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Seven Things I Learned This Year

Over the past few years, I spend part of December going back through my blog to recap a bit of what some of the key things I’ve learned over the course of the year. I’ve been doing this the past few years, for example: Learned about Learning in 2009. And every year I use this as a Big Question – see: Learning 2010. A lot of it is thinking through where my thinking has changed over the course of the year. So here are a few of the things that are a bit different for me.

1. Twitter is Much Better than I Thought for Learning

I used to say during presentations that I wasn’t quite sure about twitter as a learning tool. During 2010, I’ve been ramping up my use of twitter as a learning tool. I’ve had to find ways to filter the flow and figure out when/how to reach out. It was definitely helpful to spend time going through Twitter for Learning – 55 Great Articles.

2. Learning Coach Model Very Powerful

In 2010, I had a great experience where Dr. Joel Harband wrote a series of articles for my blog on Text-to-Speech in eLearning. Here’s the series:

But what I learned from this was that it was a fantastic way to learn about a topic where I was interested but didn’t have the time to spend researching it. Instead, Joel would write it up. I’d ask questions and edit it.

It provided high value for me and hopefully value for people reading it.

I’m looking forward to doing more of this going forward. Please let me know if you want to be a Learning Coach for me on another topic.

3. iPad (and iPhone) are Much More Useful Than I Expected

I didn’t actually think that I would care about the iPad except as a tool for training and performance support in environments like retail and restaurants where it’s always been an issue having access to machines. However, now that I have an iPad myself, I’ve found myself sitting on the couch with it a LOT. And slowly it’s got me to try more applications and then those applications expand off to my iPhone.

It’s an amazing device and no surprise it was one of the breakout topics on eLearning Learning this year.

4. LMS and Learning Tracking Still Struggling

While LMS solutions continue to get better, more powerful, more diverse, I continue to find myself searching for just the right solution for particular needs. For example my search for an LMS Solution for Simple Partner Compliance Training didn’t really arrive at just the right solution. I was also struggling for clients who needed very simple learning tracking but with some customizations. Marketplace LMS solutions don’t quite fit. Neither do more complex solutions.

And a big part of the problem is just how many there are and how fast they change.

5. Aggregation and Social Filtering Provide High Value

eLearning Learning has somewhat become my singular source of great eLearning content. I use it to filter and find all the best content on a daily, weekly, monthly basis. And it’s going to become much better in the new year as it moves over to the next generation platform. I was really glad to see it grow to become one of the Top eLearning Sites. And the system itself is growing with sites like Social Media Informer.

6. Open Content Potential But There are Challenges

This year I spent quite a bit of time looking at where and how open content could get leveraged in different ways. I’m still struggling a little bit with it, but I know there’s going to be a lot going on around it. See Failure of Creative Commons Licenses and Creative Commons Use in For-Profit Company eLearning? for more on this.

7. Flash may Die and HTML 5 is Going to be Big

2010 opened my eyes are Flash and HTML 5. I really think that 2010 marks the Beginning of Long Slow Death of Flash. This, of course, means some really big changes for authoring tools in the industry.

Best Lecture

I just read George Siemens post Will online lectures destroy universities? He makes the point that despite articles like Why free online lectures will destroy universities – unless they get their act together fast:

Statements like “universities are obsolete” or “universities are dying” are comical. And untrue. Universities are continuing to grow in enrolment and general influence in society. Calling universities obsolete while we are early on in the so-called knowledge economy is like declaring factories obsolete in the 18th century just as the industrial revolution was taking hold. Utter nonsense.

While George does talk about challenges in education, I think he misses part of the point of the article. And this is something that I’ve been thinking (and writing – see Physics Lectures) about for a long time. Here’s the point:

It’s incredibly easy to capture and distribute lectures.
Rather than getting a lecture from whoever is teaching your course locally, wouldn’t it be better to get a world-class lecture.

As the article points out:

At the same time, millions of learners around the world are watching world-class lectures online about every subject imaginable, from fractional reserve banking to moral philosophy to pharmacology, supplied by Harvard, MIT, and The Open University.

Have you seen Planet Earth or watched a Professor Lewin physics presentation? There’s basically no way to compete with those sources. And wouldn’t it be better to get the best available lecture with local discussion, studying, testing, etc.?

I’m not quite sure that I buy the article’s contention that:

The simple fact is that university lectures never worked that well in the first place – it’s just that for centuries, we didn’t have any better option for transmitting information. In fact, the success of top universities, both now and historically, is in spite of lectures, not because of it.

Maybe that’s because I’ve learned a lot in schools that way. But even if you keep lectures, but you open up everyone to the Best Lecture available on a given topic … The implications here for education are profound.

Best Lectures in Corporate Training

I also believe the implications here are profound for corporate training. We can continue to hide behind the myth that our content is special and different. Some of the time, that’s quite true. But there’s a lot of content (leadership, management, safety, etc.) that really should not be replicated by every organization.

Instead, we should be looking for the Best Lecture and work our specifics around that. Of course, that’s sometimes made harder because despite the Open Content movement in education, there’s less of a movement in corporate learning (and some barriers: Open Content in Workplace Learning?, Creative Commons Use in For-Profit Company eLearning?).

