Sunday, April 5, 2015

"Get Out There"

The past week has hardly seen me in work; notice that I said ‘in’ work and not ‘at’ work, because I have most definitely been at work, except that instead of being sat at my usual desk in my usual environment I have taken to the road in search of enlightenment.

Tuesday saw me travelling to Northampton to meet up with Mark Berthelemy from Capita L&D. Mark had very kindly agreed to discuss the mysteries of a SAP / Moodle integration with me as Capita had been working with this SAP/Moodle set up already.

My desire to provide our learners with an engaging, visually rich, intuitive portal into SAP is borne out of the disengaging, unappealing, complicated SAP GUI. It is my belief that as an L&D funtion we should be removing as many barriers to learner engagement and thus ‘learning’ as we possibly can. Plonking a learner down in front of a complicated LMS GUI, regardless of how much training is thrown at them is just not on, not when there are far more intuitive, engaging platforms out there. This belief led to me to Northampton to discuss the technicalities surrounding a SAP/Moodle integration.

For me the outcome of the meeting was a realisation that whilst the integration was perfectly feasible (Capita had achieved it along with a number of other organisations) it may be more prudent to wait for the SAP Learning Solutions platform to be implemented within my business as this could quite possibly provide the intuitive, engaging tool that I am looking for.

Had it not been for this networking visit then it is quite possible that I would have continued pursuing a solution that ‘may’ have proven to be unwarranted – having said that I will believe that SAP Learning Solutions provides a rich, engaging, intuitive GUI when I see it! ;-)

My organisation has been using the Atlantic Link e-learning authoring tool since July 2009, Atlantic Link themselves have recently been acquired by Kaplan IT so Thursday saw me getting further acquainted with the M6 Southbound en-route to a customer day hosted by Kaplan IT.

The purpose of this day was to acquaint Kaplan customers with the Atlantic Link products and vice-versa, I had anticipated that there would be a heavy sales pitch throughout the day but I am pleased to say that the emphasis was on letting the products speak for themselves without any pressure or sales pitches. For me though the afternoon proved to be the highlight of the day with Dr Richard Hyde (previous Director of Atlantic Link) providing an Instructional Design Workshop.

Richard and 2 previous Directors have now formed the company ‘Mind-Click‘, I won’t go into the workshop in too much detail as I believe that this site entry provides sufficient overview. If you would like to gain a better idea of the content of the workshop I have provided a pdf copy of the session here.

Friday saw me boarding a train en-route to Old London Town to participate in a Masterclass in Using Social Media in Learning facilitated by Jane Hart. I have already commented on this in a previous post.

On my return home on the train my thoughts turned to the distances I had travelled, the people I had met and most importantly what I had learned.

There wasn’t a Joining Instruction in sight, not a SMART objective to be seen, nor a session plan on the horizon…. but it didn’t matter..

… I had a great week, learnt loads and made some great connections

So in essence, if you haven’t networked recently

Get Out There


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