By Greg Boyd | Published: Thursday, February 09, 2012
Desire2Learn in the Corporate Vertical - Why, and Why Now?
2011 ended with a lot to be proud of for the Corporate team at Desire2Learn, with new clients coming on board in the final weeks of the year, and promise of more to come in early 2012. There is a great deal of momentum coming into the year because of both this growth, and also because of the investment Desire2Learn is making here in the years ahead. This is great news for our existing base of Corporate and Association clients, but does lend itself to the question of ‘why’ (let alone, ‘how’) and ‘why now’? Online Learning in the Corporate space is hardly a new idea, and there are a number of leaders in today’s marketplace already – so what makes Desire2Learn different? Among the many factors Corporate clients will consider when looking to choose an Online Learning system, we think there are three things that are absolutely critical, and that set Desire2Learn apart: Desire2Learn’s Leadership in Teaching and Learning, the Design and Flexibility of Desire2Learn products, and the Engagement Model Desire2Learn uses to work with our Corporate clients.
Leaders in Teaching and Learning Technology: Desire2Learn has built a reputation as a world leader in Online Learning in the education space, partnering with some of the finest and best known K-12 Schools, Colleges and Universities in North America and around the world. To date, the focus for the design and development of the product has been around pedagogically sound methods, which enables our users to leverage professional design that helps enhance and optimize the educational impact of the courses ‘students’ attend. Learning Departments within organizations find the Learning Environment easy to use and intuitive for structuring course design and delivery, such that users have an experience that simulates that of a traditional ‘course’ experienced at a high school or post-secondary institution. Having an environment that is intuitive for both students and instructors is critical to overcoming user’s apprehension towards Online Learning as opposed to more traditional ‘in class’ style.
System Design and Flexibility: Online Learning systems can be built on a modular ‘Organization Structure’. This enables administrators to allocate roles to various levels of users that can have unique permissions associated at the most granular level. A major barrier to the adoption of wide-spread Online Learning tends to be security and permissions concerns that obstruct an instructor or administrator’s ability to control ‘who sees what’ within the system. To ensure an effective user experience for both administrators and students, an Online Learning system must be flexible enough for users to have access that is designed for their needs, and overcome these security and privacy concerns. That is, students should be permitted only to see/access courses which they are required to take, instructors the courses they are teaching, and administrators the areas that they have authority over. This can be achieved to the extent that, in certain cases, Desire2Learn® Learning Environment can be used to grant singular access and permissions to individual users with a unique use case. Although best practice would encourage as broad an ‘Organization Structure’ as possible, some Corporate clients require levels of granularity that forces them to leverage the ‘modular’ design inherent within Desire2Learn Learning Environment.
Model for Engagement: Online Learning systems are among the many applications that organizations in the Corporate space will run internally to support day-to-day operations of their business or association. Moreover, the Online Learning system faces the challenge in some client organizations as being perceived as a ‘secondary’ priority, or perhaps even a system that can be stood up, and left alone to be accessed by students at their convenience. These are risks unique to the Corporate space, as in contrast, the Online Learning system is an essential piece of the Education Institution’s infrastructure – That is, the Online Learning system is the ‘ERP’ (Enterprise Resource Planning system) of the education space. To overcome what can be daunting challenges requires the owner of the learning program to have a defined, justified (and, often, approved) need, a strong strategy and roadmap, and sound metrics in place for measuring the success of the system. These metrics can be elusive to define, as tracking returns on training and education is far less tangible than, say, tracking ROI in dollars and cents. Desire2Learn has an effective sales design and engagement model in place for our Corporate clients to combat these challenges. The Corporate Engagement Model is made effective through the smooth transition of the client from the initial sales cycle to Account Management (AM) upon signing, where the AM team is held accountable for client’s success. Support at this stage to not only define a successful strategy for Online Learning, but to redefine and invigorate the Online Learning strategy, is critical, and is a key differentiator for how Desire2Learn engages with our Corporate clients. Backed up by a whole Support and Services organization, the entire Sales team works in partnership with clients to ensure success and the continued evolution of Online Learning within today’s organizations.
