Happy 2012! Many of us make resolutions… to get in shape or make changes to be better in the coming year. LINGOs is no exception. We are putting into action some of what we learned at our 2011 member meeting from Tom Kuhlmann’s super presentation on the power of growing a shared practice community.

If you haven’t had a chance to look yet, January 1 brought a few changes to LINGOs Support and the LMS Administrators Community area of our member site. While it’s still a sharepoint site, you’ll see that we’ve reorganized to make it easier for you to find the answers to your questions. We’d like for the LMS Administrator Community to become your first stop when you have questions or experience issues with your LMS portal.  Over time, we’ll expand and beautify the site as members identify and share new issues and questions with LINGOs Support.  You can access the new site at http://ngolearning.org/learningtools/intralearnlms/lmsadmin/default.aspx

But the website is only part of the community. We’re working hard to strengthen and build the community and enable all of us to learn from each other. We’ve initiated a series of Quarterly LMS Administrators Community Q&A virtual sessions.  The first one was January 10, 2012. With about a quarter of LINGOs member agencies participating in real time, it was a great success.  A few of the topics covered were:

• Using discussion features in the LMS for self-paced courses
• Using the Event Manager for staff to register for face to face and virtual classroom learning events
• Branding/re-branding/editing an LMS portal
• SCORM Dispatch

If you missed the first Q&A session, you can click here to view the recording or, as always, you can find links to past events by going to the Events section of http://ngolearning.org.  

We are confident that the enriched community will be a valuable resource to all of LINGOs’ 75+ international member organizations. By actively participating: seeking information from and contributing knowledge to the community, you’ll help LINGOs move its technology and tech support forward.  With the new year we also documented and put into effect our Member Service Level Agreement for Technical Support.  This document outlines the level of support for the LMS portal included in your LINGOs Membership, as well as the services that will incur additional fees.  You’ll find it on the LMS Administrators Community site.

We hope these changes make getting support for your LMS portal as worry-free as possible, and are looking forward to working with you throughout 2012.

The next LMS Administrator Q&A  is scheduled for April 24, 2012 at 11:00 AM Eastern Time. Member Agency LMS Administrators, please click on the button below to register.

For years, international organizations have documented lessons learned and best practices through the publication of evaluations, technical papers and guidelines.  These documents are filled with valuable knowledge that has been learned “in the trenches.”  Too often, however, the lessons from these documents are not learned.  Why?  For a number of reasons, including but not limited to the following:

• People might not know the documents exist
• Documents might be  in an unfriendly format (long, technical, complex)
• Time is always short and there are dozens of competing priorities!

Mercy Corps has addressed this challenge through a technology assisted approach.  The organization’s DM&E team regularly schedules and facilitates  DM&E Global Learning Exchanges.  These consist of live webinar sessions    (using the Blackboard Collaborate platform provided through LINGOs membership) to discuss recent evaluation documents that have been published by the agency. 

M&E staff from around the world present on topics of interest, focusing on effective or innovative tools, methods and experiences.  The DM&E team organizes topics, potential field presenters, promotion of the event and session facilitation.  The first session in December 2009 witnessed over 70 staff from 20 countries logging on simultaneously to hear presentations on M&E data management solutions from CAR, Somalia, Kosovo and Pakistan.  Over 900 individual chat messages were exchanged in the two-hour session, as members connected socially and professionally.

These events have changed the way knowledge related to evaluations is shared at Mercy Corps.  The monthly conversations are lively and social.  Over time, colleagues who previously might not have ever had the chance to develop personal relationships, now feel comfortable reaching out to each other with questions and requests for support.  Most importantly, learning is no longer gathering dust on the shelf.  Evaluations are shared and read before each event and discussed/debated during the monthly events.

 “Without on-line training and sharing, I don’t think we could have implemented Mission Metrics,” notes Sanju Joshi of Mercy Corps Nepal.  

 The ‘Together We Learn’ Global Learning and Collaboration in the DM&E Community of Practice Program described in this post was selected as one of the top five innovations in Mercy Corps – stay tuned for final competition results.

Astha built on the knowledge shared in the community, and documents many of those ideas and tips (including many shared in last week’s superb virtual coffee break in which Conservation International’s Catriona Moriarty shared her agency’s experience in the first year of building engagement and marketing learning through Conservation International’s eCampus).

 In the spirit of community resource, LINGOs asked Astha to share her experience and approach, which she kindly does here.

