“First there were online self-study courses; then came virtual instructor-led training. The next stage is self-published training — resources such as blogs, wikis, and podcasts. Innovative training organizations are now working to harness these resources.”

We couldn’t agree more.  Why is self-publishing important in leading organizations?

• Wisdom of Crowds. A mixed collection of experts and neophytes will give you a better result than a group of just experts. Learning published by the subject matter experts themselves, then refined and reviewed by colleagues will have higher quality than learning produced by a training group in conjunction with SME’s.
• Speed. Give the SME’s the tools to create learning themselves and you break down all the expensive coordination required to publish e-learning.
• Accuracy. Many people think that learning produced by the central hierarchy will be more accurate than learning produced by the SME’s. Our opinion is that centralized content creation is as prone to error as decentralized. Maybe more.

Thanks for the predictions!

“The trend toward end-users, consumers, teachers, and students creating content for themselves and their peers delivered in writing, in audio files, or in video clips.”

We couldn’t agree more, of course, and we think people will want to create content that is a little more interesting than just “writing.” That’s why we help to create a more visually rich flash-based learning experience. The current crop of people entering the marketplace are comfortable with new technologies, and information sharing. They’ve also grown up on graphically rich video games, the internet, and MTV. So they expect more than just plain textual content.

This is no surprise really, especially since Time Magazine named “You” the person of the year — a position usually reserved for the likes of Bill Gates, Andy Grove, Bono, or Bill Clinton. Hello peer producers! You are it!

Search Enhancements

If you type in a search word like “listening” now you will get richer search results. NanoLearning will search not just the description of your Nano, but also the text of it. The search results show some context of the search term it found, as well as icons showing if that Nano contains visual images or sounds. You can click on the name of the NanoLearning item returned in the search to go right to it and check it out.

New Template – Full Page Image

Have you ever wished that you could have a page that was just one big image? Now you can. Use your Photoshop skills to create whatever you want to display on the page.

Enhanced Template – Flash Movie

The “Flash Movie” template will let you upload a SWF file. We’ve had that for a while. But now if you want to display a YouTube video, you can check the box and enter the URL of the YouTube video. We’ll display it for you.

We’ve been hard at work on some other features that we’re getting ready to roll out, so stay tuned for more! Happy New Year!

Open Content (learning wiki)

Anybody can contribute to a learning module on any topic, just like a wiki. Collaboration is hugely important, and a team of people who effectively collaborate on something can achieve incredible results far beyond what an individual could create. The Wisdom of Crowds would say that this group of collaborators should be comprised of both experts and neophytes, and the best results will be acheived. Not only could the information have higher quality, but it could be created faster by dividing up the labor. This is a highly valid approach. Soon in NanoLearning you will be able to invite collaborators to edit a piece of NanoLearning. As we’ve seen with the Wikipedia though, content that is acceptable to everybody is interesting to nobody.

Open Market

To continue with a Wikipedia example, what if rather than modifying the JFK entry with my theory on who shot JFK (and having the moderator roll it back), I could create my own Wikipedia entry on who shot JFK. People who prefer my point of view would link to my entry, and people who prefer someone else’s point of view can link to theirs. In a system where people can rate/review/recommend learning chunks the market would recommend each accordingly. The open market approach really doesn’t work with company policies like vacation time, but a microlearning chunk on “How I handled sexual harrassment in my department” might be hugely useful by the HR organization. It might also be a different approach from how another person handled harrassment.

There’s no right or wrong answer, and smart people will use the appropriate tool for the job. But it’s great to discuss and explore the issues. I just wish there were more collaborative content creation tools out there so that we could create some real examples to share, rather than talking about “what if” and “someday.”

Technorati tags: NanoLearning, L2006, microlearning, nano-learning

We have the capability to embed NanoLearning inline with a blog entry, and I would have done it here. However, WordPress does not allow their users to embed Flash into blog entries. That happens to be one of my personal “pet peeves” about WordPress, and most likely one of the reasons for us switching blogging platforms pretty soon. On the page with the NanoLearning title and description, you will see a link titled “Blog this” where you can create a blog entry that links to a piece of NanoLearning, or embed’s the NanoLearning directly into the blog entry.

