Interview with John Alonso, OutStart: Innovators in E-Learning Series // Corgi Big Bark Award

Mobile learning continues to evolve quickly as mobile devices, access, and connectivity speeds continue to improve. The potential to leverage social networking in order to create a robust social learning environment, with reliable outcomes-based assessment represents a dramatic step forward, as does the "multi-screen" approach. Welcome to an interview with John Alonso, CTO of Outstart.

E-Learning Queen is happy to announce that Outstart is the recipient of an E-Learning Queen Corgi Big Bark Award for forward thinking and a commitment to innovative approaches to e-learning.

1. What is your name and your relation to e-learning?

My name is John Alonso – I’m the CTO and one of the Founders of OutStart. I evolved into eLearning about 16 years ago. I started as a software developer, worked in multiple industries and in the mid 1990’s found myself in front of the classroom as a teacher. I did that for several years and learned a great deal. I became a video star , doing a several DVD based learning courses. This led to working on CBT’s as an author and subject matter expert, which led to eLearning. In 1999, I and a few others started OutStart. Our focus and goals where to create a company that would focus on learning and specifically on learning content. We didn’t want to be a content provider, we wanted to be enablers, to provide tools and technologies that would make it easier, faster and cheaper to create content.

2. What is the name of your company and what are its main products?

OutStart Inc.

OutStart LCMS

• OutStart LCMS is the leading Learning Content Management System (LCMS) for automating the development, management, maintenance, delivery, and publishing of modular and personalized learning to enhance both learning and development teams and learner effectiveness. Available SaaS or On-Premise.

Participate

• Participate is social business software that integrates social networking, collaboration, and knowledge sharing technologies, enabling organizations to more effectively collaborate, contribute and share knowledge. Available SAAS.

Hot Lava Mobile

• Hot Lava Mobile is mobile platform to develop content, deliver and immediately analyze results in support of corporate communications and mobile learning. SaaS offering.

TrainingEdge.com LMS

• Full-featured, configurable learning management system to administrate, document, track, report, and deliver learning in support of classroom, online, and mobile learning. SaaS offering.

TrainingEdge.com

• TrainingEdge.com is an integrated suite combining LMS, LCMS, Social Business Software and Mobile to meet the breadth of learning and knowledge needs of an organization. Available via SaaS.

3. How has the popularity of tablets changed your product line?

Our product philosophy of single-sourcing, which at its core is about isolating presentation from content, makes supporting Tablets easy. While I’d like to claim that we foresaw Tablets in 1999, the reality is that we could not foresee what future technology trends would arrive. That being the case, we wanted to protect the investment that people made in content. Our OutStart LCMS platform allows for the creation and management of content without having to declare what the output format needs to be. This allows us to transform the content to whatever delivery device we choose. Our viewers, which are really the plug-ins that we use for transforming the content, allow us to deliver to almost any target device. A specific viewer can easily be created for different platforms, for iOS, Android, or WebOS. We also can create viewers that generate HTML5 allowing us to target modern browsers on mobile devices.

4. What do you see as the next directions with respect to tablets and elearning?

I believe that Tablets are here to stay, unlike Netbooks, which seemed new, but in essence was an inexpensive laptop with many compromises; Tablets are a whole new thing. They are the ultimate device for consuming content, they are highly portable, rugged, work for a long time between charges and have almost ubiquitous connectivity … and their interface is truly intuitive. I expect that Tablets will evolve to provide more consistent capabilities, making it easier and cheaper to target multiple devices, instead of having to build for each tablet out there. I think that tablets will become the primary device that we will consume content with, and that laptops and desktops will be relegated more to content creation devices and “power-user” devices. I do not believe that tablets will replace the pc, but they will be the key device that we see people carrying and using. This will force content developers to think of tablets as the primary target, instead of it as an afterthought or add on. I also believe that the gap between tablet capabilities and laptop capabilities will become very small. The choice will be more made on the form factor and use case, not on capabilities.

5. Does OutStart incorporate simulations and serious games?

We and our platform view serious games and simulations as a logical extension of the learning experience… a natural evolution of what can be done with rich media. 15 years ago, the state of rich media was audio for eLearning, 8 yrs ago video was becoming more common place and expected, within the next 2-3 years, consumer will come to expect much more interactive and intelligent interaction with their content. The technical challenge of incorporating simulations and serious games has been met, we have several examples of solving those problems. Unfortunately, the cost for creating these rich experiences and the skills needed to create them is the largest roadblock. While many want these things, few understand the cost of building them and the cost of maintaining them. In our current economic climate, it has been very hard to justify the expense for these things for most developers.

We have some customers who are using simulations and serious games today, leveraging their investment in them throughout their curriculum.

6. What is your philosophy of growth for tablet-based and smartphone-based elearning? Which areas turned out to be dead ends? Which areas evolved in ways that you did not expect?