 Guest post by Astha Parmar, Manager, Talent Management & Engagement, The Grameen Foundation

Hi Marian,

Thank you for (last week’s) thoughtful post- you really hit the key points here. As you pointed out, we did launch in two weeks (and actually in week 3 of me joining Grameen!)

Here are a couple of thoughts on our approach.

Pre-Launch

• Talent Strategy: Our VP of Human Resources actually did a great job prepping us for the launch. We’ve done a lot of ground work in terms of having a talent strategy, seeking feedback from our employees and collecting data on key learning needs. So when I walked in, we had a couple of pieces in place: topic areas that would interest employees and leadership excitement/ commitment to pushing learning.
• Community: My ability to attend the LINGOs Conference was just such a huge plus in getting me started. The connections I made and the understanding that LINGOs is not just a portal—but a community deeply committed to helping international development organization’s build capacity—was invaluable. Plus between you and Joey, I really walked out feeling like I knew what I had to do to get set-up.
• Helpful skills: Finally I do want to add that I have launched LMS’s before and worked in the world of online course development. Which helped.

Launch

• Branding: Folks can see the branding of our portal here (http://gflearning.org). Getting a URL that was super easy to remember and consistent with our brand was important. The look and feel is deeply aligned to our mission and overall org branding.
• Usability: I used shadowbox to create the in-page pop-out effect. My goal here was to make the main page actionable and draw the learner in. You actually don’t need super technical skills to make this happen—but a working knowledge of html helps. Or unwitting friends who are software engineers and will trade help for food—that will work, too.
• Selecting Courses: A couple of thoughts on picking the courses:
• We aligned the launch with an organizational initiative. So we were just launching a new online project management tool, and we rolled out GFLearning with PM courses as a support for this initiative. A couple of advantages— the employees saw this as supporting their day-to-day work needs; and instead of me doing demos, the person heading the PM initiative stumped for the our portal (goes to credibility)
• It’s daunting to review and pick the courses that are right for your organization. But I have found that between the course completion reports published by LINGOs and the feedback on the PSI University catalog—you can get to a good shortlist fairly quickly.

Keeping the momentum going

• Bite sizing releases: Instead of launching too many courses from the get-go, we have chosen to launch courses in bite sized chunks. So we launched with the Project Management Courses. Next we did a mini release in which we responded very quickly to initial employee requests that came in after our portal launched. Folks loved this. Now we’re doing topically focused releases, our next one being on Management Skills.
• Organization-Created Content: Almost all LINGOs members I have interacted with emphasize the importance of creating and hosting organization specific courses. Since we don’t have the bandwidth to do this upfront, we have used some short cuts to get there. We host a lot of online brownbags, and I have started importing these into Camtasia, editing these out and aggregating them on GFLearning. Encouraging departments who need to share process/program info with employees to use the platform has also worked for us.
  Also, most people think of online courses as an actual training. I have created some very quick resource aggregations with Articulate and published these on our portal as a quick fix to get some info out.
• Impact stories: we have only been launched for about a month now and folks have busy schedules—so to incentivize people to share, I sent out a ‘share your feedback’ email with some targeted questions. The pay-off? Everyone who got responses in by a certain date was entered into a $15 book credit, for a book of their choice that would further their learning. Worked!
• Email updates, leadership support and field calls: ..all the usual suspects!

Initiatives we’re working up to: a new employee orientation/learning plan and more sophisticated Grameen authored training courses. Last thing I would emphasize is that we follow the 70-20-10 principle of learning, so all my Lingos effort is in context of an on-the-job and people supported learning strategy that’s geared to further our mission.

Most of the 70+ international development, humanitarian relief, social justice, and conservation NGOs that are members of LINGOs are using a Learning Management System (LMS) to distribute courses to their global staff and track their progress, all in a secure environment!

LINGOs INGO memberships include the deployment of a secure LMS, which is available, and accessible by any staff member with a web connection and an Internet browser.  One of the main advantages an LMS offers over a traditional website is its reporting capability: agencies can record their learners’ participation in courses and events and share these reports in several useful formats.

The LMS provides capability for Instructor-led synchronous and asynchronous learning as well as providing scheduling and tracking of online and live events!

As you are considering putting an LMS in place for your organization, there are a number of issues to consider. Many of these have been asked in the LINGOs Discussion Group on LinkedIn, are posted on the LINGOs Member Site (http://ngolearning.org) or have been touched upon in earlier posts here. This blog post curates many of those responses.

