The next episode of the e-Learning Lingo Podcast Series is up! This week's word is "Uniform Resource Identifier".
On the e-Learning Lingo Podcast Series, there are three ways to
comment on each episode. You may post a message to the blog; leave a web-based
voice mail by clicking the button in the upper right-hand corner; or
call in and leave a message about each show. You may find each weekly episode and
its accompanying transcript on the e-Learning Lingo Podcast Series page located in the Media
Center of the SyberWorks web site.
By Steve Pena, Instructional Designer and Implementation Consultant for SyberWorks, Inc.
Can your distribution partners access your training-services infrastructure, to quickly train their employees about your products, while also building a university-like organization to deliver and track training of their (and your) end customers? In a distributor-oriented organization, your LMS should be able to support many levels of such “Distributor-Modeled” training… and deliver benefits to you, your distributors, and your customers.
At the simplest level, your distributors would be able to send people to your LMS training site, and have them registered as customers of each distributor (as shown in Figure 1). This would allow you to generate reports about courses delivered, classroom scheduling, and training results for each distributor’s customers over the past month, quarter, and year. It will also allow you to create more complex training solutions for heavy users of your training services, while being able to identify distributors who might benefit from special training promotions.
Figure 1: Distributors push their customers to your LMS.
The next logical step would be to give distributors themselves restricted administrative access to your LMS (Figure 2). In the simplest implementation of this model, the distributors would be able to:
Modify training accounts for their own customers.
Assign online training.
Enroll customers in your LMS' scheduled classes.
And on a more advanced level, distributors could:
Assign Training Certificate Competencies and their related learning events to their customers.
Create and run their own onsite training sessions.
Figure 2: Distributors have restricted administrative access to your LMS:
This model will improve your relationship with distributors, enable you to provide them with more services, and reduce the training-administration overhead for your company. Some of the advanced services it also enables are:
Linking a class with a specific distributor, so that only that company can enroll its customers in the class.
Customizing training catalogs, with a reduced set of courses/classes and/or individualized course/class pricing for specific distributors.
Offering these catalogs with either a prepaid training-account that end customers can tap, or a standard e-Commerce “customer pays” set up.
Allowing distributors to order training for their customers.
Creating special reports to track the training and certifications of distributors’ customers.
Setting up customized user-interface paths for distributor-administrators, to control their access to specific LMS functions.
This model also allows you to create a “Super Administrator” role for more advanced distributors, which allows them to perform such functions as:
Creating classes.
Entering class results.
Creating user accounts.
And finally, to extend this Distributor Model to an advanced level, think about branding separate campuses for each distributor (Figure 3). This allows you to create completely separate, distributor-branded training sites for each distributor within your LMS, while still permitting you to do complete rollups of all their training information and results.
Figure 3: An advanced distributor-branded implementation
Among this model’s advantages are that it allows distributors to:
Keep their corporate branding throughout all customer training materials.
Create one-to-many levels of structured reporting, allowing each distributor to produce hierarchical training reports for its own operation.
Receive a single point of contact in your company, with Registrar rights and privileges, to help distributors maintain their training operations.
So if they fit into your operation, these three levels of Distributor-Modeled training can improve your relationships with your distributors and provide them with much better levels of service, support, and training functionality. These models can also both save you money (through reduced administrative costs) and increase revenues (through branded training campuses).
About the Author:
Steve Pena is a Senior Instructional Designer and Implementation Consultant at SyberWorks, Inc., Waltham, Mass.
About SyberWorks
SyberWorks, Inc. is a leader in providing Learning Management Systems and custom e-Learning Solutions for Fortune 1000 corporations, higher education, and other organizations. Located in Waltham, Massachusetts, the company serves the multi-billion-dollar e-Learning market. Since 1995, SyberWorks has developed and delivered unique and economical solutions for creating, managing, measuring, and improving e-Learning programs at companies and organizations in the United States, Canada, Europe, and other countries.
Today is the final day to register for the webinar "21 CFR Part 11 and Its Application in a Compliant Environment" presented by SyberWorks and Veracord. The webinar will be held Tuesday, October 27, 2009, at 2:00 pm ET.
