Ping Networks builds and manages blog networks that
transform groups into better, faster, and smarter bottom-up,
peer-based communities of interest and practice. A Ping Network is made
up of weblogs aggregated into a blog portal. Ping Networks are built on
Pingware™, hosted blogging software that offers each community a
unique interface with custom designs, features, and information
tailored to its needs, interests, and processes.
We build interactive, scalable and personalized courses around your
first-rate university or corporate content. For more than 10 years we
have dedicated ourselves to creating the best collaborative learning on
the Web.
The Otter Group's e-learning model is distinguished by its emphasis on:
* Low production costs/high value
learning-management services: We have shifted our course production
model to a new set of tools that make it as inexpensive as possible to
develop new learning programs. In the past we used expensive
production techniques like video and flash movies. We are now
developing models for pushing the production costs as low as
possible. Take a look at our Podcasting for Learning paper to see
one model of a course that takes the faculty one hour per week and the
podcast producer one hour per week to create. Hosting is
$49 per year and we use iTunes for free one-click subscription and
distribution.
We manage and support interaction now with weblogs, which are
practically free to use. By pushing our production costs to as
close to zero as possible, we then charge for our services where we can
provide the most value: in designing and managing your learning
network. Service charges are variable depending upon the time and
complexity of the project. They can range from as little as $500
per month per course to $250,000 for a full learning program and
network for a year.
* Highly engaged learning networks. The best
education relies on the easy exchange of vital ideas; put another way,
learning is fundamentally social. This holds doubly true online, so
ensuring an environment that encourages communication among students
and between students and professors is a critical element in any
successful e-learning experience. Our course designs reflect that
philosophy by steering clear of static, one-way programs and actively
tapping into and building learning networks of sophisticated
professionals.
* High levels of interactivity and scalability. To
facilitate the exchange of vital ideas, e-learning programs demand
higher than average student-to-teacher ratios, yet a major benefit of
online education is that a single professor's course can be made
available to thousands of learners at once. Our solution to this
dilemma? Emphasis on peer-to-peer learning, combined with The Learning
Director.
* Learning Directors. These corporate managers,
recruited and trained by Otter, are experts in how a course's subject
matter is most relevant to a select group of students. Learning
Directors are agents and facilitators, and they ensure that students
feel connected to the professor, the material and one another. We like
to think of them as the Avon Ladies of the Knowledge Economy.
* Personalization. One of the great advantages of
the Web is that it allows information to be organized and presented for
each individual's needs. Indeed, personalization is an area where the
power of databases can rival offerings in the physical classroom.
Otter's education model is built on our ability to capture deep
profiles of students and use them to create personal, unique learning
experiences.
* A suitable technology platform. We prefer
technology platforms that support collaboration and knowledge-sharing
and place social interaction and collaboration. We have been achieving
great results with programs that employ blogs and RSS networks.
Frequently Asked Questions:
A: We
have shifted our course production model to a new set of tools that
make it as inexpensive as possible to develop new learning
programs. In the past we used expensive production techniques
like video and flash movies. We are now developing models for
pushing the production costs as low as possible. Take a look at
our Podcasting for Learning
paper to see one model of a course that takes the faculty one hour per
week and the podcast producer one hour per week to create.
Hosting is $49 per year and we use iTunes for free one-click
subscription and distribution. We manage and support interaction now
with weblogs, which are practically free to use.
By pushing our production costs to as close to zero as possible, we
then charge for our services where we can provide the most value.
Service charges are variable depending upon the time and complexity of
the project. They can range from as little as $500 per month per
course to $250,000 for a full learning program and network for a
year.
A: With
our new production model, we are moving into the mode of “just do it.”
Rather than spend a lot of time and money designing, we think that
courses should be rapidly prototyped and piloted with small
groups. They can take as little as a couple of weeks to get
going. Once the prototyping is done, the course should be ready
to roll out of a larger group.
A: There can never be deep
interaction in a course without the creation of a social context for
person-to-person exchange of ideas. Many of our programs use faculty
whose time is extremely limited. To leverage scarce time we form
small cohorts of learners who can directly interact with the professor
using a synchronous platform such as Live Meeting. When we are
working with a larger group, we provide intermediaries whom we call
Learning Directors. The Learning Director stimulates interaction
among members in the group. We also use decentralized networks
where individuals and teams work independently and then their ideas are
aggregated in a central learning network hub. New technologies
like RSS can be combined with search to create automatic links between
people and ideas and opportunities for peer-to-peer interaction.
Q: What's the deal with the otter?
A: When
we were thinking about a name for our new company (in 1996), we wanted
to find something that would not sound like every other e-learning
company out there. We threw the I-Ching, burned some incense and came
up with the idea of an otter. When we added the laptop, we knew we had
a memorable image that communicated the spirit of our business: work
from anywhere and work smart and not hard. We add the otter to all of
our course Web sites to communicate our unique and powerful
methodology. And the name also works as an acronym: Online Training,
Technical, and Education Resources.
