SmartForce / SkillSoft Merger - Integrating e-Learning Formats

A recent InformationWeek.com article highlights the need for product set continuity in the wake of the SmartForce / SkillSoft merger.

"Both companies will have to develop a way to integrate the styles of their courseware, which are quite different, Meta Group analyst Jennifer Vollmer says. "My clients have concerns with the formatting of SkillSoft content," Vollmer says. SkillSoft courses are two hours long, while SmartForce's E3 courseware runs about an hour, she says. Vollmer questions how both companies will make all formats of their products match so there's continuity in the product set. Henry [SmartForce executive VP of marketing and customer service] says these are the questions both companies hope to attack and answer during the regulatory clearing period." Read article...
eLearning Forge | 10:18 AM

e-Learning Leaders to Merge

SmartForce and SkillSoft to combine to create e-Learning industry powerhouse

Redwood City, CA and Nashua, NH - June 10, 2002 - SmartForce plc (Nasdaq: SMTF) and SkillSoft Corporation (Nasdaq: SKIL), both leading providers of e-Learning solutions to the Global 5000, today announced that they have signed a definitive agreement to merge in a stock-for-stock transaction. The combination will create a global leader in corporate e-Learning and bring together SmartForce's leading portfolio of IT, enterprise applications and sales and CRM e-Learning solutions with SkillSoft's comprehensive suite of business and professional e-Learning solutions, including management, leadership, communication, project management and customer service. The merger supports SmartForce and SkillSoft's overall strategy to deliver the most comprehensive and highest-quality learning solutions and positions the combined company to best serve the demands of this growing market. Read Press Release...

eLearning Forge | 9:11 AM

Google Set to Retain Dominance in Search Engine Wars

Offering far more information than Google's update service, Aaron Swartz's Google weblog is a great resource for those keeping tabs on the engine that continues to deliver salient answers to sentient queries. Having just awarded its $10,000 programming prize to New York's Daniel Egnor, a programmer who created a program that allows users search for web pages within a specified geographic area, the WebmasterWorld-featured engine untainted by Pay to Play rankings will now deliver results on both AOL and subsidiary, Netscape, as it renegotiates its contract with Yahoo!. Google watchers optimizing Web sites for search engine referrals would do well to study WebmasterWorld's Google Knowledgebase V2.

eLearning Forge | 10:24 AM

SmartForce Partners Laragh Courseware

SmartForce Announces new Distribution Partnership in South Africa

"The two companies have enjoyed a long-standing relationship spanning six years during which Laragh has developed more than 2,400 hours of e-Learning on behalf of SmartForce."

(from Laragh Courseware)

"As part of its restructuring and consolidation activities, SmartForce, the world's largest and most experienced e-Learning company, today announced the sale of its South African subsidiary to Laragh Courseware. Based in Cape Town, South Africa, Laragh is a developer of e-Learning content covering such disciplines as information technology, finance, business management and regulatory compliance. Under the terms of the agreement, Laragh will become the exclusive distributor of SmartForce e-Learning solutions in South Africa."

"The two companies have enjoyed a long-standing relationship spanning six years during which Laragh has developed more than 2,400 hours of e-Learning on behalf of SmartForce. Laragh's experience working with organizations in the region coupled with its close relationship with SmartForce lends itself well to a successful transition of the business and to the continued delivery of high quality service and solutions to South African customers."

"We are proud that SmartForce has entrusted us with much of its most challenging development work, particularly in those cases where quality and efficiency were critical," said Tom O'Neill, managing director of Laragh. "As a provider of learning solutions that drive business processes and address critical business issues, SmartForce has become a major player in South Africa's e-Learning market. We will continue to offer the quality solutions and support that SmartForce customers have come to expect and demand from their e-Learning provider." Read article...
eLearning Forge | 10:03 AM

Making Sense of Learning Standards

(from The Masie Center)

"The phrase "learning standards" is one of the most powerful and most misunderstood aspects of the e-Learning revolution. As organizations make significant investments in digital learning content, there is a strong desire to have greater assurances portability and reusability. As organizations focus on providing learners with the "just right" content and activities, there is a strong desire to have the ability to more easily store, search, index, deploy, assemble and revise content. All of these hopes are part of the story of "learning standards"."