How much effort should we expect to set up the Portal?

There are several aspects of setting up the LMS. The technical set-up is actually the easiest, and LINGOs will establish the portal, train several of your staff on how to get it to look the way you want, and show you how to manage it (plan for 1-2.5 hours for this on-line training).

Then comes the larger start-up process of planning, branding, selecting courses and preparing a communications plan. Few agencies have personnel dedicated 100% to this effort, so it can stretch out over weeks to several months.  However, with a tight time frame and a dedicated and experienced new staff person, The Grameen Foundation, which  joined LINGOs in early October 2011 as a Level 2 Member*, was able to set up, brand and launch their portal in less than two weeks. (Discussion of this in the LINGOs group on LinkedIn).

*Level 2 Membership benefits include a brandable LMS portal and the ability to select courses for it from among the LINGOs Catalog and ability to post custom-developed courses, or purchased seats to SCORM Conformant commercially supplied courseware.

FHI 360 documented its process of planning, piloting and launching its portal in a great post on the LINGOs Blog in January 2011 (click here for the post) and in the June 2011 Virtual Coffee Break (click here for recording)

What are the Steps to Getting Started? See the summer 2011 Series of Posts by Ruth Kustoff on the LINGOs Blog:

	Getting started: Identify Top Learner Needs and Develop a Plan
	Selecting Courses to Meet Learner Needs
	If you build it, will they come? Develop Communications Plan  Please also see info below, about upcoming December 8 Virtual Coffee Break on Building Engagement and Marketing Learning Resources to Global Employees

How much time should we plan for ongoing management of portal? The answer to this varies tremendously, depending on size of organization, set-up of the portal, and whether there had recently been an activity that increased demand for courses. In a LinkedIn Group discussion on this, members reported the time ranged from  20 minutes to an hour a day on a heavy day for Habitat for Humanity, with 2600 registered users. Other agencies spend 2-20 minutes per day responding to registration requests and inquiries from present users. With the order manager functionality in place (Level 2 Portals), processing requests for existing student accounts should take 1-2 minutes.

Where can we find additional resources?  You can find manuals, tips, tricks, recorded webinars and a wealth of resources on planning, branding, Developing, Launching courses in the IntraLearn environment on the LINGOs LMS Administrator Community Site.

Participate in two upcoming live (virtual) events: 

Join the Dec 8, 2011 LINGOs Member Virtual Coffee Break in which ”Barista” Catriona Moriarty of Conservation International in an informal virtual coffee around engagement and marketing of self-paced learning resources. Conservation International (CI) launched its eCampus just about a year ago. Learn a bit about CI’s experience, share your experiences and ideas. What ideas and approaches have you used to build interest, excitement and utilization of learning resources globally in your organization? What’s worked well? What would you like to try?

LINGOs’ LMS Administrator Joey Watkins will facilitate the first LMS Administrators Q&A Session on Tuesday January 10, 2012 from 11am- noon Eastern time (same as New York). LINGOs member agency LMS Administrators are encouraged to register to attend this session. To register, visit http://lingoslmsjan2012.eventbrite.com.

• Make it Easy
• Curate information
• Recognize expertise

We will use the LINGOs blog to curate, tag and share some of the wealth of knowledge and expertise from the LINGOs community that is shared in the LINGOs Group on LinkedIn. That group does two of Tom’s three points. It’s an easy way to participate and LinkedIn provides a good way to share and recognize expertise. However, it is not presently easy to search.

This post, complied from the LINGOs Group Discussion on LinkedIn by Penny Whittaker, Freelance Instructional Designer and eLearning Developer, curates the Learning Blogs that LINGOs Members Like.

Feel free to post additional blogs that you find particularly useful here, or better yet, in the LinkedIn group (this blog will post there by rss feed a day or so after it is published).

Want to see the presentations and resources shared at the 2011 Member Meeting? Click here.

 LINGOs Director of Content and Impact Mike Culligan (right) facilitates a  panel discussion on Impact with Roger Steele of LINGOs, Marie-Laure Curie from PSI, Brian Washburn of SightLife, and co-facilitator Elvis Frazer from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

 What a fantastic few days the LINGOs community enjoyed in Seattle. PATH and SightLife hosted our meeting and reception in grand style. Over 60 participants networked, sharing stories, approaches, tools and resources.  