A: The
Otter Group was formed in 1996 to bring the best methodology for
teaching and learning online to corporations and universities. Since
its formation, the company has developed successful programs for
Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and MIT's Sloan School of
Management, Merrill Lynch, CDM, and others. Prior to the Otter Group,
Kathleen Gilroy, the company's founder and CEO, ran a distance-learning
company, which was responsible for pioneering e-learning programs,
including Harvard Business School's first e-learning program in 1992
and the first e-learning program on e-commerce in 1995. Programs
developed by Kathleen and the Otter Group have reached tens of
thousands of professional students worldwide.
Because of our deep history and involvement with elearning
programs, we come to the world of online communities with a view that:
1. No weblog is an island.
2. Blog networks are the ideal technology for online communities because they enable collective intelligence to emerge.
3. Collective intelligence requires independent thinking, diversity, and decentralized aggregation.
4. Decentralized aggregation can be achieved by:
a. Collecting the diverse knowledge of individual bloggers.
b. Aggregating and filtering through reading and linking:
i. Readers see an aggregated view of all new information in the network.
ii. They independently determine what to read and cite.
iii. The weblog records
these links and citations (through trackback) so that collective
knowledge emerges.
5. The best blogs and blog networks maintain a good balance between
being self-serving (reputation building) and altruistic (sharing). It
is this balance that keeps them lively and interesting.
“From start to finish, concept to execution, you and your staff were
organized, efficient, flexible, and professional….None of us
anticipated the unparalleled success of this project: initial
predictions were in the neighborhood of 2,000 enrolled and in the end,
we enrolled over 6,000. This experiment in distance learning was an
unqualified success and much of the credit goes to you.”
– Michael T. Boland, Associate Dean, Harvard Business School
“Congratulations! The course was a high-quality educational event that
should have a very positive impact on HBS alumni and their colleagues
in attendance. It just adds to the pride we can have in attending such
a great institution.”
– Jed Bullard, CEO, E.D. Bullard Company, about a course for Harvard Business School
“I was extremely pleased. I enrolled several staff members and we came
out feeling elated. We are going to present these ideas to top
management.”
– Marcia King-Gamble, Director Guest Relations, Carnival Cruise Lines
“Flawless execution!”
– Peter Drucker, author, about an OTTER telecourse with 10,000 students registered
“What a great effort you put forth in putting together the
course. So many pieces had to be fitted together that this resembled
something demanding a 'General Ledger.' But you did it expertly and
with the right mixture of enthusiasm and discipline.”
– James L. Heskett, UPS Foundation Professor of Business Logistics, Harvard Business School
The Otter Group meets your e-learning needs with unparalleled experience, refined methodology and tested solutions.
We are dedicated to creating the best collaborative learning
online. With more than 15 years of experience crafting distance
education
programs, Otter has developed the best method for delivering powerful
e-learning experiences. Our clients include Harvard University and MIT,
and we have applied our system to their content, achieving terrific
results. In addition, end users at corporations like Merrill Lynch have
highly rated their learning experiences with Otter.
We build interactive, scalable and personalized courses around your
first-rate university or corporate content, making your most valuable
knowledge available to the largest number of adult learners you'd like
to reach. And we replicate the most important element of a live
classroom by designing every course to foster communication among the
students, enabling them to learn from each other while forming
personally satisfying, career-enhancing relationships.
Our Services
At every step, Otter's collaborative working process creates value for
your organization by emphasizing very outstanding, memorable learning
experiences for your students and employees. Our services include:
* Helping your organization develop a transformational e-learning strategy
* Working with your faculty to design and translate their courses into effective online formats
* Producing your courses, including all media necessary
* Building and managing your learning communities
* Providing technical and customer support to the courses and communities we build and manage
* Sharing our best practices
Howard Dean's use of the Internet has catapulted him into the top ranks
of the Democratic candidates for President. While it is not clear that
the governor of Vermont will ultimately prevail in the 2004 Democratic
presidential primary and caucuses and become the party nominee, the
Dean campaign's use of the Internet has been extraordinarily successful
at creating a high performance learning community. And there are
enormous lessons to be learned here for designers of e-learning
programs for corporations and universities.
The strategy of the Dean campaign is called “emergent” because it draws
its power up from the grassroots. Dean online followers collaborate on
organizing and perfecting the campaign, their ideas trickling up from
the bottom rather than being superimposed from national headquarters.
Emergence is the term coined by author Steven Johnson, whose 2001 book
on the subject described self-organizing intelligent systems of slime
molds, ant colonies, and cities. Johnson's principles are the
philosophical basis of the Dean campaign site. According to Johnson,
“Dean is a system running for President.”
What follows are a set of principles working to great effect for Dean,
which we think can be adapted to online learning programs with equally
powerful results.
