Ambient Connections via Ron Edwards

Online Educa 2005 Perspective

I have attended Online Educa four years in a row now and have seen the conference grow steadily. The format and focus has been consistent with more attention on higher education and governmental initiatives than on the corporate world in which I have been a part of for more than a dozen years (last year I counted about eight corporate attendees, this year seemed about the same). The structure of having four presenters share an hour or a bit more is quite different from what I have come to recognize as primarily an American model of one presenter per session. This means that you can get a variety of perspectives in one session, but I find that they rarely fit together or are of the same caliber, and rarely (by design) do I obtain any real insight. Experiencing Educa as a collection of data points to draw your own conclusions about the state of the industry and to generalize on trends rather than as an educational experience where the learning happens in the sessions is where I have found value in addition to the networking, of course.

My conclusion from this conference is that while the presentations did not change much in terms of how advanced the subjects/projects were, the interest in the audience seems to be shifting towards more innovative approaches. I noticed five areas in which this seems true, naturally the same areas I am working in and spent my time at the conference pursuing: eLearning for Security, Enterprise eLearning, Mobile Learning, Games for Learning, and eLearning for Developing Countries. My thoughts on each:

eLearning for Security
New to Educa this year is the emergence of security as a significant educational need better addressed through technology as I experienced through my participation/presentation at the Defense and Security Forum preceding Online Educa, where Dick Davies and my presentation on mobile games and simulations for learning received significant interest and generated conversations throughout the week. This audience ranged significantly in experience with eLearning so what impressed some as an example of effective learning looked like standard-issue page turners to me – an arena ripe for innovation.

Enterprise eLearning
Two presentations stood out for me, Nigel Paine of the BBC on their new learning practices, I’m impressed by how far he’s led his organization to adopt collaborative informal learning utilizing an effective mix of blogs, wikis, podcasting and other techniques Elliott Masie is calling 'Extreme Learning'. It was especially amazing to see progress in their culture Nigel would characterize as 'not sharing' before! The other presentation was by Jonathan Levy on a project he led for Cisco for an enterprise learning portal that matched needs and interests of learners to content, courses and other people, a utopian mix he actually got to work and used a wide variety of people around the world to help make it a reality, showcasing the new way innovation is constructed and providing a state of the art working model companies should aspire to. Based on the questions and comments heard, I don’t think either audience grasped the significance of what was being presented, in the first, that a mix and match low cost approach can get even the most insular company collaborating – helping it to move faster while saving money, and in the second, just how far we’ve come to now see a real example of a dynamic and intelligent learning portal that has almost nothing to do with an 'LMS, yet the questions from the back were 'so what LMS are you using'…

Mobile Learning
I found the interest in mobile learning strong based on the number of participants and sessions held on the subject, as well as the myriad of discussions I had in the corridors and Giunti Labs booth where they were showcasing their mLCMS. Three tiers of applications are emerging; solutions for executives, traveling employees (primarily sales & engineers) and line workers often in remote locations – for these combining corporate learning with connecting to experts and the emergence of context sensitive help (wearable computers, location based content) were of high interest once you got past their first impression of what mobile learning is (same content and approach on a smaller, mobile device). Most people I talked to or overheard did not make the distinction of fitting need to device and approach so there is a lot to be done to educate people to better understand the context in which mobile learning can be a powerful addition to their efforts.

Games for Learning
The session held on this subject was so full there was a queue outside the 150 seat room waiting for people to leave so they could enter for the six presentations that varied wildly on relevance and value. The most important thing to note was the sheer interest in the subject. The organizers should take note and hold better and bigger sessions to accommodate. Interestingly, I did not see any vendors exhibiting game engine platforms or other related solutions. We generated several interesting discussions with our handheld gaming platform we demonstrated continuously shoulder to shoulder (it was hard to get it back sometimes!) - on applications for sales people (rich media demonstrations) to corporate communications/culture building games to team building support on the device that costs less than many mobile phones and could either be integrated with corporate systems or not - it was appealing that they could be a low cost way of distributing content and engagement without infrastructure impact.

eLearning for Developing Countries
There were a few presentations showing quite advanced elearning programmes in universities in South Africa and Ethiopia and across Latin America/South America and a room full of interested participants who shared overviews of their own significant programs (e.g. a Kenyan University startup with 18,000 learners). Conversations revealed high interest in African countries being able to participate in EU funded educational initiatives in 2007 and upcoming relevant conferences. I was impressed at the scale of the programs with attention to learning effectiveness. The South African example of 28,000 students with class sizes of 800 having to be split into sub groups for engagement and facilitation was encouraging to see how programs can scale and evolve with student needs at the forefront. I came away with a sense that eLearning is working in places in Africa quite well and at a scale many would find surprising. Of course, there is still much work to be done, especially with educating teachers how to best use existing and emerging technologies. Interestingly, mobile learning support was seldom mentioned for countries in which the majority of learners have mobile phones but not access to email and computers from home – contrasted to the mLearn conference in Cape Town which highlighted mobile phone support for learning programs in countries across Africa.