Location: UK Consulate

Great New Panel Has Just Been Added

Keynote Speaker: PROFESSOR ROBERT STONE, Director,Human Interface Technologies, Chair Interactive Multimedia Systems University of Birmingham, United Kingdom.

Additional panelists include Scot Osterweil, Research Manager, Education Arcade(MIT) and Kent Quirk, Chief Technical officer at CogniToy. By 2008 40% of U.S. companies will adopt serious games in their training efforts. Learn more about games-based learning, its market and what it means to the US and UK markets.

By 2008 40% of U.S. companies will adopt serious games in their training efforts. Learn more about games-based learning, its market and what it means to the US and UK markets.

Professor Stone has a long a distinguished career in the fields of gaming and virtual reality and is a human factors expert working with the MoD and DoD in their utilization of serious games.

Scot Osterweil is the project manager for the Education Arcade (an MIT Project) and is currently running “Learning Games to Go,” a federally funded project designed to develop mobile games that teach math and literacy.

Kent Quirk is the Chief Technical Officer and one of the founders, Kent has over 20 years experience in software design and development. He is the architect of Programmable Objects as well as lead designer for MindRover. His role includes game design as well as overseeing all aspects of development, art, media, and website design. He is an entrepreneur and a specialist in human factors and software interface design.

Register now!

Join thought leader and eLearning guru Clark Aldridge as he shares his thoughts on the learning Games and Simulation design arena.

Many conversations about simulations seize up due to conflicting definitions, expectations, and experiences. Meanwhile, others have brought together simulation, game, and pedagogical elements into highly powerful and effective training experiences. We’ll discuss the top four simulation types used in enterprises and schools today, and learn when, where, and why they make sense. Using many examples, you will see some surprising themes between all of them, and how they are combining with other experiences including role-plays, computer games, marketing games, and flight simulators to start redefining formal education in the emerging future.

Learn more and register for this exciting webinar brought to you by Elluminate.

Don’t miss the chance to participate in this great event!

You will be able to be part of an international videoconference discussion on award winning learning programs in the financial services sector. You can read the original description, or register here.

Directions and parking information is available here.

Roadblocks to Learning Technology: How to go around, over, and through the roadblocks to a successful eLearning implementation

Please join us as CMASTD and NELA come together to present a lively panel discussion on the Roadblocks to Learning Technology.

Come learn about the roadblocks to deploying learning technology and what strategies can be used to avoid the potential pitfalls. The session will begin with Michael Brennan, Principal Consultant at Knowledge-Infusion and former industry analyst and Program Director for IDC’s Learning Services research programs. Michael will be talking about blended learning best practices, strategy development as well as where he sees the future trends of Learning Technology.

The second half of the session will be a panel discussion featuring:

• Adam O’Toole – Manager of Vertical University at Vertical Communications. Adam will discuss the design and development of Vertical University, an online tool that provides product training to all of Vertical Communications resellers and distributors.
• Patricia Gugliotta – Manager of Sales Training for DePuy Spine. Patricia will discuss DePuy Spine’s migration from sharing an internal training site to the development of a dedicated external site that provides online learning to a national 600 person sales and reseller team.
• Mark Siegal – Principal at MSA Solutions. Mark will discuss how Genzyme created learning programs with a goal to foster broader exchange of cross-functional and business knowledge related to how products are produced at Genzyme.

Bring your notepad and questions, as the panel will be open to discussion from the audience as to what the biggest roadblocks are and how to avoid them.

Schedule: Tuesday, November 28th

8:30 – 9:00am Registration and Networking
9:00 – 10:00    Mike Brenan
10:00 – 10:15  Break
10:15 – 11:30  Panel Discussion
11:30 – 12:00  Q&A

Refreshments sponsored by GeoLearning 

Location: American Cancer Society

30 Speen Street,
Framingham, MA 01701-9376
Get directions

Register online here

NELA and SHARE Boston join together for a special mid-day boxed lunch broadcast from both Switzerland and Cambridge. Esteemed experts from both sides of the world will discuss successful award winning learning programs in the financial services sector. What is the world of corporate finance? Does in change in other parts of the world? Are we teaching the right skills? Are we taking advantage of today’s technology? Join a spirited cross the world discussion. Bring lots’ of great questions.

