The keys for success are:

1. Define a vision

You are using SharePoint because you have a business need to solve, a business problem that you want the learning to solve. Start from the business need – identify the needs and prioritize them. Don’t start from any feature of SharePoint or any technical baseline – work out the vision and business value and start from there.

A vision document should also include a map of how learners receive and share information, an overview of your IT environment and how SharePoint fits in and where your strategy aligns with technology. It should also include a simple ROI (Return on investment) model. Review with focus groups to ensure that the vision meets user and business needs.

2. Design an engaging user experience

Your use will likely succeed or fail due to the quality of the user experience. If it’s an engaging user interface, there is much more chance of widespread use.

When planning the site, don’t think about the administration or the authoring first, think about the end user first. The success of your use is all about the end user experience. Survey, plan, whiteboard and prototype to make sure the user experience is good,

3. Leverage SharePoint’s features

Concentrate on “out of box” features first, before writing code. For example most sites will benefit from discussion forums.

Use SharePoint to enable task orientated and in-context collaboration, personalized aggregation points, business intelligence gathering and analysis, enterprise searches and enterprise-wide content management.

4. Manage your information architecture

Identify what type of information will be stored and work out how to tag / organize it so can be shared. Effective SharePoint use relies on content being structured, labelled and categorized so that different audiences can navigate and search for information.

5. Measure success

Bill suggests that you should avoid “experimental” tool syndrome. The system should be a production one and aim to produce business value and you should measure this from the beginning.

You should set benchmarks before you begin and measure yourself against them – it’s useful to measure both quantitative items and qualitative items. Some useful quantitative items can be usage, levels of collaboration and the number of searches. Some useful qualitative items can be to run a survey and collate user comments and to look for things people search for that are not found.

You should ensure you measure both learning/training value and business impact.

6.Implement a governance program

Define roles, responsibilities and processes so an enterprise can guide development and use of the solution. Think about this prior to rollout – setting up a governance panel with quarterly meetings works well in many organizations.

I thought these were valuable and worth sharing, thank you Bill for giving permission to do so. For more on what GP Strategies offer in SharePoint, see http://sharepoint.gpstrategies.com/.

But I wonder if a new e-learning standard called the Experience API might have more impact in getting SharePoint used for learning, particularly in corporate training?

Who is behind the Experience API

The Experience API is a new standard based on activity streams, under development by the US government funded ADL. This is the organization that introduced SCORM, a widely used e-learning interface standard

Almost all learning software supports SCORM largely because at one point the US Department of Defence said they would not buy any software that didn’t support it! SharePoint support of SCORM is part of the SharePoint Learning Kit.

The ADL’s new standard, the Experience API (previously called the Tin Can API) is getting a lot of interest from learning users and vendors because it’s really simple yet supports a lot of really exciting use cases about capture of learning data.  Is also supported by the AICC, a very well-established learning technology standards organization, who are redirecting their work on a new CMI-5 standard to collaborate with ADL on the Experience API.

What does the Experience API do?

Learning happens everywhere, not just within formal learning events. What the Experience API lets you do is capture learning activities as they happen, and store them in a Learning Record Store (LRS). Lots of different kinds of learning – simulations, games (serious and non-serious), social learning, mobile learning, quizzes, collaborative learning, viewing documents and almost anything can be recorded by the Experience API.

At the core of the Experience API is a simple sentence structure:

Actor, verb, object

or

I did this

For example “John Kleeman viewed this video” or “Peter Brown walked into the bank in the simulation” or “James Smith made a forum post in this discussion area”. Any learning activity can be easily configured to send back learning activity using a simple REST interface (based on the Activity Streams concept). And then one can collate the information and make predictions or inform or take actions as a result of it.

How might this help SharePoint?

Lots of learning happens in SharePoint. People view documents, they look at videos, they collaborate with others through forums or using SharePoint social features, they search, they might launch learning activities from SharePoint as a portal. But these SharePoint activities are not well or easily tracked. So although SharePoint is used for learning, the learning is not easy to identify or measure.

