If you're looking to improve your organization's competency management, you're in the right place! In today's rapidly evolving workforce, it's more important than ever to effectively manage employee skills to stay ahead of the competition and achieve personal and organizational goals.

Governments across Southeast Asia, including Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and the Philippines, place a high priority on competency management. They're continuously developing competency frameworks for civil servants to improve strategic plans and help their workforce. Similarly, multinational organizations prioritize competency frameworks to provide a standard for hiring, training, and managing employees through desirable behaviors and qualities (OECD & ADB, 2019; Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, 2021).

Since performance employee evaluation provides a lot of opportunities in the communication process of an organization, it has become one of the most challenging problems of the employers in this generation. Therefore, it is necessary to be aware of the goals of the organization to clearly give feedback on job expectations, development of learning and other plans, as well as help establish merit-based remuneration adjustment (Brook, n.d.).

And these evaluations sometimes use conventional approaches such as traditional evaluations and manual methods like manual encoding, written exams, and IQ tests and these can be ineffective and time-consuming for evaluators, specifically the Human Resource Department since they are usually the ones in charge of the training of the employees.

Our user-friendly platform offers a solution to these pains and problems – mL PROGRES (Professional Growth Evaluation System) – designed to track employee skills easily, advance employee capabilities, and boost organizational productivity, product quality, and customer satisfaction.

Here are 7 reasons why mL PROGRES can help your organization:

1. Identify skills and gaps. It is really important to continuously monitor the competencies of each employee for constant learning. That is why mL PROGRES extends its hand especially to the Human resource department to identify and monitor the skills and gaps of the employees to develop training programs and other strategies or techniques to improve employee performance and productivity.
   
2. Increase employee engagement. If the employees believe that the organization values and recognizes their talents and competences, they will become more engaged and motivated in their work. Employees can receive a clear grasp of the skills and abilities needed for their position and career growth through mL PROGRES.
   
3. Improve succession planning. To ensure a smooth transition when important positions become vacant, organizations can use mL PROGRES to assist them in identifying high-potential employees and establish succession plans.
   
4. Enhance performance management. mL PROGRES can provide managers with a framework for setting performance goals, monitoring progress, and providing feedback and coaching to employees.
   
5. Support career development. For constant learning improvement, mL PROGRES can help employees identify the skills and competencies they need to advance their careers within the organization.
   
6. Align training and development with business objectives. With the advanced capability of mL PROGRES to generate reports and consolidate data, an organization can align training and development programs with strategic business objectives to ensure that employees are equipped with the skills and competencies needed to achieve organizational goals.
   
7. Increase compliance. mL PROGRES will assist the organization to ensure that employees are properly trained and competent to comply with regulatory requirements and industry standards, helping to reduce the risk of non-compliance and associated legal and financial penalties.

To meet the unique needs of your organization, mL PROGRES offers a customizable and adaptable competency management solution like modified templates, reports as well as its look and feel.

mL PROGRES provides a fresh and effective method of evaluating and enhancing employee competencies helping your organization to achieve your goals. Whether you are a large corporation or a small business, mL PROGRESs will provide a flexible and user-friendly platform for competency management.

Talk to us, and take your teams to the next level.

Updated March 28 2023

Google Classroom is a popular learning management system (LMS) that offers many basic functions. However, if you need more advanced capabilities, you might want to explore what the moodLearning Management System (mLMS) has to offer. Both platforms are excellent for collaborating and creating online classrooms, but the details can make all the difference.

Here are six (6) reasons why you should switch to mLMS:

1. Unlimited Possibilities:

Unlike other learning management systems, mLMS offers many customization options. You can gamify your courses, generate reports for administrators and learning managers, scan for plagiarism (with additional options for word counts, word clouds, readability scores, peer comparisons, and more), and customize your site, courses, and exams without arbitrary restrictions.

With the various options that our mLMS offers, your online classroom will be a space that allows for a more comprehensive and effective approach to education. Some students may learn better through visual aids, while others may prefer interactive activities or discussion forums. With our multidimensional mLMS, you can incorporate a variety of media formats such as videos, images, podcasts, and interactive simulations to cater to different learning styles.

2. Comprehensive Anti-plagiarism System:

mLMS offers a comprehensive anti-plagiarism service that goes beyond just checking for similarities between documents. Our service goes through four different stages of checking – from submission, to peer comparison, to internet and network search, up to the consolidation of results. For instance, don't you wonder how an essay submission could be so different from previous ones in terms of readability? Plagiarism is not just a cut-and-paste business. Those determined to cheat could well use free paraphrasing tools online, so anti-plagiarism scanning should be "wiser" and not just look for similarities between documents. For more details on our approach to plagiarism, you can check out our anti-plagiarism service website.

3. Wide Range of Exam Types:

With mLMS, you can conduct exams with great attention to technical, methodological, organizational, and behavioral aspects of student evaluation. Some of these options include:

• Exam time limitation
• One device limit
• One browser, one tab limit
• Restriction of physical activity
• Restriction of IP
• Different tests per student
• Shuffled questions

We offer a wide range of exam types and evaluation options for teachers to provide a more comprehensive evaluation of student learning. Check the full list here. Organizations on Premium Accounts can also benefit from our experience in deploying Proctorial, a live remote exam proctoring platform that upholds academic integrity.

4. Live Remote Exam Proctoring:

Organizations that opt for a Premium Account on mLMS can enjoy live exam proctoring with access to recordings of the exam proceedings for immediate or later review. Proctors monitor the exam live and those with premium accounts may opt for SMS notifications of events, in addition to email and dashboard notifications. With the limitations of the remote set-up, mLMS makes the way for you to still uphold exam integrity.

5. Data Handling and Ownership:

Are you able to archive your Google Classroom materials, posts, grades, etc. all in one go? With mLMS, you have complete control over your data. You can archive your data all at once. This also makes it easier for you to generate reports from your data, may it be about performance, competencies, or attendance, allowing you to make data-driven decisions to improve instruction and learning outcomes. If you ever decide to switch to another service provider or go entirely DIY, you still get to keep your data.

