For those of you that missed Robin Hoyle’s article about EduComs or the official launch of EduComs at TrainingZone Live – London, in May – here’s a quick recap:

EduComs are short, complete learning pieces, capable of being accessed on any platform; linked to must have information; designed to create a common vocabulary.

EduComs are designed to support practical learning that is rooted in the activity rather than in the theory. They are delivered over a minimum number of screens that can be used to reinforce information gained at a training session, or be used effectively in pre-work to a training event, or in regular day-to-day on-the-job learning.

Accessing the technology

Today Blogs are everywhere and every application in the learning industry seems to want to include one, just in case it proves useful. Recently I have been talking to more and more clients about new Web 2.0 LMS requirements and implementations and time and time again the requirement of a blog, and of course not forgetting the Blogs sidekick – the Wiki – crop up as essential must-haves.

So let’s think laterally about how we can use a simple Blogging tool to implement the EduComs concept. At its heart the Blogging tool is no more than an online text editor, capable, in most cases, of including hyperlinks to other sites or e-learning pieces. But with an off-the-shelf Blogging tool you can’t track access to links easily and you definitely couldn’t track results. So now it makes sense to integrate the Blogging tool into the LMS! But change the name! Don’t call it a Blog or people just won’t get it. Use the tool for creating articles about your new processes, add links to your EduComs, make sure they can be launched in a SCORM or similar environment and you have a solution worth looking twice at.

Earlier I mentioned Wiki’s; the same concept can be applied to them as well. Traditionally the Wiki has been used to collaboratively develop solutions to problems, and again your Intranet possibly already has one. But what if we applied lateral thinking again and suggested that a Wiki could be simplified to a mere Glossary of terms or encyclopaedia of terminology used in your organisation. I was talking to an agency recently that provides services to large multinational organisations who said one of their biggest headaches was in understanding all the acronyms used by their clients. When they had new staff to train up to work on the accounts they would go into meetings and not understand a fraction of the terms used. Simple glossaries or encyclopaedias built on the humble Wiki technology may be the answer here and again include your EduCom links, integrate with the LMS and we have yet another solution for delivery.

But wait, that’s not the end of the technology story for EduComs. There is a great little piece of technology that has been around for a few years that can search for keywords and phrases in articles and dynamically link descriptions or meanings directly to them creating hyperlinks in the text as it goes. Simple enough to implement if you know how, but the end result is very effective. You may have noticed that in the first paragraph in this article there was a hyperlink to Robin’s article about EduComs. This is just a simple example of what the resulting paragraph would look like using dynamic linking technology and this would be an ideal final step for rounding off the EduCom technology implementation. There is no need to write in your links as you create your process communication piece. Create the EduCom, tag it with the correct key words or phrases, make sure the phrase or keyword appears at least once in your communication piece and the technology will build the links automatically every time the page is loaded. Be careful not to pick a word that might be repeated too many times though as your article could become awash with hyperlinks!

So that’s our technology insight pretty much complete, we have an LMS for tracking, a Blog or Wiki for creating the communication pieces, an e-learning authoring tool for creating the EduComs and a dynamic link creation implementation to build the links on-the-fly into the resulting article.

Now for the Blue Peter moment, here’s one I built earlier…