Experience API calls can be made easily in JavaScript and so are easy to slot seamlessly into SharePoint. And so anyone who is using SharePoint could easily track learning activities with the Experience API and have the information recorded and analyzed via a LRS (Learning Record Store).

You never know. This could be the invention that gives SharePoint traction as a genuine learning system.

Here are seven Slideshare presentations that you may not have seen. All are relevant to the theme of SharePoint and Assessments.

1. Don’t let your training fall off a cliff

I love this presentation from John Lightfoot which talks about how SharePoint can be used to improve the benefits of training by keeping learners engaged and helping them on the job after training. See http://www.slideshare.net/exnav29/dont-let-your-training-fall-off-of-a-cliff or below:

2. SharePoint in Higher Education

This presentation by James Lappin dates back to 2009 but has some different thoughts on the use of SharePoint in Higher Education, much of it still relevant and some neat drawings.

http://www.slideshare.net/JamesLappin/sharepoint-in-higher-education

3. Decommissioning the University VLE: Using SharePoint to Engage with Students

This presentation delivered at the International SharePoint Conference in London earlier this year is by David Coleman (see my 2011 interview with him) and Alex Bradbeer, about a university moving from Blackboard to SharePoint.

See http://www.slideshare.net/davecoleman146/moving-from-blackboard or below:

4. Measuring social learning in SharePoint with Assessments

This is my presentation on using SharePoint to measure social learning with assessments at the European SharePoint Conference last year.  See http://www.slideshare.net/QuestionmarkSlides/measuring-social-learning-in-share-point-with-assessments or below:

5. Office 365 for education

There are lots of presentations on Office 365 on SlideShare, many of them marketing ones from Microsoft. This presentation from MVP Alex Pearce has some interesting screenshots and examples of use. See http://www.slideshare.net/pearce.alex/using-office-365-for-education or below:

6. 10 best SharePoint features you’ve never used but should

I met Christian Buckley at the European SharePoint Conference last year, and he’s both expert at SharePoint and good at speaking. This presentation describes 10 features of standard SharePoint that many of us are not familiar with. See http://www.slideshare.net/echo4sharepoint/10-best-sharepoint-features-youve-never-used-but-should or below:

7. Assess to Comply: how else can you be sure that employees understand?

Last but not I hope least, here is a presentation I gave earlier in October at the Ethics & Compliance Officer Association’s (ECOA) Annual Ethics & Compliance Conference in St Louis, Missouri. This may interest anyone involved in compliance issues within SharePoint or elsewhere, it’s titled: “Assess to comply: how else can you be sure that employees understand?”. See http://www.slideshare.net/QuestionmarkSlides/assess-to-comply-how-else-can-you-be-sure-that-employees-understand-ecoa-2012 or below:

I hope you enjoyed these presentations, and at least one gave you some new ideas or insight.

1. I found CIO.com’s piece Office 365 Earns High Marks in Education, Struggles in Enterprise insightful, not so much for its mention of education as to the suggestion that it will actually be Office/SharePoint 2013 that will make organizations move to Office 365 – if you’ve got to upgrade, may as well upgrade into the Cloud.

2. Speaking of SharePoint 2013, of course this has gone to beta over the summer. Not as much new as some people hoped, but a new app store and lots of incremental improvements in UI, mobile support, social features and more. To quote Jennifer Mason in her article  SharePoint 2013: Not Quite What I Expected, it is a pleasant surprise, as she says:

“Some of the smallest changes in how things are presented or integration have made a huge impact in this release.”

3. What of new education features in SharePoint 2013? See my own earlier article SharePoint 15 will allow quizzes? for speculation. In July, Bjørn Furuknap’s SharePoint Corner shared some information on quizzes in SharePoint, but his article like mine is based on Microsoft’s developer documentation, and I’ve not yet seen any screenshots of quiz authoring in SharePoint 2013, maybe this will only be in a separate education module or it’s still being developed?

