The Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin has been supporting youth health education programs through their Children’s Health Education Center (CHEC) for the past twelve years.  In 2004 the Center started the www.bluekids.org program to focus their efforts on reaching youth, educators, and parents via the Internet. Over 12,000 students participated in CHEC’s teacher-facilitated game-based learning curriculum last semester alone.  When tasked with quantifying the impact of interactive web-based programs on youth behavior and attitudes, CHEC and researchers at the Children’s Hospital have come up with very positive preliminary results.

Ellen Behrens calls her new self-published book aLearning: A Trail Guide for Association eLearning.  If you are an association education director or you are tasked with re-igniting eLearning as a non-dues revenue source for your non-profit, then this book will serve as a handy reference guide.  In the following eight minute interview, I caught up with the retired association education director turned author while she as RVing on the West Coast.  Ellen highlights the importance of taking a good look at using the Internet to replace the loss of revenue from declining face-to-face workshop sales.  What peaked my interest was her insistence that the book is a necessity for an association hiring a professional vendor to develop a new eLearning initiative.

Individuals with careers in eLearning often started out as educational technologists or programmers, writers or creative educators. Few of us started this career path with expertise in business, management, not to mention sales. Most of us just don’t get it when it comes to selling products and services—the schools of education or computer science certainly didn’t focus on instilling business acumen or sales expertise. Yet in the real world, most of us (in both non-profit groups and private sector teams) will have to pitch to prospects and prepare a proposal for a potential project.

In the following six minute interview with eLearning consultant and social media expert Jeff Cobb, we discuss the ASAE Professional Development Council and Jeff’s thoughts on the recent ASAE conference in Toronto.

I was particularly interested in his ideas on the intersection of eLearning and social media with respect to associations. Jeff shares his thoughts on the “owners” of social media efforts in associations and reasons education directors should consider including it as part of their online education efforts.

Here is Part II in my series of interviews with Clark Aldrich on his upcoming book The Complete Guide to Simulations and Serious Games. The book will ship sometime in October, and Clark sent me an advance copy. This book has the potential to become an instrumental resource for sponsors and managers of educational simulation and serious game development. It intrigues me because Clark Aldrich addresses those very issues that concern those of us who manage or fund educational games and simulations:

I am planning to conduct a series of interviews with Clark Aldrich about his upcoming book (available for pre-order) called The Complete Guide to Simulations and Serious Games: How the Most Valuable Content Will Be Created in the Age Beyond Gutenberg to Google. This first interview explores a few general questions on the topics covered by the book, including why simulations and serious games do a better job of teaching the important “big skills like leadership, negotiation, stewardship and middle skills like directing people, probing and procurement” (borrowing from Jeff Sandefer’s forward to the book).

If I had to pick one eLearning must-read, it would be Bill Horton’s eLearning by Design. I first reviewed the book when it hit the market in 2007. In my interview with Bill Horton today, he stands by most of what he wrote three years ago. I was skeptical initially—Bill and his partner Kit had simply dropped out of the eLearning community and taken a sabbatical over a year ago. After being a prolific workshop instructor and keynote speaker, Bill was nowhere to be seen. I was shocked that “the book” was not even for sale in the eLearning Guild’s Annual Gathering’s bookstore this year. Yet colleagues kept asking, “Where are the Hortons?”

As an eLearning provider, we are hearing a lot of chatter from prospects looking to transition to online education. No doubt the anticipated 20% - 40% decline in face-to-face workshop education is causing alarm in the conference marketplace.  However, I believe that eLearning managers should attend at least one industry conference a year. The choices of eLearning and distance learning conferences are plentiful— see the list below of the ones I keep on my own radar screen.

Web Courseworks’ game developer, Joe Rheaume, and I recently interviewed author Clark Aldrich about his impressions of the Acton MBA School’s use of simulation games to teach business concepts. For complete disclosure purposes, my company Web Courseworks is one of the vendors for the Acton Foundation, and Clark Aldrich has provided consulting services for Acton in the past. What intrigues me about Acton is the intersection of two of my favorite subjects: Entrepreneurs and game-based learning.

In this video we talk briefly about Clark’s new book, The Complete Guide to Simulations and Serious Games, and Clark shows us the aspects he likes about Acton’s game “Robo Rush: Can you make a profit and meet customer demands?”

Guy Kawasaki’s continuous tweets have drilled the Alltop aggregate sites into my psyche, and there it was—a site for eLearning! To apply to be accepted, it required a blog name. After six months of blogging, I finally decided to name this blog: “Managing eLearning.” I will occasionally get into the weeds about eLearning tactical issues, like voicing an opinion on instructional design, but most of the time my blog posts will focus on: