Moodle Doodle: Building Online Courses Using the Open Source LCMS Moodle

This session was disappointing. The session just went over some of the basic tools and functionality of Moodle, which I think we are all familiar with. The speaker did however provide some pretty good links: MoodleTutorials.org, Workshop.webcourseworks.com and Moodle Guide for Beginners from School Anywhere.

Tuesday Keynote: The Carrot Principle – Chester Elton

This keynote was based on the best-selling book, The Carrot Principle. The speaker was Cheston Elton. They keynote covered how using recognition and appreciation creates results. He asked: What makes a great leader? Some audience members replied that the manager cared about them as a person, not just as employee. Did you trust that manager? They all answered Yes. These were leaders that gave showed appreciation. Some characteristics of great leaders: Goal setting, communication, trust and accountability. It’s a must have if you want to build a great team. When you do not create a carrot culture, employees are not eager to go to work. They are constantly looking at the clock.

Seeing Changes Everything: Collaborative Video making for Organizational Transformation

This was the first session I attended on Tuesday morning.  The concept was to show us how video can be used in the workplace to capture company culture and how video gives us another point of view to our company and ourselves. The presenter handed us all Flip video cameras and asked us to pair up and interview each other.

Producing Great Audio and Video Podcasts

This was the last break out session of the day, but one of the best. The speaker was Jonathan Finkelstein. Before he started the presentation, he gave out his cell phone number and encouraged us to send him text messages while he was presenting.

Virtual World – Real Learning

This was a great breakout session on using Second Life and other Virtual Worlds for training and instruction. The speaker had guests connected to us from London and Thailand.

The speaker showed us the entire presentation via Second Life. He connected us to an institution in South East Asia titled ‘International School Island‘. I was able to visit the blog and was provided with a link that teleported my character in Second Life to their community. They use the island to educate trainers and other educators.

Keynote: A Whole New Mind

This was a keynote by best-selling author Daniel Pink, who wrote ‘A Whole New Mind’ and ‘The Adventures of Johnny Bunko’.

Beyond the Blend – Optimizing the use of your LMS

This session was held by Bryan Chapman of the Chapman Alliance. This conference was specifically targeted at Training managers, so this presentation had more of a mind frame of training large groups of people in different countries. But some of the facts and numbers he mentioned were very interesting:

Adobe AIR

This was the first session we attended on Monday morning of the conference. The title of the session was ‘Using Flash with Adobe AIR’. You can read more about Adobe AIR here. AIR basically lets developers use web technologies to build Internet applications that run outside the browser on any operating system. Here’s what I learned:

eLearning Design Certificate – Day Three

Day Three of the eLearning Design certificate was really great. Here are the main ideas:

• Scenario Based Learning. All online scenarios must have human emotion because people are always emotional.
• When they learn something, they learn something from the emotional standpoint.
• Some examples of emotional scenarios are here.
• Use the audio to highlight the emotions.
• Some of the features, like the intro and the choices do not have audio or a graphic because it added NO VALUE. Text was just fine.
• Embed your content in the story.
• Also embed the feedback in your scenarios. As it plays out, the students will know if they did wrong. You do not have to scream out ‘You got it wrong’. They will know.
• The content was organized for you to discover that you had to listen.
• Very few objectives. Only present what is really important to learn.
• It has to be emotional, it has to move people.

eLearning Design Certificate – Day Two

OK, Day Two, read below:

• Biggest pitfall – skip the course development and just place the entire book online.
• Why is web 2.0 tools successful? Not because of the media, but because of the improvement of the conversation between 2 or more people.
• Conversation goes back to the idea of story telling. We always communicate by telling each other stories. Tell someone a story online and they will remember it and be interested.
• When we tell students to ‘Click forward, click forward, click back…’ there is no human interaction to guide them and converse with them. This makes the course boring and unappealing.
• What does engage mean? People have unfinished stories. Stories help complete unfinished stories. Completed stories become memories. Memories trigger behaviors
• Technical Simulations. Letting them manipulate something. Do not simulate the simple things. Focus on the things that produce real errors and are most difficult. The cost of developing these types of games are higher upfront, but produce the largest ROI.