4. Could the ability to make apps for SharePoint be game-changing in Education? See this thought provoking blog post by Ray Fleming of Microsoft Australia : Building education applications for Office, Office 365 for education and SharePoint. To quote Ray:

“For education customers and partners, this is good news. Really good news. What it will mean is that customers will be able to add custom applications to their installations of Office or SharePoint easily, without having to do lots of fancy customisations themselves. And create a market for education apps for Office…”

5. It certainly does look as though more universities and colleges are seeing the wisdom of Office 365 and/or SharePoint. Microsoft proudly announced a few days ago for instance that Georgia State University Switches to Microsoft Office 365, Saves $1 Million in Operating Costs. Even over 5 years, this is a nice amount of money to save.  

6. In the world of compliance, some organizations use SharePoint to track reading of rules and regulations. Is this a good way of ensuring that people learn and understand rules? In an article in Compliance and Ethics Professional July/August, What’s the best way to document that training has taken place?, I argue that this is not ideal – better than nothing, but to really check understanding you have to test people not just track them.

7. Last but not least, if you’ve not caught it already, for a real story, read Dan Holme’s blog on how he used SharePoint to set up NBC’s Intranet at the London Olympics (part 1, part 2, part 3). The London Olympics were a great event, living in London I was fortunate to  get tickets to see Bolt win the 200m at the stadium (he was fast!), and it’s lovely to see that SharePoint was working to help behind the scenes.

Starting the trial is very easy. I went to my computer about 16.20pm and filled in a simple form signing up for the UK version of Microsoft’s A3 education plan. You don’t need a credit card and you don’t need to prove educational status to start the trial (though you need this to use it for real).

The account gets set up within a few seconds, but SharePoint needs a few minutes to be provisioned:

. 

But by 16.28 I’m into the SharePoint administrator system and it’s set up 3 site collections for me

And with a bit of exploring I found by 16:35 the team site which looks very familiar to other new SharePoint sites as you can see below. I used the domain name sharepointlearn for my trial, and so my SharePoint site is called sharepointlearn.sharepoint.com and my admin area is called sharepointlearn-admin.sharepoint.com.

From then on, it’s just a question of using SharePoint, not all the features of On Premise SharePoint are present in Office 365 for Education, but most of them are. And it’s all set up for me in no more than 15 minutes. You can probably do it in 10 minutes if you weren’t taking screenshots while doing it …

It looks as though SharePoint within Office 365 for Education is similar to that in other editions of Office 365. See my earlier articles for some technical how-tos for including assessments within SharePoint in Office 365:

• Call assessments from Office 365, authenticating via Active Directory
• Want to use Office 365 for learning? Four ways to use assessments within Office 365
• How to pass candidate name into an assessment from Office 365’s SharePoint Online

Compared to the huge effort to install, maintain, set up search, set up load balancing and manage SharePoint on premise, Office 365 for Education looks very interesting. And that’s just for SharePoint – of course you also get Lync, Exchange and Microsoft Office as well.

There are things you can do on premise that you can’t do in Office 365 (e.g. make a fully functional SharePoint public website), but the ease of setup and management makes SharePoint if Office 365 look very interesting for Education.

If you have any difficulty viewing the embedded slide show, click here to see it full screen.

Presentation decks shared on SlideShare seem a great way of learning, here are some other good, recent slide shows:

• Dave Coleman’s blog entry and slide show on moving from Blackboard to SharePoint at a university
• Jonathan Lightfoot’s presentation on “Don’t let your training fall off a cliff” about use of SharePoint My Sites
• My own presentation on 6+6 is more than 12, How Online Assessments add to Distance Learning

Enjoy!

It’s widely rumoured that SharePoint 15 (currently under wraps but expected out early in 2013) will have an education module – an addition to SharePoint that will allow courses, lessons, assignments and grades. It will support IMS Common Cartridge format, which will allow SharePoint users to import courses published for Blackboard and Moodle. See  zdnet or Bjørn Furuknap’s blog for more on the SharePoint 15 education module.