6. Personalized Site Support:

Is site support important to you? Do you see yourself having humans around to answer your emails and calls? mLMS offers personalized site support. You can count on us to answer your emails and calls promptly and provide the support you need.

With online and blended learning as part of the new normal, it is important to have a multi-dimensional learning management system that is efficient and effective. Our mLMS provides various tools and features that cater to different learning styles, preferences, and needs, while also addressing current problems of our learning system such as cheating issues and plagiarism.

Learn more about the best practices in deploying the moodLearning Management System. Email us at contact@moodlearning.com. We look forward to helping you create engaging and effective online learning experiences.

Something good happened to me during the pandemic. Audiobooks.

Since I had already purchased some equipment for my online classes--a microphone, a webcam--I decided to record an audiobook of the Philippine short stories that I loved.   I did not intend to make it according to some boring lesson plan, as most students are allergic to anything required for classes, but something to be enjoyed, like a piece of music or a movie.  Literature, my philosophy goes, is something to be enjoyed, not rammed down students’ throats like bitter medicine.  The audiobook entitled Philippine Short Story Masterpieces was designed for delight, and test my skill as a story-teller.  I acted as a curator to a gallery of some of the greatest short stories written by Filipinos, at least according to my lights.

I started recording in September and sent it to a friend in UP Diliman who had a team of young people to clean it up and edit it and add transition music.  I finished two months later--all 20 hours of it, 23 short stories with special focus on representative works of National Artists, including my personal critical introduction to each short story.  By January when I learned that I was to teach 4 classes of Philippine literature online, I decided to try it out on my first batch of guinea pigs.

I decided to use the audiobook I’d made only as resource for my students’ final paper.  During the first 2 months I went through the motions of discussing literary selections on a thematic basis--from the self as defined by memory and the past, to relationships within the family, graduating on to love stories and the definition of a national consciousness, the circles of ideas getting wider and wider and ending on a cosmic scale by tackling Filipino religion and spirituality--all through a lens refracted by Philippine poems, essays, and stories.  However, all the story texts from these themes I cherry picked from my audiobook anthology.  By the final month, my students were already familiar with the text of ¼ of the stories in the audiobook, stories that we had already discussed in my online classes.

For their final requirement, I wanted breadth, a historical view of the Filipino experience based on the great short stories of the 20th century.  Depth had already been tackled in the regular sessions, but they would now have to swim for themselves across the 20th century sea of Phil short stories in English.  Enter the audiobook recorded by moi: Phil Short Story Masterpieces.

Before I proceed to tell you how my students took to the experience of listening to an audiobook instead of wallowing in longer durations of zoom fatigue, let me tell you some technological convergences that made me decide to use audiobooks for teaching, especially during the pandemic.

Eight years ago, when I moved to Manila to teach at La Salle, I noticed how almost half of the students walking on campus were plugged in to their cellphones, listening to music.  At first I was a skeptic, thinking that technological gadgets like cellphones were a shallow implement that distracted the dumb young generation from the depth of experience that I so cherished: reading books.  But then urban reality slapped me in the face: kapow! I was faced with three to four-hour traffic jams that saw me cramped inside an SUV van while trying to read a book, my eyeballs jerking with every jolt, all resulting in indescribable headache and a wish to go back to the backwaters of Samar where I came from.  What saved me during these traffic jams, what kept me sane, were audiobooks.  Instead of reading, I started listening, to books that I downloaded from the internet and put in my phone files for traffic listening--including those thick, dense novels called classics that I never got around to reading--War and Peace by Tolstoy, Moby Dick by Melville, Portrait of a Lady by Henry James, and even the first two volumes of Marcel Proust.  Sad to say, they were all foreign books--no Philippine titles.

Eight years ago was also the start of the audiobook boom--in America, in Europe, especially Germany--but not in the Philippines.  Two things made audiobooks come to the fore--the ubiquity of cellphones, and streaming/downloading from the internet.  In the past, audiobooks were inconvenient because they were stored in tapes that came in several volumes and which you had to eject and turn over while listening  during a road trip.  Audiobooks then were associated with blind people opting not to read Braille with their fingers.  Now the digital age had made it possible for a 60-hour audiobook version of War and Peace to be stored in your cellphone and the level of artistry and performance has attracted even famous actors to make dead letters on the page come alive through the human voice.

In the past ten years, audiobook sales have been consistently going up--by an increment of about 15% every year.  Compare this to the consistent decline of sales of print books and even ebooks at a rate of 20% decline every year.  (Fewer and fewer students are checking out print books from the library). Half of the buyers of audiobooks nowadays are young people, not visually challenged old fogeys like me.  Clearly there is a demographic shift in the consumption of literature going on, and as literature teachers, no matter how hard we cling on to that dog-eared copy of the novel we loved in college, we cannot disregard the fact that the times, indeed, are a-changing.  If, in my abstract I said that audiobooks are the wave of the future, I say it’s high time for us to ride the wave.

So what did my students say about their audiobook experience?  For almost all of them, it was their first time to listen to an audiobook, so they started like me in an attitude of skepticism.  I had asked them to write very short capsule reviews for each story in the audiobook anthology, ending with their choice of Top 10, with explanation on why they liked them.  This was to make them exercise critical judgment, not merely to passively listen.  Only 3 out of 180 had a previous experience of listening to an audiobook.  Here are some relevant comments ranging from the cautiously sober to the over-the-top exercise of academic flattery:

"I want to point out that this was the first time I've tried listening to an audiobook and it very much felt like a podcast that I have tried before. I had to adjust at first because I was more of a visual  learner/reader but after listening to about one to two stories, I already got used to it and was able to multitask while listening to the various pieces. I was pleasantly surprised because of how effective and convenient the medium is. I also enjoyed how each story was narrated because there are portions in each story which was better heard than simply read. I was easily able to pick up the emotions of some of the characters simply based on the tone of the reader which served as a helpful guide in navigating some of the confusing and non-linear stories. Despite being a paid audiobook, I would highly recommend this to other students because there are many Filipino short stories out there that need to be heard and appreciated."

