eLearning Learning Adds Personalized Subscriptions

Aggregage, the platform that powers eLearning Learning has added a powerful personalization engine.  That means that eLearning Learning now allows users to sign-up and have their content personalized based on their interests.

You can sign-up via the "Personalize Your Content" button on the right side of the interface shown to the right of the red arrow below.  Or put another way, just above and right of the picture of Justin Bieber. 

eLearning-Learning-Personalization

By the way, I should point out that the four top articles on the site when I took the screen shot were all great:

It's what I love about the site.  It always has great, fresh content from a wide variety of industry professionals.  Every time I visit it, I find something that I missed that was really good content.

Now with personalization it's even better. The picture below gives a sense of what's happening:

Aggregage-Personalization

Curators handle finding the best sources of content.  The system then uses social signals such as those coming from Facebook, twitter, LinkedIn, delicious as well as clicks and views.  These are compared to averages for the source and also looks at who is providing the signal, how often they signal things, how often they signal for that particular source, etc.  Those aspects existed before and it does a good job of finding great content.  You can read a bit more about these aspects in eLearning Learning Launches New Features.

What's new now is that the site allows you to sign up and provide your Twitter and LinkedIn information.   The site will look at your activity on these sites and the content of what you share.  It will use that to find interests as well as to cluster you with other users who are like you based on interests and sharing.  You can partially control your interests via the Subscription page as shown below:

eLearning-Learning-Subscription

This will change over time based on your LinkedIn and twitter activity.  You can always visit and manually select interests as well.  You can read a bit more here: Personalization Explained.

The system then can combine three pieces of information to figure out what will be most interesting to you:

  • Social signal score – are people in the audience finding it interesting
  • Topic match – does it match up with your interests
  • Like sharing – are individuals who are like you sharing this

The system uses these to both rank things on the site and to generate Daily and Weekly newsletters.

The reason that I'm most exited about this is that I partly use eLearning Learning to make sure I don't miss things that is good content that is relevant to me.  Now with personalization, it is even less likely that something will sneak by. 

I also personally like the format of the new newsletter.

Give it a try and let me know what you think.

Flash Dead for eLearning

I've been warning about this since January 2010 in Still No Flash, and called it out further as the signs became more serious in May 2010 with Beginning of Long Slow Death of Flash.  My words then:

We are hitting a tipping point where you have to question building anything that uses Flash as the delivery mechanism. 

Screen-Shot-2011-11-09-at-12.17.08-PMIn February of 2011, Mobile Learning and the Continuing Death of Flash, I pointed to the smart moves by Rapid Intake to work around this problem.  And said,

The death of Flash is continuing.

Well, I believe we've seen continuing signs of this with Adobe moving its tools towards HTML 5.  And now, Adobe Admits: Apple Won, Flash For Mobile is Done, HTML5 is the Future.

What does all of this mean?  No More Fence Sitting!

Content Creators => you can no longer build content in Flash as a delivery vehicle.  You must adopt tools that do not rely on Flash as a delivery mechanism or at least delivery solutions to Flash and HTML 5.

Authoring Tool Companies => you must immediately talk to your product roadmap and how you will be able to deliver HTML 5 content.  You must look at how media will be handled going forward.

This may seem like a shock, but we've gone through this transition before as we move from desktop to web-based delivery.  Really Flash was part of that last wave.  It won't be part of the next wave.

Of course, that still leaves some really hard questions about how you design for all the different mobile platforms with widely different screen sizes and their non-standard inputs and widely varying connection speeds.  This is a great opportunity for mobile authoring tools to take a bite out of a much larger market much like the Director to Flash transition did back in the day.

I'll be curious to hear comments on this.

LMS Low-Cost Webinars Hosted eCommerce Subscriptions

I was talking with a startup that has an existing audience and now want to provide a monthly subscription for access to training to this audience. They will only convert a portion of the audience to the new service. The learners will get access to webinars, recorded webinars, videos, and other online content that they will author separately.

They don't really have a tech team, so going with a hosted solution that would live at a subdomain would be best, i.e., subscribers would go to: learn.company.com in order to sign up, pay, and get access to webinars, content, etc.

They are early stage, so low-cost would be good. And it would be nice if it was a Rapid LMS.

I'm a little concerned how well LMS solutions will handle the webinar integration and the subscriptions.

What would you recommend they research as possible options?

Here are some resources that I found that may help:

And some of the resulting choices based on these resources:

More:

  • Absorb LMS (Blatant Media e-Learning)
  • Acadia HCS (Acadia HCS)
  • Allen Communication Learning Portal
  • Avilar WebMentor
  • Course-Source (Course-Source Limited)
  • CourseMill LMS (Trivantis)
  • DOTS (WebRaven)
  • ED Training Platform (Strategia)
  • Generation 21 Enterprise
  • InforSource (InfoSource)
  • Inquisiq EX (ICS Learning Group Inc.)
  • IntraLearn XE (IntraLearn Software)
  • Isoph Blue (Learn Something)
  • Kallidus LMS (e2train)
  • LearnerWeb (MaxIT)
  • LearningServer IntraLearn
  • LearnShare LMS (Learnshare)
  • LMS Live (Wizdom Systems)
  • MindFlash E-Learning System
  • NetDimensions EKP Bronze
  • OnPoint Learning & Performance Suite
  • On-Tracker LMS (Interactive Solutions)
  • OutStart Evolution LMS (OutStart)
  • SSElearn Portal (SSE)
  • Syntrio Enterprise (Syntrio)
  • TeraLearn LMS (Teralearn.com)
  • The Learning Manager (Worldwide Interactive)
  • Tracker.Net (Platte Canyon)
  • TrainingPartner (Geometrix)
  • TrainingMine (Frontline Data Solutions)
  • Upside LMS (Upside Learning Solutions)
  • Virtual Training Assistant (RISC)

And if you want a MUCH longer list, go download the 475+ LMS names from here: LMS and Learning Platforms