Of particular interest for this blog is that it looks as though SharePoint 15 (or its add-on education module) will allow creation of quizzes inside SharePoint. The evidence for this is contained within an “Education Quiz Client-Side Object Model Protocol Specification” (MS-QUIZCSOM), downloadable here. It’s a 73 page technical document describing the draft API to the quiz module. Reading the specification:

• SharePoint will have a new concept of a quiz – an assessment tool used to determine users’ knowledge of course material.
• A quiz can be assigned either for unlimited attempts or for 1-5 attempts.
• Quizzes contain questions, that can be computer graded or manually graded.
• Supported question types are fill-in-blanks, multiple choice, essay and rating scale.
• Multiple choice questions can include true/false and multiple response questions
• Feedback can be given for correct and incorrect answers
• There is a rudimentary concept of question difficulty (a number between 1 and 5)
• There is no concept of “topic” to group questions in and give feedback in
• There also is no concept of shuffling choices nor randomizing questions from an item bank.
• There is no mention of any support of assessment standards – for example no support of IMS QTI.

The capabilities and question types are quite limited, but it will be useful for basic quizzes. It’s not clear if the feature will be available as part of standard SharePoint or in some chargeable add-on.

What does this mean?

Microsoft may change some of these features before release, but it does look as though learning scenarios will be addressed seriously for the first time by Microsoft in SharePoint 15, replacing the existing quasi-supported Learning Kit. It seems this will be aimed more at schools, colleges and universities than corporate training.

I see this as good news for all in education and training who are interested in using SharePoint. The basic out-of-the-box capabilities look limited, but capable enough to be useful for simple use cases. And it will encourage the community to think of SharePoint as a learning system – using both the Microsoft built-capabilities and third-party systems.

Jim, what is your background?

I spent 13 years running technology and product strategy for SumTotal Systems. I started in learning technology developing and then managing a product called Ingenium (Jim and I first met back then) at a company called Meliora Systems. We sold that company to Asymetrix. We took that company public in 1998 and rebranded it as Click2learn. This company eventually became SumTotal Systems after a merger with Docent. The products I managed and helped design still live within Sum Total Systems’ current suite. After a 12 month stint at a start-up where we built an analytics solution for large strategic consulting organizations, I joined Microsoft 5 years ago.

What is your role at Microsoft?

I am Senior Director of Operations and Platform for what we call the Readiness Organization in Microsoft.

I am responsible for a variety of things including reporting, quality, tools & platform, technology, innovation and the operational services necessary to deliver nearly 2 million hours of training per year to 45,000 employees. This includes product and solution readiness which contains technical, licensing, industry knowledge, compete, and go-to-market readiness as well as professional skills training that we primarily deliver within a curricula framework we call Academies.

How does Microsoft use SharePoint for learning?

We’ve got a notion at Microsoft of “first and best”, which essentially says that it’s our job to use (and occasionally misuse!) products ahead of customers and better than any customers. This makes two things happen. One is we can take what we’ve learned and share it with our customers. The second is we make our products better by finding any problems – often before products are released to market. For example, the Windows 8 Consumer Preview was released recently and the very next day a substantial portion of Microsoft employees were already running the beta.

I believe we’re the world’s largest SharePoint implementation. From a training perspective, we use SharePoint in a few interesting ways.

We’re just wrapping up a project to build a SharePoint search experience for training. The outcome is that Training becomes discoverable from across the intranet. This is a really simple thing to do and I encourage all customers running SharePoint to consider doing the same.

The screen shot to the right is of our SharePoint search experience. Notice the facets to the left that allow for quick filtering of the catalog by taxonomies that are meaningful to people looking for training.

One benefit of this approach is that we are able to provide employees with a single training discovery experience even though we have two primary learning management systems in service of employees. With the SharePoint search scope, we have both LMSs being indexed in the same way, we have a common taxonomy that makes up the filters that learners search, and so we’ve unified searching across multiple LMSs, and we’ve brought training to where the people are, which is often better than forcing them to go directly into the LMSs.

