eLearning eVolution

With today’s pace of business, constant barrage of information, and economic pressures, who isn’t strapped for time each and every workday?  Surely avoiding meetings is a way to free up time for something else more pressing.   This thinking assumes that going into it, you don’t expect anything real to get accomplished.  The Harvard Business Review article Is Your Company As Dull and Unproductive As Its Meetings? caught my attention and turned my thinking around.  Why not embrace meetings and treat them as a key way to strike more off our daily punch lists?  Critical to the success of this is effective moderation, engagement, and managed participation.  Online meeting services, also known as web conferencing, can help with all of this, improving meeting productivity and maximizing the value of every meeting.  Here are a few ways:

Use tools that allow participation – Simply watching and listening makes for a boring meeting experience.  Allow your colleagues to be active during your meeting.  A shared whiteboard enables multiple users to contribute to a brainstorm session, add or remove action items, and snapshot visuals for review  and annotation.  Be sure your online meeting tool saves all team contributions to the whiteboard as you peruse multiple virtual whiteboard pages during your meeting, and as you end your meeting.

Use engaging media – Nobody likes “death by PowerPoint”, and merely sharing PowerPoint slides in an online environment may drive participants’ attention elsewhere.  Take your meeting participants to relevant websites to validate points, show video clips to assess needs or provide testimony, use live video to establish a personal connection with your participants.  And by all means if you do present PowerPoint slides, use pointers and graphical mark-up to focus your audience on key points as you speak.

Exercise your moderation skills and tools – Your great meeting leadership skills will transition well to an online meeting environment.  And, you will now have more tools to make moderation even easier.  Know when to “open the floor” for ad-hoc discussion and when to “give and take control” using virtual microphone for a more structured and focused approach.  Want someone to temporarily take the reins as meeting leader?  Make sure your meeting tool allows you to selectively give moderation powers to a colleague – and more importantly let’s you remove them to get your seat at head of the table back.

Offer up several ways to communicate – Use multi-way audio conferencing – either VoIP or phone – to speak, but also allow participants to use text-based chat.  This is a great way to get all ideas out on the table, especially from those who typically may not win any airtime at an on-site meeting.  Be flexible with your agenda and pause every now and then to read what’s happening in the chat, addressing any questions, issues, and ideas for further discussion.

Record for those who cannot attend – Don’t waste so many cycles polling for availability and finding the ideal day and time when the whole clan can come.  Rather, schedule the meeting for when your key stakeholders can attend, either online, by conference call, or ideally both.  Record the meeting so that others who wish to be informed can be – on their own time.  You will avoid repetitive one-on-one recaps with those who could not attend.   Make sure you’re using an online meeting tool that captures everything – content, shared media, VoIP audio, and phone audio – so that nobody can plead ignorant at accountability time.

So don’t give up on meetings.  If you and your colleagues underperform in an on-site, face-to-face meeting environment, try it again online.  You can improve productivity using tools unique to this environment and potentially save big on time, travel, and room rental costs.

Finally, do not tolerate meeting mediocrity.  Your company or institution cannot afford it.  Expand your meeting management talents by leveraging new online tools that can help you and the team accomplish so much more.

- Donna Christopher, Elluminate Director of Marketing

From an Elluminate perspective, 2009 was a great year. While we continued to enhance existing products, like Elluminate Live!, Elluminate Plan!, Elluminate Publish!, and Elluminate Bridges, we also launched two new innovative products with Elluminate VCS and LearnCentral.

We grew revenues to record highs and increased our customer base to over 1,500 accounts, we served more than 624 million annual web-collaboration minutes to over 7 million teachers and students located in 170 different countries. Wow!

Best of all, we continue to hear from enthusiastic and loyal customers who are using our enabling technology to transform teaching and learning worldwide. We applaud those innovative educators. Elluminate is making a difference. We are grateful for the opportunity. And very proud.

- Beth, Elluminate Goddess of Communication

If you are an educator, you’ll want to know more about social networking for educators, or educational networking.

