As manager of public affairs for SHRM, I managed more than 40 bloggers during the SHRM 2015 Annual Conference & Exposition in Las Vegas in June.  I’m excited to be heading back to Las Vegas in October for the 2015 HR Technology Conference where I’ll have the opportunity to wear the "blogger hat" and deliver all the best highlights for the HR Tech Insiders and SHRM blog...

The Society for Human Resources Management (SHRM) is my professional association. I support other professional organizations, but my first HR job was as a generalist so SHRM was the first professional association I joined. Every employer I’ve ever worked for supported my membership in SHRM and allowed me to attend SHRM professional development events. They also supported me being a SHRM volunteer leader. It wasn’t until I became a volunteer leader that I learned about the SHRM Foundation. That’s why I think of it as a best kept secret. The...

The concept of exponential education entrepreneurship applies directly to your online coursework success. In this LMScast Joshua Millage and Christopher Badgett explore what this is and what it means to you. In their book, Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World, Steven Kotler and Peter Diamandis explain how exponential entrepreneurship has replaced linear growth in business and how you can leverage the power of technology to build and expand your own business in ways that were never before possible. Technological entrepreneurs like Larry Page, Elon Musk, Richard Branson, and Jeff Bezos have built billion dollar businesses using disruptive technologies that outperform older established corporate entities. They accomplished this by following revolutionary philosophies based upon three factors that will help you as you develop a plan for your online courses. The three basic factors that create exponential value are: Exponential technology Flow dynamics The power of the crowd Exponential growth occurs far more quickly than linear growth, and is made possible by powerful, accessible technologies. One of the best examples is the internet, especially since it is available via mobile phone, and is now globally ubiquitous. What that does for eLearning is that it allows people to take online courses even if they don’t have a computer. Flow dynamics is probably best known as "being in the zone." It is a framework for thinking that you can use for creating your course content, not only in your own process of course development, but also for the student’s learning experience. The power of the crowd is all about people. It includes crowdfunding and crowdsourcing, but also community building. When you create courses for people to use online you are addressing individuals, but also scaling for groups of people. You can also create a community for your students within your eLearning site. You can visualize these concepts are working together in a scenario beginning with the technology you use to develop and present your course offerings to an exponentially larger population than ever before. Creating your content in a flow state helps students enter their own flow experience in learning. You could fund your courses through crowdsourcing. And the more students who take your courses and like them will refer you exponentially to other students. The more passion you bring to your exponential education entrepreneurship endeavors, the greater your success will be. Our LifterLMS course development platform is designed to help you build your courses using these concepts. You can try a demo of LifterLMS and see for yourself what it can do for you. Remember that you can post comments and also subscribe to our newsletter for updates, developments, and future episodes of LMScast. Thank you for joining us. Joshua: Hello, Everyone. We’re back with another episode of LMScast. I’m Joshua Millage. I’m joined with Christopher Badgett. Today we’re talking about exponential education entrepreneurship. What in the world are we talking about, Chris? Chris: This stems from the work of two guys who are writing and speaking and creating content around exponential entrepreneurship. Their names are Steven Kotler and Peter Diamandis. I think their most recent book is called Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth, and Impact the World. They study people like highly impactful entrepreneurs like Larry Page, Elon Musk, Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos. They also are technologists. They’re often looking at the impact of technology on business. They think a lot about the future in terms of what’s coming in medicine, or things like artificial intelligence and so on. They’re big tech business thinkers. I’ve been listening to some of their stuff. I’ve realized that what they’re saying about exponential entrepreneurship is also applicable to more of our niche to education entrepreneurs who are building and creating online courses, and the online schools, or blended learning environments. There’s a lot of lessons that can be learned by studying what these guys are up to. Maybe we can start out by defining. Joshua: Yeah, what’s a first or first concept? Chris: I think the very first thing is to think about the three contributing factors that create exponential entrepreneurship, which really means just creating exponential value. Those three things that come into that mix include exponential technology. I’ll just run through them and then we can unpack what each of them are. Exponential technology, the flow states, and then also the crowd, the power of the crowd, whether that’s crowd funding, or building online communities and so on. When those three things come together, that’s when