Members had options to participate in 25 different sessions on topics ranging from moving learners to action with video, developing a personal learning network via twitter, Career-pathing and talent management in INGOs, Successes and challenges in improving education in the developing world, How to develop a personal learning network and basic use of Twitter, Marketing learning for impact using social media tools, How access to corneal transplant can reduce blindness (including a tour of the area’s largest cornea bank!), Lessons on building a global learning community, Getting started with m-Learning and so much more.

Tom Kuhlmann from Articulate shared his very practical approaches and lessons on building a global learning community (his blog has over 84,000 followers and there are more than 107,000 global members of the Articulate Community).  You’ll see us starting to put some of his tips in action as we strengthen the LINGOs community. We challenge you to contribute regularly to the LINGOs community: comment on the LINGOs Group LinkedIn, share something you’ve worked on by guest authoring a post on the LINGOs blog, offer to co-facilitate a Virtual Coffee Break, Tweet info of interest to #LINGOs, or follow @LINGOsOrg on Twitter

Scott Macklin from the University of Washington facilitated a fun session on telling stories via video. Participants videoed each other with flip cams and we’ll be sharing some of the brief introductions over coming months… We welcome you to add some of your own and find ways to tell the story of building capacity to enhance performance in your organization!

Elvis Frazer from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and LINGOs own Mike Culligan facilitated a two-part interactive laboratory on measuring impact of learning interventions.  Mike will be posting a series of posts in this space related to measurement and impact over the coming months.

PSI’s Marie-Laure Curie shared some of the elements of her organization’s very successful extension of learning to its global staff. Those of us in attendance certainly could see the value and impact of what PSI is doing, and so does Chief Learning Officer (CLO), which awarded PSI’s Steven Honeyman their Gold Award in the Global Learning category. Click here for more info on PSI’s award winning approach.

As part of LINGOs’ efforts to ensure that the learning from last week’s annual meeting is documented and shared with all those who were unable to make it Seattle, a LinkedIn LINGOs’ group thread has been started to capture participants’ thinking on two questions:

• What three ideas/practices from the meeting did you take back to the office and intend to apply over the coming three months?
• Are there any challenges that you will need to address as you apply these ideas/practices?

If you were at the meeting, be sure to post your response for others to see!  If you were unable to attend, learn more about what everyone is talking about by visiting the Linked In thread here.

We’re planning to move the meeting back to the east coast next year. Likely to be bigger… if your organization has space or access to space that could accommodate 70-100 participants, please send an email to Marian(at)LINGOs.org.

And finally (for now), we are updating the meeting site to include the resources from the meeting sessions. To access them, click here.

While social media has a terrible reputation for tempting people to waste time and talk about Justin Bieber, social technologies have tremendous capacity for enabling humanitarian and development professionals to learn, iterate and adapt their practices quickly in challenging circumstances.

(For those who haven’t experimented with Twitter yet, check out the six minute crash course I built for friends who were bugging me to help them “learn to use Twitter.” It’s quick and it will cover the basics. Both that course and another entitled “Beginning Twitter for Professionals, Part 2″ are available to LINGOs Member Agencies via your LMS. In addition, I’ll be presenting on Twitter for learning at the LINGOs member meeting in October.)

With famine and drought situations in East Africa, many NGO staff members are faced with incredibly challenging, dynamic relief situations, where the best solutions are never obvious and rarely consistent.

With limited resources, social media creates an opportunity to network with peers all over the world. Social media is the gateway to the personal learning network (PLN): A network of peers where you share your challenges and experiences. You may be the only person with your job function in a 500 mile radius, but social media can help you build a support network based on ideas, challenges and topics.

How do I get started building my PLN?

A strong PLN will help you find information rapidly, get advice, learn from experts as you go, and find support from peers. In turn, you will have opportunities to share your own experiences. Here’s how.

1. The first step is to figure out where your peers are hanging out. This doesn’t just mean “on Twitter” or on “LinkedIn”. It’s the next level of analysis from there. Is there a hashtag chat on a topic of interest to you? If you’re a training/learning professional, how about #lrnchat? If you work with social entrepreneurs, how about #socent? If you’re seeking advice on using social media, how about the LinkedIn forum on social media for nonprofits? Still new to technology altogether? Try liking “Gettin’ Geeky” on Facebook, where Gina Schreck shares great tips and how-tos on getting social.Ask your peers, coworkers and friends. Next time you attend a conference, find out what the hashtag is and take part in the conference backchannel. Form online relationships through your preferred social networks to reinforce and extend the relationships you have offline.
2. Create your profiles and introduce yourself. Whether it’s any of the Quora, LinkedIn forums or hashtag-based chats mentioned above or something you find or found, use your profiles as an introduction to who you are, what your affiliations are and what your experience is. Use the same keywords to describe yourself that you would when searching for people to communicate with. Don’t make it hard for people to understand why they would want to network with you. Provide links to your sites and other profiles to make your network connected and multi-faceted. 