2012 is a big year for Desire2Learn, as growth is expected to continue in the Education sector, a major, new release of the product is scheduled for the Spring, and this continued push into the Corporate will allow the organization to deliver value to clients in ever-increasing ways. Advances in the technology driven out of one vertical (that is, Higher Ed, Government, or Corporate) can be leveraged in the others. When Corporations and Associations look for an Online Learning system, there will be a variety of factors to be taken into consideration – however, three factors critical to the success of any Online Learning strategy will be the pedagogical foundation of the learning system, its flexibility and design, and the model used to support organizations embarking on an Online Learning journey.
Follow us as we continue to build out our Online Learning story for Corporate clients in 2012. Watch for news updates, Community events, webcasts, and monthly blogs posts, right here on Desire2Learn.com. Join the conversation – we’d love to hear from you!
Posted in: Corporate Learning Environment Learning Management System
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By John Baker | Published: Friday, January 20, 2012
Reflections on 2011 and Excitement Ahead in 2012
I hope everyone enjoyed the holidays are back to start the New Year with renewed energy and excitement.
In my reflections on 2011 in my ePortfolio, I started with "It was an incredible year." We achieved record growth, adding hundreds of new clients and millions of new learners. We helped our clients migrate hundreds of thousands of their courses from other legacy systems to our next-generation learning system, and we are seeing great momentum on organizations making the choice to move to Desire2Learn products and services. This makes our community of users ever stronger.
Very importantly, we achieved over 98% client retention again this last year. This is a metric that is shared with all our staff throughout the year as it matters to us dearly. We strive to ensure we have the best possible client experience. We are here to make your experience as rewarding as possible.
Stay tuned for a number of new initiatives this year targeted at making you a happier client. We are already seeing amazing interest in our FUSION users' conference this coming July. And we will be hosting another dozen or more regional events around the world that are building on the success of our first couple (and very successful) 2011 regional events.
We were also listening closely to your requests and issues as we released 5 significant versions of our Learning Suite last year and did touch-ups (service packs) 1-2 times a month throughout the year. We continued to make major investments in our software and our cloud-based infrastructure. This investment will increase again in 2012 as we strive for better levels of service for our clients.
Our products and company won numerous awards and certifications last year. One of which we are particularly proud is our work with, and certification from, the National Federation for the Blind. We continued to lead the industry with accessibility and are the first LMS to be recertified by the NFB.
We also saw record employee growth this year as we added over 160 staff to our family of companies, including several new senior leaders. And with the addition of a few new hires in January, we now have a team of 375 people worldwide. We remain focused on continuing that growth this year to ensure we achieve even better levels of service, reliability, and more innovation from our products.
We completed our move into our new space late in 2010, and added a floor in 2011. We share a large complex with Google and the Communitech Hub - a mobile media accelerator center of which we are a founding partner. This is a great environment to help us attract staff. We would love the opportunity to host more of our clients here this year.
It's exciting to be focused on building a great global organization that cares passionately about building lasting relationships with our clients from around the world, and helping them reinvent the learning experience. We are hard at work getting ready for some major new announcements to make your life easier, and helping you make your user's experiences richer, more personalized and engaging. Stay tuned for roadmap discussions and webinars on upcoming releases - you will be excited to see the advancements.
Very special thank you to all our customers, partners, and friends for an outstanding year and looking forward to working with all of you in 2012 and beyond! Together we can achieve even bigger transformations of teaching and learning.
Sincerely,
John Baker
President & CEO
Desire2Learn Incorporated
Posted in: ePortfolio Industry Trends Learning Suite Research and Design Transforming Teaching & Learning
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By David O'Hagan | Published: Thursday, December 22, 2011
Get Passion
Recently, I read a blog post from Angela Maiers on passion-based learning. The post was great, and it highlighted some key points that relate to both teaching (integrating learning into a student's whole life) and leadership in general. Her point 'a' on reaching out to the disenfranchised, while stating "we need to prepare kids to be successful in the real world, not just while in school", is very relevant in preparing children to be both inspired and equipped to deal with various personalities, deadlines, and stresses of 'real life.' Angela's point 'h' however is key, and the one I'm focused on here. Everyone wants passionate students; however, it is teachers that have a wonderful opportunity to draw out passion in their students.