that …. Exponential, meaning something that grows very fast, or spherically. Those are like those explosive growth things like when Facebook came out, or Amazon, and eCommerce, and that kind of thing. There’s some real exponential things happening there. Joshua: The first concept in a nutshell is? Chris: That it involves a technology that’s growing exponentially. Joshua: Got it. Chris: A couple examples of that beside the internet would be the things that are happening with processing power on a computer. Joshua: Oh, speaking to like Moore’s law, I think it is? Chris: Yeah, yeah. Joshua: And then probably other things that are going …. They’re talking about artificial intelligence, too. Chris: Say that again. Joshua: Artificial intelligence is jumping exponentially right now all the time. They’re looking for the opportunities in technologies that are doing that. Chris: Absolutely. There’s certain things like Peter Diamandis, I think is on the board of Singularity University. The singularity, if you will, is a theoretical moment in time that Ray Kurzweil talks about and wrote a book about what happens when the processing power of computing outstrips the processing power of the human brain. That inflection point is called the singularity. We don’t really know what’s going to happen after that, but we’re heading in that direction based on these exponentially growing technologies. Joshua: Yeah, we’re heading there really quickly. That’s interesting. I like it. How can we leverage this idea in our courses? Chris: If you take it and you’re not just looking at, if you bring it into the educational context, the internet is an exponentially growing technology. There’s more people coming online. There’s a lot of people who haven’t even come online yet. We take that for granted in the developed world. Some areas of the world have skipped the laptop or the desktop and are going right to the phone. There’s all these interesting things happening with technology. Maybe in another episode we can get more into the lifecycle of exponential technology and talk about where learning management systems are, and eLearning, and educational technology in greater detail. That opportunity is here. We have the tools. WordPress power is like 25% of the internet or whatever. It didn’t exist seven years ago. I’m not sure of the exact start date. That is a very fast growing exponential technology that we’re tied into. I think the other cool things to look at outside of the technology are what these guys would call the flow dynamics or the flow states of the leaders behind it, also the crowd. To talk about flow first, a flow state …. There’s a great book called Flow. I have a hard time pronouncing the guy’s name. His name is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi or something. He writes about exactly what flow is and what’s going on in your brain and in your psychology. We’ve all experienced flow at some point in our life where we’re being challenged, but we’re in the zone. That could be in an athletic endeavor, or it could be in an intellectual endeavor. It could be in a entrepreneurial or a relationship endeavor. When you match exponential technology with a flow state, you really unlock a lot of potential and power in entrepreneurship, or creating valuable courses in community and that kind of thing. Joshua: Yeah, I like it. Really what we’re talking about today is a framework for thinking, a framework for thinking through ideas and thinking through really just course content. I think the interesting part of this though is that it doesn’t necessarily mean that you can’t make a living off of a niche that isn’t in this, too. Everyone is talking about, "The riches are in the niches." and all that sort of thing. We forget about, oh, what are some of the things that we can do to interact with an exponential market and place ourselves to even capture a half percentage of that market is still a lot of cash if that’s our goal or impact. There’s some people who are more open source minded. That’s fine, too. It’s still a great way to look for opportunities to impact people that way. Cool. Any final thoughts before we wrap this up? Chris: The last thing you said, people, that’s the third part. It’s the power of the crowd. When you have the opportunity to do things like crowd funding, or crowd sourcing, or build a community in some way with your exponential technology tools, your flow state, and your ability to interact with people at scale, that’s the three-legged stool, if you will, of exponential education entrepreneurship right there. Let’s say you have a course idea about, I’m just pulling this out of the air, how to make your own medicinal herbs for a homemade first aid kit, or something. You want to teach other people how to heal naturally with food, and herbs, and plants. You could pitch that idea, create a video, put it on Kickstarter. If you get validation, you can use your exponential technology, and the internet, and your learning management system. You can get in a flow state because you love it so much, and you’re so passionate about it, that’s an example of using the power of the crowd and how that fits into the greater context. Joshua: I love it, I love it. Thanks for listening, Everyone. We will talk to you next week. http://feeds.soundcloud.com/stream/216986877-lmscast-049-exponential-education.mp3 The post Exponential Education Entrepreneurship appeared first on LMScast.

Guest post by Richard Lee, Director of Digital Marketing and Analytics with Honey Growth can be very positive for many companies. Growth pays for team outings, free snacks, in-office massages and... Visit site for full story...

