Preparing People for the Real World

The world is becoming more complex and preparation to apply knowledge adaptively in new contexts is becoming the essential condition to hold good jobs in our society. Workers at all levels are now expected to quickly identify then adjust to changing realities on the ground. In order to succeed in this new reality, workers need to become more like experts in their approach to new situations, able to draw from a deep well of knowledge and experiences and have an open, flexible mindset. It is a commonly held belief that it takes ten years of experience to work with a large enough number of examples to develop a deep understanding of domain knowledge, and how it is combined and applied in real contexts for a professional to attain a reasonable degree of expertise. Because we live in a highly competitive world it is necessary to shorten the amount of time it takes to develop expertise. We use new technologies in ways that are supported by learning theory to target difficult learning and help people gain essential skills in an accelerated time frame and cost effective manner. At Venturit we offer a full range of services, including designing, developing, and deploying online certification training and adaptive learning management systems, game and game augmentation applications, community-moderated new media overlays, and experience harvesting knowledge management systems. In addition to these three areas, we are flexible and agile enough to work with customers on different kinds of projects and serve as consultants.

Expertise, Experience, and Flexibility

• Theory-based learning tools and strategies – Our applications are supported by Cognitive Flexibility Theory, a theory about how to prepare people to select, adapt, and combine knowledge and experience in new ways to deal with situations that are different than the ones they have encountered before.
• Expertise – We understand technology and how technology can support the learning of difficult topics and an open, flexible mindset.
• Experience – We have decades of experience designing and evaluating learning applications.
• Flexibility – We are flexible and agile enough to work on different kinds of projects and develop on different platforms. We adapt to fit the needs of individual clients. We maintain a tight network of affiliates, freelancers, and consultants who complement our capabilities.
• New media – We are able to identify emerging technology trends.
• Collaborative – We use online collaborative tools so clients can track the progress of projects.
• Sustainable learning programs – We work with clients to create learning programs that are sustainable. We partner with clients to develop the learning programs and prepare people to manage the programs.
• Scalability – We can meet custom content development needs. We work with large, medium, and small organizations.
• Security – Bandwidth, system capacity, backup, and concurrent usage issues are managed automatically.
• Cost effective – Our focus on Experience Acceleration and on new technologies enable us to deliver applications that promote powerful learning and are cost effective.

CFT Projects

EASE History http://www.easehistory.org/ EASE (Experience Acceleration Support Environment) History. This project is interested in how a Cognitive Flexibility Hypermedia system can support the teaching and learning of U.S. history. EASE History is an online environment that prepares learners to become more flexible and critical thinkers by encouraging certain habits of mind like placing events in context, looking at situations from multiple perspectives, and making connections between cases– all habits that are essential for an active and engaged citizenry.

Read Macromedia’s Case Study of EASE History http://www.venturit.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Macromediacasestudy.pdf

Teaching Text Making Meaning (Teaching Literacy Strategies with Video) http://edr1.educ.msu.edu/CompStrat/login.asp This project involved scaling expert knowledge and practice for teaching elementary school students. The project integrated four research programs: Reciprocal Teaching, Questioning the Author, the Theory of Cognitive Flexibility, and the use of text in science education. Controlled experiments compared two models of professional development, one of which features the use of a hypermedia tool and the second of featured the same information, presented via linear video-based cases.

Interlinked Challenges http://interlinkedchallenges.org/ This project is interested in how an online learning environment that employs CFT principles and new media might support the understanding of how 21^st century challenges are interrelated.

CFT Tools

Our team will work with you to develop tools to help you address your strategic and technical challenges to help you meet your goals in the following areas:

• Game Design and Augmentation
• Experience Harvesting
• New Media Applications
• Online Certification Training and Adaptive Learning

Game Design and Augmentation Games can be powerful learning tools. They can reflect real world complexity, provide immediate feedback, situate learning, and enable users to test out hypotheses. Young employees are hard-wired for game learning and many organizations have integrated game learning into training. But often games can leave learning to chance, introduce too much complexity and overwhelm learners, not place events in context or make obvious connections to the real world, and take too long to complete. CFT games and game augmentations are designed to take advantage of the strengths of games and compensate for their weaknesses. We can build learning games for the web and for mobile devices that support deep learning and promote flexible, adaptive thinking and augment and extend game learning by building web and mobile devices applications for previously-built games that won’t leave learning to chance.

o features – Integration with CFT video learning applications, social networking tools, blogs, wikis; Add quizzes and exams; SCORM conformant, API for integration with other systems.

o platforms – web, mobile

o reporting tools  – Our user tracking tools enable administrators to see how many users complete the game, stop halfway through, replay the game, or quit on a specific page; View quiz and exam results.

o scalability – CFT’s LMS infrastructure allows multiple clients or business units to be managed on one single portal installation.

o customization – CFT games and game augmentation applications are customizable to include corporate logo, wordmarks and color schemes, your terminology, your domain name, your language, your layout, and your features.

