Challenge to Learn

2012 in retrospective: top 10 posts

January 2, 2013 By Kasper Spiro Leave a Comment

It is the time of the year to look back and to make plans for the new year. In this post I will have a look at 2012 based on the top 10 post of this blog. The top 10 is:

There are three post in this list (on 1, 4 and 10) about a new metaphor for eLearning. A generic one, one on learning maps and one on cased based learning. I do believe that this is a topic that will be big in 2013 as well. We need to find more effective ways to present our learning content to our learners and that means we have to move away from the current ‘book’ and ‘slide show’ metaphors.

50 educational thinkers. A real great series of posts by Donald Clark. I learned a lot, not only by his selection of thinkers but also by his great summaries of their central thoughts.

The launch of our free edition was big for easygenerator (number 3). A new step in easygenerators endeavor to change e-Learning. We are now live with the free edition for two months and are now approaching the 1500 users mark in over 80 countries. That is something that exceeded expectations. Will be interesting to see what will happen in 2013.

Agile e-Learning development. I’m happy that this post is in the top 10. I think the waterfall model and ADDIE have to many limitations. I believe a better way is the agile approach that comes from software development. An other interesting development here is Michael Allens SAM, an agile methodology for eLearning development. On his corporate blog is an interview with him on SAM. We need to move away from ADDIE and SAM might be the way.

My post from the mobile eLearning conference on trends also made the top 10. Well mobile (both smart phones and tablets) is a game changing trend by itself and that day at MLearncon was a very educational day for me. Also the first post where I used my mind map notes. In 2013 there will be a lot more on mobile and on mind maps.

How to keep formal learning relevant. Our world is changing and we have to change too to keep relevant. This is a trend that will be even bigger in 2013, TinCan wil come and will really be a game changer: I can’t wait. Both subjects are in the top 10.

The post on Blackboard is a representative of another trend: consolidation. We will see match more take overs in 2013, Not always for the best, but it will happen more and more, it is a sign that our industry is growing up.

I’m happy to see that this blog is growing (almost 250% up in comparison to 2011) although that is not my goal. My blog remains mainly a place for me to put done notes and thoughts, but it is nice that people appreciate this. I wish you all the best for 2013 it will be an exiting year for everybody in the e-Learning community and I will keep writing about it.

Filed Under: e-Learning Tagged With: 2012 in retrospective, e-Learning, elearning, top10

Free eLearning authoring with easygenerator, already over a 1000 users!

December 5, 2012 By Kasper Spiro Leave a Comment

Reblogged from easygenerator.com:

We launched the free edition of our on-line eLearning authoring tool November 1st at DevLearn. This week we registered user number 1.000. This post is to celebrate that first milestone. This post also contains information on extra functionality we will make available to the users of the free edition in the coming period and some facts and figures about those users.

We had a lot of contact with the users of the free edition. We have a community in Yammer and we have at least two webinars per week to get them started. Based on the feed back we received we decided on some future changes for the free edition. The highlights are:

Branding
The free edition has a fixed look and feel, which is branded in the easygenerator style. We will change this and create a look and feel which is more neutral. In easygenerator you can set the look and feel by applying master pages. In collaboration with our partners we will offer a series of master pages. There will be a number of master pages with a fixed unbranded look and feel, we will have master pages where you can do limited branding (your own logo and background image) and we will offer the ability to use customized master pages. These options will probably be available in January or February and can be purchased for a one time fee.

Question types
The current free edition has three question types. We are currently rebuilding all question types from flash into HTML. In the first half year of 2013 these HTML based question types will become available and will be a part of the free edition.

Extra space
In the free edition you are allowed to create 10 courses and your repository is limited to a maximum of 250MB. Next year we will offer upgrade programs that allow you to create more courses and have a larger repository.

User base
I also want to share some information on the user base. At this moment we have 1077 users, spread over 6 continents and 71 countries. 51% is from the United States, followed by The Netherlands, United Kingdom, Australia and Canada.