With educational networking, you have access to a 24×7 online experience not unlike the connecting and sharing that happens face-to-face at conferences. But now, geography is no longer a constraint, critical mass of interest needed is lower, and time and cost to participate are significantly more affordable.

Here’s a great new white paper, “Educational Networking: The Important Role Web 2.0 Will Play in Education.” It was developed by our own Social Learning Consultant Steve Hargadon, who is also the founder of Classroom 2.0. The paper discusses social networking, Web 2.0, the emergence of educational networking, and its adoption for personal learning.

It also looks at how our LearnCentral social learning network for educators is taking educational networking a big step forward.We invite you to become part of the educational networking revolution. It’s free to join, and you get a free personal meeting room and access to a free public conference room for larger events.

- Beth, Elluminate Goddess of Communication

I read an article in the Boston Globe today that said that many students no longer have much recollection of the events of 9/11, as they experienced them at such a young age. Lessons for today are turning more into historical facts vs. a discussion of remembrances. My memories are still so alive. After all, 8 years ago in an adult’s life seems like just yesterday. And it was 8 years ago on 9/11 that I experienced “continuity of learning” without even realizing it.

Early morning 9/11, I was at work planning for a Customer Advisory Council meeting. I worked for a company that developed virtual learning products, and I needed to learn about what educators needed in future versions. My meeting was to be held online, using web conferencing technology, the next day.

At 9:10 on 9/11, I abandoned my preparation efforts to watch the replays of the twin towers being hit by 2 planes, crowded into a cubical with co-workers all standing in silence. As the day went on, I worried about my family living in the NY area, my co-workers and neighbors who headed to Logan Airport that morning for a flight, and colleagues at a conference in NYC. Like everyone, I experienced distraction, confusion, anxiety, and grief. This was not a business-as-usual day. Would tomorrow be?

The next day, 9/12, was my big Council meeting. I attended my online event from home. As invitees began to enter the virtual room from all over the U.S., I greeted them and said “I’m really not sure what to expect today.” I was referring to meeting attendance, but my comment triggered discussion about concerns of the nation that day. It turned out that in the end my online session was quite successful despite the crisis situation.

In retrospect, the worries I had about my meeting were incredibly minor compared those who were faced with life and family changes as a result of 9/11. They were:

- Would everyone attend? — Why not. Flights were all grounded but internet service was fine. My online meeting was on and reachable at the click of a link.

- Would this session even happen today? — Why not. People displaced by shutdowns or who chose to work from home for safety merely attended from a different PC-equipped location. They had participated in online sessions so many times before. Only their chairs were different now.

- Would we be in the mindset? Sure. Live interaction and discussion allowed for a brief but needed decompress. After that, we were ready to focus on something engaging and positive.

As they say in times of death, life goes on. In times of crisis, learning and productivity can go on, too.

- Donna Christopher, Elluminate Director of Marketing

I recently attended an online webinar along with approximately 349 other people distributed throughout the world. There may have been even more attendees than this, as some attend as a single online participant but have a room full of people behind it. Even though seated here all by myself in my home office, I left at the end believing that I had a more intimate experience than if this had been a seminar in a physical conference room.

Why? Many reasons, but I will describe one – I was able to interact and actually influence the presentation by nature of the feedback I contributed. I did this through chat. I did this by adding my thoughts in text to the whiteboard. And we were all encouraged to do this by the brave presenter willing to take on the challenge of making this a true educational experience, not just a one-way push of information.

The bottom line is that I doubt I would have had the opportunity to do this if seated in row 50 of a dark conference room with a PowerPoint presentation on the big screen at the front. So an intimate, engaging experience no longer means small class sizes in the online world. I’m not entirely sure that means big is better, but it can be pretty darn good.

To see for yourself, view the interactive recording of “5 Games in 50 Minutes” with Lou Russell.

- Donna Christopher, Elluminate Marketing Director

It’s the title of an article by Charlene O’Hanlon that was published in THE Journal in March, which is about the need for educators to adopt technology products for education. It’s not only good for the students, it makes an educator’s job even more interesting.