And another one:

"I would definitely recommend this to other students because not only do I find it more effective than reading, but it is also convenient at times. I sometimes find my eyes hurting when looking at a screen for too long. I do not need to look at a screen when listening to an audiobook. Audiobooks are also good for those who cannot bother to move their eyes from left to right reading. Overall, I find listening to this audiobook better than reading the short stories themselves. Not only does it bring nostalgia when stories used to be read to me, but it is also effective at setting the mood and tone for the reader and can be done during commute at the MRT/LRT."

The most florid review was this one:

"Being stuck and saddened by the ongoing lockdown in these trying times, I find our audiobook to be a breath of fresh air and a sweet aroma to my heart as the stories are embedded with a roller-coaster series of emotions and Filipino cultures. Starting off with the first story, I was already hooked and attracted to the romantic yet sad story as it slowly captures my heart."

And so on and so forth.  Already my audiobook of Philippine Short Story Masterpieces released three months ago has more than 60 reviews online, and if I believe what my students wrote there I would say I deserve to be cast up to a heaven for literature teachers.

I must however say that like any art form, audiobooks are not for everyone.  Two of my students expressly said they did not like the experience and still preferred the written text.  Toward this end, I decided to include a free accompanying text, to be bundled with every download, all at 300 pesos.  The text will also be convenient to use by teachers who might decide to use particular selections for classroom discussion.  This is cheaper than any anthology or traditional textbook that I know of.

I was so inspired by this vanity project that after finishing the audiobook I went on to record Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo to see if I was up to the dramatic challenge of making Rizal’s novels come to life.  This was followed by two more volumes of Contemporary Philippine Short Stories, this time covering only the last 30 years.

My friend in UP decided to create an online platform for my audiobooks, and bought an exclusive domain on the internet called “literature.ph”.  Please visit it.  It is meant to make educational materials in our country accessible to teachers and students wherever they may be.  At first I felt lonely because my audiobook was the only title there, but since then we have been campaigning for other Filipino writers to put their works there either as audiobooks or ebooks.  Already I have been joined there by Eugene Evasco, the writer of Philippine children’s stories, and he was able to get showbiz celebrities like Eugene Domingo and Cherry Pie Picache to turn his stories into audiobooks.  It's not exactly a wave yet, but we’ve started to surf it.

Come join us.  Let us catapult Philippine literature towards a future where students will still find it in them to hold Phil literature close to their hearts.  If you are a literature teacher, lead your students to the water so they can drink for themselves.  Better yet try it out yourself first.  If you are a writer, think of how your literary works can reach more people during the digital age.

Join us in our campaign.  Literature.ph.

With apologies to the Department of Tourism, I’d like to end by saying: “Pilipinas, Tara Na!”

Updated March 29, 2023

Intellectual dishonesty such as plagiarism comes in many shapes and forms. One of the most obvious and brazen forms of plagiarism is copying someone else's work and passing it off as your own. Sure, it is easy to plagiarize, but these days, with technological advances such as Google, it's also easier to detect plagiarized work. It’s the more sophisticated forms of plagiarism, such as rephrased (but uncited) resources or materials sourced from the analog world, that make plagiarism harder to detect.

Fortunately, for as long as the submitted material is electronic, there’s always a way to determine whether a submission is plagiarized or not. You can also look at readability levels,sentence construction, or even examine specific phrases to compare with other materials previously submitted by other students. There are many plagiarism detectors, but the moodLearning Anti-plagiarism tool (mLaP) is one of the exceptional tools that educators and institutions can use.

mLaP is an innovative tool that automates the routine part of screening for copied parts of submitted documents. The mLaP tool goes through four steps:

• Step 1: Submission

A work or an assignment is submitted in any of the following file formats: txt, pdf, doc, docx, odt, rtf, txt, cpp, java. In Moodle, this is done via the Assignment activity of the course.

• Step 2: Peer Comparison

When a paper is submitted, it undergoes hashing or "fingerprinting" to create its unique identity. The resulting “identity” is compared with other fingerprints from other submissions.

• Step 3a: Internet Search

After Stage 2, the submitted work is compared with online materials that have been indexed by a search engine, regardless of the outcome. Currently, the reference search engine is Bing.

• Step 3b: Network Search

To enhance the search process, an additional layer of search is done with the moodLearning Native Search (mLaPNS) indexing particular networks or domains. This feature also allows individuals or organizations outside of any learning management system to upload documents that can be used as a reference or added to the database. See also use-cases-of-mlap-native-search

• Step 4: Results

Finally, the results from comparisons done in Stages 2 - 3 are consolidated and displayed as percentages of similarities. Such results should enable the evaluator of materials to determine whether plagiarism has occurred.

As can be seen from the steps above, you can compare students’ submitted work with the materials submitted by their fellow students as well as compare it with the vast amount of materials available online. Somehow, the evaluators or the teachers must have the confidence in their own ability to flag plagiarized work.

Such confidence (or lack of it) is only probabilistic. At what percentage of the whole document would prove conclusive that it is plagiarized? 10%, 30%, 50%, 70%? The higher the percentage of similarities between the submitted document and other previously submitted documents (whether online or those submitted by their fellow students), the stronger is the teacher’s confidence that the submission is plagiarized. It’s the lower numbers that may prove to be rather tricky – and it’s never an exact science.

Like any probabilistic tools, plagiarism-detection apps are bound to yield either false positive or negative results. It can either tell us there’s a likelihood of plagiarism where there’s none, or tell us there’s no plagiarism when there’s one in fact. (See, for instance, this piece from Inside Higher Ed)

One of the key advantages of using mLaP is that it automates the routine part of screening for copied parts of submitted documents, saving teachers and raters time and effort. This allows them to focus on more important aspects of their work, such as engaging with students and providing constructive feedback.