The next episode of the e-Learning Lingo Podcast Series is up! This week's word is "RFP".
On the e-Learning Lingo Podcast Series, there are three ways to
comment on each episode. You may post a message to the blog; leave a web-based
voice mail by clicking the button in the upper right-hand corner; or
call in and leave a message about each show. You may find each weekly episode and
its accompanying transcript on the e-Learning Lingo Podcast Series page located in the Media
Center of the SyberWorks web site.
David Boggs, CEO of SyberWorks, states, “In this episode, Stuart Campbell, Director of Software Engineering at SyberWorks discusses his recent article, ‘SCORM and the Learning Management System.’ In the article, Stuart diagrams the communication flows between a SCORM course and a Learning Management System."
The SyberWorks and Veracord webinar series focuses on compliance and validation issues associated with companies in the life sciences, medical device, pharmaceutical, and other regulated industries. SyberWorks is partnering with Veracord to deliver regulatory and compliance information and expertise. Veracord-and its 21 CFR Consulting division-offer compliance consulting services nationwide, specializing in validation, IT compliance, clinical, medical, and regulatory affairs.
The first installment in the webinar series, "GAMP5 and the Alignment to International Guidelines," was held on September 15, 2009 from 2:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. ET.
The next webinar in the series, "21 CFR Part 11 and Its Application in a Compliant Environment," will be held on Tuesday, October 27, 2009 at 2:00 p.m. ET. To sign up for this webinar, click here.
The next episode of the e-Learning Lingo Podcast Series is up! This week's word is "Keyhole Strategy".
On the e-Learning Lingo Podcast Series, there are three ways to
comment on each episode. You may post a message to the blog; leave a web-based
voice mail by clicking the button in the upper right-hand corner; or
call in and leave a message about each show. You may find each weekly episode and
its accompanying transcript on the e-Learning Lingo Podcast Series page located in the Media
Center of the SyberWorks web site.
By Stuart Campbell, Director of Software Engineering, SyberWorks, Inc.
Sometime…oh, around 2004…you probably started hearing buzz about “Web 2.0…The next generation of the Internet.” The term was coined by O'Reilly Media. And though everyone you ask gives you a different definition of the way Web 2.0 should look and feel, perhaps the best definition can be found in the company’s own archives, here: O'Reilly Publishing's Original Web 2.0 Description.
And O’Reilly continues to call Web 2.0 a “transformative force.” But have you felt it yet? You may just have.
O’Reilly’s early definition differentiated Web 2.0 from Web 1.0 (the old “cloud”) in that:
Private content‐management systems would be replaced by editable public Wikis.
Personal web sites would give way to dynamic communal blogs.
Publishing would take a back seat to participation.
Web content would become more configurable.
New services would make it easier for people to connect interactively.
Financial speculation on domain names (to lock down good URLs) would become less prevalent than search‐engine optimization (to help people find sites and content regardless of its URL).
Companies even advertised that their products and services were “Web 2.0‐ready,” subtly implying that Web 2.0 was some sort of official specification, which it wasn’t. Some even speculated that the Web 2.0 Internet would become a 3D virtual world like Second Life (SL). And the fact that IBM and Microsoft were big SL backers did blow some wind into that sail.
In reality, O’Reilly’s Web‐2.0 description has been materializing all around us, unnoticed by most for what it was. The above bullets sound mighty familiar, don’t they? Wikis and blogs are everywhere now. We increasingly friend and track each other in sites like FaceBook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. And through them, our small, personal, “e‐Villages” are merging into global meshes.
Most of us in the e‐Learning world live and work online, like tropical fish in an aquarium. And the water in which we’ve been swimming all along has picked up Web 2.0 colors even as we breathe it in.
And Now Comes “Web 3.0”
Many people are now describing the “next” Web 3.0 Internet as a “personal assistant” that:
Learns our habits and interests by watching past activities, and automatically focuses information delivered to us. (Can you say “Cookies”?)
