DevLearn08 - Day 2 (cont.)

Lunch was good. I chatted with some ladies who work for the State of California. Fortunately, the woman sitting on my right had a loud, clear voice so that I could actually make out what she was saying. Always nice to be able to hear the person you're talking with. Turns out they're all AAA members - a couple even had our insurance - and they had lots of questions about what I do and how we train as a result. I mentioned the eLearning 2.0 thing, and suddenly they wanted to know all about that as well. Apparently that was a pretty new concept to them, and they hadn't considered how social collaboration tools can be used for learning. Then they launched into an internal discussion about how they could use it. Whether or not it would be valuable to them in their department I can't say, but it was cool to see them get excited about it.

Today's second session: "Learning Personalization and Discovery: Why and How at IBM" with Matt Velencius. IBM has more people than many states, so this would seem to be a very challenging concept for them - learning personalization. This isn't likely to be strictly relevant to AAA NCNU with our 6000 employees, but I'm curious about it nonetheless. According to Matt they have over 47,000 learning objects. So, yeah, learning discovery is a bit of an issue.

The IBM Learning Personalization and Discovery mission statement: "Our goal is to create and promote the adoption of applications, services, and logic for finding, personalizing, and delivering relevant learning to IBMers based on who they are and what they are trying to accomplish."

One of the key things they did was to make all of their learning objects - even those within the confines of the LMS - locatable via their intranet search engine.

They deleted old, irrelevant content that nobody was accessing anymore. This housekeeping reduces the incidence of useless search results.

Learning recommendations are delivered on each employee's intranet start page based on keywords in their online employee profile such as geographic location, job title, department, interests, etc. People who create learning objects assign the keywords to the objects.

IBM uses JavaScript/CSS smart tips to provide definitions of glossary terms that appear within a learning object. They look a lot like those little advertisement pop-ups you get on some websites where you mouse over an underlined word thinking it's a link, and instead you get this little pop-up ad. Maybe it's just me, but I hate those things.

The guy sitting in front of me in this session just passed a note to the gal sitting on his left. They obviously don't know each other. Suddenly I feel like I'm in high school again.

Apparently IBM also has another tool that's similar to the LMS in some functions, but which they use kind of as a way to help schedule learners for an entire curriculum of courses and learning objects. They use the Saba LMS, which also has this capability, so I'm not sure why they have this other tool.

They also have a learning toolbar for your web browser. It has a number of bookmarks to useful learning sites within the organization, and a search bar that searches the intranet.

They also have a back-end tool that counts the number of hits to not only individual pages, but to folders as well, and then can display the counts for multiple folders and/or pages as a spreadsheet with historical results. This allows them to see what people are actually using, which programs need to be marketed more or less, and which learning objects can be archived. They can also find out what types of employees have been accessing what types of learning objects by using the keywords in employees' profiles and the keywords attached to the learning objects.