Session 646 was titled “What if Amazon and Google Partnered to Build an LMS?” Good thought, and something we’re thinking about all the time. Google and Amazon are doing some things really well, and we’d love piggy back on many of those concepts.
Thoughts from the group (and these aren’t new to us):
- iGoogle as personalizable, “LMS” homepage
- Context aware content suggestions/recommendations for learners
- Profiles. How can we establish a profile on an individual and use that effectively.
- Commission based virtual classroom. Editor’s Note: This one really resonates for me. Democratization of content production and offering is fascinating to me. I want a brilliant content producer (like Jenny Zhu of ChinesePod) to be able to deliver content to people directly.
- How do you incent learners to take the content?
- Tie all of this into “communities of practice”
- Access to a system of mentors, or an SME network?
- Amazon/Google are trustworthy, innovative, easy to use. LMS’s fail in this regard today.
- Usage statistics on the content itself… which pieces of content are useful and used.
- A suggestion to check out Epic 2014
- They want to stop thinking about SCORM and AICC (I know someone who can help with this…)
So, the most interesting thoughts and questions to me…
- The best analogy I heard for a training department of the future was that of the “newsroom”. Newsrooms are looking at all the stories, structuring them, validating them… Training departments need to be doing the same things.
- How big does an organization have to be in order to make use of “the wisdom of the crowds” for creation of content? Can a 500 person company effectively generate content at the bottom levels and then confirm its validity? Can we please open up LMS’s and centralize them like Google and Amazon so that usage data and information has a massive audience?
