Summertime and What Was that About Living?
Happy Autumn! "The Living" might have been hard, but things were really hoppin' around here. I thought I should include our old news site content so we wouldn't lose it with the new Blogger format.
August 2006
Instructor Develop. Course for WCT Pilot
ISDS Principal Mark Scher was asked to participate in the National Highway Institute's pilot Instructor Development Course for WCT.
WCT, or Web Conference Training, brings learning to the desktops of employees. This increases the reach of training opportunities at a lower cost. WCT is typically characterized by brief, targeted, and task-based learning.
"This was WCT performance-based learning and a great experience. During the sessions, I participated in the real-time (synchronous) online Web conferences and explored a series of short on-demand (asynchronous). It was exciting to see some of the work I had developed on project for NHI sampled and instructed during the course. This was very valuable feedback for me as a designer," Mark explained.
The sessions culminated in teach-backs critiqued by fellow participants and senior ISDers Susan McDonald Osborn and Thomas Elliott. His teach-back was enthusiastically received, which was great validation from respected peers.
Some especially good beneficial results from the course meant registration in FHWAís online Community of Practice for WCT Facilitators. We will also partner with NHI as a WCT Facilitator as part of their initiative to build workforce capabilities in the highway transportation industry.
Met with FHWA and experts for design review meeting with John McFadden, Geometric Design & Safety Engineer, Dean Larsen, Safety Engineer, Tom Elliott, NHI ISD Project Manager
July 2006
Outside the Box Design Award
ISDS Principal Mark Scher received a surprise award from senior NHI Staff. The recognition was for his design and development work creating the eLearning course Principles and Practices for Enhanced Maintenance Management Systems. Originally an instructor-led course, the project revised and converted existing PowerPoint material to an interactive, blended learning approach.
Learners participated in subject matter expert-facilitated sessions, ebook self-guided study, and interactive activities. This course awards continuing education credit. The target audience for this course includes State and local maintenance engineers, maintenance supervisors, asset managers, and their industry counterparts. In particular, individuals who are responsible for directing and managing maintenance operations and budgets, maintenance project and treatment selection, and/or the monitoring of system conditions.
"Distance learning design for technical courses is a lot of fun. Though our typical learner in this course is in a supervisory capacity, we knew that the people would come from different regions, have varying experiences, diverse educational backgrounds, and different levels of computer skills. The age range alone runs approximately from 25 to 60 years old. All of this makes for a challenging design, and is why we like designing these programs in the first place. "The folks at Adnet and the National Highway Institute are a particularly great group for collaboration, and I really appreciate their recognition of the quality of our work," said Mark Scher.
PowerPoint eLearning Conference
I know, I know...PPT and eLearning go together like, oh, let me see, well, maybe they don't. At least I wouldn't have thought so until we redesigned and converted the huge NHI instructor-led courses. People ended up really liking them, wanting more, and this is the best part--the courses don't look like PPT slides! Turns out our ISD brother and sisters out there are doing a fair amount of development using PPT as a platform and then moving it to the Web using Breeze, Articulate, and Captivate. We participated in the ELearning Guild's Online Forums "Converting Classroom and PowerPoint Content to e-Learning." We picked up some great ideas and will be blogging more on this.
Donna's Silent Movie
Congratulations to Mudpuddle Creations, one of our favorite graphic design collaborators. They participated in Baltimore's annual 48 Hour Film Project. Given the genre of Silent Film, they storyboarded, shot, post-production edited, and created a classic silent film theme-based music score accompaniment. They completed their six minute masterpiece from start to finish in a weekend. You can view the piece as a streaming Flash video at:
www.mudpuddlecreations.com/silentmovie.html
June 2006
Fran Scher, PhD Receives MBA and ASQ
Now this is really an achievement and we are especially proud to report that Fran Scher achieved two major career milestones, and almost back-to-back. Though holding down a demanding full-time position, she completed her Masters of Business Administration from Johns Hopkins. As her capstone project, she and her group won a competition against all other Hopkins MBA teams. The competition required business research, analyses, and recommendations for increasing Sun Trust Bank's commercial industry position from fifth place to third. Their approach, presented to, and selected by, a panel of the president and other VIPs from the bank, was enthusiastically received.
As if this honor was not enough, Dr. Scher followed another path and fulfilled the requirements for an ASQ-Certified Quality Engineer. This is a significant level of recognition of professionals who have demonstrated an understanding of and commitment to quality techniques and practices in their job and career. This certification is from the American Society for Quality and allows individuals to use "ASQ CQE" on their business cards and professional correspondence. For more information visit
www.asq.org/certification/quality-engineer/.