3.    Get involved. Start talking. Don’t be bashful. Many people feel unsure about jumping in conversations (perhaps because they view these conversations like the kinds you encounter in real life). Don’t be. People are having these conversations in open forums because they expect, value and welcome new voices and new ideas. If you have something to say, say it. (For more on this, read on.)

4. Curate and share. Once you’ve started building your networks and engaging in conversations, think about how you can make the network richer and more effective. Can you create Storify records of useful Twitter conversations? Can you introduce new voices? Do you have internal resources from your organization that you could share? Do you have a blog where you could feature new ideas and the leaders in your PLN?

 So once you have started building my PLN and you some online connections, you’re probably wondering what kinds of conversations people expect and want to engage in.

• Share what happened today. Did you develop a new approach to conflict management? Did you find a great resource, blog post or idea? Curate the resources that you use to succeed, and look for people doing the same.
• Share your organization’s resources and best practices. Within reason, share the point of view your organization has developed over time. 
• Experiment. The flipside of sharing the ideas you develop on the job is being adventurous and experimenting with the new tools, ideas and suggestions you encounter through your PLN.
• Ask for help. Do you need help with finding the right person in a distant country to help you clear a shipment through customs? Do you have a challenge with finding the right application or software package to help you solve a problem? Ask. You will find references to new tools or to people have solved the same problems. I’ve been consistently surprised and thrilled and the new connections and helpful ideas I’ve built on social networks.
• Say thank you. People appreciate hearing that their advice and ideas are being put to work. Say thank you and highlight how your PLN has made you better at your job.

In closing, you can start by reaching out to other LINGOs members through the @LINGOsOrgTwitter account and LinkedIn forums, not to mention the Oct 2011 Member meeting. These are great starting places to find nonprofit professionals focused on organizational learning.

The well-developed PLN is social learning at its finest: Technology providing opportunities for employees in challenging situations to communicate with peers, sharing the challenges and solutions, and improving performance and programs along the way. 

Start Building Your PLN at the LINGOs Member Meeting

I will be giving a presentation on using Twitter and social media for learning and networking at the LINGOs member meeting next week. If you have specific topics of interest or questions you’d like me to cover, please send me an email.

___________________

Kelly Meeker is the Community Manager at OpenSesame.com, a marketplace for buying and selling elearning courses. Connect with her at @OpenSesameNow. She’s a communications professional and a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer (Mali 2005-2007).

To see Eric Berg’s post about the LINGOs Meeting, please click here.

by John Leary, Director of Training, ACDI/VOCA

Access to information is one of the key benefits ACDI/VOCA brings to our program beneficiaries—and to our staff around the world.

Through our programs, we teach farmers, entrepreneurs, parents, citizens and others new skills to improve their yields, profits and lives. But we also recognize that to do this well, we need strong support systems, careful stewardship of our funds, accurate monitoring and evaluation, and expert, up-to-date technical knowledge, all of which means maintaining a high level of skills among our own employees.

ACDI/VOCA provides its staff worldwide with access to learning resources through a learning management system called ASPIRE Online. ASPIRE has 700 e-learning courses on management, leadership and communication skills, Microsoft Office applications, and technical topics and best practices.

 Time and Space No Obstacles to Online Learning

 “Online courses are accessible on my schedule and I can access them anytime from any location, as long as I have an internet connection,” says ACDI/VOCA’s human resources manager in Afghanistan. “Sometimes I download course materials, print them, and read them while traveling in a car or on a plane. They are very accessible.”

There are many advantages to learning online, the most obvious being convenience.  Learners can take courses when and where it suits them, as long as they have access to the internet. They can hone in on the information they need by jumping to specific modules of an e-learning tutorial, instead of sitting through an entire class waiting for one particular piece of information. They can view a course repeatedly, if necessary.  Because staff can access information they need when they need it, e-learning has now become part of everyday working. 