I suspect that could be a quick win for a lot of people, as that’s the sort of thing SharePoint is good at – searching in external systems.

Yes, the investment involved is really very small, from a technical perspective. You can do this with a variety of techniques, the one we used was very simple – we wrote a query to write out a single file that ends up becoming a SharePoint list. The list gets indexed by SharePoint once or twice a day. And SharePoint knows how to index SharePoint lists, so there’s nothing complicated about it.

You can do this in more sophisticated ways, but this technique works fine.

Lots of people I speak to want to use SharePoint for knowledge management and aggregating and making information easy to find. I suspect a lot of people don’t realize how easy it is to index external systems like this with SharePoint search?

Yes, we’ve taken the LMS out of the ‘walled garden’ as it were, and made learning a proper ‘intranet citizen’.

What else do you do with SharePoint for learning?

The cleverest thing we’ve done with SharePoint is a site we call internally “Academy”, you can think of this as YouTube for the enterprise. We’ve done some white papers on this in the past (see for example here). It’s a podcasting platform, an executive communication platform, a training platform, a social networking platform, an expert-finder platform, it does all of those things for us. (See the screenshot right.)

It really leverages some of SharePoint’s unique strengths. We’ve put a podcasting experience in front of SharePoint that resembles YouTube with little squares that show a snippet of the video, star ratings, the name of the author, how many times it’s been downloaded and played. Content is accessible via a browser, via an RSS reader, can be easily downloaded to Windows Phone via the Zune software and we’ve recently released a Windows Phone app. In fact 30% of the content is being consumed from mobile devices – people browse the content on their Windows mobile phone and play it there.

I think that you let SharePoint users see the learning available to them and take it in a SharePoint web part?

Yes, we created what we call landing pages for learners in SharePoint. We built these in Silverlight because we wanted it to be cinematic, with animation, and it’s really easy to host Silverlight in SharePoint. It pulls content and the content structure and completion status from the LMS and marries that with the profile of the user who’s logged into SharePoint. Thus, if you or I looked at one of these landing pages, what we’d see would be different depending on our profile. You might require different training than I do, and we might recommend different training depending on job roles and geography. It takes the profile from SharePoint and presents a unique view. When the user wants to engage in the course, they click through and end up watching the content player from the LMS, or can also download and take it offline.

We’re in the process of improving this by building a Windows 8 app, with a Metro design, a touch-first app, that is on top of SharePoint. It will be available as an internal-only application for Microsoft employees and will become the primary way that Microsoft employees consume training. We’re also in the process of re-building our content player, using HTML5, making it suitable for touch mobile devices. One of the things we’re keen on in Microsoft is making an immersive experience, for instance you click on a course and it plays in the window you are in. The trend in Windows 8 is that controls are hidden unless you need them, the chrome of the experience fades away, with the content in the forefront. We’re also designing our user interface for touch and figuring smart ways of integrating this with SharePoint and our LMS.

Are you running the new version of SharePoint under development (version 15) internally or do you use SharePoint 2010 internally?

Microsoft is running SharePoint 2010. There are areas that are working with SharePoint 15, but it hasn’t been rolled out across the company. In the training organization, we’re experimented with it and we’re building our strategies around how to leverage some of the new capabilities in the context of training. I suspect that within 18 months, most of the platforms I’m responsible for will be running in the Cloud and will leverage Azure and Office 15.

Another thing we’ve built internally is something we call OfficeTalk. This is a custom application that is essentially Twitter for the enterprise. It has the notion of hashtags, which allows you to keep track of conversations. There’s a web part that allows you to integrate it with SharePoint sites. It’s getting quite a lot of traffic. There’s also a Windows Phone app if you’re not in front of your PC. (You can see some more info on OfficeTalk in this article.)

