ellegro Learning Solutions invites you to try out our new iPad app called Legato. It’s free and available in Apple's App Store. Click Here to download.

The Concept

Conceptually, Legato evolved from our desire to speak into the training and performance improvement space regarding mobile learning. Our opinion is that mobile technologies are best suited for performance improvement, learning augmentation and recreational learning (a topic for future blog) rather than simply converting instructor led training or eLearning for mobile consumption.

In addition, our team of learning professionals wants to partner with the learning and performance improvement community to contribute to greater effectiveness within training and performance improvement. In other words, we want to be part of the solution. For years, and even more so now that it is so easy to distribute one’s opinion, we have watched people talk about the ineffectiveness of the overall training and learning community. Of course, it is generally someone else that is at fault and rarely includes practical solutions. Legato is our first step at changing this trend.

Legato is meant to be helpful for all training and performance improvement professionals. This would include individual consultants, internal contractors, instructional designers, small, medium and large training firms, etc.

The Tool

Practically, we have started with modules around delivery and project risk. Our goal is to create additional modules to support the entire development process from the performance improvement/training decision to analysis to design to development to implementation to evaluation.

We have designed Legato to be more than a notepad. There are plenty of apps out there that provide information and allow you to capture your notes. Legato is built to take advantage of the computing power of the iPad. At any point in the information collection process, whether in the delivery or risk module, you can access a recommendation based on the data that has been provided. You can also email that data.

Your Feedback

Finally, while Legato began with the team at ellegro Learning Solutions, we want to extend the knowledge within the app to include the wisdom and experience of the entire learning community. This is why we've made the Legato app available on the app store for free. We look forward to working with others in the learning field to determine whether not we have the best questions, best recommendations and best user experience.

Our goal is to help the learning community make a difference through the use of mobile technology rather than just talking about mobile technology.

Please download the app and let us know what you think.

I'm headed over with Rob Stevens and Gary Bersh to the ASTD TechKnowledge conference in San Jose, and this year, we're talking about how a BYOD strategy can assist your mobile efforts.  Saving the details of a full blown technology and solution strategy for some other time, I want to make a quick note about a keyword that we (@ellegro) have become accustomed to using - experience. 

By experience, I mean consumption. In other words, the inclination or willingness of a learner to engage with a mobile solution in relation to the efforts I may have put into creating it (simple unit economics, if I may abstract).

Now, if we were to frame a strategy around creating a high-quality experience for a multitude of devices (Android/iOS tablets and smart phones, Laptops, etc.), where would we start? Some may argue that HTML5 is the *best* solution, or responsive web is a great place to start. I partially agree, but in my opinion, the technology is not to biggest of your issues. BYOD could mean that your solution will have to solve, support and scale on multiple devices/factors (can you imagine the lifecycle implications?), while balancing the worthy-experience act.

So, the idea is to separate your incentives for the learner from the mechanics of your product. Think about the experience as the incentive, while the data and content as the mechanics. If you centralize your data and content, you are making your solution highly scalable from a content and data perspective. The incentive for the learner, i.e. the individual experiences, can now be crafted along distinct directions guided by learner segments (e.g. videos on Androids, more elaborate designs on iPads, etc.). This way, you have split the development pie so that you can spend more time thinking/designing good experiences (HTML5, Responsive Web are then your tools). Experiences that drive higher learner engagement, without blowing up your data and content costs and complications.

I'm thinking that on this WiFi-enabled flight, I've used my iPad to read email, but responded to a few from my MacBook. My experience with the ever so simplistic "app", the email inbox, has been different on each device. But, neither has deterred me from consuming email. That's a subtle hint at experience, isn't it?

We, @ellegro, engage with experience design a lot. Design thinking itself is a different conversation, and a deeper dive as another Ellegro anchor. But, I'll save that for the future.

Thanks for reading!

PS: If you happen to be in San Jose for the conference, swing by our booth (#201) for more BYOD talk. Of course, you are more than welcome to comment, email me or tweet (@nswami) to keep the learning discussions going.

There has been a lot of interest and much chatter for the last few years about “social learning.”  These discussions focus on the use of social media technology in the learning process as something new and potentially significant.  Implied in all the buzz about social learning is the premise that somehow all of this is something new.

Is social learning really new?  Hardly!  I would argue that learning has always had a social dimension.  In fact some of our earliest and most familiar examples of the learning process are found in social settings such as families, schools, teams, and offices.  The whole teacher/student paradigm rests on social interaction between at least two people and often more than two.  Coaches teach in social settings and apprentices and interns learn in a social environment.

So if learning has long been a social activity, why is there so much interest now in something called “social learning?”  The reason seems to be that in a brief period of time, perhaps 20 years, technology rose to prominence as a central part of the learning process.  After thousands of years of social learning we suddenly found ourselves talking a lot about computer-based training, online learning, web-based training and eLearning.  In this new paradigm learners interacted with subject matter through a machine in asynchronous and individual experiences.

This type of learning technology became a very significant part of the learning landscape long before the world became the interconnected, mobile, always-on place it is today.  Computer-assisted instruction first took hold in a technology ecosystem in which there was no Facebook, no twitter, no blogs, and no smartphones.  The technology for delivering instruction first ran on mainframes, then individual computers that were not networked together, and then on networked computers that were still not inter-connected with others beyond a very finite small group.  So technology-based training had an anti-social upbringing because learners experienced the content individually each person on a separate island.

If we fast forward to today we find a very different technology environment.  Learners now take for granted that they have internet connectivity at almost all times in almost all places.  We talk about web-based training and online learning.  Even the term computer-based training has become an archaic throwback to the distant past of the 1980’s.

Learners today come to the table already enrolled and embedded in social networks of their own choosing that many use every single day to communicate frequently and share their experiences with others.  It is this combination of what is possible because of today’s technology, and what is expected because of what leaners today are used to doing that makes the concept of social learning buzz worthy again.

So we have come full circle when it comes to learning being a social experience.  The momentary isolation associated with early forms of technology based instruction has been overcome.  Learning can now revert back to being a social experience and can become even more social because the learner of today has access to a much broader social circle than ever before through social media through always-present, always-on, always-connected technology.

So the buzz is all around about this “new” concept of social learning even though it is in so many ways a retro concept.  Perhaps everything old is new again.  We seem to have come full circle when it comes to social circles.