 “ASPIRE Online’s e-learning tutorials have helped me to better understand the job description of an HR manager and how to relate with employees. With this, I have used new job skills and built better relationships with staff and volunteers,” says Adam Suale, who works for ACDI/VOCA in Ghana.

 “It’s like having your own trainer on hand any time,” says Mr. Suale, “You simply log in and start learning.”

 With internet capacity expanding around the world, geography, time and transportation costs no longer pose hurdles to designing or taking courses.  When a learning need is identified, ACDI/VOCA can create interactive tutorials and make them immediately available through ASPIRE Online. 

Online Courses Keep Skills Fresh

 “The most widely used courses are our ACDI/VOCA tutorials, which introduce staff to our administrative procedures as well as technical interventions, like our Farming as a Business or value chain approaches,” says Maura Bookter,  director of employee development. “They were created in-house by our small team of developers in collaboration with technical experts throughout the company.”

Online courses may be self-paced or facilitated by an instructor. They guide the learner through a topic and reinforce learning through quizzes, games, and clickable Flash, audio and video features. Each tutorial provides downloadable documents and handouts, and learners can revisit the tutorial at a later date if they need a refresher.

ACDI/VOCA is constantly adding new tutorials to ASPIRE. Many come through our membership in LINGOs – Learning In NGOs, a consortium of over 65 international humanitarian relief, development, conservation and health organizations. LINGOs provides the latest learning technologies and courses to its members so nonprofits like ACDI/VOCA can improve the skills of their employees, thereby increasing the impact of their programs.

In addition to the ACDI/VOCA courses available through ASPIRE, there are many  self-paced courses provided by LINGOs’ corporate partners,  e-learning companies like Harvard Manage Mentor, Ninth House and MindLeaders, and more than 60 courses in 12 languages were contributed by CEGOS, Europe’s leading e-learning training provider on topics such as management and leadership, sales and marketing, individual and collective effectiveness, finance and more.

Top-notch Educators are Within Reach

ACDI/VOCA employees also have access to online classes through Cornell University. “eCornell is becoming increasingly popular with our field staff” says Ms. Bookter, “These courses give professionals abroad the opportunity to earn professional certificates from a prestigious American university and interact online with other professionals around the world. We have staff working in countries where this is their only option to achieve this kind of high-level instruction.”

The practical subject matter, taught by Cornell University professors, ultimately provides ACDI/VOCA’s learners with critical skill development in the certificate subjects. The courses involve cohorts of individuals spread around the world who engage in interactive learning modules. They view videos and recordings, participate in interactive exercises, analyze scenarios and participate online with an instructor and fellow students.  Although learners are interacting with other individuals in these courses, participation can take place at any time, in any time zone.  Learners’ reactions and course work are gathered through the course discussion boards.

A Thirst for Knowledge

While over 700 ACDI/VOCA employees in 31 countries are using the learning system, field staff in Iraq leads the organization in usage: 78 employees in Iraq are currently enrolled in ASPIRE Online, with many earning certificates.

One Iraq staff member says her favorite aspect of ASPIRE are the e-Cornell classes. “It is a great opportunity,” she explains, “for me to be in Iraq and still get valuable information and experience from Cornell university lecturers and experts from all over the world.”

ACDI/VOCA is a member of LINGOs. The Aspire Learning site is powered by LINGOs IntraLearn LMS and loaded with many self-paced courses from the LINGOs catalog, in addition to those developed by and for ACDI/VOCA.

Hello LINGOs Members!

You may or may not have noticed, Elluminate Live is now Blackboard Collaborate, and with that is a whole new interface for conducting your online meetings.

1. New audio/video panel – It now appears at the top of the interface, and includes features such as speaker photo display, easier access to the audio setup wizard, and easier access to your video.
2. Drop-down menus on each interface panel – These give participants easier access to options for each panel.
3. Whiteboard/application sharing/web tour toolbar – More easily launch the whiteboard, application sharing, and web tour features.
4. Page explorer – This feature allows moderators to view thumbnails of the slide deck, rearrange the slides, and includes a private work area.
5. Enhanced chat – Chat now includes new emoticons, as well as tabbed viewing of private messages, and separate moderator chat.

Your next question is probably, “When do we get this?”  The answer is, “You have it now!”  When scheduling your Collaborate sessions, click the “Default Fields” button on the left.  Then you’ll see the option to choose “v10” (Elluminate Live) or “v11” (Blackboard Collaborate).