A lot of the SharePoint sites we’ve built have a little OfficeTalk web part off to the side; that has a semi-synchronous conversation happening, in the context of the page you’re looking at. For example, if I’m looking at a SharePoint site about Windows 8, there will be an internal conversation running off to the right of the page, of people dialoguing about Windows 8. We think that’s pretty clever, and I’d expect similar capability to make its way into future Microsoft products. As you might expect, we prefer that some conversations happen within the Microsoft Firewall so it’s important that we provide employees with a proper – meaning secure – means of collaborating.

I know there is a lot of interest (for example within the Masie Consortium) in this area. What guidance would you give other companies looking to get value for SharePoint for learning?

My guidance to my peers in the industry is to take the training to where the people are. Often what people have to do is to drop what they are doing as a knowledge worker and “take a sabbatical” to go to the learning management system. And it doesn’t dawn on most employees to go and do that. Most employees don’t fully differentiate mentally between what’s training and what’s not. Content and community get blurred in the mind of learner.

Our job is to unify it all, and unlock learning content in your LMS via APIs and expose it, for example, in SharePoint.

How do you deliver assessments with SharePoint?

We have three modes of assessments we can call from our LMS. The assessments are available from SharePoint, but are running within the LMS where the SCORM APIs ensure data is being tracked.

- Standalone assessments

- Assessment wrapped around online training

- Assessment wrapped round virtual/instructor led training

We have built our own tool that we use to develop online training and assessments. We did that partly as we had our own unique requirements and partly because we wanted to deliver in Silverlight. The unique requirements primarily enable a degree of adaptively sophistication that I don’t believe exists in standard eLearning development tools. We’re currently in the process of re-releasing the system to deliver HTML5 content. From an assessment standpoint, the tool is not as sophisticated as systems like Questionmark.

Do you see SharePoint in the long term as competing with learning management systems or more as a hybrid?

For the foreseeable future we’re going to have both a LMS and SharePoint. One of the strengths of an LMS is that it can help us administer the business rules around training, especially around instructor-led training. There’s an immense amount of business rules to administer. For example, we set up a class which has minimum and maximum capacity, we reserve certain seats for certain audiences, we have a cancellation policy, we have a charge-back policy, we like our approval workflows, we set up pre-requisites, etc. etc. etc. There are so many business rules that we leverage every day from our LMS that rebuilding it would require a significant R&D investment.

The way I think about it is that because our LMS provides a rich set of capabilities we need to run the business, it frees up my team to focus on delivering innovative experiences and creating new modalities.

Will there be learning improvements in future versions of SharePoint?

Anything my team learns from using SharePoint to train Microsoft employees, the SharePoint product team benefits from. I can’t say what’s in or out of particular versions, but I advocate for learning needs to the SharePoint product team and they are very aware of learning scenarios.

One more thing I’m passionate about is what we’re doing on Windows 8. I’ve attached a screen shot of a solution we call Role Guide. This is a touch-optimized Windows 8 Metro style app that presents tailored roadmaps to Microsoft employees based on their role, region, manager status, and many other attributes. It also provides a fantastic search experience (integrated with our LMS) and includes an ‘in-experience’ SCORM content player that looks great when playing our HTML 5 content. To my knowledge, we’re delivering a bunch of industry firsts in this solution.

A key concept to explain this is the fraud triangle, originally invented by Donald Cressey, a famed criminologist. He suggested that for people to conduct fraud, which includes cheating at a test, they need Motivation, Opportunity and Rationalization.

• Motivation. To cheat at a test, you need motivation, a reason to do it.  Typically this will be because the test is high stakes – if you fail, there will be penalties.
• Opportunity. To cheat at a test, you also need opportunity. There are three main kinds of opportunity:
  1. Impersonation or identity fraud : where another person logs in and takes a test for the test-taker. For instance, a manager gets a secretary to take the test for him/her, or a student gets a cleverer class-mate to take the test.
  2. Content theft : where the questions (and/or answers) are stolen and given/sold to potential cheaters.
  3. Unauthorized aids : where the test-takers get unapproved help to answer the questions, for instance another person to help, or access to the Internet or materials they are not supposed to have.
• Rationalization. Someone who cheats also needs to be able to rationalize to themselves that what they are doing is fair – for instance that they think the process is unfair or because everyone else is doing it or some other mental model. They need a rationale to convince themselves that what they are doing is okay to do.