Another positive aspect of mLap is that it can help create a culture of academic integrity by providing students with clear and objective feedback on their work. Processes or systems can be put in place where students do not have to plagiarize any material. Do you see gradual progress between this version and the later versions? Or do you see a sudden improvement in a student’s “eloquence” that may need a second look at his work? By using mLaP to screen for plagiarism, teachers and raters can ensure that students understand the importance of originality and attribution and encourage them to develop good habits that will serve them well throughout their academic and professional careers.

This is the kind of context where plagiarism detection is properly put. The moodLearning anti-plagiarism (mLaP) tool offers several advantages which is explained in more detail here:

• Unlimited number of users. Unlike many other commercial services, the mLaP Service does not limit the number of users. It comes bundled with the service contract with moodLearning.
• Combined power of major search engines. Using the results from major search engines like Bing, the mLaP Service searches the Internet for similar documents to be compared with student submitted documents, to check for possible plagiarism.
• Integrated search. The mLaP Service is embedded right in the settings of Assignment submission, thus avoiding the added task of submitting or cutting-and-pasting student papers in third-party online portals.
• Intellectual Property (IP) Control. The partner institution keeps the control or ownership of IP of submitted documents from its constituents. These files do not leave the institution's installation.
• Native search engine. In addition to the combined power of major search engines, the mLaP Service has its own powerful network search engine (moodLearning Search) that can be used to index contents found within a particular network or domain.
• Privacy support. The mLaP service provides privacy support to submitters of documents.To guarantee the safety and security of personal data, mLaP uses SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) encryption to protect student data during transmission from the user's computer to the mLaP server and stores all submissions in a secure data center that is monitored 24/7. Compared with the leading plagiarism scanner in the market, mLaP cannot be far behind either.

In conclusion, the moodLearning anti-plagiarism (mLap) tool is a powerful and valuable resource for educators, students, and researchers alike. By leveraging its capabilities to identify instances of plagiarism and promote academic integrity, we can create a more honest, ethical, and productive learning environment for everyone.

Do you think an anti-plagiarism service like mLaP needs to be integrated into your own learning management system? Talk to us at moodLearning (contact@moodlearning.com).

How and why do people cheat? Most (if not all) people would like to think of themselves as honest. But why are exams designed as if people are cheaters? How do otherwise honest individuals inevitably end up in certain situations in which they’re more likely to cheat? In an exam? Online exam?

For edtech practitioners and advocates like us at moodLearning, learning why we cheat might help us avoid the temptation of cheating or at least not help incentivize the behavior among ourselves. However, if the question is all about the hows and whys of cheating, we might just as well send you down the work of psychologist and behavioral economist Dan Ariely as a good place to start. There we'd learn more about things like feeling disconnected from the consequences or when our willpower is depleted, can lead us down to a cheater's path, however we put ourselves in high regard.

In any case, even after reading about the whys and hows of cheating, you still feel the need for a toolbox to help prevent cheating, especially in online exams, then you could put our work to good use. At moodLearning, we recognize that online cheating is a complex behavior. Yet, we definitely can help not incentivize it in at least one narrow area of online test taking.

What we propose is the use of an arsenal of measures, including technical, organizational, methodological, and behavioral--fine-tuning them according to the needs of specific exams for particular test-takers. Most of these measures could well fall outside the exam itself. Hence, the need to orchestrate the conduct collaboratively. The level of "strictness" would depend on what the exam exercise is all about, what goals to achieve, or how "trusting" the teacher or proctor is.

If you're on a moodLearning-supported learning management system, you have at your disposal at least all the technical measures indicated in this infographic:

For instance, using Safe Exam Browser, you can implement an exam lockdown: only one access device is allowed, only one browser can be used (with only one tab available), only one screen allowed. You can force fullscreen and have printing, download, and clipboard disabled, cache cleared, or external storage device disallowed. If the test taker logs out, you may disallow re-entry. You can even force the test taker to signify adherence to an Honor Code.

We certainly do not recommend relying solely on technical means to thwart cheating. What competences do you expect to measure with the exam? What kind of people or professionals do you expect to come out of your training program and exams? While the technical measures would give you a semblance of "strictness", at the end of the day, what the exam is about and what it seeks to achieve are all that matter.

It all came so fast. A virus that months ago didn't even have an official name, is now infecting hundreds of thousands of people and has become a global pandemic. In the Philippines, the COVID-19 disease triggered a Metro Manila-wide "community quarantine", which turned into a Luzon-wide "enhanced community quarantine" and, more ominously in some areas, an "extreme enhanced community quarantine". Now it's a national disaster and emergency, causing total lockdown, fear and anxiety (if not panic).  

Cancellation of classes ensued. Initially teachers were "forced" to hold online classes. Later, directives for online classes were themselves cancelled because, oh in case some people forgot, teachers and students have to prioritize their own safety and survival.

Pieces like "a quick guide on conducting online classes", "how to use Zoom, Google Meet, Google Classroom" and what-have-yous were passed around among teachers, grappling with the shock of "losing" the brick-and-mortar shop of a classroom due to a pandemic.

For teachers who have traditionally been conducting face-to-face classes, the mission to shift to online classes is rather daunting. They have to pour over tons of guides and how-tos. The Chronicle of Higher Education has a 32-page issue on "Moving Online Now: How to keep teaching during coronavirus". Consider this sampling of guides being passed around:

• "Teaching Effectively During Times of Disruption, for SIS and PWR"
• "Collected Resources on Digital Tools and Uses"
• "Considerations for Instructional Continuity"
• "Thoughts & Resources for Those About to Start Teaching Online Due to COVID-19"
• "Pedagogy in the time of an epidemic"
• "Online Teaching with the most basic of tools – email"

The struggle is real. As you can see, many of these documents have been hastily put together as a response to the crisis. That's not even saying anything on the "tech stuff" (trying out various video recording apps, video conferencing platforms, chat platforms, etc.) teachers and students have to grapple with. No doubt many of these otherwise face-to-face classes would largely succeed in completing their work online. As result of the exercise, some teachers would discover, love and embrace the power of online teaching and learning. But others could find themselves lost.