To assist you in learning about the new version of Blackboard Collaborate, LINGOs has scheduled four training sessions so far to show you around the new interface.  The participant links to join the sessions can be found in the LINGOs Events below:

• September 8, 2011 at 12:00 pm EDT
• September 22, 2011 at 8:00 am EDT
• October 20, 2011 at 12:00 pm EDT
• October 27, 2011 at 8:00 am EDT

We encourage you to set up some test sessions on your own to play around and become familiar with the new version of Blackboard Collaborate.  We will continue to support Elluminate Live v10 through December 31, 2011.  Starting on January 1, 2012 Blackboard Collaborate v11 will become the default version for the LINGOs Collaborate licenses.

Now you may be asking, “Where can I find resources on using Blackboard Collaborate v11?”  We have information available on our LINGOs site at http://ngolearning.org/learningtools/collaborate.  Blackboard also has an extensive support site at http://support.blackboardcollaborate.com/.  There are lots of good resources including a knowledge base, product documentation, and recorded sessions to get you started using Collaborate v11.

Many of this blog’s readers already know that LINGOs’ GlobalGivebackCompetition provides a unique opportunity for learning developers to “give back” their wealth of skills in the service of building custom-made, high-quality e-learning courses for development, relief and conservation agencies. In the first two rounds of the competition, volunteer developers have built over 50 courses, provides access to resources LINGOs member agencies would never be able to access at commercial market rates.  So, as agencies sign up to participate in Global Giveback 3 (go to http://ngolearning.org/globalgiveback/ to learn more)  it is not surprising that this is their primary objective.

However, many readers don’t realize that the Giveback competition doesn’t just provide essential development opportunities to life-saving organizations; it also inspires volunteers.  A quick visit to the Global Giveback Showcase immediately provides a number of inspiring ideas for designing eLearning interactions. 

Inspirational Idea 1:  Rethink Course Navigation

Have you seen Christian Aid’s course on Using Communication Tools? The volunteer team (led by Tom Kuhlmann of Articulate) designed a user experience that is simple and intuitive – we love the clean, white template that emphasizes the great visuals!

In addition to the fresh and modern design, the course navigation is leaps and bounds ahead of the traditional course outline. Instead of next and back buttons, the developers designed an icon-based navigation ribbon at the bottom of the page. So simple! So effective! Yet I’ve never seen anything quite like it before.

To take the course go to the GlobalGiveback1 Showcase and click on “Using Communication Tools at Christian Aid.”

Inspirational Idea 2:  Invite the Learner to Engage in Building the Content 

Two-time volunteer Amanda Warner never disappoints. Her courses invite to the learner to engage in scenario based interactions. Amanda’s “Build, Manage, Improve Credit” (for Acción International) provides a super cool decision engine where learners attempt to fix their credit record. The interface is so simple, but the interaction is playful and engaging. 

Each time I enter the Repair Credit section of the course, I find myself drawn into the interaction: I do it once, then, I do it again, then again. After the fourth time running the exercise, I have thought about credit records through four different perspectives!  (Aside – I also highly recommend a visit to the GlobalGiveback 2 Showcase to see Amanda’s winning course “Client Protection and Financial Education in Microfinance.”)

Inspirational Idea 3:  Harness the Cloud 

I once worked with an HIV project where the technical experts worked out of thirteen offices in eleven countries. Imagine trying to coordinate these teams around the development of an eLearning course. How would you access files? How would share access to development tools? How would you manage team participation? While this scenario sounds extreme, it is a common challenge when working with development agencies with staff dispersed across the world.  It is just as likely that a Subject Matter Expert will be located in Panama as she would be in Kenya, Indonesia or Tajikistan. 

The team that developed the GlobalGiveback 2 Showcase course, “How to Design a Team Building Workshop” “harnessed the cloud” to address this challenge. The team from ACDI/VOCA and its partner QuickLessons developed their course using QuickLessons’ web based course development tool. Because the tool is hosted on-line, team members contributed to the development of the course regardless of their location and without having to download the course development software to their computers. Furthermore, they were able to share course files through an on-line document repository that was accessible from any location. These features, and the ability to comment of course versions through web-hosted board, permitted rich collaboration from a geographically-disbursed global team. 

So, if you are thinking about building an e-learning course and are looking for creative ideas from other organizations that have previous experience, visit the LINGOs website and explore the Global Giveback resources section.  The results are sure to inspire you and your team