Last Friday I attended a great webinar on re-use and the dominKnow Learning Content Management System (LCMS) hosted by our partners at GeoLearning.

The hour-long session was presented by Rick Judson of Sales Performance International (SPI) and GeoLearning's Dr. Paul Schneider.

SPI is a dominKnow LCMS client through our partnership with GeoLearning.

If you've ever heard of the phrase "Solution Selling®" then you are aware of the impact SPI has had on the world of sales. Solution Selling is SPI's trademarked methodology for approaching sales from a customer-centered perspective, and innumerable organizations use this approach throughout the world. It is the core of Microsoft's internal and partner sales training approach, for example. SPI offers training on the Solution Selling methodology, including online training created using the dominKnow LCMS.

Last Friday's webinar offered a look at how SPI's use of the dominKnow LCMS and its content management and re-use options has evolved in the past three or so years.

Evolved is the key – SPI's Rick Judson explained that SPI is currently in its third phase of re-use, and is already looking forward to evolving again.

SPI started out initially just using the LCMS as a course structuring system, working with a third-party partner to create Flash movies as pages uploaded into the LCMS. This approach, Rick explained, was one of expedience – SPI needed to get new courses made and simply altered an approach that it already had in place in order to meet initial timelines. These courses could be re-used for various audiences quite quickly, and tweaks and changes could be made by altering the Flash movies and updating them in the LCMS.

SPI's next leap in re-use came with the move to using the LCMS's integrated authoring tool. By moving to the authoring tool, SPI was able to make more granular re-use of page assets such as images or media files. Rather than having to update a graphic in several different Flash movies then update the files in the LCMS, graphic updates could be updated once in the LCMS's asset manager and then shared by all pages using the image, for example.

The next evolutionary step, Rick explained, was to move to the re-use of Learning Objects within the LCMS. The dominKnow LCMS allows the creation of complete, stand-alone instructional packages that address specific topics, tasks or enabling objectives to support the overall learning objectives in a course. These packages include knowledge presentation pages, review exercises and assessment questions. Here's a visual that explains how a Learning Object is constructed in the dominKnow LCMS. Rick noted that making this evolutionary step has offered several advantages to SPI, such as speeding up development, reducing errors and improving control over content. Along with this step, SPI has also taken advantage of the LCMS's translation support features to create versions of its online courses for other languages.

Rick said that SPI's next evolution will be to make a more concerted effort to work with re-usable templates in the LCMS's integrated Authoring Tool.

The webinar was a great glimpse into how a client is successfully taking advantage of re-use in many forms, all empowered by the LCMS, and we definitely appreciated Rick's time and energy.

If you are interested in learning more, here's a PDF copy of the presentation slide deck.

Our thanks to Rick and Paul for putting together an excellent learning event!

Chris Van Wingerden is Vice President Learning Solutions at dominKnow Learning Systems.

Microsoft PowerPoint is far and away the most popular presentation software tool. In fact, it's really hit that level of status where the product name is synonymous with the generic product category, like Kleenex for facial tissues and Ski-Doo for snow machines.

PowerPoint really is the default, the standard, the go-to tool for almost everyone in the training and education space, and most trainers and training departments have invested a great deal of time and effort in creating PowerPoint slide decks to support instructor-led and face-to-face training.

This week dominKnow is releasing a set of feature enhancements that dramatically improve the process of importing PowerPoint files into the dominKnow LCMS. These enhancements really expand the flexibility of the imported content, making it simple to move from an instructor-led course to an online course – without losing the time, effort and cost you've already invested in your original training material.

The feature enhancements import each slide into the dominKnow LCMS's integrated Authoring Tool as a new page. And once the quick import is complete, the full range of Authoring Tool features is available to help you edit, update and improve every page. Want to add or create engaging and instructionally sound e-learning interactions? No problem. The Authoring Tool's full range of interaction support tools is right there for you.

Need to record narration? No problem. The narration wizard can walk you through that process.

Need to change text? No problem – the text editor is instantly available. Need to add an assessment? No problem. The dominKnow LCMS's test-question wizards let you add test questions in a matter of minutes.

Need your new e-learning course to run in a third-party LMS? No problem. The course is easily exportable as SCORM 1.2 or 2004 compliant, or as AICC and PENS compliant.

What's really impressive is how robust the import process is.

All media files are automatically imported into the Authoring Tool's asset manager. This means all images, all audio files and all video files are instantly available for re-use on other pages or in entirely different courses, with full usage tracking and the ability to assign metadata to help in searching.

All master slides are automatically used to create layout templates that can be used for adding new pages to your course or any other course. And all speaker notes are imported into the Authoring Tool's new developer notes feature as well.

New Ways to Work Together

The feature enhancements also open new ways for development teams to create e-learning. A subject matter expert or instructional designer can now use PowerPoint to create a storyboard for a course, with text in place and placeholders for any images or media files required. The instructional designer can use the speaker notes in PowerPoint to describe what's required on the page, such as outlining how an interaction needs to work.

