Dojolearning - Haheee-ya!
Aug 14, 2008 Social Learning SIG
The hidden sauce with most of the Web 2.0 / social media craze is LEARNING. I don’t think people get that. Whether it is about someone, something, or they want to have a discussion or keep up on the latest & greatest or a combination of all of the above. Very little of the companies get this and none that I have seen have taken their solution from a learning perspective from the beginning. Usually it is “We have a product. Oh ya, and you can learn with it, too.” But it is not focused on learning.
Dojo Learning is different. They recognized this and started with learning. Now please realize that not every web 2.0 solution has every aspect of web 2.0 functionality. That is because they are (usually) focused to accomplish tasks which shouldn’t use every bit of new technology. And that is OK. Dojo Learning is similar. It doesn’t have everything you might think of when you hear “social learning.” It is more of a course creation product with elements of social learning. Yet what it can do is impressive.
This is a great mix of traditional elearning and social learning. Anyone can easily create lessons online, either for a specific group or for the public. You can even charge for it or have it open and free.
When creating your lesson (which is parsed out in chapters) you can add anything: images, links, maps, podcasts, video, files, even widgets from other web applications. It seems like anything you really want to, you can add in. I love that. Others are very restrictive to what you can add, but this expands to pull just about anything in. Using this array of functionality can point the learner to potential resources on the web where they can learn more.
With everything there you might think that it is difficult to create a lesson. Nope. It is easy enough for anyone to create online instruction. And because it is online anyone CAN create it. You are tethered to a desktop license where only a few people can create the learning. True, it can’t do what other rapid elearning products like Articulate can, but it isn’t supposed to. And what Articulate can’t do, this can.
Then, at the same time, it has elements of an LMS showing the learning what courses they have taken and what they are in the middle of taking. It also gives the creator usage and billing statistics.
But social learning is all about interacting. I was pleasantly surprised to see this in their solution as well. In one tutorial they show how the learner can upload a picture to the page they are learning from which will be sent to the instructor. In this example they are learning of the rule of thirds in photography and the learner is asked to find a picture which uses that principle and then upload it. The instructor can then check the understanding of the student. But not only can the learning upload pictures, but they can upload audio, text, video and files.
At that point it is uploaded to a “journal” which the instructor and learner have access to. The instructor can then comment on the information the learner provided and they can have a discussion about it. This allows the 1-on-1 conversation to take place, it engages the learning and checks for understanding. The assessment is based around conversation.
It also allows chatting with the instructor (including archiving of the chat). Of course, for you to do that you have to be able to tell if the instrutor is online, which you can do. You can also see if other learners taking that course are online and chat with them.
Technically speaking, it gives you your own sub-domain - like yourcompany.learnerpages.com - which can be perfect for branding your learning. In addition, they give you templates for changing the look and feel. I didn’t see anything where you can customize those templates, but at least there is some variation.
Although not total social learning, this approaches it more than others. Sure, it increases the interaction between teacher and student but it does not allow much in the learners learning from each other, posting content, replying to each other - which is something I would like to see more of. The chatting is a form of that, but nothing like a wiki or blog. Yet, in their defense, they may not want it to either, I’m not sure.
For their revenue they charge by the month according to the number of courses you have. Of course, if people pay for it you may make this a profit center for yourself.
The product is still in its infancy as you can tell by the layout and graphics. Yet still it has a surprising amount of functionality (that seems to actually work well). Check it out.
Tags: dojo learning