Continent Graph

Markets
As far as we know about 45% of all users are from corporations and 20% has an educational background. About 10% of all users works for an eLearning company. The rest is from governmental organizations, Non Profits, Student or Unknown to us.

We are very exited about the interest in this edition. When we launched it we really didn’t know what to expect in terms of numbers and types of users. The response has exceeded our expectations and we are curious where this will take us next year. In case you are interested you can register and activate within minutes. Just click here to go to the form.

Filed Under: e-Learning, e-Learning authoring tool, EasyGenerator, eLearning, free edition

Returning to the didactical roots: innovation in eLearning?

November 22, 2012 By Kasper Spiro 3 Comments

Earlier this month I presented at DevLearn on connecting learning to the business and this week I did a webinar and a seminar on adaptive learning. During these sessions I noticed that our basic approach (Determine learning objectives, Figure out how to assess and then create only the content that is really needed) is far from standard. Most people create content, create an assessment and that is it. But the funny thing is that this ‘old school’ approach is the foundation of innovation at easygenerator.

Originally I’m a teacher in social studies and economics. They taught me that for every lesson you want to create you need to figure out your goal first and that you need to find a way to asses if that goal is reached in the end. Only then you could start creating your lessons. I did apply this approach through my working live: with teaching, with writing books (on bookkeeping – how boring can you get?-), when I create eLearning and even when I manage a company. I know it is not common practice, but I still believe that this is the way to go.

Old school didactics
Let’s first take a look at this old school approach.

As said you start out with your learning objectives. Creating sound and useful objectives is an art in its own right. I will not go in too much detail here but I’m a fan of the action mapping approach from Cathy Moore. The essence of this approach is that learning is not about obtaining knowledge but to (learn) to be able to perform a task. Cathy doesn’t link this to learning objectives, but if you do, they should state what the learner needs to be able to do.

The second step in the development process is the assessment: how do you prove that the learner is able to do the task? You can do this by asking questions, presenting cases, really anything that will measure the performance and comes up with a score. By the way thanks to our new emerging standard (‘Tincan API’ aka ‘the experience API’) we will be able to measure this in real live and use the outcome in an eLearning course). When you create good cases (or scenario’s) this assessment will be the learning experience by itself.

And only then you start creating the content. But in the spirit of Cathy Moore only the content that is really, really needed to (learn to) do the task. When in doubt leave it away, ‘less is better’ and much cheaper!

Innovation
We have applied this principle in the authoring platform of easygenerator and it has become the foundation underneath the innovations we have created and will create in the future. I will explain.

In easygenerator we created a dashboard to create and manage your learning objectives. You can’t create a course without a learning objective (if there no goal there is no point in creating a course after all) in easygenerator.

After creating the course you need to set how to measure the progress in the course. You do that by connecting the Learning objectives to questions and cases. In fact you are determining how to assess the objectives. Finally you connect these questions to related information pages.

And this simple approach will change and enable a lot:

It will change your design process and with that the kind of course you create.
The learner is able to see the objectives and his progress on the objectives during the course.
The course is able to present a personal study advice to the learner.
You will be able to report the outcome per learner per learning objective, giving you meaningful data to evaluate you course and your contribution to the companies goals.

These are only the first developments we did based on this approach, a lot more will follow. This video shows you how this works for the learner and for the author.

Based on these very basic dialectical principles we will continue the innovation of eLearning courses and the creation process. Some of the things on our road map are:

Create non-hierarchical metaphors and interfaces for eLearning courses (no book metaphor).
Create better support for designing eLearning courses in our authoring environment.
Implement TinCan
Create learning maps, where the learner can navigate through on his journey to reaching his learning objective
Create better support for case based and scenario based eLearning in the authoring environment

And there will be much more. But the bottom-line is that this idea is independent of a tool, it is how you organize your development process. You can do this on paper if you want, but I believe eLearning developers should do this much more, regardless of the tool they are using.

