Make Ayris Yours: Branding in Ayris Now Available!

OutCons is excited to announce the ability to brand Ayris to your specific company color scheme and incorporate your logo throughout the system, including emails! 

As my company’s admin, I can now alter Ayris to have the same look and feel as my other internal products. After I upload my company logo, it replaces the Ayris logo throughout my Ayris domain. Which means when my contacts take an exam, answer a survey, launch a course, or access www.goayris.com, they will see my company logo and color scheme. To go even further,  the emails my employees and contacts receive, which are pushed from Ayris, will also have my company logo within the email.

We are very excited to announce this, and we hope you enjoy the freedom of customizing Ayris to fit your needs!

Below is a preview of the Branding options within Ayris.

Ayris Default Branding Scheme

Branding Ayris with Company Scheme

For more information on Ayris and our branding capabilities, please reach out to support@ayris.com. We hope to hear from you!

Ayris: The First Learning Distribution System

Learning and employee development is an ever growing aspect in the corporate environment. Companies, managers and employees, all alike, are looking for E-Learnings to be more engaging, more gamified, and more impactful for their growth. Ayris is here to simplify the consumption of those learnings.

A Learning Distribution System is a disruptor in the learning technology landscape. OutCons developed this system based off various requirement-building sessions with clients while implementing other Learning Management Systems and platforms. OutCons’ team found a gap – a need to quickly and easily touch team members or clients - and decided to bridge that gap with Ayris.

Ayris is not here to replace your current LMS, but rather streamline the interaction between manager and employee, or employee and colleague. All you need to begin is a URL to the content you wish to share and a valid email address for the recipient. It is that easy.

If you are a larger corporate company, Ayris is a perfect fit with our Enterprise package, even if you have an LMS. Ayris can run in conjunction with your LMS while allowing smaller organizations or teams to run independent learning activities. If you do not have the budget nor time for a full scale LMS implementation, Ayris is ready now. Check out our various subscription based plans here.

Ayris can be used in a variety of ways, from an Onboarding tool to a team development aide.

• An Onboarding buddy could push the new hire the important links and videos about the company or team.
• A manager can have a more hands on approach to his/her team development.
• Imagine wanting to send your entire team a Ted Talk, but it does not fit the requirements to be created in your LMS.
• Ayris is here to allow that manager to push emails consisting of Ayris courses to their employees and track their completion.
• If you need reporting captured in your LMS, we can integrate the system to send completions back to your learning platform.
• Ayris can take content from virtually anywhere and assign it to any valid email address. Examples of learning content includes:
• Online news articles
• YouTube videos
• TED Talks
• Online file shares
• Direct links to courses within your LMS
• SCORM compatibility

Ayris allows you to surround this newly created course with customized exams, as well as course surveys for feedback.

To become a subscriber, please visit www.goayris.com and select the plan that best fits your needs.

• You control who the end users are
• You control the learning pushed
• You control the reporting

If you have any questions, please reach out to support@goayris.com.

The New Disruptor - Learning Distribution System

There is a new disruptor in the learning technology landscape, a Learning Distribution System or LDS. There are two major ways that people currently access learning materials.  Learners pull what they want to learn or someone pushes what they want to have the learners learn.  Learning Distribution System (LDS) helps by pushing learning to learners. Our new LDS is the perfect way to share and track the usage of content you want to push to your learners.

For corporate clients where a learning management system (LMS) in in place, the LDS works in tandem with your LMS by allowing smaller groups the ability to push learning to their people and then provide a learning history to your LMS.  If you are a small business that can’t justify a full LMS, the LDS can help you track your initiatives.

The LDS will work with content from anywhere.  It can be a set of YouTube videos on workout moves for personal trainers to help their clients reach their goals.  It can be a TED talk on how your body language impacts sales for sales managers to help their team meet their quotas.  It can be a SCORM package that helps you meet legal standards for sensitivity training. If you can link to the content online, the LDS can help you push it to your target audience and track the completion.