"To lower industry confusion about learning standards and to accelerate their adoption, The MASIE Center's e-Learning Consortium organized and facilitated a group of learning professionals who worked together for several months to generate a collection of information and job aids. The document will evolve and be updated over the months and years ahead, as the e-Learning Consortium develops a larger Knowledge Base in the Learning Standards field." Available in .pdf format...
eLearning Forge | 4:37 PM

Capitalizing on Intellectual Capital

Converting Intellectual Capital into Competitive Advantage

Jay Cross - CEO eLearning Forum

(from The Internet Time Group)

Summary: Success in the knowledge age requires new tools. This paper describes a unified approach to creating, maintaining, and exploiting intellectual capital, the knowledge platform. The objective is to deliver the right information at the right time to the right person, simply, economically, and immediately.

"This integration of a corporation’s digital information into one interactive system will empower the next-generation Knowledge Platform, where information resources will become part of the workflow. Imagine a context-sensitive dashboard on every knowledge worker’s desktop. Rather than dealing with after-the-fact performance measures, process information will be available in real time. Built-in business logics will link one worker’s viewpoint to the next. A continuously aware workforce will be able to act and react to the most current information. Training as we have known it will fall by the wayside, replaced by different levels of proficiency in performing real work."

Jay Cross's short but detailed paper highlighting one company's development of a full knowledge platform from extensible knowledgebases espouses the value of such platforms (integrated XML-based learning, content, and knowledge management systems integrating electronic performance support) to the corporation. It remains one of the most pithy KM papers published this year. The reason?

"...Extensive research by The Institute for Research on Learning found that formal learning (courses and workshops) are the source of at most 20% of the learning taking place in corporations. Real learning is informal. It is learning through trial-and-error, asking the person in the next cubicle, or calling the help desk." ... "A knowledge platform facilitates informal learning. If someone needs one small scrap of information, they can easily look up that one item. Rather than passing along garbled information, anyone can go directly back to the source." Read the article...
eLearning Forge | 10:08 AM

Distant dreams?

Economic downturn is not the only problem facing e-learning programmes: potential students seem quite underwhelmed, reports The Guardian's Donald MacLeod.

Dr Yoni Ryan, of Queensland University of Technology, Australia "...comments that business models for online programmes were predicated on booming employer demand, without establishing end-user demand, and on a booming economy. Business analysts expected labour shortages in IT and knowledge intensive industries to force the pace of e-education. "At the end of 2001, with massive lay-offs in those very industries, such projections are questionable. However, this is not to deny the potential unmet demand for general and vocational education in Asia, Africa and Latin America, and the necessity of further and higher education provision in those regions."

"Recent evidence has it that niche players will be the winners, but if the drive to size that has characterised 2001 e-learning continues, smaller niche programmes would be advised to approach their borderless business with caution." Any players in this game must have "deep pockets", she warns.

Dr. Ryan's report, in .pdf format, Emerging Indicators of Success & Failure in Borderless Higher Education, is available from the Observatory on borderless higher education.

In a related article, E-learning, at a snail's pace, the Guardian's Peter Kingston reports that despite the 'hype' surrounding e-learning, trainers are sticking to traditional methods.

"What we've had is a lot of over-selling and hype of e-learning and so far the whole debate has been driven by the suppliers and vendors of e-learning," says Martyn Sloman, the CIPD's [Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development] professional adviser for learning, training and development, and author of the book The E-Learning Revolution. "It's been a debate about technology and they've tried to seduce training managers with the technology."