The storyboard PowerPoint can be quickly imported into the dominKnow LCMS, where other members of the development team can move it forward. One developer might move through the course standardizing the look and feel. A graphic artist can come in and add images as required. A Flash developer can come in and add any required animations or complex interactions. You get the idea – everyone works to their strengths, together in the LCMS.

With PowerPoint having such a wide user base within the world of learning, it's only common sense to be able to take advantage of it when moving to e-learning. And the feature enhancements we're releasing this week really simplify the PowerPoint import process and increase the flexibility of the imported content, creating real advantage for e-learning development teams.

Chris Van Wingerden is Vice President Learning Solutions at dominKnow Learning Systems.

Visitors to the 2009 edition of BETT, the world's largest educational technology event, will be able to get a first-hand glimpse of some exciting new features in the dominKnow Learning Content Management System (dominKnow LCMS).

BETT – once known as the British Educational and Training Technology show, but now just going by the shorter acronym alone – saw almost 29,000 visitors walk the aisles at the Olympia facility in London, UK. And we're excited to be at booth SW 30 in the software area to show off the latest developments in the dominKnow LCMS.

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"Remember the e-learning!"

This new battle cry has replaced the classic "Remember the Alamo!" this week in San Antonio as the GeoLearning 2008 Summit on Learning & Performance has rolled into town.

Today marked the official release of version 5.2 of the dominKnow Learning Content Management System (LCMS), and the Summit was a great place to mark the occasion. dominKnow Learning Systems is the platinum sponsor of the event, honouring the six-year partnership between the two companies.

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Attend a hockey game here in the Great White North, and you may well hear O Canada sung in a mix of French and English. It's a boisterous exercise in bilingualism and a gentle reminder that we don't always speak the same language.

It seems fitting that as we roll out the new Language Module for the dominKnow Learning Content Management System (LCMS), one of the first available languages is French-Canadian.

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A week and a half ago the iPod touch was officially released in Canada, and this week we're rolling out the beta version of our touch and iPhone-optimized mobile portal for the dominKnow Learning Content Management System (LCMS).

The portal has been designed using the iPhone User Interface (iUI), a framework and sample code released by Joe Hewitt, a software engineer and major contributor to the iPhone development community.

Taking advantage of our iPod touch-optimized portal puts the dominKnow Learning Center in the palm of a learner's hand.

Learners can log in and access full courses, as well as Learning Objects as single-topic information and any documents or Web links added as resources to a course. Learners can also access their internal e-mail inbox, progress reports and more.

We knew as soon as we had the iPod touch in our hands that this device could open up tremendous new access to learning on the go - all because of Apple's focus on the user experience. There's been a fair bit of talk about these features for a while now, since the iPhone hit the U.S. last spring. Chief among these is the ability to zoom in and out when viewing a web page. This solves so many display issues typically associated with mobile web viewing.

Our office has been buzzing with excitement over this for the past two weeks, starting with our CTO, Luke Hickey, who kicked off the portal project as soon as he had his iPod touch in hand.

Since then, team members have been walking around the office, showing each other the latest additions and tweaks to the portal. I can't count the number of hallway huddles I've been in, as people gather around to see the portal in action - it creates that kind of interest.

I've had my iPod touch for a week and a half, and so far I've spent far more time using Safari than I have listening to music - the Web user experience is that good. And it's easy to see so many ways it can get even better moving forward.

The iPod touch really points to a whole new generation of devices that could put this technology to great effect. It seems inevitable, for instance, that one next step will be a full laptop device with touch control, and in fact tech blog sites like engadget have been buzzing about just such a device since last year. (I already find the iTouch so much quicker for Internet searches at home and when traveling, since the power-up process is so much faster than my laptop.)

For many people the iPhone is already that device, and Apple's announcement that it will release a Software Developer Kit (SDK) in February should make things really start to cook.

Our new API is an exciting development for the dominKnow Learning Content Management System (LCMS).

By giving clients better tools to access the LCMS and the learning content it contains, we really feel we're taking the idea of re-usable learning content another step forward.

I'm writing this from the Brandon Hall Innovations in Learning Conference, where Stephen Downes opened with this morning's keynote address - a presentation on the development of E-learning 2.0 that included the audience's live blogging comments on one side of the stage while Downes' presentation ran on the other side. It was an interesting experiment, one that hopefully inspired the creativity of those sitting in the crowd.

Our new API is something that we hope will lead to some interesting and inspiring experiences as well. We can already predict some applications for it, such as simplifying the process for hooking the dominKnow LCMS up to an e-commerce site, for instance, or for allowing Learning Objects to be used in context-sensitive help within other applications.

What I think will be most interesting, though, is what others may try to do.