The Social Network
First and foremost is the value of the social network. According to Joe
Trippi, Dean's campaign manager, “The Internet puts back into the
campaign what TV took out — people.” Dean has become a front-runner by
building a social network on the Internet. As in the analogy with TV in
political campaigns, people have also been missing from the majority of
online learning programs. Most programs consist of individuals
interacting (or better transacting) with static content. The absence of
meaningful connections with other people in online learning programs
accounts for their massive (60 to 70 percent) attrition rates. For
online learning programs to succeed, like the Dean campaign, they need
to put people at the center of their learning model.
In the Dean campaign, people type in a zipcode and find each other. In
a learning network, rich databases can enable learners to make
connections with other people, their contacts, and their ideas.
Learning, particularly in the context of the professional workplace
where our programs are run, is often about identifying the right person
as teacher. To address this problem, at The Otter Group we are starting
to incorporate social networking applications into our learning
platform so that our learners can tap into one another's contacts and
expertise. We always build in synchronous sessions for learners to work
together online. And we are incorporating instant messaging and
presence awareness into our newest learning models.
Feedback and Pattern Recognition
The Dean campaign web site is awash in data. The site features key
metrics about the people participating in campaign: the number of
identified supporters for Dean; the number of meet-ups (locally
organized Dean campaign events); the number of contributors and how
much they have given to the campaign; the number of letters written to
voters in rural Iowa; the number of emails received by the campaign;
the number of Blog entries posted and comments posted in response. Data
collection and display are critical features of emergent systems.
Deanspace - the term coined for the campaign website - is not really
about Dean. It's about the people working in the campaign.
Data collection and pattern recognition can also be successfully
integrated into online learning programs. One of the big problems in
online programs is that people do not have palpable sense of others in
the community. Virtual learning disconnects people from a shared
context. But the Internet is particularly well structured to counteract
this problem. It is basically a database with communications tools that
makes it easy to collect information about the learning community and
make it available.
In a program that the Otter Group has designed on conflict resolution,
we have collected profiles on the participant's conflict styles and
merged them with survey data we collected about how people are
experiencing conflict in the workplace. Combining the profile and
survey data with detailed personal examples demonstrates for
participants that their peers with very different profiles are
addressing similar problems to their own and that sometimes one
approach is more effective than another. This reinforces in the
strongest way possible the core lesson of the class: that it is
possible to consciously choose a strategic approach to dealing with
conflict.
All kinds of data can be collected and shared: solutions to problems;
opinions about current issues facing the learning community; patterns
of work processes; feedback about tactics and methods. An emergent view
of a learning community would, like Deanspace, make visible critical
information about the community's goals, needs, and expertise.
The Big Blog
The central intelligence of the Dean campaign is the “Official Blog.”
It is a journal of activity within the campaign. The blog reports,
editorializes, hustles, and cheerleads its readers. Campaign managers
post entries daily, which are read and commented upon by thousands of
Dean supporters (and critics). Each entry contains multiple links to
other sources of news and commentary. One of the Blog's innovations is
its listing of other blogs linking to it. While some of these links are
“official,” (Veterans for Dean, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders
for Dean), most are not endorsed by the campaign (Cyclists for Dean,
Lawrence Lessig). By including unedited comments on its site and
listing unofficial, independent links and blogs, the campaign makes its
diversity and range visible.
We believe that blogging can be used in online learning programs. It is
a terrific format for keeping virtual learners informed about what is
going on in the community. A blog (authored by the faculty or learning
managers) can be the central intelligence of the learning experience.
It can be the history and repository of knowledge - anyone who reads it
should be able to quickly learn what is going on. For programs that
incorporate independent or team projects, blogs can be used by project
managers and teams to keep track of their own progress, keep one
another informed, keep faculty and executive sponsors informed, and to
make connections to one another's work. Once a history has been
developed, blogs can reference past experience and knowledge.
The blog can also serve to better integrate course materials into the
discussion flow of a course. Blog entries can easily include links to
web-based materials, enabling students to quickly and easily reference
specific clips from videotaped lectures or excerpts from readings in
the context of an ongoing discussion. This overcomes the restrictions
of a linear-organized syllabus.
At a technical level, blogs generate XML files based on a standard
protocol called RSS (short for Really Simple Syndication), which allow
them to be tracked and indexed. When new entries are posted, they
generate meta-information, which can be ranked and referenced. Indexes
like Blogdex and Technorati track inbound and outbound links to blogs
and scan weblogs for quoted articles, ranking them according to the
number of references. This meta-information can be used to understand
how people in the learning community are connecting to one another and
their ideas.
Emergent Learning Communities
No matter what you think of his politics - or the ultimate success or
failure of his national campaign - Dean's Internet strategy has
converted his followers from a mailing list into a high performance
learning community. The key elements of Deanspace - activating a social
network, displaying feedback and pattern recognition, and constructing
a multi-limbed blog can be used in the design and development of
“emergent” learning programs to achieve comparable results.
Kathleen Gilroy is the CEO of the
Otter Group, an e-learning company in Cambridge, Massachusetts that
designs and manages high performance learning communities and programs.
Copyright © 2003, The Otter Group
