Role of Standards in Learning: Xyleme Voices Podcast Interview
In late 2009, I was privileged to be invited by Colorado-based LMS provider Xyleme Inc. to participate in their Xyleme Voices series of podcasts.
According to the company,
Xyleme Voices features interviews with today’s top industry analysts, consultants and practitioners in the field of learning. Our experts discuss key issues affecting the evolution of training and the ramifications on the way we learn and how we perform.
Over the course of the last year or so, Xyleme Voices has included contributions from such e-learning luminaries as
- Dr. Ruth Clark
- Bryan Chapman
- Charles Jennings
- Allison Rosset
- Clive Shepherd
- Ellen Wagner
- Frank Nguyen
- Harold Jarche
- Jay Cross
- Clark Quinn
- Janet Clarey
- Lars Hyland
- Bob Mosher & Conrad Gottfredson
- Elliott Masie
In my podcast, I discussed e-learning standards and specifications, a topic I recently addressed here on the E-Learning Curve Blog in a post called Concerning Open Source, LMSs and SCORM: Correcting Some Common Misconceptions. In the interview, I was able to elaborate on my central point about the importance of understanding the distinction between de facto and accredited standards and assert that conforming to ISO and equivalent certifications (such as IEEE) reflects the professionalism of learning companies. I also talked about the impact of innovation waves and disruptive technologies in the e-learning domain, gave some pointers about newer specifications like IMS Common Cartridge, and finally I discussed the kinds of questions LMS purchasers (including myself) in the RFI/RFQ process need to prepare and ask to their LMS vendors.
What you may also find of interest was the approach we took to recording the interview. Rather than recording the interview synchronously down a phone line (as I’m based in Dublin, Ireland and my interviewer was in Boulder, Colorado), or using a communications and collaboration platform like Adobe Connect or Citrix GoToMeeting, Dawn, her colleague Despoina Charami and I decided to try was to record the interview asynchronously.
Using this approach, the folks in Xyleme prepared and sent me the questions to be answered, I recorded and post-produced my answers in Audacity, and FTPed a zip archive of the completed WAV files to Xyleme. Once the answers were approved by Xyleme, Dawn recorded her contributions, before they were post-produced. Next, the two asynchronously captured audio components were integrated into one seamless stream of sound . Finally, the interview was converted to MP3 and published for public consumption (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: Asynchronous interview lifecycle
Hopefully I’ve whetted your appetite enough for you to want to listen to the presentation. Click here to navigate to the Xyleme Voices website, or click here to access the presentation on iTunes.
Once you’ve heard the presentation, I’d love to hear what you thought about it: you can respond by clicking on the Comments link below.
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January 05 2010 03:30 pm | e-learning
4 Responses to “Role of Standards in Learning: Xyleme Voices Podcast Interview”
virginia Yonkers on 05 Jan 2010 at 9:30 pm #
Michael, the podcast definitely was professional and covered all aspects of standards needed for elearning development. However, I personally found it a bit stilted. I asked my daughter, who has been producing podcasts for school, what she thought of it. She said that it was similar to what they learn makes a good podcast, polished and prepared.
However, I like the spontaneity of an interview. I wondered also if there were follow up questions edited in after your initial answers were submitted? Were you asked to expand on topics?
virginia Yonkers on 05 Jan 2010 at 9:31 pm #
I forgot to say that my daughter, even though she didn’t understand what you were talking about, did think the podcast was good.
Dawn Poulos on 10 Jan 2010 at 2:21 pm #
Michael,
Thanks for the background on our podcasting approach. Very clear and valuable. I like your description and the diagram.
Virginia,
Thank you for taking the time to provide feedback. As Michael wrote, our podcasts can be produced either synchronously where an interview conversation is recorded with all the participants present (either in person, via phone, or via a web conferencing call), which in general produces a more conversational session indeed, or asynchronously where each participant records his or her own part and the whole session is assembled afterward. There are obvious pros and cons in each approach. Some of our participants are choosing the second approach due to scheduling conflicts, different time zones, and different geographies. Overall, we have to be very flexible with what our participants prefer as we aim to make the podcasting production as convenient for them as possible (so, in general we don’t ask our participants to re-record and we don’t follow up with more questions, unless there is a very important reason; if we believe the topic needs further attention, we usually plan to record another new podcast). The reason being that almost all our participants are very well sought-after industry leaders that run very tight schedules and we respect that.
There are also some factors important for the quality of the final podcast that are common to both approaches. Those factors involve planning aspects (e.g. finding the right participants for our audience and our program goals, coming up with topics of interest, promoting and encouraging sharing of the podcasts, facilitating interactions between presenters and the audience, etc.), personal aspects (e.g. whether the participants are good presenters or not, whether they have been adequately prepared for the session or not, whether the questions are helpful to offer insights and value to the audience, etc.) and technical items (e.g. quality of recording device, quality of phone line or VoIp session, ability to filter out noise during editing etc.)
Hope that provides a bit more information on the internals of Xyleme Voices.
Michael Hanley on 11 Jan 2010 at 12:19 pm #
Virginia & Dawn – thanks for your detailed and thoughtful comments on this post.
Virginia – you’ve got a point about my narrative being “stilted” – however, in my defense, I would say that the subject matter (learning standards and specifications) is very technical, and quite hard to deliver in a conversational manner; in my view, it’s one of those subjects that is best approached using a multimedia methodology. Give the sophistication of the content, I found that just had to script my answers; I don’t know how coherence my responses would have been is I started talking about the material in an ad hoc manner – it certainly would not have been very fluid. As such, I made a concerted effort to break the phrasing and sentences into meaningful and comprehensible “audio objects” which led to the stiff – but hopefully highly understandable – delivery.
It’s a compromise, and compromises don’t always make the most electrifying content, but I felt that the key here was to be understood by the audience, and to elicit the answers as clearly as possible, especially as the role of standards is not inherently “sexy,” yet is vital to effective e-learning delivery and management.
I’ll be discussing non- and informal learning in a podcast in the near future, which is a much livelier subject from a sonic perspective, and one that is easier to discuss in a colloquial manner. The difference in the qualia between the two should highlight what I mean.
Dawn – thanks for sharing your insights and experiences into the many factors that can influence a podcast. Personally, I think that your team do a great job compiling consistently high-quality presenters and material.
Michael
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