Questionmark CEO discusses globalization and learning trends

Will at Work Learning: Assessment Guru Hints at Trends Relevant to Learning Professionals:

Will Talheimer of Work-Learning Research recently talked with Eric Shepherd, CEO of Questionmark, to get a sense of the learning industry and how it has been affected by the downturn in the world economy.

Check the link above for the videos of the interview.

Main takeaways?

• People are moving to where the jobs are, and jobs are moving to where the people are.
  
• Content and assessments must be culturally aware as well as multilingual to target the global workforce.
  
• Training budgets are being slashed.
  
• Measure it to Manage it.
  
• Increase in assessment tools being used in pre-employment screening.
  
• Certification and tested credentials become more important to job seekers.
  

SCORM 2004, 4th Edition Released

SCORM 2004, 4th Edition - Overview:

The ADL (Advanced Distributed Learning) has officially released the 4th edition of SCORM 2004, here's the blurb:

"Acting on feedback from the ADL Community, ADL collected and analyzed reported issues to produce SCORM 2004 4th Edition (4th Ed.), a maintenance release that addresses defects in, and adds enhancements to, the previous versions of SCORM 2004."

Biggest changes?

• Sharing data and objective info between SCOs
  
• Jump Navigation requests
  
• Partial completion status now rolls up (as opposed to relying on complete/incomplete as before)
  

And, of course, there's a new test suite and sample run-time environment to play with.

All in all, this is a welcome update that resolves a number of issues with SCORM 2004 3rd Edition. Nothing earth-shattering, but a welcome release all the same.

Best Video Conferencing Tools

Best Video Conferencing Tools - Robin Good's Latest News

Robin Good has posted a useful list of low-cost and free Video Conferencing solutions.

Although Adobe Connect Pro is on the "Multi-party" list, the emphasis is on straight video conferencing, as opposed to standard Web Conferencing (which would include slides, whiteboard, etc.) apps like WebEx or Centra.

Free Language Lesson Podcasts

Free Foreign Language Lessons | Open Culture:

Open Culture presents a list of free language learning podcasts:

"A great way to learn 37 languages for free. Spanish, French, English, Mandarin, Russian and much more."

Nomee Introduces New Social Aggregation Software

Nomee Introduces New Social Aggregation Software - ReadWriteWeb:

Ok, when I first read this headline on ReadWriteWeb, I thought it said Social Aggression Software. Now THAT would be an application I would like to see! But aggregation can be good too...

Here's the deal, Nomee is:

"a new software application for the purpose of aggregating all your social networking sites into a single desktop experience. [...] Nomee is not just aggregation software - it also functions as a social identity management tool, letting you control which identities are shared with which people. That makes Nomee more like a next-gen social address book than anything else."