So given this, why might taking a test from SharePoint make it less likely that people cheat?

The main reason is that in many organizations, you would not willingly give your SharePoint password to another person. This might give them access to private or financial information (e.g. bonus or salary). It might be a serious breach of your organization’s information security policy. Or it might allow them to take actions as you that could be embarrassing (send emails, fill in forms etc). So in many organizations, if you use SharePoint to authenticate test-takers, it might encourage someone to take the test themselves  and so prevent impersonation, which is one of the main Opportunities for cheating.

Use of SharePoint could also help a little with Rationalization, as it could be part of a fair testing programme, which will make people feel less keen to defraud it. SharePoint probably won’t help much with Motivation, nor with other Opportunities such as content theft or unauthorized aids. If you are interested in learning how to deal with these, as well as more on the fraud triangle, see Questionmark CEO Eric Shepherd’s excellent blog article Assessment Security and How To Reduce Fraud.

If your organization culture allows SharePoint password exchange, then using SharePoint probably won’t help exam security. But if your organization culture is such that people will not easily give their SharePoint password to someone else, then using SharePoint as an entry point to online tests and exams could reduce impersonation and so reduce cheating.

Danny, what is your background?

I started at Elsevier Training (part of the Reed Elsevier group), where we did some early work on PC learning. Then I was one of the co-founders of U&I Learning, which was one of the first Belgian e-learning companies, and I worked there for 12 years. About 2 years ago I joined Xylos, I wanted to broaden my work and one of the systems I wanted to work with was SharePoint.

Is your main interest learning or IT or both?

It’s a bit of both. I started as a system engineer a long time ago, but I became interested in learning. Now I specialize in using technology to enhance the learning for end-users of my customers.

How did you first get involved with SharePoint?

My first contact with SharePoint (2003 version)was at U&I Learning. We needed to implement an internal knowledge platform and SharePoint was the tool we used. Now at Xylos, we are a Microsoft partner, and I have the opportunity to work with SharePoint specialists. We use and implement SharePoint a lot and I have been able to get much more involved with it.

How widely used is SharePoint in Belgium?

Not as widely used as in some countries. Most companies are still running SharePoint 2007 but a lot of companies are installing or migrating to SharePoint 2010. Usually the driver is as a document management application or to replace a file server. That’s the first step that customers use it for.

We would like to see our customers also use SharePoint for learning purposes. This is happening slowly. We do have some implementations that use the SharePoint Learning Kit for instance.

Do you find the SharePoint Learning Kit to be effective?

I often refer to it as “My first steps in learning” for a customer. The only thing they want to do at the beginning is to make a course available and have some tracking on it (who has done it and when). Tracking at the course level is not a basic functionality of SharePoint, so we have to have something that does the tracking for the customer. And the SharePoint Learning Kit can do this and give a very basic, quick report for a few courses.

What kinds of customers are using SharePoint for learning in Belgium?

They are companies in various industries. For instance, we have one in the Chemical sector, they already have SharePoint 2007 and they want to make one or two courses available to everyone. Another company, a worldwide company, is also using SharePoint 2007. And they say, we want to train our sales people, we have new products which are being launched very quickly, we want to put the learning for a new product online.

Did you use any kind of assessments?

For one customer, we built a course using Captivate and Presenter, and there was a small assessment at the end of the course.

What do you think of the future potential of SharePoint for use in learning?

I think it’s huge. We have the new version 2010, it has lots of possibilities, meaning that you have the social part in it now. You have additional metadata functionality. You can create a community, you can add an expert search, you can define expertise, and all these things. If you build it correctly, you can have a mixture of formal and informal learning. What we promote to our customers is “If you use already SharePoint, then all the knowledge within your company is already available via SharePoint. Let’s link these documents, these PowerPoint, whatever they are to a community site where you can have your employees discussing these specific topics.”

