Come learn about ATutor, Blackboard and other learning management systems during a panel discussion at the Boston chapter of the American Society for Training & Development. The meeting is Jan. 18, 2011, from 6 p.m. – 9 p.m. in Newton, MA.

Here’s the overview from the ASTD:

The first part [of the meeting] is Tech Talk, featuring Shawn Stiles, providing an overview of Lectora. In this presentation, Shawn will discuss Lectora, a popular development tool. His presentation will be an overview of the product including costs, competitors, why he likes this product as well as some pros and cons. He’ll also cover a brief how-to demonstration and end by showing the final product, live and on-line.

The second part of the evening will be an interactive panel discussion with several LMS expert, sharing and comparing their insights on specific LMS tools. LMS experts will be covering discussions on products from Learn.com (Shannon Courtney), Blackboard (David Rosenbaum), ATutor (Monique Cuvelier) as well as others.

Location: Rebecca’s Cafe 275 Grove Street, Auburndale, MA 02459, 617-969-3382. For those who have not been to this Rebecca’s location, it is very easy to miss as you will not see a sign for Rebecca’s from the street. 275 Grove St. is the Riverside Office Park, right next to the Riverside MBTA train and bus stop. Rebecca’s is located at the back of the building, by the parking garage.

See you there!

Overhauling the way Massachusetts’ medical practices deal with patients is no simple task. Not when you’re considering coordinating all of a patient’s health needs, including managing chronic conditions, handling visits to specialists, dealing with hospital admissions and reminding patients when they need check-ups and tests. Add to it archaic systems that involve stacks of paper medical records and rows of filing cabinets in doctors’ offices.

Many doctors deal with patients’ various medical issues by writing a referral and then maybe hearing about what happened at yearly check-up time.

The Massachusetts’ Executive Office of Health and Human Services hopes to fundamentally change the way medical practices work with the Patient-Centered Medical Home Initiative. The 3-year demonstration project is part online and part in-person. Participants, which include 46 primary care medical practices, receive live coaching from facilitators, help establishing and maintaining patient registries and extensive training through a learning collaborative, managed by e-learning technical provider Talance, Inc. (http://talance.com/elearning).

The program involves all types of doctors in every corner of the state, including large, urban community health centers and small, rural group practices. Even in a state as small as Massachusetts, where it’s possible to drive from one end to the other – the long way – in a few hours, it’s still a challenge to train a broad range of practices at the same time. That’s why it’s vital for the project to incorporate online learning as a way to help manage the project.

In many cases, e-learning is the only way to effectively push health care management shifts. It’s an industry that naturally drifts toward in-person connection, where doctors talk to people face-to-face in examination rooms. When it comes to reforming office administration on such a large scale, that model won’t work. It’s the reason that 37 percent of training hours involved electronic technology in 2009, according to Alexandria, Va.-based American Society for Training and Development.

E-learning may be key in conforming to the Obama administration’s Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH), which passed in 2009. Providers will have to adopt health information technology (HIT) starting in 2011, a requirement that includes more than $36 billion in incentive payments to reward providers whose electronic medical records (EMRS) meet the government’s test of “meaningful use”.

The end result is overall cost savings.

“At the heart of our effort to ensure access to care is a commitment to strengthening primary care and reforming how we pay for that care,” said Secretary of Health and Human Services Dr. JudyAnn Bigby. “This new initiative is one of the key building blocks in our strategic work to make all primary care practices in Massachusetts transformed into advanced patient-centered medical homes by 2015.”

The Patient-Centered Medical Home Initiative (PCMHI) was designed by the Executive Office of Health and Human Services in consultation with a multi-payer, multi-stakeholder council of consumer, physician, nurse practitioner, hospital, insurer, state agency and other interested stakeholder representatives. The Council is co-chaired by Secretary Bigby and Dr. John Fallon, Senior Vice President and Chief Physician Executive at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts.

We’re covering the most important elements of taming your website copy in Keep, Cut or Kill: Writing for the Web webinar on September 2. We’ll reveal how to plan for a copy overhaul, how to be merciless with what you do have, and how to optimize what’s left. You’ll get practical techniques to purge and polish.

The 30-minute presentation is lead by our CEO Monique Cuvelier, who spent 20 years as a journalist and web editor. Here are a few ideas from the talk as a preview:

Know your audience first.

You need to be able to put yourself into your readers’ shoes before you know how to speak to them. Teens will respond to different language than Baby Boomers will.

Be merciless.

Website copy has a tendency to grow and expand, especially over time. Every once in a while, review your copy and be totally honest with yourself. Do you need it?

Clean up.

When you’ve cleared the website clutter and you’re left with the content that really should be there, make sure it reads well. Optimize for web reading, and people will respond better.

