When I talk about using Agents (or Avatars) in online courses, people sometimes give me a horrified look. I can almost see the shadow of Microsoft's Clippy in their eyes.

For those lucky enough to not to know Clippy, he was an obtrusive, paperclip-shaped help agent that would appear (at the most inopportune times) when using Microsoft Office applications. Clippy was notoriously hard to turn off and was exceedingly annoying. He was a good concept, just badly executed (Sorry Microsoft!). This has scared many people away from the idea of using Agents in learning.

But what exactly are Agents?

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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!

It's the time of year for list-making. Children (and even some of us adults) write lists of what they want.
Adults write lists of what to get others.
There are seemingly endless

href="http://www.grocerylists.org/" target="_blank">grocery lists for all that holiday entertaining. And any time now the end-of-year lists will start to roll out. We thought we'd put together a wish list of a different sort - what we wish for everyone who is embarking on or continuing along the path of e-learning.

Here are our top 5 wishes for successful e-learning courseware.

1. We wish everyone would make training relevant for the learner. A learner should know from the start that the course will be meaningful to her everyday work life and will provide her with information and skills to help her do her job better. Courses should be designed around exercises and assessments that are centered on job-related issues or scenarios.

2. We wish everyone would use active voice, a conversational tone and the second person to help learners connect to the learning experience. Formal language that uses passive voice is a barrier to learning that can distract even the most attentive e-learner.

3. We wish everyone would keep it short. E-learning benefits from being concise and focused. This applies to language use as well as course structures. Short courses, or short modules within a course, help keep learner attention. It's also easier for learners to commit to taking a series of 15-minute courses as part of a busy work schedule rather than a single two-hour course.

4. We wish everyone would make e-learning accessible from wherever their learners work, and use e-learning to solve job-related problems. Taking a training course is great, unless three months goes by before you actually have to carry out a task. Providing access to the e-learning program allows learners to review steps in a process, for instance, right at the time they need to know this information. That's when learning has its greatest effect.

5. We wish everyone would support their learners. Provide resources to help them troubleshoot any technical problems. Provide them with access to topic experts if they feel they need to learn more. Provide them with resources they can take away from the course, to help them when they return to their job.

According to the eLearning Guild's The Informal Learning Research Report 2006, 97% of survey respondents strongly agreed or agreed that "Informal learning takes place wherever and whenever people have the need, motivation, and opportunity for learning."

Okay, that's not so startling. In fact, unless we want to get picky in our definitions of informal learning, just about anyone in the training or education field would agree with this statement.

What's really interesting is that more than half of the respondents to the survey (57%, in fact) strongly agreed or agreed with the following statement:

"Informal learning works better than formal learning because it is learner-driven."

As organizational learning culture grows into a full embrace of technology and e-learning becomes more and more common, companies are looking to take best advantage of everything technology can offer. And at some point just about all of us had the lightbulb go on above our heads as we typed a keyword into a search engine, and we realized just how much informal learning was going on around us.

The result is nearly unanimous - 98 % of respondents to the survey strongly agreed or agreed that "Informal learning can be deliberately encouraged by an organization."

Why wouldn't we want to encourage it? What better learning opportunity could we hope for than helping an employee get access to information right when she needs to know it and is able to put that information to immediate use?

The dominKnow Learning Content Management System can help organizations encourage informal learning. One of the chief advantages of our approach to Learning Objects is that it is driven by instructional design principles, not just technology principles. The LCMS creates Learning Objects that are complete instructional units intended to support learning of a specific topic. And this means that courses aren't the only application for these Learning Objects.

The LCMS's Reference Feature gives learners access to learning objects as individual reference items.

Learners can search the Reference by keyword to quickly find the topic they are looking for and access the Learning Object immediately, without having to take or return to a course to find it. They get the information and training they need, right when they need it most. And since the Learning Objects are designed as complete instructional units, they get the full learning they need.

An important goal of any course focused on the use of software programs is to offer students a chance to learn how to work with the software in a low-risk, supported learning environment.

Many clients use our Learning Content Management System for software instruction. The LCMS supports such training easily by allowing clients to use their choice of simulation tools to create their training.

Many clients use Captivate or Camtasia, outputting files as .swfs to upload into the LCMS. Flash-developers can use the Envision extension from Digital Curiosity, which allows software captures from within Flash.

These tools allow a range of instructional approaches to be supported, from animated demos to remarkably accurate active simulations that allow learners to work through process steps.

The dominKnow LCMS also allows instructional designers to control the software instruction to suit the potential learner.

If the training is aimed at learners with limited experience, navigation controls can be locked down at each lesson to ensure that all pieces of instruction are successfully competed.

Learners with substantial experience can be offered courses which allow them to navigate freely within the course, covering off topics that they feel are new first, for instance, to help them focus on the specific tasks they need to learn or relearn.

And the LCMS's reference feature supports learners after the training is completed, providing searchable access (much like an index) to specific tasks contained in the training. Months may pass between the training and the time a learner finally needs to carry out a task - and the reference function gives them an opportunity to review the task steps without having to re-take the full course.

An important thing to keep in mind for software simulations is the modality principle in e-learning. Software simulations benefit greatly from audio instructions, rather than text instructions. Using audio to guide the learner through the steps of a task helps prevent the confusion and learning overload that can result from trying to look at on-screen text instructions at the same time as trying to pay attention to the software tool environment.

The dominKnow LCMS's audio controls can help you tailor this approach further by triggering text versus audio instructions, just in case the learner does not have speakers or headphones or if the learner is hearing impaired.

The range of approaches has been quite varied, but we've found that the more robust We've found that a very effective approach for these projects is to structure the software simulations for each task-based lesson into two sections.
In the first section of each task, the student is offered a choice of:
1. Seeing a demonstration of the steps being taught in the LO, or
2. Trying the steps with on-screen guidance and corrective feedback.

Once the student has made a choice and the exercise has been completed the student will move to the second section of the task lesson, where they are offered the same two choices above as well as an option of:

3. Trying the steps without the on-screen guidance and corrective feedback.

Setting up software simulation lessons this way gives students a choice in how they wish to learn, based on their own level of comfort in the software environment.

Students with a relatively low level of computer experience, for instance, may wish to watch the steps before ever trying them out themselves while more experienced students may wish to try the steps immediately.

The "try without guidance" option is reserved until after a student has at least seen the steps or tried them with guidance, to ensure that he or she has been correctly instructed in the steps.

Giving students a choice in how they wish to begin and then continue in a lesson allows the student to work through the steps with guidance and corrective feedback until they are comfortable and confident enough to try the steps from memory.

This approach has been successfully used by GeoLearning in the creation of software training courses for many different sectors, from insurance benefits programs to legal software to government software applications.