Maintains web‐based personal browsing histories, which any site can access for customizing what individuals see.
Allows different sites and services to be combined (just as Google Maps, MapQuest, and site‐visitation counters are added to many Web sites today).
Uses the Internet itself as an operating system (a‐la “Cloud” applications that run directly across the web, rather than being installed on our PCs). This too is happening already.
Replaces keyword searches with intelligent content sifting and delivery, based on interpreting the context of conversationally typed requests. For example, you’ll be able to type “Where’s the nearest store that still has a paperback copy of Dan Brown’s latest book...for under $10?”…and get a concise answer. (By “Web 4.0,” some say, this will give way to full artificially‐intelligent interfaces.)
And once again, Second Life is being held out as a possible model for the look and feel of this “next” Internet (which is also being called “Web 3D”). I won’t hold my breath on that, though! If I go to IBM’s, Microsoft’s, and Amazon’s web sites (all long‐time SL partners), their Web interfaces are still glaringly 2D. I can’t click amazon.com and find myself walking through a 3D virtual store, able to browse shelves, pick up books, scan their pages, carry purchases to a virtual check‐out station, and enter payment and shipping data by swiping a secure virtual ID card. Not today, anyway.
But several companies are working on experimental 3D browsers. For more information about that, just Google phrases like “3D browser”, “Google 3D browser”, “Google SketchUp”, Firefox 3D Browser”, and “AT&T 3D browser”. From what I’ve seen, they all look like 2D interfaces with slickly layered 3D effects… not like truly immersive, 3D, information environments.
Some have even claimed that Web 3.0 may need to run on its own separate network and use its own new protocols…implying that it will be easier to build the next Internet from scratch. I personally know how hard it is to release just one new version of a single software product. I know how tough it is to keep it both forward compatible with future plans and backward compatible with existing users. So I don’t for one minute believe that an entirely new Web 3.0 network will one day “replace” our familiar Internet.
More likely, Web 3.0 will sneak up on us bit by bit…in the night…just as Web 2.0 did (and is still doing).
About the Author:
Stuart Campbell is Director of Software Development for SyberWorks, Inc. (http://www.syberworks.com), a privately-held supplier of e-Learning software and training. A native of the United Kingdom, he had previously served as a Principle Software Engineer, Senior Consultant, Senior Software Engineer, and Development Specialist for companies such as Brooks Automation Inc., Digital Equipment, and Honeywell Control Systems. His areas of expertise include Visual Studio.NET, C#, VB.NET, VB6, VBScript, XML, COBOL, WindowsXP, Windows2000, WindowsNT, VAX/VMS, UNIX, Oracle, SQLServer, Oracle Rdb, Oracle DBMS, and Agile Modeling Methodology.
The SyberWorks Learning Management System/Learning Content Management System
SyberWorks Training Center (STC) is a Web-based Learning Management System (LMS)/Learning Content Management System (LCMS) that provides complete solutions for managing and tracking all types of training at your organization — from e-Learning courses to traditional classroom training and self-paced study programs. The STC includes extensive testing and assessment tools, reporting, management, communication and collaboration tools, and quality control capabilities — all in one integrated database application that is highly scalable to precisely meet your organization’s needs. The SyberWorks Training Center LMS/LCMS can be purchased as an enterprise license or hosted application.
About SyberWorks, Inc.
SyberWorks, Inc. is a leader in the custom e-Learning Solutions and Learning Management System/Learning Content Management System (LMS/LCMS) industries for Fortune 1000 corporations, law enforcement, healthcare, and other industries. Located in Waltham, Massachusetts, the company serves the multi-billion-dollar e-Learning market. Since 1995, SyberWorks has developed and delivered unique and economical solutions to create, manage, measure, and improve e-Learning programs at companies and organizations in the United States, Canada, Europe, and around the world.
"Veracord and its division, 21 CFR Consulting, works with SyberWorks to deliver regulatory, compliance and validation expertise in the Life Sciences industry. The two companies have joined forces to offer the 21CFR Webinar presented October 27th. The last day to register is October 22nd, 2009."
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