We often give the example of information about specific topic like Project Management. You have a site that holds documentation about your PM approach, you can add some learning parts, and you can really build your community based on existing content that is already available.

I also see a lot of value in connecting an LMS (learning management system) with SharePoint. We have an agreement with e2train where we use their LMS. We put our content in it, because the customer wants to know who visits the content and how much time they spend there, and then we build web parts that get the content from the LMS and display it in SharePoint. So the company gets the tracking from the LMS, but the employee has a single portal to access learning.

So the LMS runs on top of SharePoint?

No, it’s a separate system. We run them side by side. We’ve built some web parts which identify the user and gets some content from the LMS and displays it in SharePoint.

So users don’t need to login to the LMS, they go to a specific site in SharePoint and if there is a course in the LMS for the topic they are interested in, the course material is displayed in a web part on that site, so it’s all context driven.

I’ve heard of other companies using SharePoint as a portal into a Learning Management System. Do you think this works well?

Well it depends on the company – what do you really want to know about the learning of the end-user?

If I log in to a course ten times, or if I spend ten hours on a course, that doesn’t mean anything. It just says that I have logged into the course ten times and spent ten hours on it, it doesn’t measure my learning. So if you don’t need that information, you really don’t need a learning management system. You could say, here is the course; take the course, and afterwards do an assessment.

The main reason to have the LMS is for reporting, I call it for “funding purposes”. Here in Belgium, you are able to get some funding from the government if you have a certain number of educational days within the company. Sometimes I talk to a customer and say that if someone visits a course for two hours, it doesn’t say anything about their learning. Did they learn something? We don’t know – the only way to tell is by testing the person – using an assessment.

What do you typically recommend to customers?

Most importantly you have to listen to the customer’s needs!

Do you already have something in place? What do you want to achieve? Do you want to build communities? Do you want to facilitate “informal learning”? Do you want to have formalized learning?

For instance, I was at a customer a few months ago who said they wanted communities of practice for learning. They thought they might need an LMS, but I told them they didn’t need an LMS, SharePoint can do it

So sometimes people think they need an LMS but don’t?

Yes. People often think that if they want to start learning within the company, they need a learning management system. And that’s not always the case. A LMS as the words say will manage your learning, and in a large company where you have lots of courseware going from e-learning to classroom training to documents and other stuff, well then, to cover the management, workflow and the reporting needs, a LMS is very handy. If you don’t need all this, then you could choose something else like SharePoint.

What would be your advice to someone looking at doing informal learning using SharePoint?

First of all, they have to use the latest version, SharePoint 2010. SharePoint 2007 is fine, but there are lots of improvements in the latest version. I would suggest they start with a knowledge site on a specific topic, where they can bundle all the information that’s available and activate the services they require.

You don’t need custom software to get started. Under normal circumstances, we use out of the box SharePoint. We strongly recommend to start using the MySite functionalities. Encourage people to fill in their profile completely with their expertise, things they are interested about, how to contact them etc. The implementation of SharePoint, the MySites functionality and Lync could be, when correctly implemented, a very powerful learning tool.

What about Office 365?

We’re looking at this. We think it would be very powerful for customers to start with Office 365, using SharePoint for learning in the cloud, say with 20-30 users. Then if they like it, they can move the whole company to the cloud or install SharePoint On Premise. However we need to be sure that everything what we put in the cloud can easily be transferred to  On Premise if needed. For the moment, this is a concern.

How do you see the future?

I think lots of companies will start to use SharePoint or other community-content system for learning.

For SharePoint to be really useful, it would be nice if we could have some additional tracking within SharePoint where we can see who clicked on what, what was the contribution of users on topics/forums so you can rate or award people based on the contributions they do.

I think we are not there yet, we still have a long way to go. But things are moving in the right direction.

Thank you Danny. How can people contact you?

I’m on Twitter at @paravolve. And I work at Xylos – www.xylos.com. We have expertise in SharePoint and learning. If someone wants a SharePoint and learning solution, we can help them make it happen.