Smart Mobs blogger Bryan Alexander -- an educational practitioner as well as a commentator on what is being called "m-learning" -- has written an article for TheFeature on the subject of Teaching in the Wireless Cloud

10:37:33 PM    

Learning Circuits piece on e-Learning ROI

Paul Harris writes: "As companies look to e-learning to help meet their strategic goals, they’re seeking ROI analysis. Some of the most valuable measurements can be hard to capture, but we’re closing in. In most departments within a corporation, determining the return on a given investment is a straightforward accounting exercise that produces a factual and typically uncontested result. But when it comes to e-learning, computing ROI suddenly becomes a complicated procedure requiring thoughtful chinstroking, serious seminar time, and earnest input from consultants and vendors. Why is that?" [Learning Circuits]

From February 18 of this year. Supports the idea of ROI, tosses in the formula for ARR (calls it "the standard" - it's not), cites vendor white papers, gives a couple of examples from real companies. Glad mine is done. Will post a summary version here after publication on Monday the 14th of April. Those who want the whole thing (including the parts nobody else covers -- HOW) will have to join the Guild (which they should be doing anyway).

6:49:58 PM    

e-Learning ROI

What a day! and what a night! But the article on e-Learning ROI is finished and on its way to the Journal. Now to get to work on the examples and on the taxes.

3:47:17 PM    

This web analysis and mapping software is interesting to me for 2 reasons:

- it's one of the best values for money (when combined with its companion product FunnelWeb Analyzer) in the web log analysis and site management tools field that I have seen. IMHO it blows products like WebTrends out of the water (note it needs to be used in conjunction with its companion product Analyzer to really be a true comparison). The part of the application that I particularly like is the Webmap - it produces a webmap of your site by crawling it (like many do) but then allows you to overlay your traffic statistics visually on this map - all of a sudden the main paths that people take through you site, where they enter and exit, jump out at you. Extremely powerful for visualizing how people actually use your site. I haven't seen a lot of software in it's price range (we payed under $1000) that does this.

- from a learning perspective, the tutorial that accompanies the 'info map' part of the software is for me a great example of how to communicate abstract concepts using relevant (to that individual user) content. The infomaps present keyword and traffic analyses of your site displayed as contour maps. Instead of using some abstract example that has no meaning to the user, the tutorial helps you understand how to interpret the info map by using the map you just produced on your own site, so that when it  points to the highest peaks and explains these are the most used terms on the site, they are in fact the most used terms on your own site. This is not unimpressive - the tutorial software is intelligent enough to present concepts linked to a dynamic analysis of the map - produce a new map and run the tutorial again, and the examples it uses are from the new map.

Well worth a look - a 30 day free trial is available from there site. - SWL

3:44:20 PM