Filed Under: Action Mapping, Adaptive learning, e-Learning, eLearning, Learning objectives

My professional use of social media and communication tools

November 8, 2012 By Kasper Spiro 2 Comments

I noticed that I use more and more social media tools and different tools to communicate. Maybe I use too many of them. So I decided to create a list of them to see what I could weed out. I decided to share the list with remaining tools with you.

Blogs, writing and reading
I know that blogs are not as hot anymore as they were 10 years ago, but for me they are still very important. I write this blog and I read lot’s of them. Here are some of the tools I use:

I write this blog in WordPress. I think it works great. Easy to use and very effective. Following other blogs is much more difficult. My most valuable tool is probably Flipboard combined with Google reader. When I find a blog I want to read more often I will subscribe to it with Google reader. It will collect all new posts through RSS. Selecting the interesting ones and reading is something that I don’t like in Google reader at all, I use Flipboard for that purpose. Flipboard is a mobile app that creates a magazine like interface on several streams. These streams can be fed by other tools like Twitter, Linkedin and Google reader and I love it. You can browse through the blogs very fast. because it will show you a part of the post, you pick out the ones that interest you and read them. I love it.

The Flipboard magazine interface

There is another tool like it; Zite. Zite will show you information based on keywords you give in. It also has a magazine like interface and the advantage is that you will get information from outside your standard network. I also use aggregation sites, they will select information for you and inform you on a daily or weekly basis on interesting posts. ELearninglearning is the one I use most intense, but there are more like ‘Working smarter Daily‘.

Social media
Linkedin is an important application for me (although I don’t like their mobile app at all), I use it a lot to network and connect to people. It also gives me a constant feed of information (again through Flipboard). Easygenerator also has a Linkedin group and I take part in a few other groups. For me Linkedin is the central social application, my tweets and blog post are also published on my Linkedin page, it is my professinal homepage on the web.

I have a private Facebook account too, but I hardly use it. Easygenerator has a Facebook page, we are using that more and more. We did consider creating a community there for our free edition, but in the end we decided to go with Yammer (see communities). We now use Facebook more for announcements and things like that. I use twitter to announce things (posts, news and share interesting articles that I find). Following others in twitter becomes more and more a problem if you follow too many. Again I use the Flipboard app most of the times to go through all tweets. I have an account on Scribd and it is public, but I only use it to embed PowerPoint presentations into my WordPress blog. I do have Pinterest and bit.ly accounts to collect interesting links. I use them more for my private use, storing things that I want to read later, than that I publish stuff.

Communicating
I love the X-lite application. It brings my land line phone to my laptop, wherever I am. When you call me on my Rotterdam office number, you will reach me through my laptop, where ever I am. I love it. In our company we use Microsoft Lync (sort of internal skype). I use Skype but lately I use gotomeeting and gotowebinar more and more to connect to people outside our company. They give better quality and more functions than Skype. I noticed that I use email less and less and that I hardly make any calls on my cell phone anymore. I do use apps like WhatsApp instead of text messaging, unless somebody doesn’t have an account. Whatsapp is also the application that connects me to my wife when I’m traveling.

Newsletters
We started a newsletter recently for the users of our free edition. We choose to use MailChimp and I must say it is really good. It offers everything you need (forms, templates, list) for free and with a clear interface and process. You can have 2.000 subscribers in the free version, for more you have to start paying.

Communities
We have a community for our partners build in DotNetNuke. I don’t like it at all. It is sort of OK for exchanging files and information, but it is impossible to setup, hard to maintain and had a terrible interface. We will move to something else probably. We did setup a community for our free users in Yammer and I like that a lot more. Flexible, easy and accessible. The only thing is that it is build for internal corporate communities. Even though you can use it for external communities the whole process and communication is aimed at internal corporate communities. Can be really confusion sometimes.

Sharing and storing
I’m a dedicated Dropbox user for four years now. Everything I create I store in Dropbox and I can synchronize it on other computers and mobile devices. Really great. I have a 100 gigabyte account, which I almost completely use. I use Dropbox also to exchange large files (like demo courses) with other people.

