Posted by Nicole Fougere on . There have been no comments.
Hi Litmos blog readers, I’m Jacqueline and I’ll be joining the Litmos team! I’m excited to announce that from here on out I’ll be assisting and brainstorming with the team to provide insight and support to our customers. I look forward to the New Year! For my first blog post, I’d like to take a moment to reflect on my personal experience with online learning in college.
It is 7 o’clock in the morning and I jump out of bed and reach for my smart phone to log into my college’s online web portal to check my grades. I had studied religiously all week and had taken my exam the previous day. Although I felt confident and on top of the world yesterday, I now sit anxiously biting my nails as I punch in my user ID and password.
Several months ago this was my reality, a very determined college student wanting to excel in all of her coursework. As a person who has grown up in the millennial generation, I had the opportunity to experience eLearning firsthand throughout college. With today’s culture of people always wanting immediate results and quick turn arounds, I too wanted to be efficient in my courses. Thus, throughout my college career I enrolled in numerous online courses and used eLearning websites. With eLearning I was able to immerse myself in additional courses on top of my regular load and study at my convenience. Additionally, online courses do not require time or money spent on commuting and are typically less costly. I was also able to discuss assignments, future exams, and ask for help with my professors and fellow classmates all with a click of a button. The eLearning websites are formatted in an organized manner with assignments and tasks filed and labeled under each course heading, making it user friendly to any new student. As a user or creator of eLearning I am also doing my part in contributing to reducing my carbon footprint by submitting and receiving documents electronically.
Although eLearning has its perks, it also comes with disadvantages. For any user, eLearning can be useful when helping one to achieve their goals; however, as a user it lacks face-to-face communication like traditional courses. This will require individuals to work and solve problems more independently, have self discipline, and maintain self-motivation. However, I believe that is a very small price to pay to be successful!
All in all, from my personal experience, I can conclude that the benefits from using eLearning outweigh any slightest hesitations one may have when getting started. eLearning websites are easy to navigate and environmentally friendly, while also allowing the individual the opportunity to maintain a balance of work, school, and life!
Posted by Nicole Fougere on . There have been no comments.
Flickr photo by Tony George
Even though we all breathe, all the time, many of us don’t know how to breathe properly. Wouldn’t it be cool if you knew how to use your breath to relax and calm your nerves to achieve instant clarity and focus? Whether you’re a teacher or trainer addressing a classroom, or you’re a student taking that final exam, I’d like to pass on a trick that I’ve learned through yoga to help you achieve instant calm through the breath.
The Problem. Most people when they get nervous begin to breathe in short shallow breaths from the top of their chest. This type of breathing produces adrenalin which instantly puts your body in to a nervous fight or flight mode. For sure it’s useful when you’re in a dangerous situation, but not when you’re trying to relax in to an exam. The more you breathe like this, the more adrenaline you get, and the more nervous you feel.
The Solution. What you want to do instead is breathe nice and deep from the bottom of your belly so that your body’s air supply is fully recycled providing your body and mind with a fresh sense of calm and clarity.
How to do it. First off, check whether you are breathing correctly. Lie down or sit up nice and straight, and put your hands on your belly. Breathe in and out through your nose where both the inhale and exhale should be of equal length. What you should notice is your belly rises considerably on an inhale as your body fills with air, and falls on an exhale. That makes sense right? Well try it. You’ll be amazed at how often this is not the case.
If that’s not what’s happening, try pushing your belly out on the inhale and suck it back on an exhale. Practice it over and over. This way you’re getting fresh air circulating through your body.
The trick. If you can’t do it or it takes too much concentration for you to get there, there’s a simple trick to instantly switch your body to this type of deep breathing. Press your tongue to the back of your top front teeth, then move it up just a little to where your teeth meet your gums. Now breathe through your nose. This automatically puts your body in to a deep breathing mode and you should feel your belly rise on inhale, fall on exhale.
Likewise, if you were to move your tongue to the roof of your mouth your breath will move up to your rib cage. Finally, if you flip your tongue to the back of the roof of your mouth, you will find yourself doing short, shallow breathing from the top of your chest – the one you want to avoid when trying to calm down.
Hopefully this technique will help you to focus in and study for that final exam, deliver a killer company presentation or ace an online assessment!
Posted by Rich Chetwynd on . There have been 2 comments.
A guest post from Litmos Founder, Rich Chetwynd.
Over the past couple of days I have been attending a conference in Rotorua celebrating the New Zealand Computer Society‘s 50th year. The focus of the conference is innovation and there have been some amazing examples of companies and organizations in New Zealand doing really innovative things over the past 50 years.
