Rich Media On Demand

News and Events

Meet Momindum at the ASTD 2010: International Conference and Exposition

Momindum is participating in the ASTD 2010: The International Conference & Exposition. The American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) is bringing the major event for workplace learning and performance professionals. It welcomes more than 8,000 attendees from more than 70 countries, and world-class leaders in the industry. The conference features more than 200 educational sessions from industry-leading experts, and an EXPO filled with the latest products and services available from top providers. This year's conference and EXPO takes place at McCormick Place in Chicago, Illinois, from May 16-19, 2010.

What can you expect from this event? Well, you can anticipate to learn about the latest trends and practices in the field of workplace learning and performance, engage in more than 200 educational sessions with local and global experts in the industry, discover the cutting-edge technologies in training and development, and the most important, network with like-minded professionals.

The event should rejuvenate your thinking and help you bring value to your organization.

Momindum invites you to our booth #1816. Our experts will be more than happy to demonstrate our Rich Media Solutions, and explain how our software will add value to your training and communication efforts, and at the same time reduce the cost and time of producing the materials.

Case study

Rich Media: the new way for insurance companies to train and communicate efficiently

Let’s hear First Financial’s own words:
“Partnering with Momindum has allowed First Financial Companies to do something that is extremely rare in the Insurance industry. That is, bring something completely unique to our target market. Harnessing Momindum’s proprietary technology we have been able to deliver effective training and marketing to our clients and the results have been overwhelmingly positive.”

Thanks to the Rich Media technology, insurance companies are able to quickly and efficiently train, and communicate about current and new products to a large and wide-spread audience. With video speech, keywords indexed, and synchronized documents; insurance companies can provide a complete and clear message. Also, they are able to provide direct access to relevant information at any time.

Like many insurance companies, First Financial creates and provides training contents and communication presentations about complex insurance and financial products. Using Momindum Rich Media solution, they capture expert’s presentations, enrich it with documents and index the speech with an outline and keywords.

First Financial provides high quality training contents to the brokers and affiliates. Thanks to Momindum Rich Media solution, First Financial put an expert behind each broker’s and affiliates’ employee. They provide a sales enablement solution that increases overall sales productivity by delivering the right knowledge, at the right time, to move opportunities forward. Employees can listen to the expert’s speech when they need information, directly access the relevant information, and ask question if they have a doubt. First Financial keeps the coherence of the message and offers an innovative training tool to their clients. Hence, the sales teams have a perfect understanding of the products and their benefits. So, broker’s and affiliate’s sales productivity is largely improved.

Technology

Benefits of integrating a CMS in an LMS platform?

Traditionally, there is misunderstanding about the two disciplines as they embrace similar technologies and features. For instance, enrolling learners, structuring access to knowledge, assessing performance, etc…

However, most specialists would agree they certainly differ in their respective purpose; training/learning management (LMS) and knowledge management (CMS). Others identify a short-term vs long-term need, further reinforcing the systems potential incompatibility. We instead emphasized the underlying educational strategies (“pushing” vs “pulling” knowledge) and therefore, their capacity to be complementary.

Adding a CMS to an LMS reveals a very efficient way of improving the education quality as well as an effective way to tackle the recurring training costs issue. CMS still need to fulfill mandatory requirements in order to avoid transferring the implied training cost to the audience itself, potentially wasting valuable time searching for the desired knowledge…

Learning Management System’s basic functions include: to register learners, track participation in courses, perform tests, and then communicate the completion of the course to the employers or administrators. It organizes series of tracks into courses, and “forces” users to go through those tracks, “pushing” the information necessary for them to perform their tasks at work. They are usually costly and require a lot of time to design and complete the training materials.

On the other hand, CMS are more like a library of various types of education or communication materials (videos, audio, documents, etc.) organized and classified into folders or types of materials, but not necessary organized into courses, as on a LMS. That content is available ”on demand” to users. Users “pull” the information they need, for instance while on the job, different from a LMS that “push” the information to users. Also, the information is available at any time; users can search in the library of data and find additional information related to various topics. Given their nature, CMS are quite inexpensive and do not require a lot of effort to classify and organize the content, that most of the time had been gathered already (especially through the LMS implementation).

The following table tends to compare the main characteristics of the two systems:

After showing their main characteristics, these systems appear totally complementary as opposed to independent of one another. The main question then becomes, where to use one or the other, or according to their implied respective cost, when to stop using the LMS and start using the CMS. The following illustration brings a qualitative answer to that question:

As usage of the LMS grows (- - - LMS only), the quality and quantity of the automatically delivered education increases; therefore the associated financial return to the organization increases as well. Unfortunately, the cost rapidly expands too, especially considering the time people spend on training, potentially compromising the overall return on that investment. Going beyond the Optimum Budget and Usage may bring down all benefits anticipated out of the automated education process, initial objective of the LMS implementation. Where to situate that threshold is certainly complex and will vary from one organization to another; going with the universal 80/20 rule may still be a valid assumption for any such a financial evaluation.

Adding a CMS to the equation will basically make the necessary knowledge available to people who need it, when they need it, and reduce the time they spend at learning knowledge they may never use. Individuals’ performance would keep growing for a reasonable additional charge, provided the raw content already exists.

However, to be truly cost efficient, such a CMS needs to fulfill the following requirements:

• Be user-friendly to allow greater audience adoption, since the overall delivery strategy is based upon the peoples’ willingness to access the content. Video is an important component of such an adoption.
• Provide the ability to enrich the content so that people directly access a comprehensive knowledge set (as opposed to having to search throughout various elementary materials)
• Provide the ability to index/search throughout and, more importantly, within the content. Watching hours of videos, when only 2 minutes are relevant to a given task, may reduce all benefits expected from the CMS
• Embed in the enriched content, video and/or audio to support the speech that explains the content, and transform “static knowledge” into real assets and skills people can use right away.
• Bring collaborative features to further suggest greater team cooperation.

Ultimately, as organizations mature and adopt both technologies, CMS usage may expand beyond original boundaries to provide for an optimized usage and a greater Return on Investment. For instance, some may consider only delivering an “Entry” level education (as opposed to an “advanced” one) and let the CMS get people to the “Expert” level all the way through.

Ultimately, the CMS will not replace the LMS, it will definitely complement it. At first, preventing its clients from skyrocketing costs, and then optimizing the overall training and education expenditures, which usually are significant in any organization. LMS will certainly remain to deliver the basics such as any mandatory skills the organization needs to operate. To deliver on that (huge) promise, CMS has to improve to become truly efficient... maybe a KMS ???

Solutions

Master the new Momindum Studio in 10 minutes!

After the launching of the latest version of Momindum Studio, Momindum’s team has created a new Rich Media demonstration. This presentation will help you to discover all the benefits of Momindum Studio and learn how to use it efficiently. Momindum Studio is an authoring tool to create, enrich and index video presentations with a plan, keywords and documents. It’s the perfect software to produce efficient training or communication contents in Rich Media.

Also, you can participate in an online, personalized demonstration with one of our experts, who will explain how to create your Rich Media presentation with our software. Registering for the online demonstration takes only a few minutes and is totally free. Register on our website and one of our experts will call you back to set up the demonstration.