Techwire

I’ve been recently working on lots of eLearning strategy consulting engagements and one of my colleagues asked me to provide a set of resources around this topic.  I went back and looked at what I had written before on eLearning Strategy and saw that I had said at the time: I've spent several hours this morning trying to find good resources on eLearning Strategy development and particularly looking for examples to use in this post. I've really been striking out. I'm hoping that people will help out.  This time I had better luck and also had great luck searching for elearning strategy articles on eLearning Learning under the topic pages: eLearning Strategies , Learning Strategies and Strategy .  Here’s some of what I found.  It’s still needs more, but represents a good starting point for review: eLearning Strategy (PDF) Elearning - A Primer Learning 2.0 Strategy eLearning 3.0 Top-Down Strategy What does a real life e-learning strate...

In response to the latest post in the series on Text-to-Speech (TTS): Text-to-Speech Overview and NLP Quality , Digital Signal Processor and Text-to-Speech , Using Text-to-Speech in an eLearning Course , Text-to-Speech eLearning Tools - Integrated Products , Text-to-Speech vs Human Narration for eLearning , and Using Punctuation and Mark-Up Language to Increase Text-to-Speech Quality. Javed Alam pointed me to a couple of Text-to-Speech eLearning Examples, so I thought I’d capture a few of the examples here. I would welcome pointers to additional examples! Example #1 - Introduction to Venice - Qwiki uses Text-to-Speech in really interesting ways. Example #2 - CompUSA Dealer Training - Legal Issues - Legal services presentation on a company web site Example #3 - Calculating Usain Bolt's Power - Math derivation. Example #4 - Jane Eyre Meets Mr. Rochester in the Garden Example #5 - Concepts of Calculus with Professor Paul Example #6 - M...

I received an inquiry about resources that would help instructors who are about to move into teaching online courses.  It made me immediately think back to my first experience with an online session.  It was the first ever public session for Placeware - a virtual meeting software company that was much later acquired by Microsoft and became Microsoft Live Meeting.  Because it was their first ever public session and my first ever online session neither of us knew what we were doing.  The topic was roughly (surprise) New Technology for eLearning.  They had 100 people participating.  And because it was public they made sure that everyone was muted including the moderator. So we start the session and I’m sitting alone in front of my computer at Loyola Marymount (this must be before 2000).  I was holding my handset to my ear (no headset in my office).  And I had prepared the way I always did at that point for live, in-person audiences.  Re...

This post is part of the series on Text-to-Speech (TTS) for eLearning written by Dr. Joel Harband and edited by me. The other posts are: Text-to-Speech Overview and NLP Quality , Digital Signal Processor and Text-to-Speech , Using Text-to-Speech in an eLearning Course , Text-to-Speech eLearning Tools - Integrated Products , and seeming the most popular of the series so far: Text-to-Speech vs Human Narration for eLearning . One of the concerns raised by various comments during the series has been around the quality of the results of Text-to-Speech (TTS) Voices and if that was suitable for eLearning. This issue was partly addressed in the previous post. In this post we’ll take a different cut at it by looking at how authors can use punctuation and mark-up language with TTS voices to bring out the meaning of the text more accurately and to make them more interesting. Using these techniques a voice can be made similar enough to human narration to hold a learner’s interest during an...

I was just asked about trends in open source for eLearning and particularly open source eLearning tools.  Probably one of the better sources on this is Jane Hart’s Instructional Tools Directory .  You can find a long list of tools broken into authoring tools, games/simulations, quiz/test tools, social media, delivery platforms, tracking and whether they support mobile.  In addition, she indicates if they are free or cost money – which is not quite the same thing as open source. Beyond that, probably the best thing to do is to use eLearning Learning to go through it’s open source eLearning and open source eLearning Tools .  Here’s some of what I pulled out.  Of course, I’d recommend skimming through eLearning Learning to find the latest and greatest. Open Source LMS Other Open Source LMS Solutions - eLearning 24-7 , April 14, 2010 Open Source life, LMSs beyond Moodle - Learning Rocks , December 18, 2008 Open Source LMS - eLearning Technology ,...

This month’s big question is Examples of Big Impact from Technology and I’ve taken it as an opportunity to go back and look at the elements of different projects that I’ve worked on over the years that have had a big impact.  In this post, I’m going to focus on a common model that has been part of several of the highest impact projects.  At it’s core, the model is pretty simple: Guide through setting meaningful personal goals Teach how you can hold yourself accountable to those goals Help the user set up social support Teach the social supporters how they can help hold the personal accountable Send lots of reminders to the individual and the supporters This approach has been used for loan officers, automotive sales, management development, retail store management, and in lots of other industries and jobs.  In fact, we’ve also used it as a means of some fairly generic goal setting processes.  As a side note, I believe that there’s a REALLY...

Some challenging questions are being raised in this month’s Big Question - Voice Over in eLearning .  Some of the key questions: Given the range of solutions for voice-over from text-to-speech, home-grown human voice-over, professional voice-over: how do you decide what's right for your course? How do you justify the budget and how does that factor into your choice of solution? Are there places where text-to-speech makes sense? This post is part of the series on Text-to-Speech (TTS) for eLearning written by Dr. Joel Harband and edited by me.  The other posts are: Text-to-Speech Overview and NLP Quality , Digital Signal Processor and Text-to-Speech , Using Text-to-Speech in an eLearning Course , and Text-to-Speech eLearning Tools - Integrated Products .   We attacked these questions a little differently than the big question.  We particularly focused on: Why use Text to Speech (TTS)? Why not use human voice-over? Or just use text on th...