Experience Harvesting Experience Harvesting is a theory-based process for capturing experience for reuse. Experience Harvesting enables you to retain the expertise of workers who retire or transfer. Captured experiences are stored in a video learning system that enables your employees to develop a deep understanding of key concepts, corporate culture, best practices, by working with interconnected real world cases in a nonlinear environment – better preparing them to apply knowledge to new situations. Work with us to develop the application and we can teach you how to harvest experience so you can add new content in the future or employ our consultants to do the experience harvesting for you.

o features – The CFT video learning management system, Quizzes, Exams, SCORM conformant, API for integration with other systems

o platforms – web, mobile

o reporting tools – The Admin Dashboard makes information related to learner performance visible in an easily accessible and understandable manner. Information available through the Admin Dashboard includes: Audit mechanisms to see which learners completed what training and when; Time on task reports; Test dates; Individual user progress, Test and quiz results; Email reminders; Learner feedback reports; Automatically run reports and export data.

o scalability – Experience Harvesting LMS infrastructure allows multiple clients or business units to be managed on one single portal installation.

o customization – The Experience Harvesting LMS is customizable to include corporate logo, wordmarks and color schemes, your terminology, your domain name, your language, your layout, and your features.

New Media Applications CFT-new media overlays enable learners to feature videos and other content in a theoretically-grounded learning environment

o features – CFT video learning environment features: Video editing tools; Mindset modeling videos; Multiple viewing modes; Multiple ways to search on videos; Scrollable timeline; Integration of social networking tools (blogs, wikis, Facebook, Twitter); Community building tools; API for integration with other systems; SCORM conformant.

o platforms – web – new media overlays, mobile

o reporting tools – Our user tracking tools enable administrators to see how many users visit the site, how long they stay, where they are coming from, and how often they return.

o scalability – Our LMS infrastructure allows multiple clients or business units to be managed on one single portal installation.

o customization – CFT community-moderated new media overlays are customizable to include corporate logo, wordmarks and color schemes, your terminology, your domain name, your language, your layout, and your features.

Online Certification Training and Adaptive Learning Systems CFT’s Online Certification Training LMS supports licensing, certification, compliance programs, and corporate training.

o learner features: Easy to use interface; Profile-driven learning; Establish clear pathway between courses and a certificate; Collaborative learning environments.

o cool learner features: The Learner Dashboard enables learners to: Check progress towards certification; Keep track of assignments and deadlines; View and add calendar events, View emails; Get alerts; Keep track of training costs; Provide feedback to administrators and instructors; Print out certificates; Schedule courses; Personalize their learning environment. Users can access the CFT Learner Dashboard through the web or through mobile devices. o Easy to assemble training packages: Select off the shelf products; Create and import SCORM courses; Create self-study and facilitated courses; Customize courses; Upload assignments, exams and quizzes; Set up self or group enrollment, Integrate CFT video learning platforms with courses; Add new media tools to courses.

o reporting tools – The Admin Dashboard makes information related to learner performance visible in an easily accessible and understandable manner. Information available through the Admin Dashboard includes: Audit mechanisms to see which learners completed what training and when; Time on task reports; Employee certification expiration dates; Test dates; Individual user progress through a course; Test and quiz results; Email reminders; Learner feedback reports; Automatically run reports and export data.

o platforms – Web, Mobiles

o scalability – The LMS infrastructure allows multiple clients or business units to be managed on one single portal installation.

o customization – The LMS is customizable to include corporate logo, wordmarks and color schemes, your terminology, your domain name, your language, your certificate, your layout, and your features.