Children are impressionable, and passionate teachers help students become excited about their learning and growth. Conversely, passion can grow and wane based on a number of factors. Below is a list of methods that anyone can use to continually increase or boost one's passion, whether they are involved in teaching and learning or merely adding a greater interest in daily life. Regardless of one's position, the end result is a greater energy and enthusiasm for one's work. And, for teachers, this heightened enthusiasm can generate passion in their students, parents, and colleagues.
Clearly, everyone differs regarding individual learning styles and their application. Whether ones teaches in a traditional setting or uses an LMS, develops software, gardens, or writes blog posts, the following suggestions can be used, adapted, and evolved to kick-start passion in one's own life and others as well. Modify the strategies below as necessary, and do not expect immediate results. We are human after all and require practice to become proficient at new concepts.
Key ways to boost passion in our lives
Generate fresh ideas
- New ideas inherently ignite new energy and passion. Give these a try:
- Volunteer: Exposure to areas of society and the world you're not familiar with is eye-opening and can give you fresh motivation and greater insight.
- Meditate: It's amazing how much clarity, as well as new ideas, can come when you actively slow down your mind.
- Travel: Take the children on a national or international trip or explore a nearby village you've never visited. Learning about new cultures, traditions, and styles is a fantastic way to give you a new perspective and question the status quo.
Minimize idols
- Identify and cut out distractions from your life. Most of us are dealing with jam-packed schedules, so allow less of your precious time to be consumed by distractions that do not add to your life (e.g. excessive television, hours of video games, record setting phone conversations, etc).
- Note: Distractions can be a very good way to decompress and relax; however, ensure that they don't take up too much of the free time in your already busy schedule
Teamwork
- Form and/or join a peer group, networking group, or other like-minded organization; Partnering with others is an excellent way to build in accountability, practice constructive criticism, generate excitement, and have a sounding board for your ideas and plans.
- Seek out people with a positive energy who are excited about life, since personalities and characteristics can often be infectious.
- It's very energizing to cultivate new ideas (whether on your own or as a group/team), as well as have your ideas and goals validated and encouraged by others.
- We're human and meant to interact with others; however, people too often work solo and in a vacuum.
Fail
- A significant lack of opportunity for failure exists in many of our schools today. As a result, teachers, who are adults that acquired years of failure-aversion experience, indirectly share this with their students:
- What child wouldn't love a gregarious teacher willing to put themselves out there in the school or in the community in front of the students with the risk of it not going as planned? Seeing that teacher stumble or fail, but pick themselves up and dust themselves off and try again is inspiring.
- Failure ultimately promotes confidence in one's self, while confidence then creates passion, which then flows through to one's work. We're never too old to learn from failure, although we're now less fearless so require additional encouragement to fail
- Stretch your own comfort zone a little and experience failure and the growth and inspiration that comes with it
Read/Watch/Listen
Celebrate success
- It is quite easy to post wins, comments, and praise received that you and your students have achieved
- Create a success board in the classroom, office, or home; remind yourself and your students of your achievements. These visual reminders serve as fuel to generate energy and passion for new ideas and thinking
- Note: It's not vain to take pleasure seeing your name in lights with praise attached; consider the Dale Carnegie principle: 'A person's name is to that person, the sweetest and most important sound in any language.'
Getting passionate (or re-igniting passion within yourself) isn't an overnight job. Give it some time and switch up and vary the above suggestions. But keep in mind that a renewed passion in you can have a fantastic ripple effect on others, multiplying the positive results.
If you're passionate about your life and your role, you will inspire students, fellow colleagues, spouses, children, and others. It's awesome how momentum can build and impact many when it starts just with you.
Posted in: eLearning Higher Education Kindergarten - Grade 12 Transforming Teaching & Learning
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By Marsha Conley | Published: Thursday, November 17, 2011
Increase Student Success by Personalizing Online Learning
The idea of using technology to personalize education for each individual learner has been around since the early days of Computer Based Training. These early devices could track a learner’s answers to quiz questions and then deliver additional materials based on the questions missed which was a major improvement in those days. However, modern Learning Management Systems (LMSs) can do much more and have many new tools for personalizing online learning.
What does personalization mean? While many definitions exist, the US National Educational Technology Plan definition is available online. In usage here, it means providing adjustments to what is learned, the pace at which learning happens and the methods of learning based on students' needs and performance. The personalization suggestions below also solve another common problem - that online students feel isolated and disconnected - by making the online learning experience feel more personal and interactive.
