The Boggs e-Learning Chronicle

Teachers Talk Tech Survey Reveals Gap Between Technology For Teachers And Technology For Teaching

CDW Government, Inc released the results of its 2005 Teachers Talk Tech survey.  "The survey – conducted in March and April 2005 – revealed that the use of technology grew in every K-12 teacher role from 2004. Yet, while 86 percent of teachers rely on computers for administrative functions, 54 percent now integrate computers into their daily curriculum.

More than three-quarters of teachers (76 percent) state that technology is an effective tool for the subjects that they personally teach. The survey also indicates that the majority of teachers are most comfortable with using computers for daily administrative functions such as e-mail, attendance and posting information about classes on school intranets. Seventy percent of middle- and high-school teachers use e-mail to communicate with parents, and more than half (52 percent) use school intranets to take classroom attendance.

The survey showed that teacher technology training has likewise focused on administrative applications, rather than instructional applications. More than 85 percent of teachers believe that they are well to adequately trained on Internet, word processing and e-mail software, but 27 percent have little to no training with integrating computers into lessons, and more than 26 percent have little to no training on instructional software. Overall, the time teachers spent in technology training did not increase over 2004, and 31 percent of teachers indicated that they had no technology training in either 2004 or 2005. "

"Teachers are focused on using technology as an aid to respond to the increasing administrative requirements of K-12 education," said Chris Rother, CDW-G’s vice president for education, state and local sales. "While the resulting productivity improvements are good news for educators and administrators, the focus on administrative applications may reduce efforts to leverage technology to improve classroom instruction and student learning."  Interesting read.

Dave Boggs, SyberWorks

Help Wanted: e-Learning Evaluation Professionals?

Godfrey Parkin has a post that talks about why just using trainers to evaluate e-learning programs is short sighted.   

Excerpt:

"Informal evaluation is done by the trainer, most of who know whether an activity is “going well” or not. Formal feedback is carried out at course end, and emphasizes learner reactions, likes and dislikes. And, if the activity involves testing, there are always the scores to look at.

These are all important elements in assessing the quality of a learning experience, and they provide valuable feedback to a trainer. But they are not enough, not by a long shot.

When left in the hands of trainers and instructional designers, the focus of evaluation is too micro, too inward looking. The purpose of training is to improve organizational performance through improving the performance of individuals and teams. Learning evaluation should serve that purpose, as a quality assurance tool. To do that, evaluation has to be pan-curricular, and must adopt a higher level perspective. "

I think a  difficult question to ask is, if training departments are stretched thin, how does one provide this type of evaluation in today's business environment without taxing the training department,  other parts of the organization, or using outside consultants.

Evaluation Professionals Undervalued

Dave Boggs, SyberWorks

Progress Report on the Federal Government's Foray into e-Learning

Interesting article up on the FCW site that discusses the reasons why the USALearning Web portal is an underused tool.  The reasons listed are:

• Lack of awareness
• A lack of self-motivation
• Age of participants
• Teaching their subject matter experts to adapt to elearning
• and others.

E-learning: A progress report

Dave Boggs, SyberWorks

NMC 2005 Horizon Report on Technologies Important to Higher Education

NMC put out a report, "The 2005 Horizon Report highlights six technologies that the underlying research suggests will become very important to higher education over the next one to five years. A central focus of the discussion of each technology is its relevance for teaching, learning, and creative expression. Live weblinks to example applications are provided in each section, as well as to additional readings."

2005 Horizon Report

Dave Boggs, SyberWorks

The ASTD site has an article by Clark N. Quinn, Delivering the Dream: Models for Intelligent Assistance, looks at various models for delivering information.

Dave Boggs, SyberWorks

Evaluating Training

Godfrey Parkin has a post on  learning evaluation strategies in the context of evaluating training.

Dave Boggs, SyberWorks

The "next best thing" vs "works for me" in the context of e-learning

Business Week has a good article in July on Mapping Emotions, an excerpt is below:

"Technology has become relatively inexpensive -- and rampant. Many companies face competitors that are equal in technical expertise. The competition has simply caught up.

At the other end of the spectrum, consumers are becoming less impressed with a new technology. .....People are shying away from the next 'best thing' and opting for products that 'work for me.' "

So if this were applied in an e-learning context, in the case of a company or institution, we should design and develop e-learning programs that work for 'the company' and 'the learner'. You say, well, that's common sense, but as one knows, common sense is not that common at all.  So how does it play out in the scenarios below.

• Loads of multimedia in courses-The course is very sleek looking and certainly will impress the boardroom, but what about the single mom who has plain old dial up who goes online after the kids go to bed or the territory sales rep who has a centrino chip but very little time and energy, does complexity serve him?
• An EMT [Emergency Medical Technician] organization buys a number of seats in a set of online certification courses which their EMTs [employees] are required to re-certify in every year.  The program is successful. The courses are well done and more than 90% of the EMT staff use this vehicle to re-certify.  Every time someone completes a course with a passing grade, an email is sent to the HR manager, but how does she keep track of 120 or more EMTs that have to certify on may be 6 or 7 different courses?
• Will field engineers learn more effectively using blogging and podcasts as the 'primary vehicle' and not as an enhancement to an web-based training program to learn detailed design schemas that contain a fair amount of factual specifications?

Its just something to think about in the context of the article.

Dave Boggs, SyberWorks

e-Learning Strategy

ASTD has an article by Jennifer De Vries on e-Learning Strategy

Dave Boggs,  SyberWorks

Setting up Auto-Discovery of Podcasts By Keyword

The Research Buzz Blog had a great post about Setting up Auto-Discovery of Podcasts By Keyword

Dave Boggs, SyberWorks

E-Learning Maintenance Strategies — Why You Need One

Nice article on the ASTD site about why an organization needs an e-learning maintenance strategy.

e-Learning Maintenance Strategy-Why Do You Need One

Dave Boggs,  SyberWorks