More details and registration.

The format required that all seven presenters limit themselves to five minutes (okay, Pat really gave people six before shutting them down) for their presentation.  Everyone agreed that this was the hardest part of the event, getting one or two key points across clearly in just five minutes.  At the end of the evening, each audience member was able to vote for their top two presentations.  Then the votes were tallied and prizes were awarded for the top three presentations.

The Winning Presentation Are:

1. Doug Foster, “Moving from Training to Collaborative Learning”
2. Nurit Bloom, “A Tale of Two e-Learning Vendors: Pitfalls and Best Practices”
3. Ted Coine, “Developing eLearning Content for New Computer Users”

Thanks again to Pat O’Malley for all his work coordinating this event and to all the presenters for their hard work trying to get a presentation to fit into a five minute time limit.  We feel the event was a great success and will be working to refine the format a bit to make it an annual event.

We will be working with all of the presenters to get their presentations and/or support materials up here for those of you who weren’t able to make it to the event, so check back soon.

The presentations for the NELA Choice Awards are in!  There are still a few people that we are following up with, but here is the current list of presentations for Wednesday:

• Ted Coine, Coiné Corporate Training - “Developing eLearning Content for New Computer Users”
• Nurit Bloom, Bright Horizons - “A Tale of Two E-Learning Vendors: Pitfalls and Best Practices”
• Mark Siegel,  MSA Solutions - “The E-learning Proposal Development Process: The 1st Step in Bringing Value to Clients”
• Malcolm Johnston - “Simulations: Creating Engaging eLearning”
• Paul Braswell - “Making Learning a Strategy Inititative: How the World Bank makes learning part of the organizations’ overall business strategy.”
• Doug Foster - “Moving from Training to Collaborative Learning”
• Lisa Neal - “The use of personas and heuristic evaluation for e-learning”

Event Details:

Date: June 14, 2006, 6-8pm
Home Suites Inn-Weston Room
455 Totten Pond Road, Waltham, MA 02451

Register Now!

Do you have an elearning story to share? 

NELA will be hosting a session on June 14th, 2006 entitled “The NELA Choice Awards – Users Sharing Stories” — Best Practices and Lessons Learned.

You are invited to present lessons you learned or best practices you discovered, for example:

• in a program launch
• while marketing your elearning program
• while developing a Return on Investment evaluation
• while developing or implementing the content in your Elearning program

Some other ideas are described in the details below by clicking on (more…) below.

Benefits of presenting

• each presenter will receive free admission to a future event
• the overall winner will receive a prize
• you will significantly contribute to the advancement of the elearning community

Guidelines

• keep it brief, compelling and to the point: stories should be 5 minutes or less
• vendors are welcome but keep in mind that attendees are looking for practical useful tips: no sales presentations

Action

• if you are interested in presenting, please read the details below by clicking on (more…) below and send a submission by June 1 to PatNELA@PatrickOMalley.com
• call 617-PATRICK (that’s my phone number, no kidding) if you have any questions or would like to discuss anything related to the session.

Details

Anyone can participate (including vendors), but the emphasis is on real world solutions, tips, war stories, and examples.  If too many presentations are submitted, we will choose the ones that will provide the most value.  The audience members will vote on the best presentations, and prizes will be awarded.

Please send a brief description of your presentation by June 1 to PatNELA@PatrickOMalley.com which contains:

• A title and a 10-20 word description, if the title isn’t self explanatory
• A brief outline
  * 25-100 words about what you plan to discuss, and why you think this talk will be of benefit to the NELA members
• a few PowerPoint slides if you plan to use them

FYI, these summaries may be placed on the NELA blog for further discussion or for post-presentation access to reference materials.