Posted by Dawn Marie Bailey Since 1989, the Blind Foundation for India (BFI), a 501(c)(3) charitable organization, has served over 15 million blind people in India, raising over $4 million, performing 125,000 free cataract operations, donating 10,000 Braille kits to blind children for their education, and funding 115 vans to transport doctors and patients. Additionally, the foundation has worked on prevention, conducting 750,000 eye exams for school-age children and providing necessary interventions such as eye drops, glasses, and Vitamin A. And according to Dr. Manu Vora, chairman and president of Business Excellence, Inc., the charity has done all of this by using the Baldrige Excellence Framework as a way to manage its work and ensure optimum efficiency and effectiveness. "The Baldrige framework has added great value throughout the BFI journey," said Vora. "By using various concepts/tools from the Baldrige Criteria, we were able to create a lean organization with six directors. Corporate governance and ethics have been used to manage BFI. We keep focused communication with our donors, for example, with an annual appeal showing a progress report. We recognize our donors and volunteers. Use of these tools helped us in becoming a donor-centric, nonprofit focusing on the actual needs of 15 million blind people in India." Vora, who is also a blogger for the ASQ Influential Voices program, said he has been familiar with the Baldrige Excellence Framework and its Criteria from his work since 1990 in quality management at AT&T Bell Laboratories. "Since 1993, I have integrated these Criteria in my Total Quality Management course in MBA programs at various business schools globally," he said. "I am convinced that the Baldrige framework provides important guidance to effectively manage an organization." The Baldrige framework is used to ensure that the nonprofit considers all elements of its operations-by aligning its quality tools with the Baldrige Criteria. For example, Leadership category focus: Vision, Mission, Values, Ethics, Governance, Social Responsibility, Lean, Board of Directors, Plan Do Study Act (PDSA) Strategy category focus: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) Analysis; Balanced Scorecard; and Hoshin Planning Customers category focus: Voice of the Customer (VOC), single yearly update to donors (Lean) Measurement, Analysis, and Knowledge Management category focus:  Benchmarking with other nonprofit organizations Workforce category focus: Recognition of donors and volunteers Operations category focus: Brainstorming, Affinity Diagram, Pareto Principle, Ishikawa Diagram, Lean, Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI), Process Mapping, SIPOC, Problem Solving, Medical Partner Development in India Results category focus: Feedback Reports to Donors, Gantt Chart, Critical Path Method (CPM), Risk Matrix "The Baldrige framework provides an excellent platform to manage any organization," said Vora. "The assessment helps in focusing on value addition to stakeholders (donors, volunteers, the community, etc.), with a continuous-improvement philosophy. For nonprofits with limited resources, the Baldrige framework is a great way to optimize resources and provide value to society." BFI’s mission is to prevent and cure blindness, and educate and permanently rehabilitate  blind people in India. India is home to one-third of the world’s blind population. This video will help you learn more about BFI. How might your volunteer work be made more efficient and focused on value through use of the Baldrige framework?  

                     Women start their careers with more ambition than men do, but they lose their confidence within their first years in the workplace. That’s the conclusion of a Bain & Co. study that compared employees with minimal work experience with more tenured workers. The study posed two simple questions:         --Do you aspire to top management within a large company?         --Do you have confidence you can reach top management? The study found that, within two years of starting out...