Customize Communications with Personal News Items
A great strategy that makes an online class feel much more personal and interactive is to create news items that respond immediately to the student as they complete tasks in the course. An example would be a news item (announcement that appears on the course home page) acknowledging that a student has passed a quiz (or not), submitted a dropbox assignment, posted to a discussion topic, etc. These pre-programmed news items can even have the student’s name automatically inserted and have a link to the next set of materials or assignments.
When I tried this in my own online course, I got very positive feedback from the students. They said it felt like someone was paying attention and cared that they were doing their work in the class. One student even said, "Wow, you must be online 24/7. I took my quiz at 2 am last night and as soon as I finished there was a message from you saying that I passed!" The good news is that if you build these custom news items once, they can be copied from course to course and semester to semester. So, while it feels very personal and responsive to the student, it actually saves the instructor time and effort. Now, that is a win/win!!
Here is an example:
Note: The student's name is easy to add in using the replacement string in most LMSs. For this example, in the Desire2Learn platform, you would type {firstname} in the news item in the location after the greeting.
Provide Optional Materials and Activities
Modern Learning Environments provide tools called "release conditions" that allow instructors to make content materials or other online tools available to students based on their performance or previous activities rather than by dates and times. These options can deliver remediation materials only to students who need them based on criteria such as performance on tests or other assignments. Similarly, instructors can deliver enrichment materials only to those students who are demonstrating mastery of the basic required materials in the course.
Allow Students to Choose Notification Methods
Most LMSs provide multiple ways that students can be notified about announcements or other course related events. For example, the newest version of the Desire2Learn® Learning Suite provides many options for students for how they prefer to be contacted and notified about what is going on in the course. It is an opt-in system where they can choose to receive an email or a text message about news items, upcoming deadlines, replies to their discussion postings, etc. Or they can see what has happened in the course since they were last there in the Updates widget (if this has been added to the Course Home page).
Provide a Cafeteria Menu of Assignments
Another method of personalizing an online course is to provide students with some flexibility in how they demonstrate that they have achieved the required learning objectives. This could mean having a menu of assignment choices so that students can choose to write a paper, give an oral presentation, create a video, develop a case study, or other appropriate "deliverable" that demonstrates their skills and knowledge. This can also enable students to choose which technology tools they prefer to use (as suggested by David O’Hagan in a previous blog post). This is easy to do using release conditions and doesn’t cause a lot of complication in the gradebook either.
Give Students Personal Deadlines and Time Limits
It is quite easy in an online environment to give a student, with a legitimate reason, an extension on an assignment without affecting other students. This custom date can appear in the student’s personal course calendar but no one else will know that they have a different deadline. Similarly, it is much easier now to accommodate your students with special needs who require extra time on an exam without impacting other students or causing a lot of hassle in the gradebook for the instructor. Janna Cameron’s earlier blog entry had other comments on students with special needs.
In future blog postings, I’ll add to these strategies with some additional ideas for helping students succeed, keeping students honest and thinking for themselves, and overcoming student anxiety in online courses.
Posted in: eLearning Higher Education Industry Trends Learning Environment Learning Management System Technology
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By David Halk | Published: Wednesday, October 26, 2011
Responding to Technology
Lessons From The Frontlines: Responding to Technology
In early 2009, while completing my final year of university, I made a somewhat impulsive decision to participate in an exchange program organized by the Canadian government. A few months later I was unpacking my things in the small town of L’Assomption, Quebec, Canada, where I was to spend the next nine months teaching English to francophone high-school students.
Through this experience I was able to gain a great amount of respect for K-12 teachers. Sure, some classes were angelic with no disruptions, no attempts at cheating, and were filled with optimism and hope for the future. Others, well, let’s just say they resembled something more like a scene from the movie Gremlins 2.
Before entering the class for the first time I thought back to when I was that age, and I remembered how cool all the students thought the student teacher was. Remembering that I attended primary school before the Internet was widely available, I thought I was going to stroll into that school, meet a bunch of teenagers who thought they knew everything about technology, and then blow their minds with all of my rad Internet tricks.
Well, things were a lot different, much different. In five short years the game had changed dramatically.