This is where our team at moodLearning would want to help. While we benefit from the increased demand of eLearning services, we empathize with those who are lost in translation. In moving from the physical classroom to the online, there's much to be done to ensure online learning isn't simply "pantakip-butas" to the academic calendar.

While the crisis, indeed, compels us to move online, there's an argument to be made that even in normal times, those predominantly face-t0-face classes could well use an online learning management system. It's not online vs. offline, and that "online" wins when there's a quarantine and lockdown. A better response to a crisis isn't going online only when there's COVID-19 (or goodness knows what else is in store for us) but to have the necessary infrastructure and thoughtful practice for online learning--even as we maintain residential classes during periods of "normalcy".

So moodLearning is here for the long haul.

Unlike traditional face-to-face courses in physical classrooms, online courses entail labor-intensive development processes. Online course development is a collaborative enterprise among various talents (e.g., content providers, course developers, learning managers, videographers, graphic artists, illustrators, analysts). Team members must be in constant communication throughout the whole process to keep them on the same page. To help your team get to that page, here's a workflow consisting of six simple steps to guide you in developing an online course.

1. Design/Plan

Planning or designing the course is perhaps the most crucial step in developing an online course. In planning the course, you must first begin with an end in mind. What do you want the students to learn at the end of the course? Create a big picture of your online course, then break it down into smaller chunks or modules. Arrange the modules according to your chosen instructional strategy and determine how long each module should take. Include in your plans an overview of all the activities in the course. By this time, you should already have an idea about the kind of audience you intend to reach. So you know how to pace the course well and improve on its "digestibility". Put together such plan and design in the form of a comprehensive course blueprint (sample here).

2. Module Scripts

Content providers can start writing the scripts of specific modules after creating the course blueprint. As you write the learning objectives for each module, indicate how you want your students to demonstrate competence based on specific learning objectives. Doing so communicates to the students what they should expect in the course. The modules must be readable, easily understandable; the relationship across modules also be made clear. A high quality online course would consider substantive interaction between students and teachers. A student might feel distant or unmotivated if the teacher's presence isn't felt throughout the course. Phrase module content such that it is interactive and motivational to encourage your students to participate. So your scripts must have these things well considered.

3. Lesson and Module Development

This is where developers have to focus on transforming the scripts and storyboards into media-rich lessons and modules. Having a good course blueprint is one thing. But without the actual skilled people who can wield "magic" on the materials and render them LMS-ready and fit for online consumption, your labors would be for naught. These lessons and modules have to be integrated into standards-based elearning packages as well that you can deploy to different learning management systems (LMS).

4. Quizzes and Evaluation

In some other workflow, you'll see this part being subsumed in the "development" stage. But I feel that this should be a stage on its own. This is the part wherein the teacher evaluates students’ mastery of the course. The evaluation part of the course is essential to assess its effectiveness. Exercises may be simple question-and-answers (Q&As), discussion prompts, essays, student presentations, etc. Make sure that the quizzes and other assessment exercises are consistent with the course objectives and the overall course design. You may provide incentives to students when they finish a quiz or an evaluation activity.

5. Testing

Before deployment, you will have to make sure that your product works perfectly well. Conduct a pilot test of the online course among the development team, consultants and beta testers (preferably students with similar or the same profile as those of the target audience). Test the product’s usability and its functionality on different browsers. Run a survey or a focus group discussion with your beta testers, and quiz them about the site's ease-of-use, the course's accessibility, its materials' readability. Make the necessary adjustments according to the comments of your testers.

6. Deployment and Monitoring

Once everything gets tested and ready, the course can finally be deployed to intended audience or students. Make room for improvements and be alert to student feedback on usability and revise the course elements accordingly. Direct solicitation of user feedbacks can be done. You may also monitor learning management system logs and activity reports. Set up discussion forums and survey form in the package to hear comments directly from the students themselves.

The line you see in the workflow illustration above is just made up for simplicity. In reality, there's no linear path to creating an online course. The steps are all inter-connected. A step tends to loop back to earlier steps. However complex the process may be, it's definitely not an impossible task. Talk to us at moodLearning. We'll help you get started with your online courses.

When two organizations wish to do business with each other, a contract is needed to specify the activities both parties enter into and the terms by which they will deliver their parts of the agreement. Poorly phrased contracts can cost a company a huge amount of money over some technicality. Hence, even for small companies, managing these contracts might seem a big deal. But, imagine if you have to deal with tens or hundreds of contracts with suppliers and clients. Will you be able to keep track of deliverables and other terms of contracts? Will you be able to fulfill your obligations and ensure that your rights are enforced faithfully throughout the duration of the project or even beyond?

Why Contract Management System?

Contracts ought not to be mysterious. Nor should be their management. These tenets can guide us in forging a better contract management system:

• Business rules are effectively enforced. A contract management system minimizes errors that a company can make. Through such management, resources can be saved, and errors and potential penalties can be avoided. It enables the faithful adherence to business rules.

• Risks are carefully assessed and managed. Legal, financial, procurement, and logistical risks need to be mitigated and managed to pave the way to greater profitability. In contract management, risk is an uncertainty of outcome, whether it's a positive opportunity or a negative threat. These are managed by identifying and controlling the factors that may have an impact on the fulfillment of the contract.

• Requirements are duly complied with. Legal requirements, company policies, and client requirements are kept track continuously to ensure compliance to the deliverables at hand. Through a contract management system, the duties and responsibilities of both parties are efficiently enforced.

• Expected revenue is accurately forecasted. Successful contract management reflects its impact on revenues, since it is through revenue forecasts that financial risks are assessed and ultimately managed.

• Billing and collection are efficiently done. In dealing with multiple contracts, a company can't afford to let minute details slip through the cracks. Payables and receivables must be kept on the right track.