About CFT

Cognitive Flexibility Theory (CFT), a constructivist learning theory that emphasizes an adaptively creative response to new situations. The theory supports learning in ill-structured domains where general principles do not account for enough of the variability in the way knowledge has to be applied. Instead, learners must have experience with
a large number of cases to see the different ways that conceptual knowledge is combined and applied in real world contexts. The theory and its multimedia applications embrace the idea that learning does not proceed in one direction and that new technologies can support nonlinear learning (Spiro et al. 1988; Spiro & Jehng, 1990; Spiro, Collins, Thota, & Feltovich, 2003; Spiro, Collins, & Ramchandran, 2006; Spiro, Collins, & Ramchandran, 2007). Cognitive Flexibility Hypermedia systems (CFHs) have been created for medicine, biology, civics, history, literature, military strategy, and teacher preparation in the literacy and physics domains. They help learners develop a deeper understanding of content and prepare them to respond adaptively and creatively to new situations.

Foster an open mindset – Learners need to work with a lot of cases, examine them from different perspectives, see how knowledge is interdependent, represent knowledge in different ways, and see how events are similar and different. CFHs includes multiple cases, multiple viewing windows, tagging, multiple theme searches, and video effects – all designed to foster an open mindset.

Make learning manageable – We have built in limitations on working memory that we need to overcome. In order to reduce cognitive load CFHs feature short, dense cases, well organized content, and short descriptions that help learners easily find relevant content, identify patterns, and place events in context.

Support meaningful learning – In order to support efficient knowledge retrieval, knowledge should be interconnected (CFHs link of multimedia content), well-organized (CFHs tag content on multiple themes), contextualized (CFHs provide descriptions and video interviews), and elaborated on (CFHs enable learners to place cases side by side in viewing windows. This is designed to support across case comparisons).

Support nonlinear paths through content – Learning does not proceed in one direction and new technologies can support nonlinear learning. In CFHs learners are able to examine cases in different contexts and from different perspectives, and encode information in multiple ways.

Accelerate experience – Brief videos, new video techniques, and the arrangement of cases might shorten the amount of time that learners require to develop expertise. Cases are revisited in multiple contexts and examined from different perspectives in CFHs.

REFERENCES

Jacobson, M. J., & Spiro, R. J. (1995). Hypertext learning environments, cognitive flexibility, and the transfer of complex knowledge: An empirical investigation. Journal of Educational Computing Research, 12(4), 301-333.

Jacobson, M. J., Maouri, C., Mishra, P., & Kolar, C. (1996). Learning with hypertext learning environments: Theory, design, and research. Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia, 5, 239–281.

Marques, C. & Carvalho, A. A. (2005). O fórum como Meio de reflexão na Aprendizagem do Módulo de Arquitectura de Computadores. Simpósio Ibérico de Informática Educativa (no prelo).

Palincsar, A. P., Spiro, R. J., Kucan, L., Magnusson, S. J., Collins, B. P., Hapgood, S., Ramchandran, A., &. DeFrance, N. (2007). Designing a hypertext environment to support comprehension instruction. In D. McNamara (Ed.), Reading comprehension strategies: Theory, interventions, and technologies. (pp. 441-462)

Spiro, R. J., Collins, B. P., & Ramchandran, A. R. (2007). Reflections on a post-Gutenberg epistemology for video use in ill-structured domains: Things you can do with video to foster complex learning and cognitive flexibility. In R. Goldman, R. Pea, B. Barron, & S. Derry (Eds.), Video research in the learning sciences. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Spiro, R. J., Collins, B. P., & Ramchandran, A. R. (2006). Modes of openness and flexibility in cognitive flexibility hypertext learning environments. In B. Khan (Ed.), Flexible learning in an information society. Hershey, PA: Idea Group

Spiro, R., Collins, B. P., Thota, J., & Feltovich, P. (2003). Cognitive Flexibility Theory: Hypermedia for complex learning, adaptive knowledge application, and experience acceleration. Educational Technology, 43(5), 5-12.

Spiro, R.J., & Jehng, J. (1990). Cognitive flexibility and hypertext: Theory and technology for the nonlinear and multidimensional traversal of complex subject matter. In D. Nix & R. Spiro (Eds.), Cognition, education, and multimedia: Exploring ideas in high technology (pp. 163-205). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Spiro, R. J., Coulson, R. L., Feltovich, P. J., & Anderson, D. K. (1988). Cognitive flexibility theory: Advanced knowledge acquisition in ill-structured domains. In the Tenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 375-383). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.