I think that today we are in the middle of a hype cycle … mobile, mobile, mobile … mobile is cool, mobile is hot, mobile is the future. Yes, yes, and yes … but I believe that we are focusing on the wrong things today. The key to mobile is not the technology, it isn’t the features and it isn’t the devices … to me, and I think of the importance to the learning community, mobile is really about always having a device on you, regardless of what that device is. This is the fundamental change, and this is what will make significant changes in learning and performance support. As mobile devices mature, we will not be talking about what they can do or are capable of, we will be talking about how we have changed the way we design content. If you can count that a person always has a device on them, you can design content very differently. You start to realize that what is important is understanding context and delivering the right content for a given contextual situation.

Unfortunately, today we are focused on mobile being something different. We think that creating content for iOS, RIM or Android is the important part, yet we seem to fail to realize that the technology is evolving incredibly quickly and that creating for a given device will have a very short lifespan. I think that in 2 yrs we will look back and question why we invested in building content for a specific device.

This is also the thing that I am surprised by the most … as an industry we do not seem to learn from history or previous experiences. I see us committing the same mistakes we made 12 yrs ago when we chose to focus on specific browsers. Many people spent great deals of money building content for Netscape, only to have it made obsolete 3 years later and their content unusable. I understand that this is somewhat of a natural evolution, steps we must go through to learn and move forward … but we should be studying history and learning from it. We should really question whether assuming that all content will always be consumed by a specific device (say BlackBerry) is realistic? Will RIM be here in 5 yrs? Will their platform look the same?

7. Please recommend a book that inspired you.

I’m not a big book reader, although I am a voracious reader. I have many varied interests which means my reading list is very broad. I read many blogs on a daily basis, I’ve probably been most inspired in the last year by;

Setsail.com – a boat related site, an accomplished yacht designer and his wife share their experiences, the writing and the approach is inspiring. Things are clearly explain, data is provided and conclusions are always supported.

Yankodesign.com – is very different subject matter, I’m constantly inspired by the ideas of others, the different viewpoints they bring and the concepts I never considered.

IKEAhackers.com – yet another subject matter, yet similar to the design example, truly inspiring to see how people are solving problems, cheaply and effectively.

Interview with Frederic Aknin, Sparkeo: Innovators in E-Learning Series

Welcome to an interview with Frederic Aknin, CEO of Sparkeo, a new video platform designed to enable more flexible uses of video with e-learning.

1. What is your name, your affiliation, and your history with e-learning?

My name is Frederic Aknin, I am an internet addict and a passionate continuous learner. I believe in the power of the Internet to broadcast knowledge, fertilize ideas, and bring the means to people to excel and make the most of themselves.



I know the basics in elearning. I am a user of YouTube which I used to discover extremely good content and a total TED freak.

I believe online learning is at its dawn and that it should expand. I see several very important trends:

· The need for simple video monetization to enable people to sell their premium knowledge on the Web and to enable users with a way to find the knowledge that they seek online. Currently, the highest quality end content is not online since the experts have no motivation to give it away.

· The C2C market: The world is changing so fast that the universities cannot keep up. It is already known that what students learn in college will become irrelevant when they graduate, while new platforms appear on a daily basis. The top 10 most in demand jobs today did not exist ten years ago.

There is no formal education that teaches you how to be a social media director or community manager. I believe that a great part of learning will focus less on the universities and more and more online. A college education is fundamental in building the foundation for your future, but people must know that a formal education is no longer enough: They must continue to evolve with technology or they will be left behind, and this is where Sparkeo steps in.


· Need of simplicity: This is a result of the former element. Because people are learning more and more once they are out of college through YouTube, podcasts, and online tutorials, they need elearning applications that match their current use of the Web. LMS, CMS or complex elearning infrastructures are not addressing those needs.

· Interactivity: I believe that users are craving for interactivity.

2. What are your core beliefs about visual learning?

I believe in the essence of visual learning. As being more visual myself, I have difficulties in making the most of audio podcasts and such.

The visual contact with the educator and learning material makes it easier to remember and to reproduce our natural learning path. Moreover, graphs, charts and images create clarity and emotions that ease the learning process. If this is true for visual learners, I believe it is also true for all learners since we all learning though our three senses.



I believe that all tools developed by elearning can actually enhance the learning experience, but they should respect the visual nature of the learning process.

The iPad, the Google Tablets and all the new digital slates deliver new means to extend visual learning and make it mobile. It is a new frontier and a fascinating one.

3. What are some of the problems with using video as an elearning element?


There are many hardships:

· Video is an art: Educational content might not need the highest end means in terms of recording, but it does need to be nicely edited. A small number of the people that have knowledge really know how to film themselves. Therefore, the result is mediocre videos that are difficult to watch.