The new API opens up a world of learning possibilities and can help remove barriers to learning. We have no doubt that there are challenges out there, waiting to be solved and the API is an important way for us to empower our users to solve those challenges.

E-learning systems such as the Learning Management System (LMS) and Learning Content Management System (LCMS) face an upheaval, says Elliot Masie of the MASIE Center.

The e-learning futurist has his eyes on the e-learning prize, and says the target is not just moving but changing altogether.

"In a nutshell, we are moving from traditional branched e-Learning to a much wider set of informal learning, media-based objects, performance support objects, search based objects," he says in a "Briefing on LMS Changes", available on the website promoting the LMS 2007 Learning Systems User Group conference scheduled for Las Vegas April 12 and 13.

The reason? Changes in both the ways e-learning is being created and who is doing the creating, Masie says.

Here's what he says about the ways: "We are evolving from using just formal types of training to ever-increased production and distribution of informal content."

Here's what he says about the who: "Increasingly, Content is now coming not from a single syndicator of content, but rather from multiple sources. It is coming from internal and external sources and increasingly, Content is coming from the crowd. We are creating content at multiple points in the organization and we are giving the ability of subject matter experts and users, even sometimes customers and people in our supply chain, the opportunity to create Content as well."

And the challenge, he says, is helping learners find what they need: "We need to figure out a way in which our content becomes discoverable. Our learners are wanting to be able to get at Content in multiple formats...and our instructional designers are wanting to be able to get at the Content that's being created in other parts of our enterprise."

So what's an LCMS to do? Well, the answer really is to keep on doing what you've always done, only more of it.

That big capital C and big capital M in the acronym LCMS is what I'm talking about: Content Management.

The dominKnow LCMS has always been more than just a course creation tool.

It has always been a searchable, indexed content management tool that gives learners and developers alike the ability to find the learning content they need, whether that content is a full-fledged course with learning objectives and testing or a smaller piece of knowledge focused on an individual topic.

And it has always taken advantage of whatever content format works best for the individual creator of the content, whether it's a Microsoft Word or PowerPoint file or a PDF file or HTML pages or Adobe Flash movies (which includes content created by any tool able to export a .swf file.) And, with the 5.1 version, that now includes audio files such as podcasts.

This means: 1. Anyone can make the e-learning content they need to make 2. Anyone can find the e-learning content they need to find.

And it means that an LCMS is a good choice to help any organization deal with the changing natures of learning.

Sometimes, even good news travels slowly!

We've just noticed that PENS has offered congratulations to dominKnow Learning Systems for adding the new standard to the list of industry compliances and standards supported by our Learning Content Management System, the dominKnow LCMS.

Those congratulations were extended last December when we released version 5.1 of the dominKnow LCMS, which included PENS compliance.

PENS particularly applauded what it describes as dominKnow's "impressive time to market", noting that we announced support for the standard only 90 days after members of the dominKnow development team had attended the inaugural PENS Plugfest. The Plugfest got under way on Sept. 19, 2006, in Vancouver B.C., and we rolled out our PENS compliance on Dec. 19.

The Plugfest was attended by members of the dominKnow LCMS development team, who were also attending the simultaneously-held AICC meetings. Adding PENS to the list of e-learning industry standards we already conformed to (which include AICC and SCORM) was a pretty easy decision for us.

In fact, when I asked why we made the move to add PENS support, our CTO Luke Hickey said, "because it's cool."

In addition to the coolness factor, PENS helps us help our users get their online learning content into the hands of learners more easily, by simplifying the way e-learning courses move from a content and authoring system like our LCMS to a Learning Management System (LMS). In fact, the PENS specification describes this as "single click publishing" - and it doesn't get much easier than that.

Bersin and Associates rolled out their predictions for 2007 last week, announcing that this will be the year that "E-learning 3.0 arrives."

The company is predicting that organizations will make greater and better use of self-published training resources.

And dominKnow Learning Systems is ready to help make that happen. Version 5.1 of the dominKnow LCMS includes support for managing and deploying podcasts as part of an organizational learning strategy. We see this as opening a lot of doors for organizations and their employees or team members. It gives learners another channel for learning, particularly auditory learners. It frees up the learning process, allowing learning to take place without requiring an online connection. With the RSS feed capability of the podcast feature, learners can have content forwarded to them without logging even into the LCMS.

It also gives organizations an opportunity to encourage subject matter experts and even learners to help create learning content. It's fairly easy to create an audio file - almost anyone can do it on their computer. So now it's easy for learners to share success stories or tips, for example. In this way, everyone in the organization benefits from each learner's knowledge and experience.

We also hope it will open new creative options for designing learning. Last month, the E-Learning Queen offered some observations on ways the best-written television shows generate interest and hold a viewer's attention - and how these could be used in educational podcasts. More creativity will flow, no doubt!