In part 1 of the article we took a look at storyboards, their purpose, and the best ways to start working with them. Today I will give you some advice regarding best storyboard creation practices, and also explain in what situations you will be best served to not use them. I will begin by reminding you that a storyboard is something like a schematic of your course that displays its main ideas and sometimes even its design in a clear and demonstrative manner. Creating a storyboard makes working on a course significantly easier, and enables you to identify weak spots in your course and fix them on the fly. And like in any other human endeavor, there are many nuances and tricks to creating storyboards, and knowing them can save you a lot of time and effort. As you have probably guessed, this is what the second part of the article will be about - bringing people who have never created a storyboard in their life up to speed. No need to make the same mistakes thousands of E-learning pros have already learned from before you, right? Lucky for you, they are a pretty cool bunch, and are ready to share.Storyboard Creation - Best PracticesDetermine your storyboard’s target audienceWho will see it, and who will be reviewing it? Take this into account when creating the storyboard content, text, and descriptions. Target audience also dictates how thorough you need to make them, what kind of illustrations will be required, and also how deep you will need to go when presenting the course material. Target audience can be, for example, college graduates, software engineers, students, or subject matter experts. Or maybe it will be just you alone, if you plan to use the storyboard purely as a blueprint for your course.If you are preparing a storyboard for software engineers, it will likely include a lot of technical details. On the other hand, if no one besides you will see it, a basic outline will suffice, as long as you are able to recall what it was that you planned to do on each marked slide.What information to include on every screen?The structure of your pages depends on a number of factors: how much time are you prepared to dedicate to your storyboard, how detailed a blueprint do you need, and who will be reviewing it. If you are pressed for time, or are unwilling to expend a lot of effort on storyboard creation, limit every screen to the title, screen number, and a schematic drawing of the page. If, however, you are the kind of person that likes to describe everything in meticulous detail and you have time to spare, your storyboard may look a little like this:Your storyboard may contain detailed descriptions of every page, including information about  interactive components, details regarding navigation, transitions to other pages, and sound. Go one way or the other, or find some middle ground that works best for you - it all depends on your needs and on how much time you are willing to spend.Pick a tool that will enable you to change the storyboard plan with easeCreating a blueprint for a course is quite a dynamic process. Most likely, you will need to change the order of pages within the course and add new pages between existing ones, thus changing the storyboard structure. This makes using a tool that enables you to mix up the structure of your storyboard and the order of pages within it very much preferable. An erasable pencil will do, but a web service allowing you to drag-and-drop pages within the course is even better.Don’t be afraid to change or delete already existing storyboard pagesIt takes a genius to think up a scenario from start to finish and not make a single mistake. More likely than not, you will start doubting your storyboard layout during creation, and your doubts will grow stronger while working on the pages themselves. Should you come to the realization that half of your page sketches are best scrapped and re-done from scratch, take heart: this is just preliminary planning, not a manned mission to Mars. On the contrary, by noticing and correcting your original mistakes you demonstrate a greater insight into the nature of your course gained through the creation of the storyboard. This would not have been possible without the handy and versatile tool that helped you improve your course - the storyboard.Pay attention to nonlinear coursesSince the structure of a nonlinear course and the relations between its pages is not always easy to describe with words, consider using more visual means that will enable you to demonstrate the nonlinear connections within the course without confusing those who will see your storyboard. There are online services that can help you, such as course authoring aids giving the ability to see the course skeleton, but a sheet of paper and a pencil will work in a pinch. You can also use PowerPoint or a simple graphics editor.When working on a nonlinear course, it always pays to provide a detailed description of all possible transitions - what page the learner will be redirected to after encountering the nonlinear portion of the course, and under what circumstances.When to Avoid Using StoryboardsDepending on how detailed a blueprint you want, storyboarding can be quite time consuming. Creating a visualized storyboard, complete with thorough descriptions and detailed mockups of pages, can take quite a lot of time. So before starting, you should ask yourself: "Is this worth it?" The answer to that question can be "No". Here are a few situations where you may want to avoid using storyboards:Storyboarding may not be for you if you prefer to rely on the trusty "paper and pencil" method and are constantly having a change of heart about the course structure. Constantly erasing half of what you have sketched and starting over will get tedious soon.If you are the only person within your organization tasked with the creation of E-learning courses, and do not need to share your vision and ideas with colleagues/SMEs/software engineers, creating storyboards may not be practical.Creating a comprehensive storyboard for a complicated nonlinear course can take a lot of time and effort. You may be better served by skipping the storyboarding stage and proceeding directly to the course creation, using the course authoring tool to express the transitions between the course pages.If you are not sure whether creating a storyboard for your course is worthwhile, try limiting yourself to a basic storyboard. Sketch pages with titles only, maybe jot down a few quick lines about some key points you want to get across. Use short words and simple sentences. This will not take much time, and at the same time will give you a better understanding of the course and its main ideas, and help you get going. More often than not, preparing a storyboard will help you get your ideas in order and get the course structure just right (especially if you do not have another document detailing the course blueprint).