· It is difficult to watch a video on a computer for more than 15 minutes. People lose their concentration and have short attention spans because the videos can be uncomfortable to view, and the Internet is a huge distraction with social networks and online games. On the other end we have the cellular phone. Although it is becoming increasingly more connected, it has a small screen that makes it difficult to watch video in the long run. But there are solutions: TV set top boxes and smart TVs that enable viewers to watch web videos and content on their computers directly on regular TV screens or the tablets that create a new space on which they can watch some content.


· Passivity: A video is a passive experience while the Internet is an interactive one. This is another reason why people connected to the web have little patience for video. How can we transform it into a more interactive one? We need to create a link with the content provider and make the whole video experience more social.


· Navigation: It is crucial that an educational video be easy to navigate. Where am I within the video? What chapter? What is he talking about? How do I bookmark the parts I really liked for later? It is all the more decisive, as an educational video is meant to be watched a few times. By definition, learning is a requirement. Therefore, navigation is key!


· Customization: Any tool that will help me appropriate the content in some means will bring high added value.

4. What is your favorite way to use video in an online course?
Screencasting can be efficient, especially in demoing a product. I like using webcams to connect with the audience, but think that an educational video, especially one that delves deep into its particular subject, needs to be taped at a good quality, not a webcam. Using webcams or unstable photography inhibits the user’s ability to learn because their focus is on the moving background. Taping a quality video will help eliminate the distraction problem I spoke of earlier.

5. What is your favorite way to use video in mobile learning?
I like Qik and online streaming video applications. I do watch the occasional educational video on my mobile phone, however only short video snacks. If it is something that would require a video that is longer than a few minutes long, I would much rather view it on a larger screen.

6. What is Sparkeo?
Sparkeo is a flexible video platform that enables experts, consultants, teachers, and passionate entrepreneurs to promote and sell their expertise through the creation of video courses all over the Web.


It specifically meets the needs of the experts by bringing two decisive innovations: A portable payment solution for the online sales of videos and an enhanced learning experience.


Through Sparkeo, users can create paid courses, free courses and soon invitation-only courses.
Sparkeo addresses a new phenomenon: The massive emergence of knowledge entrepreneurs.



There are all kinds of experts, educators, consultants, or simply knowledgeable amateurs who are Web savvy and have the entrepreneurial drive to make money teaching what they know and love over the Web. But they all had one problem: They did not have the right tools to do it.

7. What are the reasons for developing Sparkeo?
We want to empower the expert to maximize his or her online potential.

We want to give the expert an intuitive tool that is as simple as YouTube, but that has been specifically designed to meet his needs: Building a business out of his knowledge.

We cannot expect to see the best content on the Web if we do not provide the expert the means to make money of his knowledge. How can we expect the experts and educators to give their best insights when the revenue is so low, that they are better off using offline monetization opportunities through seminars, consulting, and such? That’s what we had in mind in creating Sparkeo, one simple goal: To bring a simple solution to a real problem: The lack of real financial incentives for experts.

Our product addresses both the most famous experts who are puzzled about the way they can bring their expertise on the Web in a way that makes sense financially, and the potential amateurs who have unique knowledge, but do not know from where to start. Our solution is free and works on a revenue sharing base. There is no need to invest in building a website or developing an application. It is totally embeddable all over the Web and can be embedded on your blog, website, and social networks.

8. How does Sparkeo make the learning process more effective?
There are three components that make the learning process more effective:

Interactivity
A key strategy is transforming the video from passive content to a bridge between the expert and his users.

Users can ask the experts a question directly through the video. This question is made public and everybody will be able to see it on Sparkeo.com. The answer to the question will also be emailed directly to the user.

The idea is to create a means of communication and interactivity within the player. For the user, it is a dream to communicate with the expert directly. For the expert, interactivity is a decisive selling point. He does not just sell a video, but an interactive learning experience in which he can address his customers’ needs. This tool is also a very powerful way for the expert to push the engagement of his customers to new extents and enrich his course with qualified Q&A.

For our corporate clients, it opens new frontiers in terms of customer relations and internal learning.

Enhanced Navigation
The other part of the experience that we deliver, aside from interaction, is enhanced navigation: Educational content is longer the typical 3 minute video found on most video sites, and it is designed to be learned. Most educational videos on Sparkeo are between 20 minutes to 1 hour long.

Sparkeo emphasizes the need of navigation by the introduction of chapters. Like in a DVD or book, the user can skip from one chapter to another with ease. The correct organization of the information provided ensures a better understanding of the content taught.


We also created an index which makes it even simpler to go to the relevant chapter. From the side of the expert, the creation of chapters is intuitive.

Video Personalization
As in a regular lesson, article or book, the user is given the possibility to highlight the best parts of the video and annotate them. The video becomes personalized. The user can go back to a video he already viewed and see in a glance the parts of it that were most important to him and he can view his annotations.