What’s also interesting about this situation is that there are similar barriers from the content creators standpoint. In the Business of Learning, I talk about the challenges as a content creator and how the business models might work. And every day, I’m talking with people who have great content and could be creating the Best Lecture on a topic. And while they can easily capture it, getting it distributed in a way that pays is difficult. Instead, they need to package it into a unit that is self-contained. They need something similar to an LMS or a course that runs in a corporate LMS. But it certainly won’t look like a Best Lecture model with corporate eLearning professionals being able to act like local discussion, studying, testing.

I’m not sure what any of this will look like in education or in corporate training – but I am sure it will be quite different in 20 years from how we do it today.

Text-to-Speech Costs – Licensing and Pricing

This post is part of the series on Text-to-Speech (TTS) for eLearning written by Dr. Joel Harband and edited by me. The other posts are:

In this post, we will look more closely at costs of Text-to-Speech and issues around TTS Voice Licensing and Pricing. The subject of TTS voice licensing and pricing is important because it helps e-learning practitioners understand which TTS tools they are legally allowed to use for their specific applications as well as letting them estimate the costs and pricing models of using these TTS tools.

Voice Talent Rates and Implications on TTS Licensing and Pricing

When the TTS voice manufacturers looked for a pricing model for their product, they naturally looked at the model used by real voice talents, including the rates and the types of usage.

Here are some examples of rates of voice talents suited for e-learning (voice talents for advertising can be a lot more). The rates are given in $ per hour of recorded sound.

Site	Rate per hour
www.e-learningvoices.com/price-per-minute.php	$1200
www.voices.com	$800-$1200
www.voice123.com	$1800 (median)
www.narratorfiles.com	$650

The average for this type of voice talent is about $1200/hour.

In addition, voice talents and voice producers tend to charge depending on the purpose of the recording and size of the intended audience of the recording. If the recording is going to be heard by many people and helps the customer make a lot of money, the voice talents expect to get more money than if the recording has a very limited use. The rates will be different for local, regional or national broadcasts. For example: a 30 second recording for a TV commercial broadcast all over the US may cost several times more than a five minute recording for a local documentary (voice123.com).

The TTS vendors learned two things from the voice-talent pricing model:

The price level – Because of their perceived lower voice quality, TTS voices need to be priced much lower than their real counterparts to be an attractive alternative
The TTS voice price need to be fixed according to the value of its use to the customer.

Based on the second criterion, the TTS vendors work with the following two general usage categories:

Personal Use - reading books, making sound files for personal use, etc. This is a low value usage.
Audio Distribution – a sound file that was created with the voice is distributed and played to an audience. This usage has a higher value.

Audio Distribution

Audio distribution, which is similar to broadcasting a voice talent recording, is considered to be a usage that is more valuable to the customer. Within audio distribution the following categories exist. They are listed according to increasing value to the customer:

Internal audio distribution - a company puts an audio training presentation with the TTS sound file on an internal server – intended for company employees only
Public audio distribution - a company puts an audio product presentation they made with the TTS sound file on a public web site – intended for a more general audience. Includes call centers.
Selling a TTS sound file for profit - a company sells an audio training presentation they made with the TTS sound file for profit

E-learning courses created by corporations are typically in the category of internal audio distribution – the course is put on the company server to be accessed by company employees.

TTS Voice Licenses

The TTS voice vendors enforce the intended usage of a voice by a voice license, which precisely describes the restrictions on the use of the voice. Strictly speaking, the vendors sell a license to use the voice software rather than selling the voice itself.

The following licenses are used:

Personal Use License – this license covers personal use of the TTS voice by the customer and expressly prohibits audio distribution - thus cannot be used for e-learning. Examples of products that use voices with personal license are: Natural Reader, TextAloud, Read the Words, and Spoken Text.

Personal licenses are sold for a low fixed price. In general, a price less than $50 indicates a personal license.

Audio Distribution License (ADL) – This is the license that permits audio distribution and is the type of license required for e-learning in business and education. The voice vendors have fixed the rate for an ADL license to be around 1/3 – 2/3 of the price of the equivalent voice talent ($1200/hour), depending on the TTS voice quality. The basic TTS voices cost $360/hour of recorded time and for the best TTS voices the rate can go up to $720/hour of recorded time.

The TTS voices with ADL are sold in three ways:

Fixed Price – this model allows a company to purchase any TTS voice with full audio distribution rights from a vendor without being tied to the specific authoring tools (e.g., Captivate) and its bundled voices. In talking to vendors (Neospeech), I was told that this model had been selected by some companies. Acapela also offers a model like this for unrestricted ADL. The fixed price depends on the exact usage. A typical price for internal training courses is $2500, which represents about 7 hours of recorded time.
On-Demand - Voices can be purchased via on-demand web services or desktop products that accept text and generate sound files. They charge according to elapsed time of the generated file, at a rate of about $6/min ($360/hour).
From a Reseller – A company purchases voices from a reseller at a reduced price. The price is lower because the reseller has bought voices in volume. This is the case for Adobe Captivate and Tuval Software’s Speech-Over Professional where those companies resell the voices bundled with their products and the voice license terms are specified with the product. At present, the purchase price for these tools includes a fixed price for the voice license that does not depend on the elapsed time of the generated file.

Course developers generally are going to use bundled products, i.e., from a reseller. In some cases, there will be use of other models.