You may have also noticed some changes on the Explore tab. Instead of giving you a big list of NanoLearning things we’re showing you the Top 10 most popular NanoLearning objects. Any NanoLearning can still always be accessed via it’s URL, or you can type part of it’s name in the “Search” box just like Google.

From the Explore menu, there is a submenu named Advanced Search. You can use that to search even the content of a piece of NanoLearning. So if you can’t remember the title or description, but you know it mentioned the planets, then search the content for “planet” and you will find it.

I know it sounds simple to be able to search in the content of a piece of any learning, but actually it isn’t. Most learning is built in Flash, and seach engines like Google can’t dig into the textual content of a Flash movie. Luckily we have designed our system in a way that lets you search learning content, and lets Google index NanoLearning content.

To start with Skillsoft has been moving sideways for a while with no revenue growth, but they’re putting maybe 6% to the bottom line. Not bad, but it’s hard to prop up a P/E of 30 when you’re not growing. The market recognizes this and rewards this non-performance with a pretty unremarkable stock price.

Skillsoft revenues are around $220M and they’re going to pay $285M for NETg. That’s gutsy! They’ve got $70M in cash, and they’re going to borrow $180M to buy this company. Plus NETg revenues have been declining solidly over the past several years from a peak of over $400M down to $160M today. If nothing else, the folks at Thomson are shrewd businessmen and are probably happy to shed this business unit at what looks like a premium. Based upon the hit that Skillsoft stock took today, I’d say the market is not too happy with them paying a premium like this for a shrinking business unit.

Obviously it’s a big risk for Skillsoft; perhaps the biggest in their company’s history. We will see if it pays off.

It is a new industry and the old rules do not apply. The market now favors innovative “disruptor” suppliers that are skilled at meeting the needs of the new buyers.

The report talks about how the relatively high cost to create rich self-paced e-learning content is an inhibitor to growth in the market. Most analyst estimates place the cost of developing engaging interactive e-learning courses at $25,000 – $50,000 per learning hour. We believe that revolution happens not when costs decrease 25% or even 50%, but by 2-3 orders of magnitude. The personal computer revolution was fueled by dropping the costs of owning a computer from $250,000 to $2,500. The cost to produce video has gone from $1,000 per minute to $500 for unlimited minutes, and that is driving the personal video craze at websites like YouTube and Revver.

Even if only 10 people in the world care to watch a video of me lipsynching to Shakira, if the production costs are almost zero the price is right. If nothing else, Web 2.0 is about ultra specialization.

NanoLearning is doing the same thing with interactive self-paced learning by providing free tools and infrastructure, and a business model that charges for premium services (becoming known as the “freemium” business model).  When you add to that the trend toward user-generated content, along with feedback/ratings and social aspects of learning you get powerful results.

We don’t release statistics, but I will tell you that over half of our users are from outside the United States. They tell us that the e-learning revolution never really happened in their countries because most businesses could not afford to buy six-figure LMS software or spend large amounts on content creation. That is true of small and medium sized businesses in the United States as well.

If people are starting to label NanoLearning as a market disruptor, then we are starting to make some progress.

Technorati tags: NanoLearning, nano-learning, microlearning, freemium, disruptors

We’re working on a user forum so that people can create and share ideas, suggestions, and issues, and we can reply and interact with you in a forum. That way future generations can search all the forum discussions and find all our your great advice and ideas.

We’ve had some bloggers cover NanoLearning in the past few weeks. People are talking about us on microlearning.org, HotFromSiliconValley.com, TechCrunch (what’s hot at DEMO), and StartupSquad. Join the conversation!

Here are some of the things we have been hard at work on, and are rolling out in the next few days:

•  Some usability enhancements, including better instructions on your homepage, and hover tooltips.
• We had an issue with some accent characters, noted by some of our users in Brazil. That has been fixed.
• Google indexing of your NanoLearning content. We’re integrating with Google to allow them to scan the actual contents of your NanoLearning, and not just the name and description. With lots of other people linking to great NanoLearning, it will rise in page rank. We’re still waiting for the day when Google returns NanoLearning on the first page of hits on a particular topic.

We are still working on some issues that Macintosh users are having.  Mac users are a large and creative community, and we want to make sure our applications works flawlessly on the latest version of Firefox for the Mac.

Technorati tags:  NanoLearning

Not the scared look on our faces!

Technorati tags: demofall06, demofall2006, NanoLearning