What seems to be a recurring theme is that education is the key driver for innovation and while I do agree that education is extremely important, I really feel people have skipped over the social or more ‘touchy feely’ things that can be catalysts for innovation.
I’d like to propose that inspiration is a key driver for innovation and here’s why. In most cases people both young and old have heroes, mentors or people that they follow or aspire to be like. That aspiration leads to dreams. If you have a dream then you are naturally driven and inspired to make that dream happen and it’s that inspiration that people use to set about coming up with ways to bring their dreams to fruition – in other words, they innovate ;-)
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this concept. What do you think, does inspiration lead to innovation?
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There’s a great new post up from Jeff Goldman (@minutebio) called ‘My e-Learning Don’ts‘ and it’s definitely worth skimming his top 10 list to make sure you’re not committing any of the major design faux pas.
Here are my top 3 from Jeff’s list:
Don’t:
Don’t:
Don’t:
There’s more being added in the comments section so take a look at the full post and add your 10 cents worth, from a designer or learner perspective.
Posted by Nicole Fougere on . There have been 1 comment.
I’ve just read the “Association: Learning Management Systems” report released in October 2009 by Tagoras. The report was based on the responses of 11 LMS vendors (Avilar, Blackboard, Digitec Interactive, GeoLearning, iCohere, LearnSomething, Meridian KSI, Peach New Media, Results Direct, WBT Systems and Web Courseworks) and it has some interesting stats pertaining to average LMS costings and implementation times that I thought I’d share:
The average first year cost for an LMS ranges from:
$25,000 for 500 users
to $193,500 for unlimited usage
Across 3 years the costs averaged out at:
$59,000 for 500 users
$435,000 for unlimited usage
Average Implementation times for an LMS ranged from:
19.2 calendar days for a simple implementation of the stock-standard LMS
47.6 days for a ‘typical’ implementation, as in the usual experience of LMS vendors
85.3 days for a complex implementation involving integration and custom development
I found it interesting to read these statistics and compare them with our own product to see where we sit in comparison.
Costing - First year costs at Litmos are no different from every other year so when you consider our Gold plan for 500 users is $699 per month, then the annual cost would be $8388 which over 3 years comes out to $25,164. For unlimited usage it’s a little tougher to work out as we don’t advertise an unlimited plan and custom build plans above 2000 users. But based on the 500 user numbers I would imagine it would be considerably less than those surveyed.
Now - implementation time. This was outlined in the report as: ‘Assume the implementation clock starts when the contract has been signed and stops when end users begin accessing the LMS’. This one again is a little tricky because there are no contracts to sign with us, once you have decided to go with Litmos and upgrade your account, the system is ready for you. But to get some idea, I’ll include our 14 day free trial period where most organizations use this time to load up content and begin testing on end users. Then before this period ends an organization will upgrade their account and make their first payment, therefore, sealing the deal. Now this all happens within a time-frame of 14 days – content uploaded, users accessing courses and reporting underway.
The report does make the comment that hosted systems generally translates to lower costs, and in our case I would say that is definitely true. The report does not discriminate between hosted and installed systems when averaging implementation time which I find very odd because there are some very big differences between saying ‘yes’ to a web-based LMS and waiting until a technician comes around to install an LMS on your servers.
All round a very ‘enlightening’ (and somewhat boggling) read when it comes to what’s going on in the LMS industry.
Posted by Nicole Fougere on . There have been no comments.
We’re releasing some new color themes for Litmos accounts this week and so I was putting together a high contrast version for partially sighted people. After spending some time working out the right combination of colors needed I stumbled across a very simple way to do it which does not involve me creating a new theme at all.
In Windows 7 you can switch your whole display to high contrast mode and every website is transformed to give you the right view – how cool is that?!
This is how you do it:
Go to your ‘Control Panel’
Then click on ‘Appearance and Personalization’
Under the ‘Ease of Access Center’ select ‘Turn High Contrast On or Off’
Scroll down the display choices and you’ll find are a number of high contrast options for your screen. Pick one and your screen will automatically adjust.
Also in the ‘Ease of Access Center’ are features for low vision like a magnifier, screen narrator, text or visual alternatives for sounds, onscreen keyboard and other shortcuts to make life a little easier. It’s cool to check out even if you have 20/20 vision as it gives you an idea of what it’s like to look at your website or app through someone else’s eyes.
Posted by Nicole Fougere on . There have been no comments.