• Intellectual properties (IP) are protected. Contracts must address the IP issues that are needed to run activities smoothly to make sure that they are done in a lawful manner.

• Chances of renewal are improved. To ensure that contracts are tailored to the changes in a client's business, a contract renewal is often needed, and duly fulfilling your obligations may boost your way to success.

Taking stock of these tenets should permeat throughout the enterprise, observing them at every level of a contract lifecycle.

Contract Lifecycle

Contract lifecycle management is done in order to track and assess success factors in every stage of a contract's life cycle (from initiation to renewal to expiration). Each "stage" appears to have its own unique set of characteristics. At moodLearning, we tend to get rid of excess fats in the spirit of keeping our processes simple and our organization lean. Here's how we do it in terms of stages. These, however, can be customized by our clients to tailor to their needs.

• Assemble. All papers or documents relevant to the creation of a particular contract (e.g., business requirements from the client, previous similar contracts, etc.) are put together. This is preferably done through a document management system. The right references and expertise for the task must be assembled. The point person for this step would be someone from your support staff.

• Create. A contract is created using a company template resulting from the cumulative experience in selling and supporting a particular company, product or service. New contracts need fresh input from business and project managers, especially on resources needed for better project estimates and project execution. It's also an opportunity to take a fresh look at pro forma clauses, terms and conditions. Special attention should be given to delivery schedules, reports, and dependencies.

• Analyze. Information or data that are specifically important to the contract creation at hand are accounted for. Also considered are identified milestones, enforcible rights, and demandable obligations, etc. In this stage, inputs are needed from business and project managers.

• Review and Revise, Approve and Sign. No such thing as instantly perfect document, contract or otherwise. Make sure that contracts are reviewed and revised. Then they must be approved and signed by the right people. A review workflow needs to be established beforehand. It is useful that these contracts be reviewed with a fresh eye that is familiar with business and competing products and services.

• Implement. A duly signed and notarized contract document is sent to respective parties for implementation. At this stage, a document manager needs to validate the controlling copy of the contract whose project deliverables are communicated to the project managers on both the moodLearning and the client sides.

• Track. Risks, deliverables, milestones, payments, and renewal or termination schedules are tracked. An alert system must also be developed especially for time-sensitive risks. Indicators are put in place to trigger renewal or archival of contracts. If the former, the cycle goes back to the Create and Analyze stages to check for qualitative contextual changes that may impact the terms of the contract.

In the end, contracts are only as good as those who abide by their terms or enforce them. But a tool like our Contract Management System can make all the difference in the ease with which we are governed by the contracts we enter into. Such system can help us monitor and abide by the terms of contracts more faithfully.

Talk to us at moodLearning if you feel you need help in managing your contracts.

Some months ago, my colleague Kim wrote about SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model) and gave us some useful tips on deploying SCORM packages for eLearning platforms. The reality, however, is that producing such learning packages remains heavily dependent on authoring applications that, although available off the shelf, still take some time for many organizations to master before they could produce respectable interactive packages. With high expectactions for many sectors to have the "nice and shiny" and the insistence of some folks on what their "brands" entail in the "look and feel" department of eLearning, lousy SCORM packages just won't cut it at all.

The SCORM standard itself (perhaps more accurately, a collection of standards) is rather old. With its roots back in the 1990s in the U.S. Department of Defense's offline computer-based training, SCORM has evolved over years to be an online course deployment standard as well.* More recently, "rival" standards have emerged. "Experience API" ("xAPI", aka "Tin Can API"), for instance, came about to provide tracking for learning across content providers. Know more about xAPI here. xAPI's proponents waste no time reminding us of its many benefits.

Expectedly the politics around standards couldn't be less energetic. See, for instance, this post. For this blog, we'll try to stay out of it. It doesn't help that SCORM packages done using different authoring software are replete with quirks. In the able hands of some developers and project managers, however, these quirks do not have to be too annoying.

Still, for no small reasons, people are taking a long time to adopt to more advanced versions of the standard. Version 1 of xAPI came in 2013. Look where we are at with that right now!

One can make the argument that xAPI is still SCORM. But in the minds of old folks, SCORM is just their old stand-alone package (online or offline), oblivious to the need for its real-time trackability by learning managers and content providers. Truth be told, the people we talked to across industries, those who actually pay for the development of interactive materials, still do not find xAPI's functionalities compeling enough for them to shift away from the "classic" SCORM. While compatibility across learning management platforms is given lip service, most people in our melieu are content with their good-ol'-fashioned SCORM packages (on version 1.2, circa 2001) playing on their trusty learning management system (LMS).

So where does that leave us? One alternative to consider is to deliver lectures via videos. No interaction within the video itself? This much you see in the MOOCs^ scene these days, with providers as diverse as EdX, Coursera, and the like. Keep the videos short and have them interspersed with interactive activities. Otherwise, flat visuals are all you have. And for many courses this approach works. Unless you still feel the need for these short videos to be jazzed up with illustrations and graphics.

The problem with videos is that not that many people organic to the institution can do them well. What you often see are awkward people "acting" before the cam. Mostly we see talking heads. Obviously the alternative to the alternative is to have the video production outsourced to some media company, which in itself is no guarantee for good learning outcome.

The challenge doesn't end here. Added to SCORM, xAPI, and videos is the possible use of the Common Cartridge (CC) Standard. With CC, contents are supposed to be compatible with each other, regardless of which LMS you are using. Know more about CC here. There are other standards out there (see, for example, this roadmap), and using one does not necessarily mean the exclusion of the others. For instance, CC can use SCORM as part of its packaging. The differences between standards largely have to do with which aspects of the learning experience is emphasized.

So "to SCORM or not to SCORM"? To use an old (but tried and well-adopted) standard or to try a new promising one? Certainly not a simple either/or question. Which standard gets widely adopted and dominates eLearning, is partly a function of which tools get deployed widely. It's not necessarily about which standard is superior but which standard (or combination of standards) people find appropriate in their own contexts, given whichever tools are working "naturally" in the organization's workflow.