Rules

• Presentation ideas should be submitted to PatNELA@PatrickOMalley.com by June 1st
• Anyone can participate, including vendors, but sales presentations are not allowed

Benefits of presenting

• each presenter will receive free admission to a future event
• the overall winner will receive a prize
• you will significantly contribute to the advancement of the elearning community

Ideas for presentations

Stories and presentations that would interest our members most are:

• A successful elearning program launch, focusing on a couple of key success factors or lessons learned.
• An elearning program or development where something went wrong.  What were the assumptions or problems, and what did you do (or would you do in the future) to overcome that problem.  (Names can be changed to protect the innocent
  * This could also be called “Here’s a mistake you don’t want to make…”
• An elearning program that changed something in the industry, established a new best practice or industry benchmark.
• A new way you marketed or promoted your elearning program to get learner buy-in or community excitement.
• The top two benefits you used to convince your company to fund your new elearning initiative.
• The ROI (return on investment) study or cost-benefit analysis you used to gain funding for your elearning initiative.
• The evaluation process you used to show that users actually learned and the company benefited from your recent elearning project.
• A new Elearning technique that you developed or used
• An innovative instructional design strategy or simulation you used in your elearning program.
  1. why you felt it was successful
  2. how others could do use this technique

This is a new type of session for NELA, but one that will be different, interesting and productive for our members.  Since we are trying something new, we welcome comments about how it should be implemented – the emphasis is on learning from others in a fun and informal session.

Feel free to call me at 617-PATRICK (no kidding) if you have any questions or would like to discuss anything related to the session.

Please join practiced and knowledgeable panelists from Bayer Healthcare and others who will share their experiences of boosting their organization’s marketing efforts through elearning education and training.

More information and registration coming soon!

We started the panel with a brief introduction from each of our panelists, and then proceeded to go through some of the initial questions.

Mike Laffin from Serono led off the discussion talking about the wide range of audiences and learning styles that they have to deal with.  Specifically the difference between the needs of sales reps and managers and hit internal folks such as scientists, researchers, finance, IT, marketing, customer services, etc.  He brought up an interesting conflict that many times the sales people’s learning styles often are best supported by classroom training with many application exercises, but they are remote, so classroom training is difficult.  This contrasts with many of the more analytical internal folks who are slower to interact and try new things. The home office people are easier to get in a classroom, but many prefer some sort of self-paced online training.

Kevin Kovalcik provided some interesting discussion around how compliance driven their work is.  “Never documented, never done” was the quote he used to start off the discussion.  Everything that they due needs to be transparent, for audits, traceability, change controls, etc.  They use a validated system that is hybrid, a combination of paper and electronic.  For example, many of their training events are delivered via their portal, but completed on “paper.”

At this point, discussion picked up with the audience and some additional questions were raised, such as “What evaluation levels do you go to when evaluating your learning events?” and “How does Learning & Organizational Development work with Marketing?”.  Each question led to further discussion and debate, and I will work to get more details here shortly.

The session closed with each panelist sharing their key learnings that they have gained through their experience in the field.

Kevin Kovalcik focused on three key areas:

1. Having the right people on the right teams
2. Having an “Organizational Cultural Awareness”
3. Having a plan for change management as part of the process

Mike Laffin provided two key learnings:

1. Include stake holders from the earliest possible moment, including: SMEs, Legal & Regulatory, IT, Vendors, and Learners/End users
2. Realize that your own personal learning preferences are not the same as everybody else.  Keep an open mind and focus on the learner.

As the moderator of the panel, I wasn’t able to take detailed notes, but I heard that someone was.  I will make sure that those notes get posted here as well.  If you have additional thoughts, ideas, key learnings, comments, or just want to correct something I’ve said above, please click on the comment link below, and share them with the group!