Even if I was just five years removed from my own high-school experience, the entire mentality of the high-school student had been remodelled. While I did teach them a few new things, like which P2P downloading programs were least likely to contain viruses, and how to fix the tracking on a VHS tape, most of them had already designed themselves into teenage mutant technological warriors.
The hastened exchange of information outside of the classroom - propagated by smartphones and new media – has created a new generation of high-school students that consume and respond to information at an unprecedented rate. In that light, instructors shouldn’t lament this new evolution of teenage pandemonium, instead they should adapt their styles to reflect the expectations of delivery that are reinforced by new media.
Keep Things Fast-Paced
I remember that in Grade 11 my media arts teacher told us that our generation’s attention span was ruined by Sesame Street. She said the short segments of erratic information taught our generation to be restless for longer periods of time. Well, now imagine what that same teacher would say about the generation that is consuming an endless amount of one minute, totally disassociated, unrestricted content, on-demand and online. Moreover, the most popular videos are primarily cute animals and babies, or people getting hurt.
I think that teacher is now probably wishing the ”Sesame Street generation” was still in class.
From my perspective, while working with teachers in English classes, I learned that the best way to keep a student’s attention and improve participation was to prepare multiple, short, and digestible activities for each lesson. In addition, interactivity was a crucial element as the students are being raised in a media environment that is adjustable with the touch of a finger.
We would fill 75 minutes with 4-5 fast paced activities reinforcing the same subject from different vantage points, using different media to engage the students with different senses. Mainly, we used this method to maintain our own sanity as a bored class would only lead to rampant tomfoolery, so we would weave a fast-paced class between hands-on activities, videos, audio, and discussion. It was a constant attack of misdirection.
When I first entered the class and saw the planned rate at which we would switch activities, I was a little surprised. But through practice I found that a constant change of pace was, ironically enough, the only way to hold the attention of the students.
Online Technology Should Reinforce Social Learning
Some may say that new forms of communication have created social hermits who communicate more in ASCII than they do with verbal words. I couldn’t disagree more.
If you just observe a single high school class, students are still itching for every opportunity to communicate with each other. Whether it be a movie playing, a YouTube video streaming, or even a next-generation tablet equipped on each student’s desk, if a teacher leaves the room the class will erupt into conversation.
While texts, Facebook, email, and other forms of online communication have definitely become a dominating form of communication, they are all still just mediums used to create situations that people want most: real-life social interactions.
Comparing my experience teaching in Quebec to my own high school experience, students now seem remarkably more in tune with each other, and lines between exclusive groups of friends are more blurred. Sure, thereare groups of friends that hang out with each other more often than not, but in general the student body has more familiarity with each other.
This familiarity is because outside of class students are still communicating and learning about each other through Facebook and other online Web 2.0 mediums. They know more about each other, have more respect about each other, and the ability to meet one of your classmates no longer requires painstaking social manoeuvring, but only the press of a single button.
With that in mind, online technology shouldn’t be seen as something that outstrips the importance of social interaction in a classroom. Instead, it should be seen as an additional medium that reinforces in-class social experiences. Instructors should encourage their students to take work online into the social networking space.
Don’t Underestimate Out-Of-Class, Self-Directed Learning
In English class, one thing that always amazed me was that I could almost find a direct correlation between strong bilingualism and kids wearing shirts baring the logos of The Doors, Pink Floyd, and Led Zeppelin. In short, those students who demonstrated passion for music as culture seemed to excel at acquiring a new language. After speaking with one of these students, I realized how integral a role that online access played in this development.
He told me that his friends would listen to songs they liked in English, research the lyrics, and then learn to thoroughly understand them. Moreover, they had access to online forums, discussions and chats to discuss these concepts with peers around the world. In all of these situations they were practicing English, and by the time they were in their final years of highschool they had become entirely fluent in the language.
With immediate access to information, if a student is interested in something, whether it be music, geography or politics, they will go out and learn about it at home. This accessibility of information needs to be respected in formal classrooms; telling students that the classroom is the only place to learn, achieve a diploma and be successful in life will only instigate a sense of disdain for the system.
Instead, instructors should stress the value of relationships, dialogue and social reinforcement that is found in classrooms, and how these elements can be used to support learning that one achieves at their own will, on their own time.
Posted in: eLearning Higher Education Kindergarten - Grade 12 Technology Transforming Teaching & Learning
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