At the end of the day, learning managers do not always have the luxury of waiting for the better standards to emerge clearly as "winner" before they run eLearning. Deployment started yesterday and, today, there's more demand for interactive materials online.

Should you persist with the production SCORM packages for your organization, make sure you publish them in HTML5 format, as opposed to Flash. The fate of the later is dim. Google Chrome, for one, will end its support for Flash by December 2020. But HTML5 is well supported on various platforms; it's going to be around in the foreseeable future.

Experimentation on the adoption of standards is not always a luxury for many but, to the extent feasible in our own contexts, it should be a duty for all of us. Standards are a means to an end. Insofar as we try out new things to be more efficient and effective, we experiment with new standards. It's a balance between "the usual" and taking eLearning to new heights.

We at moodLearning help our partners make informed decisions as to what standards to adopt. We also provide the requisite tech support services for you to accomplish your mission in eLearning.

Left unchecked, information technology (IT) can be a runaway beast. Underdeveloped, IT infrastructure can be a waste of meager resources, as it nonetheless falls short of its intended impact on the business or organization. It is also an area of potential demoralization among the rank-and-file employees, who are left short of the necessary business tools. A middle ground needs to be struck between "overly developed" IT Department with so much gears to play with on one hand and, on the other hand, an underfunded, under-prioritized group. Filling in the gaps between these two extremes is outsourced technology support. It is desirable for the following reasons:

Cost

With tech support outsourced, operational costs should be in your greater control. Tech service providers like moodLearning would generally offer predictable utilization structures like yearly plans. That's one cost directly associated with the tech side of your operations. No more overheads like staffing, overtime pays, extra utilities, software licenses. It means just one or a few line items in your budget or financial statement. Clear sight of cost, greater control.

Focus

Anecdotes abound on how business meetings turned into tech porn digressions. Refocus on business mission and functions. Technology is a necessity for most modern businesses but it shouldn't take too much of your energies. Obsolescence plagues technology, which probably is beyond what your organization can deal with efficiently. With tech support outsourced, technology management is left to those who should be better at dealing with its coming and going.

Better resources

The best and newest tech is often pricey. Watch your IT department make a pitch for it! The reality, however, is that the newest tech is not necessarily better or more appropriate for your organization. A vast majority of small and medium-sized businesses may not even need the latest technologies. What you might just need is a bundle of tech services that simplify the resource allocation for your organization. The bonus here is the wealth of experiences your well-vetted tech service providers have in dealing with challenges confronting your business.

No more than what you can chew

If you are like most small to medium companies, you only have a few staff designated as all-around tech experts. Infotech may not even be their main role or responsibility. It could be that you and your colleagues simply lack the knowledge and experience required to run increasingly complex technical systems. The employees at tech support companies like moodLearning eat, sleep and breathe technology. They provide enterprise-level IT support and knowledge. Take no more than what you can chew, and outsource tech services that are beyond your current expertise.

Risk management

While outsourcing tech services has its own risks, direct risks from technological obsolescence, equipment failures, human errors are better managed when tech management is left to experts. The relative value of one technological approach over another, costs, software, hardware, peopleware present a different dimension to enterprise risk management. Lengthy downtime, lost data, business disruptions due tech failures are risks that are best handled by people in the know, and they are not necessarily from your IT department.

As your business may only be starting to build its IT department, it is entirely plausible that such department is cheaper than a service contract with a tech service provider. But if you factor in the fact that IT departments tend to to seek department growth REGARDLESS of your organization's real needs, then in the mid- to long run, don't be surprised if you end up maintaining a mammoth. The cost of purchasing technology, maintaining it, tech failure recovery cost, the cost of retaining an internal IT team will skyrocket before you can be bothered to control it.

When you hear the word "eLibrary", what comes to mind? Computers, internet, books? Materials stored electronically? All of the above. And more! An eLibrary is an amazing creation that enables you to do research and save time going to a real library and browsing a mountain of books.

An eLibrary is not meant to replace "real" physical libraries. But for schools, teachers, and students in remote areas, however, an electronic library can possibly be the only access to a comprehensive collection of learning materials. Rural schools may not even have enough "real" physical books, to begin with. Here moodLearning and project partners like Tambayayong Mainit, Inc. (TMI) answer to the call of providing such platform, especially in places where the internet is spotty or non-existent. Learning resources could be donated by sponsors and other project partners. Focused on K-12 and secondary education, the eLibrary project is meant to be a support system for less-privileged schools.

The Project is by no means a dole-out. It is a people-centric undertaking of the eLibrary Project Partnership, a collaboration between the school and the eLibrary Project champions (Project Sponsors, Technology Providers, and Partner Schools). The primary goal of this partnership is to enhance the entire education experience of students and teachers. Providing the technology and hardware for the eLibrary System to the school is just secondary to the partnership for an engaging, responsive education.

The Project Sponsors provide the necessary hardware for the deployment of the eLibrary System. They have to supply the server, for a school that already has a local area network (LAN), some workstations, and a wifi access point (WAP). They also have to spend for the transportation and accommodation of the Technology Providers.

The setup of the eLibrary System at the school and the pre-deployment preparations are done by the Technology Providers. Tech providers need to collaborate with local institutions with people capable of supporting the project technically. Additionally, they must be able to provide training for the school's faculty on the use of the eLibrary System and to demonstrate how the eLibrary might be integrated into every facet of learning at the school.

With the eLibrary System, less-privileged schools can have a better teaching and learning experience. All they need to do is integrate the eLibrary System into their curricular and extra-curricular activities. Just let teachers be teachers; students, students! In rural areas, the eLibrary is the next best thing to a full endowement of educational resources. But without the Partnership, the eLibrary is just another infrastructure project.

For more details on the eLibrary program, contact moodLearning or partner orgs like TMI.

Want a convenient way of managing your organization's human resources? Payroll? Check. Time and attendance? Check. Personnel profiles, training, leave management, performance evaluation? All checked, all covered by the peopleSuite Human Resources Information System (HRIS).