For me it means that it’s critical for educators to get on the bandwagon for using Web 2.0 and online collaborative technology–like Elluminate Live! and our soon-to-be launched LearnCentral social learning network–or get left in the dust.

If you’re going to NECC, stop by our booth #3542 to learn more about LearnCentral, as well as new enhancements to the Elluminate Learning Suite, like best-in-class breakout rooms.

Elluminate aside, there is so much wonderful educational technology out there, it boggles the mind! Now, I have to admit, all this blogging and twittering stuff put me off at first, but I’ve grown to understand the power and benefit of it. The same is true of tools that are designed to transform teaching and learning. So my advice, is to just jump right in. A good place to start is LearnCentral, where you get a free vRoom when you join. Tours will be starting next week.

- Beth, Elluminate Goddess of Communication

Came across a great blog entry from Anne Mirstchin who teaches IT to students in grades 3-12 in Australia. She’s used Elluminate Live! for the past year for staff meetings, conferences, and professional development as well as with her students. I’m with Anne when she says that Elluminate is the way to go for 21st century education.

Along with sharing a cool project that involves connecting members of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra with several remote rural schools to teach about their instruments, Anne also provides a number of tips that have increased the successful use of Elluminate with her students, like having a code of conduct for chat and having a timeout room (breakout room) for offenders. Check it out and prepare to be inspired!

Keep on Elluminating!

- Beth, Elluminate Goddess of Communication

I don’t know about you, but I’ve heard from some that online learning may be good for classes like reading or language but not for science or math. At Elluminate, we know better because customers tell us everyday how they are transforming teaching and learning by using our enabling technology for a wide variety of courses and programs.

Today, I was happy to find some proof! Here are some statistics from Florida Virtual Academy, a K12 Inc. school and Elluminate customer that show that students at their school got significantly higher FCAT test scores than the state average in reading AND math and science! Check it out.

So there, you naysayers!

Keep on Elluminating!

- Beth, Elluminate Goddess of Communication

Facilitated by Project Tomorrow, the Speak Up National Research Project has collected and shared the ideas and views of
more than 1.5 million K–12 students, teachers, parents and administrators on education and
technology since 2003. The latest report talks about today’s students as a “digital advance team” leading the way about how to leverage emerging technologies effectively for teaching and learning.

Here is their wish list. Let’s see how many Elluminate can address.

1. Un-tether learning and leverage mobile devices to extend learning beyond the school day and
meet all learners in their own world. CHECK

2. Create new interactive, participatory learning spaces using such tools as online classes,
gaming and simulations, online tutors and virtual reality environments. CHECK

3. Incorporate Web 2.0 tools into daily instruction, especially those that develop collaborative or
social-based learning and provide unique opportunities for students to be content developers. CHECK

4. Expand digital resources in the classroom to add context and relevancy to learning
experiences through new media tools. CHECK

5. Get beyond the classroom walls and make learning truly experiential, such as using high-tech
science instrumentation and creating podcasts with content experts. AND CHECK

Looks like we are on the right track for the digital advance team. Your wish is our command!

- Beth, Elluminate Goddess of Communication

I always get a little giddy on Fridays, looking forward to the weekend after a week of hard work at Elluminate from my home office in Arizona. However, this Friday was extra special.

One of our sales reps sent a few execs the link to an NBC affiliate story about an autistic boy in Philadelphia who is using a webcam with Elluminate Live! to train for the Special Olympics. The sessions include virtual exercises and lessons on sportsmanship. View “The Teacher Says: Special Olympics Training.”

Within seconds, our president had sent the link to the entire company, and the response emails started pouring in. Even though a significant number of our employees work virtually, the feelings expressed in the emails were mutual. We are all so proud to be working for a company that makes a difference!

We also had another great news clip this week from NBC World News with Charles Gibson. This video showcases Elluminate customer Georgia Virtual Academy, the state’s largest public school. View “School 2.0: Kids Go Online to Learn.”

Enjoy the videos. We sure did!

- Beth, Elluminate Goddess of Communication