Conferences
Lately more and more conferences have an app and I love that. Especially the eLearning guild does a great Job. Schedules, your own Agenda, info, twitter, locations. You name it and it is in there. I haven’t seen an app in any of the European conferences (like online Educa Berlin or Learning Technologies in London), maybe I will even boycott them until they have one.

Room for improvement
Even after the weeding process it still is a lot and I don’t even mention the things I tried but dismissed (like Klout or Google plus). And these are only communication tools, I’m not even talking about production tools (most favorite tool is MindNode on Ipad for mind mapping). I hope that you get something out of this post and if you have suggestions for improvements, better tools or better solutions, please let me hear. There is absolutely room for improvement.

Filed Under: Communication tools, social media tools Tagged With: Dropbox, Elearninglearning, Facebook, Flipboard, Google reader, Gotomeeting, gotowebinar, Linkedin, Mailchimp, Skype, Twitter, Whatsapp, Wordpress, Workingsmarterdaily, X-lite, Yammer, Zite

#DevLearn retrospective: Start dreaming about the future of eLearning

November 4, 2012 By Kasper Spiro Leave a Comment

This year more than ever DevLearn addressed the future of eLearning. The message from the keynote by John Landau was that imagination precedes the technique. The stories in movies like Titanic and Avatar were impossible to realize with the techniques available at the time the stories were written. So they created the techniques in order to be able to create the movies. Our current situation is reverse. Thanks to the TinCan API (now renamed into ‘experience API’) the technique is ahead of us (learning developers and vendors). Instead of us challenging the technique, the technique is challenging us. There was another keynote by Allisone Levine at DevLearn. She draws all kind of lessons from her experiences as an adventurer. Unfortunately I was in meetings during her presentation. I stepped in for 5 minutes and heard her say: “Fear is ok. It’s normal. Complacency will kill you. You can’t afford to do nothing in an environment that is rapidly changing.” It applies to us. Our environment is rapidly changing and we need to step up to the challenge and we can’t afford to wait and see. (By the way in the back-channel I found a post by Tracy Parish who has captured a whole bunch of great lessons from that keynote.)

So what to do? It will be a mutual challenge for the people who are developing this standard, for vendors and for eLearning developers. Let’s take a closer look at our challenge.

Our challengers

I took this Photo at the TinCan panel session at DevLearn. The guy sitting on the left is Aron Silvers from ADL. He is the driving force behind the experience API. The third guy is Mike Rustici from Rustici software (the company behind Scorm cloud) the company that developed the TinCan API. They are the ones challenging us. What they did is in principle very simple. They changed the standard from a tracking and tracing system (Scorm) into a learning experience facilitator. All we need to do is to figure out what that means.

The vendors
It is time for the vendors to step up to the challenge and develop solutions that will unleash the power of TinCan for you. It is not about implementing TinCan as an extra publish option; enabling tracking and tracing via a new standard is the easy part. No, we need to facilitate new forms of eLearning where you can include real live activities into your eLearning. We need to come up with forms where learning is centered around experiences instead of information transfer. It is about connecting learning to the workplace, combining informal and formal learning and all that stuff we have been talking about for years but could never really do in a Scorm course. Another big thing is feedback. TinCan will inform your course on what people are doing and your learning needs to be able to respond to that. The tracking will change in a feed back mechanism that you can use to offer proper learning experiences, real adaptive learning based on real life outcomes. Will this happen in an LMS, in an formal course, or somewhere else? It will probably be a combination of all three. And the truth is that I don’t have the answer. We do have some ideas but we know we can’t figure this out without our partners and the users of our authoring tool.

We are aware of the fact that we as a vendor should engage our users more and start joining forces with them. And we will. A small example is the feedback button we build in, in the latest edition of easygenerator. Any user can click on it and can come up with a suggestion or an idea. All ideas will go direct to our product owner who is responsible for the product development. We will to do more like organizing a series of webinars to discuss the effect of TinCan for eLearning development and open up a community. We plan to have support for TinCan in easygenerator in February and the great thing is, we don’t have a clue how it will look and what it will enable. I’m looking forward to this process and you are all invited to join in.