>> Sign up for the live event

September 2
2 p.m. Eastern
Online

You may have piles of experience presenting to live groups but are fuzzy on how to make the transition online. Particularly confusing is the difference between an online course and a webinar. While both formats let you present information to people from afar, they’re not the same, nor are they mutually exclusive.

If you’re considering opening up your training to include an online element, this matrix might help you find the best tool for the job.

Any veteran teacher will tell you that planning is the key to a successful course. Not all e-learning courses are taught by veteran teachers, however. Even if you don’t have years in the classroom, you can still follow some basic guidelines to develop a course that helps your learners get what they need. Here are five essential elements that benefit most online courses.

Technical Backgrounder

Some of your learners may be pros at navigating an online environment, but many won’t be. Even if they’re addicted to their iPad, they still may need help understanding your online learning environment. We build and host courses in ATutor, which is extremely intuitive, but we still provide a set of instructions that explains how everything works. Do this for any of your online courses, and make sure you cover any other kinds of technical requirements, such as a need for third-party software like Adobe Acrobat.

Syllabus or Overview

Set expectations early, and everyone will be more satisfied with the outcome. Tell your learners what you’ll be covering in the course, broken down by chapter or module. Include objectives and lend a preview into upcoming assignments or what you’re expecting from participants.

Chapters

This is the filling in your online learning sandwich. Be organized when you structure what your learners are to be learning. Some people call these modules.

Course Wrap-Up

When the course is over, summarize the key information covered. I think it’s effective to add a few bullet points that tell learners what steps they can take next to put what they learned into effect.

Final Survey

Always ask for feedback. What your learners say about the course will prove invaluable when you offer your course the next time. Also ask your instructors to provide an evaluation. This will help you make educated revisions from a different viewpoint.

This is a guest post from one of our favorite clients: Jenny Aisenberg, Knowledge Development Manager at JESNA and JESNA PDC, an organization that provides Jewish educational coordinating, planning and development. We asked Jenny what blogs she turns to regularly for help running her job at a Jewish education non-profit.

In my role as Knowledge Development Manager at JESNA, one of my key responsibilities is to keep my finger on the pulse of the Jewish world in social media. If there’s a resource on the web for Jewish educational and lay leaders, I wanna know about it—and share it with you! Every week, I update our Sosland Online Resource Center with the newest in blogs, tools, websites and more for the benefit of Jewish communities near and far. These top five picks are just the tip of the iceberg! I hope you’ll enjoy exploring them, and email me your ideas for other resources we should know about at jaisenberg@jesna.org.

1. Innovation in Jewish Education Blog

This is the blog of the Office of High School Programs at Brandeis University, drawing on BIMA and Genesis, their two summer programs for high school students, as living laboratories. I love seeing the thoughts and reflections of a whole panoply of educators who work with teens here, on topics ranging from “Self-perception and Participant Investment in the Intentional Community” to “Jewish Education and Family Priorities.” Plus, who wouldn’t love these tags?

2. The Alban Roundtable

A self-proclaimed “virtual meeting place for congregational leaders,” the Alban Roundtable blog is the social media hub of The Alban Institute, founded in 1974 as a major resource for American congregations facing the challenges of a changing society. As a leader in my own congregation in Park Slope, Brooklyn (I’m the chair of the 20’s/30’s social group and a former Hebrew School teacher) I have a deep appreciation for this kind of resource, where I can learn from others who face similar challenges, yet aren’t part of my daily grind.

3. Jew Point 0: The Darim Online Blog

Darim Online is the home of “Internet Strategies for Jewish Organizations and their Communities,” and their blog, run by our good friend Caren Levine, first launched in August 2008 as a place for Darim staff to share useful nuggets that arise from both their work and personal lives. This is a particularly succulent knowledge-sharing resource for anyone looking for guidance in the use of technology and social media in Jewish settings.

4. Jewcy

Most progressive young Jews under 30 know about this emergent online media outlet/blog/social network/brand by now, but it’s too, well, juicy to leave off my list! First launched in 2006, Jewcy is a forum for discussion of politics, culture, sex, religion and lifestyle in the Jewish world today. It has been called “the social media hub of the Jewish hipster movement” by The New York Times. Gee, and I thought I had a lock on that title…

5. Storahtelling Blog

This one is near and dear to my heart, and a wonderful resource for Jewish educators and community leaders interested in bringing new vibrancy to Jewish ritual and synagogue life. Storahtelling fuses storytelling, Torah, contemporary performance art and traditional ritual, both here in Manhattan and at synagogues around the globe. On their blog, you’ll find everything from the weekly drash, Storah-style, to tales from the road as they visit and perform at synagogues near and far. If you’re up for a trip to Boston, check out their summer educators’ training, StorahLAB.

I adore my Sony e-book reader, and it’s perfect for novels. But one of its big drawbacks is its size, which makes it difficult for reading technical books or any document that benefits from a large format. That’s why I was happy to see the Plastic Logic reader in production.

