from a satellite area and out of those 16 only 3 have signed up. I guess that may be a good selling point though to the presenters. If they were to do the presentations in person it would have been a one hour drive to the facility to present to 3 people. At least by doing this as a webinar we've cut down on travel, gas, and time. All three of those factors more then "triple-negate" (if I can say that) the cost for one month of purchasing the webinar platform.

Today I have test runs with each presenter so it should be interesting. I'm hoping for a big success here as I would love to continue to run more. I'd love to hear from anyone that perhaps ran a webinar of a live event that was happening within there facility. I'm curious how or even if this is a good idea. I'm unsure as I've only ever sat in on webinars that were just that; schedule to only be a webinar and not a "broadcast" of another event.

Cheers everyone to a long and sunny July.