From eLearning developer to Learning experience director
So what do you need to do? Just follow the advice from John Landau and start dreaming and follow the advice from Allison Levine and start acting. Dream about what it would mean if you can include real life activities (of any kind and in every place) into your learning, what you could do if you can respond to the outcome of these learning experiences from your learner and figure out a first step. Make sure that your vendor enables you, by telling them what you need. Our (vendors and eLearning developers) mutual goal is to come up with so many new ideas that we make guys like Aron and Mike sweat in order to catch up with us.

Filed Under: #devlearn, e-Learning, Experience API, TinCan API

#Devlearn TinCan panel: #Tincan is rocking our world

November 2, 2012 By Kasper Spiro 4 Comments

I attended the panel discussion on TinCan this morning; great session. I have tried to capture the session in a mind map. It is clear that TinCan is a major change. It is not only a shift from tracking and tracing to enabling learning experiences, it opens op a whole new world of possibilities. We have to redefine what (e)Learning is or could be. Some remarks at the panel triggered me into this observation:

There is a lot of confusion about TinCan and the impact on our (learning people) day-to-day activities. I believe this is because the TinCan guys invented a combustion engine. And the public is trying to figure out what is means for their every day live. But there are no cars yet, no roads, no gas stations, no drivers licenses so it is hard to imagine what it means. But the vendors are already stepping in and create the cars, roads and gas stations, new learning theories will emerge and it will become clearer in the future. Best suggestion from the panel: Start dreaming of all the new possibilities (what could you do if you had a car, roads and all). Start dreaming and doing it and request (or force) your vendor that they will enable it (in the spirit of the keynote from John Landau.)

In the session it also became more clear what the AICC adoption of TinCan really means. They will develop their standard CMI5 upon the TinCan API, making it an extension of TinCan. And this is big! All the standard dinosaurs are transforming into new agile forms. And this is great news because they will stop creating boundaries for us but instead they will offer us new opportunities to create great learning experiences. These are revolutionary times!

Click to enlarge

Filed Under: #devlearn, e-Learning, Learning experience API, TinCan API

Devlearn conference day one: an exhilarating day

November 1, 2012 By Kasper Spiro Leave a Comment

So we are off to an excellent start with DevLearn. As always at the first day of a guild conference it was an exhilarating day. I was able to attend some sessions and keynotes and talked to lot’s of people. Here is my wrap-up.

Trends?
I try to spot the emerging trends at conferences like this, for this conference there are two. One is SaaS or cloud based solutions, the other is the future of the Learning Management Systems. Acceptance for cloud based solutions is definitely growing, almost all the vendors have plans in that direction.

TinCan and IACC
The other trend is that the LMS market is changing rapidly. The big thing here is TinCan. I wrote about it before. Yesterday it became even bigger. Before the second keynote there was an extra unplanned presentation by Aron ‘TinCan’ Silver. He showed a video where AICC announced that they will adopt TinCan. I don’t think that the entire audience grasped the meaning of this announcement. We have two main standards in our industry SCORM and IACC, both of them enable us to track and trace results, both of them confine eLearning within the borders of the LMS. TinCan will free us from this, it allows you to track and trace any learning experience, anywhere. I don’t know what the adoption will actually mean but it sounded like TinCan will be the next version of IACC. This leaves us with one standard and but more importantly it ‘frees’ eLearning from the boundaries of the LMS. This really is a big thing and it will affect the way we use any LMS and in the long run it will change the market completely. We will see how this develops, but I’m exited.

Way to reinforce learning
A morning buzz session I attended, presented by Art Kohm. It was about how to improve memory retention.