What the Plastic Logic reader does:

From ebooks to newspapers, magazines and blogs, the Plastic Logic reader is designed to support a range of open document formats. These include such standard and widely available formats as PDF, ePub and Microsoft Office document types.

I can’t wait until it’s ready for prime time. Meanwhile, watch the preview:

[The following is reprinted from the technology issue of Torah at the Center, and educational publication from Union for Reform Judaism. Read the whole technology issue by clicking here.]

By Monique Cuvelier, Usability Consultant and CEO, Talance.com, Burlington, MA

The last thing you want a student to do in an online course is to think. That sounds wildly counterintuitive, considering most instructors want students to have thinking caps strapped tightly on and cranked to maximum when they sit down to learn. However, if students are thinking too hard about what to do with online course software, they’re not going to be engaged in the course materials – and that’s the reason you want them there in the first place.

The benefits of e-learning programs are clear. They’re convenient, bring students together who live in different places and can be adapted to address the various needs of students. But many organizations focus too closely on the benefits and not enough on usability, the ease in which students can navigate a course and accomplish learning goals.

The trouble is that creating good usability should look natural and easy, but it’s incredibly hard. What seems the natural way to work in an online arena is not natural; it takes planning and design. In the six years that I’ve been making online learning environments more intuitive for students and teachers at my company Talance.com, I’ve seen students drop out of courses, give up on their favorite topics and turn their ire to their hapless instructors all because they were confused and frustrated by the technology.

Below are a few rules you can think about when evaluating online courseware or creating a simple online learning environment from scratch.

Familiar Workflows

Students should move naturally from one task to the next. Tasks should guide the students to the right information at the right time. For instance, you may want the student to work through the course this way: log in, read any pertinent announcements, review reading material, discuss a project in the bulletin boards, submit a writing assignment. In this case, make sure the announcement appears on the course homepage and that instructions for the writing assignment are at the end of the reading material. Include enough shortcuts that students can navigate easily from one task to the next.

Free-Flowing Communication

Students should have open channels of communication with you (the teacher) and other learners, whether the course is synchronous or asynchronous. Add options for navigation. Icons on the homepage that take you to different sections of the course are OK – as long as you’re on the homepage. Use tabs at the top of the screen to create quick access to frequently used sections of the course, because they can be seen from any page. Course participants should find it easy to send course e-mail, and they should know at a glance if they have new messages. They should know where to find help, through an FAQ or an e-mail form where they can submit technical support issues.

Flexible Enough to Foster Creativity

Multiple-choice questions may be fine in some circumstances but are too rigid on their own to address all learning styles and encourage creativity in an online course. Present several ways for students to learn and interact, such as real-time chat rooms with whiteboards, and essay-type questions in tests. Allow students to upload Microsoft Word documents, which let them work in their familiar computer environments rather than typing responses into text forms.

Hebrew-Language Support

Think about how your software handles Hebrew, if you require it for your class. Support for Hebrew is often not included in the first release of software packages. Can you render characters in Unicode or graphically? Discussion boards in particular may have difficulty rendering Hebrew characters, especially along with English. Can you allow students to attach Word documents that are formatted for Hebrew?

Just the Essentials

One hazard of working with an online course is there is no page limit. Avoid information glut by presenting students with just the information they need. Create places for secondary information elsewhere in the course for those who want to learn more.

Following these principles is only the first step to creating a more usable online course. Make better usability an ongoing effort by constantly noting problems students have, asking for feedback and making adjustments. Eventually, you’ll find the more you think about how students learn in an online environment, the less your students will have to.

I’m always looking for ways to demonstrate how technology is relevant for our clients. So when I happened across this detailed explanation of how Rabbi D. Nimchinsky brought along his digital camera to snag some videos and upload them to YouTube during an 8th grade field trip to Washington DC, I was delighted.

The good rabbi says:

The results were very gratifying. Each day we received numerous emails from parents, teachers and other students commenting on the trip, the video bloggers, and the students in general. It built up a good deal of enthusiasm and excitement about the trip which the kids were thrilled about when they called their parents or friends in the school.

Look at this detailed how-to on the AVI CHAI Educational Technology blog.

A pen, you may say, is by default wireless. That’s why it’s called a pen and not a keyboard. But the Mobile Digital Scribe GPEN200N from Iogear looks like a pen but is effectively a portable computer.

This device captures 50 pages of your handwriting or drawings – using normal ink – and it transfers them to your computer as a digital document. You can sign checks with this thing, but it has enough digital juice to grab a whole day’s worth of meeting notes. When you’re done jotting, upload to any computer you want – without need of a digital notepad or special paper. The handwriting recognition software (OCR software) converts your notes into digital text.

This has a real benefit for anyone giving a presentation, because you can connect the pen to a digital projector to show your writing in near real time. Forget overhead projectors.

Pretty cheap too. You can buy it for $129 from the manufacturer or pick it up for less than $100 online.