What an HRIS does best is the simplification (if not eradication) of paperwork relating to human resource management. But the game changer could really be the integration of the devices that keep track of the "little things" for the system.

Biometric or RFID devices keep records for Time and Attendance. But almost always there are people in your organization personally eyeballing these records for "verification" or manually entering, cutting-and-parting them into the system for the purpose of computing the payroll.

The good news is none of that sort needs to be done with peopleSuite (pS) . pS comes with the peopleSuite middleware that does the integration of devices for the HRIS. As long the devices are connected to the network, biometric information gets transmitted to peopleSuite. If and when the network connection becomes temporarily unavailable, the devices can keep the data and the peopleSuite middleware will later pick up where data aggregation lefts off.

In a word: convenience. Gone are the days when employees have to use log books and attendance cards as their daily time record (DTR). The middleware does the "magic" now by automatically collecting and sorting DTRs from devices.

Does your organization have multiple sites, with multiple devices in multiple building entrances and exits? No worries. The pS middleware will do the "hard work" for you by aggregating the data into a coherent individualized DTR.

From there, viola!, payroll. It means time and money saved by your organization. With the quick aggregation of biometric data using pS middleware, HRIS is on steroids!

To know more about peopleSuite, contact moodLearning.

With millions of takers from all over the world, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are not only massive in reach. The way resources are mobilized for such undertaking is massive, too. Heavyweights like Harvard, MIT, Stanford are running MOOCs. But even with massive resources, MOOCs are hardly able to reach those potential learners in the peripheries of the digital world.

For those relatively well connected online, MOOCs are a boon to learning. Locals are able to access courses (and, for a fee, get certificates from brand name universities and other providers) that are otherwise unavailable from local training institutions. With MOOCs, a student on-the-go can learn with the use of a smartphone or tablet. So who can take up MOOCs? Anyone who desires or thirsts for knowledge but otherwise unable to attend regular classes at a local university. The preference for online learning is also factor. The operative word here is "online".

However, for those in the digital Third World (or for the optimists, "developing world"), MOOCs are practically a non-event. Current successful MOOC implementations involve mostly participants from developed countries, those with college degrees and even graduate education (Gais 2014). MOOCs have yet to make a real difference in the developing world.

How could people from the digital Third World tap into MOOCs? Fret not. Even in regions where internet connections are scarce, the will to go beyond the usual modalities of learning helps fill in the gaps. If there's a will, there's low-tech way as well. It's a slow throttle, but: Will + Technology wins the day!

Consider, for the instance, the use of a Portable eLearning System (PeLS). The thought of USB drives being distributed to MOOC participants isn't exactly anyone's idea of a "massive online" thing. But in places where the interweb is at best spotty, what choices do we really have? PeLS could be a massively cumbersome exercise, but, hey!, there's always reason to persevere.

Even good innovations backed by big institutions experience headwinds at some point. In the case of MOOCs, a low completion rate--in many cases as low as 10% only (Pope 2014)--plagues their implementation. Paradoxically, the solution could be some complementary offline access like PeLS, at least for those in the digital peripheries.

MOOC pioneers had it wrong when they thought MOOCs would soon impel the educational system. Not all MOOCs students take the time to finish the course. Some just browse or absorb only the materials they are interested in. Others are not yet ready to tackle complex online curriculum.* In the peripheries, completing a MOOC is daunting. But the flexibility neeeded in online learning could get some boost from "low tech" interventions like PeLS.

Nowadays the demand for online learning is growing by leaps and bounds. Specially for young people, learning online is generally more appealing than many car traffic-wading, face-to-face instructional modules. Many professionals prefer using online learning tools in conducting training and seminars. However, with different learning platforms, it is difficult to find a software that can ensure online compatibility and re-usability.

Creating an online training material can be time-consuming and costly. Having these limitations in mind, the American ADL (Advanced Distributed Learning) Initiative produced the Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) to help address the challenges that organizations face in creating eLearning contents.

SCORM serves as the bridge for courses and Learning Management System (LMS) to communicate with each other properly. It is a well-known standard in creating online contents that can now be viewed in various SCORM-compliant Learning Management System (LMS) with convenient accessibility for the users.

To further grasp SCORM, let us break down its meaning:
Sharable Content (SC) is a course or module which can be shared with ease with anyone. Object (O) is the lesson in the SCORM course that is adapted for the benefit of the learners. Reference Model (RM) refers to the standard developed over the years in delivering SC.

A lesson in eLearning content is actually the Sharable Content Object (SCO) and uploaded to any SCORM-compliant LMS. Imagine that you are working on a jigsaw puzzle. The pieces are your lesson modules and activities, which you are trying to piece together so that the whole lesson can be completed.

Identify your learners first before creating your SCORM compatible template so you will know how to design it. Put yourself in the learner's perspective. Keep in mind the possible internet connections and web browsers your learners will use so the SCORM package will function correctly.

Here are some tips to consider when "SCORM-ing" or creating a SCORM package for eLearning:

1. Look for a SCORM-compliant authoring tool (some list here), noting that some of these high-end tools can be expensive. There are also free and open source authoring tools (Examples: eXe eXeLearning, RELOAD). Pick the ones appropriate for your needs.
2. Always consider packaging your content in SCORM 1.2 standard, the most portable version that can also be played using various web browsers. This helps ensure compatibility with older players.
3. Test the SCORM package with the end-user in mind. The outcome should always be aligned with the end user's needs.
4. Specially for places with spotty network connection, keep the SCORM package under 50MB for faster access and ease of use. This is to ensure that the user or learner can access the content without delays or interruptions.
5. Double check the computations of quiz scores because that can also be used for record purposes during offline engagement.
6. Include appropriate text, audio narration, and 2D animation if possible. These will keep the learners more engaged in the modules. The graphics can help keep the learner's attention.

Need a SCORM learning package for your organization or for your training and seminar? Help is just around the corner. Visit moodLearning.