His story was along the lines of the keynote of last year by John Medina at the Learning Solution conference. The brain filters information (to prevent information overload), in principle you forget the most information that you encounter, you need to reactivate the facts in order to really store them in your brain. He refers to research by Rodigger. His solution is Booster training. Two days after the learning event you have to trigger the information by asking (multiple choice questions). It forces you to retrieve the information and that will enhance the retention. After two weeks you have to do that again. The interesting here is that in this phase he will ask open questions, that not only require retrieval but also processing of the information. I believe that memory retention is a sort of blank area in eLearning, there are some tools but the notion isn’t widely spread. Ans it is important it determines the effectiveness of your Learning experiences.

Brent Schenkler
Brent opened the first session. He is the driving force behind DevLearn, but he has accepted another job. So this conference is his last one. It will be interesting to how this affects future conference. He spoke briefly about all the elements of the conference.

Keynote: John Landau

John is the producer of many movies, the most famous ones are Titanic and Avatar. Great presentation. His message is that the story precede the technique. The technique to shoot the scripts of these movies wasn’t there when the scripts were written. They just developed the techniques they needed. According to him the same goes for eLearning. Make the learning experience leading and then just make it work. Great keynote.

Easygenerator Free edition launch
After the keynote I presented the launch of easygenerators free edition. I had a good turnout and great responses. It is great to see how the story about better eLearning courses catches on. More info at our website, you can register and start working within minutes.

Xtranormal scenarios
I joined this session because I am a scenario based learning fan, but this turned out to be a session about the posibilities of a product that let’s you create animated video’s with Lego images and text to speech voices. Looked ok, but is really not my thing.

Learning objectives concurrent session
My second presentation of the day about learning objectives and how you can use the in many ways, but most importantly how to use them to connect learning to your business goals. I really enjoyed giving this presentation. Good crowd, good responses.

View this document on Scribd

Organizational Learning with agility
A session by Jenet Clarey of Bersin. I was triggered by the term agility. It turned out to be something very different. She was talking about trends in the LMS market. She says that the trend is that it is changing rapidly. The core function of LMS was track and trace and course management. In the ‘Agile LMS’ it is just one of the functions. It grows to become a broad talent management system or even a corporate portal where learning is just a part of. I have two photo’s of interesting slides. I think they tell a large part of the story, again a story about the changing LMS market.

Brian Bushwood, how to scam your way to the top.
This was interesting. He is a ‘sort’ of a magician. But his story turned out to be a marketing story, he told us how he build his internet brand. He is hugely succesfull with his ‘Scam school’ he had great stories how created fake Ibooks and made them top-ten hits in Itunes and his Scam school is very successful. Some of his lessons:

Identify one niche and own it, be first at least in your category or in the minds op people. His niche was internet magician and it is great to hear and see how he made it to the top of his market.
And he is funny:

More to come tomorrow. Make sure you check out the curated backchannel of Devlearn by David Kelly.

Filed Under: #devlearn, EasyGenerator, eLearning, Learning objectives, SCORM, TinCan API Tagged With: IACC

Blogging about #DevLearn

October 29, 2012 By Kasper Spiro Leave a Comment

I will be leaving for Las Vegas in less than one hour, visiting the eLearning Guilds annual conference. I will try to post a daily blog about my findings. I’m really looking forward to it, last year was great. Great keynotes, interesting concurrent sessions, lots of good conversations and contact and the official launch of easygenerator in the United States. This year looks very promising, I like the line up, attendance will be at a new record (approaching the 2000) and we will launch our free edition. Enough to look forward to.

Some figures
As I said attendance will be close to 2000, but there are more interesting figures to share with you:

10.580 – 6573
The number of kilometers/miles I will travel in the next 21 hours.

6/43 – 28/82
The temperature in the Netherlands (Celcius/Fahrenheid) and the temperature in Las Vegas. From drizzling rain and wind to Las Vegas sunshine!

421
Easygenerator’s booth number at the expo, please come and check us out.

204
The number of my concurrent session on Business objectives and Learning Objectives. (Wednesday @ 1.15 PM)

10
The time (AM) I will present the free edition of easygenerator at the Management Exchange Stage. I will present both on Wednesday and Thursday.