Hello! I am Michelle Kosmicki, Research Manager for NET Nebraska. I engage in many different types of media research, including broadcast media, digital media, social media, and web analytics. While most of the data I curate and analyze is used for monitoring performance and planning, nearly all of my grant funded reporting requires some form of media impact evaluation. Media impact evaluation has been a hot topic over the past few years. It’s been discussed and explored at the AEA annual conference. The burning question remains: How on earth do you measure media impact at the local level? While measuring media impact doesn’t require magical things like unicorns, it really does help to have a full understanding the nature of media data. This can be difficult for evaluators who were trained in the cause-effect quasi-experimental method. It was quite difficult for me at first too. Lesson Learned: Get comfortable with the fact you have no control.  That’s correct. In most cases your media impact data will have been collected via interactions with self-selected participants. This is a different type of research than the typical recruited market research panel. So you will have very little control over who the participants are. Even if you are using data from a proprietary source such as Nielsen or Rentrak, you still have no control of their panel of participants, data imputation, and analysis of the data before it arrives in your office. Lesson Learned: Get comfortable with "squishy" data.  Social media data seems straight forward. Someone clicks on a link in your tweet and you can see the number of link clicks. The question is, can you tell how many link clicks resulted in views of the linked digital media: a page view, story read, or video viewed? Hot Tip: Learn how to use campaign tracking with URL tags.  Most web analytics can handle some form of URL tagging. It is the easiest way to track clicks on links on social media, in e-newsletters, blogs, and even on other websites. If you use Google Analytics, you can find directions here. Lesson Learned: Look at the big media picture.  Bringing all your media data together seems like a strange thing to do. In reality, it is no different than using a mixed methods approach. Analyze the data separately and together. Look for patterns. Visualize it. The results may not be straight forward. Lesson Learned: Assume nothing.  Media data is inherently full of bias. Always be aware of your own bias as you analyze and report on media data. Recognize the limits of your data and analysis. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org . aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.

Overview You are using SharePoint 2013 (SP 2013) or Office 365 (O365). You are planning to implement the Branding and customizations to your site. In this blog I will introduce how to use Design Manager, its limitations and workarounds. Visual appeal is the foremost requirement to attract visitors to content. Though the SP 2013 or the O365 provide OOTB options to choose from to creatively design the sites, custom design can also be done using Design Manager. Design Manager is a publishing feature that is available in publishing sites in both SharePoint Server 2013 and Office 365. A Design Manager is used to brand the website in Office 365. Branding packages can also be created and branding can be applied to new or existing Site Collections. The process is extremely useful when multiple site collections need to be branded alike. The design package is a .wsp file that is created through the Design Manager, and it comprises of a few files. The packaging process exports files from various lists and libraries to form the complete package. While importing to a site collection, these files are distributed to different locations based on file types. Ensure that you have a minimum of Designer permission in order to start using the Design Manager. Creation of Design Package from a Branded Site Collection Assuming that a reference branded site collection exists, follow the following steps to brand other site collections. Go to Site Settings -> Design Package Click on Create Design Package, specify a Design Name and  Create Once the package is created, a confirmation message is displayed with Message "Your Package is ready Click here to download" Click on Click here to download to download the package to a local drive Import Design Package into New Site Collection Now that a design package is created, this package can be imported to any unbranded site collection and branding can then be applied there. The following steps guide through the branding process on the destination site collection: Go to Site Settings -> Look and Feel -> Import Design Package Browse to the downloaded branded package on the location machine and Import Note: The branding package import process may take a few minutes and the end of the process is indicated with a notification message. Branding Components & its limitation With the import of the design package, all branding components are added to the destination site collection. Below is a list of the added components: Site Assets - All site images that were used as a part of branding, are added here Theme file - The .spcolor file is added to the library Themes /15 Master Page - The .master (Master page) added to the Master Page Gallery Export Location Exported Assets Document libraries Master Pages Gallery Themes Gallery Style Library Site Assets Library Lists Design Gallery Composed looks Apart from importing the branding components we notice below limitations as well on the Site: Solution Gallery - Design Package Solution is added to the Solution Gallery as "System Account" not by the actual User Importing the Design Package, we don’t see anything as Feature in the Site Collection Features or Site Features. Site Logo - Even though it’s part of the branding change will not get updated as we import. Work around - Change Title, Description and Logo manually after the package is imported. Change the Look - Though it is expected that the new theme appears as an option here, but it exists only in the Composed Looks library since the .preview file does not come as a part of the design package Workaround - Add .preview file of the specific master page Design Packages on Root Site Vs Sub Site: Design Packages of sub sites cannot be created Design Package gets created only at the root site Design Package gets imported only at the root site Limitation on the size of the Design Package - A Design Package of size greater than 50MB cannot be created, and there’s no workaround for this!

  On July 29, @shrmnextchat chatted with Dan Cross @CrossOverHR about How HR Can Build a Dream Team. In case you missed it, here are all the great tweets from the chat:   [View the story "#Nextchat RECAP: How HR Can Build a Dream Team" on Storify]  ...