Sloman says: "E-learning will eventually become a powerful new tool which will transform learning in organisations . . . it's going to happen but more slowly than people are predicting."
eLearning Forge | 2:50 PM

Grassroots KM through blogging

Maish Nichani and Venkat Rajamanickam

(from elearningpost May 24, 2001)

"In this article, we share our experiences with a strategy and technology so simple in design, that it could present the next wave of grassroots KM implementations. We are talking of the "storytelling" as the killer strategy, and "blogs" as the killer technology. Both of them share one common ground: grassroots interaction — a concept voiced by the likes of John Seely Brown, Larry Prusak, Steve Dennings, Dave Snowden, David Weinberger, among other prominent KM personalities." Read the article...

Yes, it's nine months old. But if you haven't read it, do so now. It is one of those articles, from one of the Web's top e-learning publications, that will remain of value for as long as its subject remains of relevance to us.
eLearning Forge | 12:46 PM

The Emerging Standards Effort in E-Learning

Edward J. Cohen

(from e-learning Magazine, January 2002)

"In e-learning, our challenge has been to make courseware run smoothly on different learning management systems (LMS) - a "plug-and-play" ideal. But beyond simply ensuring that courses launch and end without exploding, standards also should broadly define how courseware and an underlying LMS together communicate useful things to an instructor. And they should allow the "content objects" that make up a given course to be easily recycled into new courses that trainers and teachers design themselves. As content authoring tools proliferate, this becomes even more important." Read the article...

(see also The importance of standards)
eLearning Forge | 1:04 PM

The PHP and MySQL Training Series

Hard on the heels of Laragh Courseware's recent release of Quality Management Systems and Standards (QMS) e-learning series, comes the PHP and MySQL e-learning curriculum, also developed by eLearning Forge. Like QMS, PHP and MySQL consists of three courses, namely PHP, MySQL, and PHP and MySQL on the Web.

PHP provides a comprehensive introduction to the application by describing its features and how to install it on Linux, Apache, and Windows computers. It introduces basic PHP code, explains how to use functions in PHP code, describes how to use PHP to create dynamic web features, and it explains how to create databases in PHP.

MySQL grounds you in MySQL theory and practice by introducing the MySQL relational database management system, demonstrating how to install MySQL and how to use it to create a database, and demonstrating how to organize tables and perform MySQL calculations such as date calculations and pattern matching.

Once you have grasped PHP and MySQL, you can use PHP and MySQL on the Web understand how to configure web security with PHP, use MySQL databases with PHP applications, and create e-commerce functionality on a web site.

The modular structure of these e-learning courses allows the incorporation of objectives and summaries, topic questions, links to web resources, and scored testing. You can view detailed tables of contents for PHP, MySQL, and PHP and MySQL on the Web at the Laragh Courseware web site.
eLearning Forge | 3:23 PM

e-Learning Quality Management Systems and Standards

Laragh Courseware's recently released Quality Management Systems and Standards e-learning series, developed by eLearning Forge, consists of three courses, namely Fundamentals of Quality Management, ISO 9001:2000 Requirements, and Certification and Auditing.

Fundamentals of Quality Management puts quality management into perspective by outlining the essentials of quality and of the quality management process. It introduces the revised ISO 9000 quality standard and explains the quality management principles underlying the revisions to the ISO 9000:1994 family of standards

The ISO 9001:2000 Requirements module explains the revised standard in detail by introducing ISO 9001:2000's documentation requirements, describing management responsibility in creating a quality management system, and introducing the ISO 9001:2000 requirements regarding resources and product realization. It also introduces the revised standard's design and development, purchasing, and production and service provision requirements, and it explains the ISO 9001:2000 requirements for measurement, control, analysis, and improvement.

The third course in this comprehensive e-learning series, Certification and Auditing, examines the certification audit by introducing you to the certification process, auditors' requirements and techniques, audit reports, and follow-ups to certification audits.

The modular structure of these e-learning courses allows the incorporation of objectives and summaries, topic questions, links to web resources, and scored testing. You can view detailed tables of contents for Fundamentals of Quality Management, ISO 9001:2000 Requirements, and Certification and Auditing courses at the Laragh Courseware Web site.
eLearning Forge | 12:32 PM