559 – 48
The number of users of our free edition (559) and the number of countries it is being used (48). We are very happy with this numbers. We quietly pre-launched our free edition prior to DevLearn to make sure we could build it up slowly and monitor it closely, in order to ensure a perfect authoring environment. But having 559 users in 48 countries in three weeks time, is clearly beyond our expectations.

Enough numbers, my next post will contain more content and stories and less figures.

Filed Under: #devlearn, e-Learning, e-Learning authoring tool, EasyGenerator Tagged With: elearning

Book review: Blackboard essentials for teachers

October 23, 2012 By Kasper Spiro Leave a Comment

PACKT Publishing asked me to write a review about the book ‘Blackboard essentials for teachers’ by William Rice. It is an instructional book on how to build courses in Blackboard. I get these kind of request occasionally, but most of the times I will not go into them. This time I did because as a CEO of an authoring tool it is very interesting to keep up to date with the authoring capabilities of Learning Management Systems. I was curious if this book could give me a clear impression on how Blackboard works and what kind of facilities it offers. And I must say, it did.

I must say that it is a very clear and instructive book. He has written it from the perspective of a teacher. The book has lot’s of screen shots, clear step-by-step instructions and it covers the subjects in a logical way. It has tips and warnings and could actually guide a teacher through the complex system Blackboard is and let him create, publish and use an eLearning course. It doesn’t stop at the creation of a course but it also covers how to deploy the course, and even how to grade your students. If I was a teacher and had to create a course within Blackboard I would be very happy with this book.

I don’t have access to Blackboard, nevertheless it gave me a very good impression on what the functionalities are and how to use them. The one thing that I missed are instructions on how to use of external course material. It does cover how to include content elements like images and video, but not how to use an external SCORM or QTI package. As a teacher you probably want to use external courses as well, and especially within universities there will be often be a department that will deliver the final assessment to you. Apart from this I can recommend this book to you. More info is available at PACKT.

Filed Under: BlackBoard, Blackboard essentials for teachers, book review, e-Learning, Packt, William Rice

Valve handbook: an unique way to organize talent and business

October 21, 2012 By Kasper Spiro Leave a Comment

This week I was having dinner with Hans the Zwart who is a former colleague of mine. He is one of the most well-read people I know and when he gives me a reading tip, I will read it. This time he mentioned the Valve ‘Handbook for new employees‘. Valve is a game company (known for Half-Life, Team Fortress 2, and Portal and the digital delivery platform Steam) which is organized in a unique way. The handbook is an internal guide for new employees in order to ‘not freak out’ when starting to work in an organization without any formal structures.

It really is a very interesting read. At Valve there is no hierarchy, no formal job description, no bosses, nothing of the structures you would expect in a company that has some 300 employees.

People decide themselves what project or product they will work on and what kind of contribution they will make. The idea is that they are best capable to decide where they are of the biggest value for the company (and for the customers). Roles are fluid and can change when the requirements of the work change. Projects are voted on by feet (or better wheels). If you find a project interesting you can just roll your desk over (they have wheels) and start participating. Everybody can start up new projects or products, all you need to do is convince other people to join you.

When evaluating people they will use a peer evaluation along four dimensions:

Skill Level/Technical ability
Productivity output
Group contribution
Product contribution

Based on this peer evaluation they will ‘stack rank’ employees and based on that they will decide on their compensation. Not surprisingly ‘Hiring’ is the most important process in this company. Getting the right people in is crucial for such kind of organization. They use the same four dimensions when hiring and they are looking for what they call T-shaped employees.

This means people who are generalist, but they also are an expert in one field. This is the best guarantee that people can collaborate in a team and will have added value to that team.

There is a lot more to read in the 55 pages, so please do. For me books like this are interesting because the ideas are so far out of the box that it stretches your own boundaries. In this case it will even remove boundaries. It will change the way you look at your own organization and that is always a good thing.

By the way. Another tip from Hans, his favorite movie ‘The big Lebowski‘. And if he says you should watch it, you should.

Filed Under: achieving your business goals, Change management, Hans de Zwart, management, Valve