August 2006
Instructor Develop. Course for WCT Pilot
ISDS Principal Mark Scher was asked to participate in the National Highway Institute's pilot Instructor Development Course for WCT.
WCT, or Web Conference Training, brings learning to the desktops of employees. This increases the reach of training opportunities at a lower cost. WCT is typically characterized by brief, targeted, and task-based learning.
"This was WCT performance-based learning and a great experience. During the sessions, I participated in the real-time (synchronous) online Web conferences and explored a series of short on-demand (asynchronous). It was exciting to see some of the work I had developed on project for NHI sampled and instructed during the course. This was very valuable feedback for me as a designer," Mark explained.
The sessions culminated in teach-backs critiqued by fellow participants and senior ISDers Susan McDonald Osborn and Thomas Elliott. His teach-back was enthusiastically received, which was great validation from respected peers.
Some especially good beneficial results from the course meant registration in FHWAís online Community of Practice for WCT Facilitators. We will also partner with NHI as a WCT Facilitator as part of their initiative to build workforce capabilities in the highway transportation industry.
Met with FHWA and experts for design review meeting with John McFadden, Geometric Design & Safety Engineer, Dean Larsen, Safety Engineer, Tom Elliott, NHI ISD Project Manager
July 2006
Outside the Box Design Award
ISDS Principal Mark Scher received a surprise award from senior NHI Staff. The recognition was for his design and development work creating the eLearning course Principles and Practices for Enhanced Maintenance Management Systems. Originally an instructor-led course, the project revised and converted existing PowerPoint material to an interactive, blended learning approach.
Learners participated in subject matter expert-facilitated sessions, ebook self-guided study, and interactive activities. This course awards continuing education credit. The target audience for this course includes State and local maintenance engineers, maintenance supervisors, asset managers, and their industry counterparts. In particular, individuals who are responsible for directing and managing maintenance operations and budgets, maintenance project and treatment selection, and/or the monitoring of system conditions.
"Distance learning design for technical courses is a lot of fun. Though our typical learner in this course is in a supervisory capacity, we knew that the people would come from different regions, have varying experiences, diverse educational backgrounds, and different levels of computer skills. The age range alone runs approximately from 25 to 60 years old. All of this makes for a challenging design, and is why we like designing these programs in the first place. "The folks at Adnet and the National Highway Institute are a particularly great group for collaboration, and I really appreciate their recognition of the quality of our work," said Mark Scher.
PowerPoint eLearning Conference
I know, I know...PPT and eLearning go together like, oh, let me see, well, maybe they don't. At least I wouldn't have thought so until we redesigned and converted the huge NHI instructor-led courses. People ended up really liking them, wanting more, and this is the best part--the courses don't look like PPT slides! Turns out our ISD brother and sisters out there are doing a fair amount of development using PPT as a platform and then moving it to the Web using Breeze, Articulate, and Captivate. We participated in the ELearning Guild's Online Forums "Converting Classroom and PowerPoint Content to e-Learning." We picked up some great ideas and will be blogging more on this.
Donna's Silent Movie
Congratulations to Mudpuddle Creations, one of our favorite graphic design collaborators. They participated in Baltimore's annual 48 Hour Film Project. Given the genre of Silent Film, they storyboarded, shot, post-production edited, and created a classic silent film theme-based music score accompaniment. They completed their six minute masterpiece from start to finish in a weekend. You can view the piece as a streaming Flash video at:
www.mudpuddlecreations.com/silentmovie.html
June 2006
Fran Scher, PhD Receives MBA and ASQ
Now this is really an achievement and we are especially proud to report that Fran Scher achieved two major career milestones, and almost back-to-back. Though holding down a demanding full-time position, she completed her Masters of Business Administration from Johns Hopkins. As her capstone project, she and her group won a competition against all other Hopkins MBA teams. The competition required business research, analyses, and recommendations for increasing Sun Trust Bank's commercial industry position from fifth place to third. Their approach, presented to, and selected by, a panel of the president and other VIPs from the bank, was enthusiastically received.
As if this honor was not enough, Dr. Scher followed another path and fulfilled the requirements for an ASQ-Certified Quality Engineer. This is a significant level of recognition of professionals who have demonstrated an understanding of and commitment to quality techniques and practices in their job and career. This certification is from the American Society for Quality and allows individuals to use "ASQ CQE" on their business cards and professional correspondence. For more information visit
www.asq.org/certification/quality-engineer/.
posted by Mark at 12:24 AM
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