Today I’ve been checking out iTunes U for the first time. It’s been around a few years so I’m not sure why I hadn’t looked at it before. But if you haven’t checked it out either it is a specialized area of the Apple iTunes store that enables Higher Ed institutions to make audio/visual content available for download and subscription.
According to Wikipedia the service was ‘created to manage, distribute, and control access to educational audio and video content and PDF files for students within a college or university as well as the broader Internet.’ Wikipedia says that ‘an advantage iTunes U has over traditional podcasting tools is that access to content can be restricted because of the use of the iTunes infrastructure end-to-end’ and apparently there are now over 75,000 files available to download.
If you have the technical / professional infrastructure to support and market your own eLearning system and you’re looking for a content distribution tool for your institution, rather than a full-blown Learning Management System, it’s worth checking out. With iTunes U you can create a ‘single home for all the digital content created or curated by educators, which can then be easily downloaded and viewed on any Mac, PC, iPod, or iPhone’ (from the website).
While mobile learning (mLearning) adoption rates continue to increase I can only see this becoming much more popular, especially for some of the smaller institutions. Already the big guys like Stanford, Yale, MIT, Oxford, and UC Berkeley distribute their content publicly using the iTunes store, so it is already a ‘success’.
Posted by Nicole Fougere on . There have been 2 comments.
A recent report conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation has some surprising statistics on youth media usage (well, for me anyway). The report which is the 3rd in a series conducted every five years, shows youth media use is still increasing despite experts in the second report (2005) believing that it would not be possible as there was not enough time left in the day.
This is the report overview:
‘Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds is the third in a series of large-scale, nationally representative surveys by the Foundation about young people’s media use. The report is based on a survey conducted between October 2008 and May 2009 among a nationally representative sample of 2,002 3rd-12th grade students ages 8-18, including a self-selected subsample of 702 respondents who completed seven-day media use diaries, which were used to calculate multitasking proportions.’
Here are 10 stand-out findings from the report:
Youth aged 8 – 18 spend more than 7.5hrs a day (equivalent of a work day) using a smart phone, computer, tv or other electronic device – 7 days a week
Less than five years ago the above number was less than 6.5hrs per day
The above times do not include daily use of computer for school work, texting time (1.5hrs) or talking on their cellphone (30mins)
Taking in to account multi-tasking, on average those studied can pack 11hrs of media information in to those 7.5hrs per day! In 2004, multi-tasking brought it up to 8.5hrs.
Youth media consumption has grown far more in the last five years than in the previous five year period: 1999-2004
Contrary to public opinion that media usage displaces exercise, the heaviest media users reported spending a similar amount of time exercising or doing physical activity as the lighter media users of the same age (a particularly positive finding I would say!)
Almost 9 out of 10 users surveyed reported participating in some physical exercise the previous day
Heavy media users report getting slightly lower grades in school than lighter users
Overall most users reported being very content and having lots of friends. But those users that felt less personal contentedness tended to be heavier media users.
46% of users surveyed reported sending text messages during the day and this averaged out at 118 texts on a typical day
I must be a little out of touch because I find these results to be unbelievable.
Last week I wrote about a Sheffield (UK) school that reported very positive results with the increase of ICT and mobile technology in their curriculum on student behavior. But when I read this report I immediately wondered about the implications on mobile learning – is there room for more media in the already media-filled lives of these youth? Should there be something else more outdoorsy and wholesome filling the other 7.5 hours of their day? It would be a shame not to integrate mobile learning, but what will the long-term effects be on their eyes squinting at little screens all the time? I think once again, the responsibility lies with the parents to inspire kids to get outside, exercise, have fun with others outside of school time and moderate media usage with some simple rules as this report also covers.
The real number one – that stands far out ahead of all the others by a gap of more than 3000 unique views – is still a post I wrote in August 2008 entitled 5 Key Characteristics of Generation Y. It seems this post just can’t be beaten, not for a lack of trying!
Although our primary offering at Litmos is our learning management system, this blog has grown over the past three years to become a bustling little place for people from all different backgrounds to stop by and read up on their favorite online learning topics. Thank you to all of those people who read this blog and also to those who comment on my posts. Although I start the conversation, it is you who keeps it going and that’s what keeps us all learning.
Posted by Nicole Fougere on . There have been no comments.
It’s not particularly original, and others have done it before – but we haven’t! So please do enjoy our ‘Happy Holidays 2009′ hip hop dance routine, carefully choreographed and performed by Rich, Dan, Nicole and our favorite 4-legged office mascot, Sprocket.
Just a little something on the lighter side… @Schnicker