The LDS is a tool that anyone can use and is accessible via the tools they already use on a daily basis. Typically, people are working in their email both personal and corporate.   Email is accessed at work on their computers, at home on their computers or tablets and even on their phones.  So rather than have the learner go to an LMS, the LDS will send the links you want directly to the learner’s email from you.  It will not be a system generated message but one that comes from you.

Your email will include links to courses which reside in your LMS, TED talks, SCORM courses, online articles, PDFs of pricing documents, YouTube videos of work outs; essentially whatever you want that your learners will be able to access via a link. Once you have done this, you will be able to view and export LDS reports to track usage of the content you pushed to your learners.

OutCons will be leading the way in LDS technology with a platform called Ayris.

Best of Manchester - Thank You!

My partners and I are deeply honored to accept the award for Best of Business Services in Manchester, New Hampshire.  We were a bit stunned when we discovered we had won this award as 2015 was only our second year in business. 

Without false modesty, I can say we could not have done this if it were not for our employees and contractors. They each deserve as much, if not more, of the credit for the work they do with our clients.  I also want to take this as an opportunity to give a huge thanks to our clients… without them we would not be in existence. 

 

We will continue to provide exceptional customer service as we truly believe that our ability to serve our clients, is what separates us from others in our line of business.  We will also continue to provide the highest level of customer service and provide our clients with the services they require in the learning industry to excel. 

Thank you,

Mike

Content Hosting Primer

One of the questions I have been asking for years is ‘where is your content’.  When I first started working with Learning Management and eLearning in general, the term ‘cloud’ wasn’t a marketing trend yet.  Clients, customers, and even the companies I have worked for put their eLearning content wherever they could but generally behind a corporate firewall along with their Learning Management System (LMS).  One client I had was a commercial client that sold content – since my company hosted their LMS, we also hosted their content on the same servers.  Very easy setups!

Today it’s different.  Users are not just behind your firewall.  They are out in the world accessing the content from their phones without noticing any difference in quality of throughput or security restrictions.  This is a fantastic step forward and gets us all closer to performance driven content delivery where the information is given to us right at the moment we need it. But getting closer to this nirvana is a hard thing to do technically and as it turns out sometimes it is a very hard thing politically and socially within companies.

Content hosting is a relatively easy thing to do.  You procure a cloud environment, upload some content, plop the URL into your LMS and run….right?  It can potentially be that easy.  There is work to be done and technical tasks that need to be completed, but none of them are beyond an experienced person’s ability. 

There are a few questions to ask yourself next time you’re considering reviewing where your content is hosted (internally or externally).  Some of them include:

Where is your audience?  This is the primary in driver in your content development and should also be a primary driver in how you host your content.  Does your audience need access outside of the network?  If so, how will you ensure security and reliability in the connection? Who is paying for them to consume the content (who pays for wifi, data plans, etc)?

What technology is your content? This is not a call to debate the best technology, but once that determination is made, the hosting and consumption vehicles must be able to support whatever is chosen.  You may determine that you don’t even need mobile enabled content and this can be an easy question.  The point is that someone has to make the determination before you spend a significant amount of time, money, and resources on a piece of content that may not work on your intended audiences’ device.

How do you want to report on consumption? This could be a little controversial within your company.  Are you launching LMS courses that communicate completion back to the LMS?  Are you just launching videos that may or may not reside in some other system and you just want to track the launching?  There are a lot of different options depending upon the business need for the content.

An experienced content hosting team can help coordinate along with your eLearning producer to make sure your content is delivered flawlessly.  After you have made the decision to host (internally or externally) there are steps to help get your company through the technical snags that will happen.  In the next few posts we will further explore hosting and how you can effectively host content for all of your users.

The need for Content Governance

The OutCons team has worked with several clients globally and one thing many of them struggle with is content governance.  I personally have worked with clients ranging from 100 employees up to 100,000 and while the smaller companies have less of a problem, all of them have a need to streamline and enforce a content governance policy. 

Where most companies have issues with their content governance is at the beginning of the process.  Your role in the company creates a bias on how what you think is the best delivery method and that ultimately impacts the governance process and how well the message is received and consumed.  If you are in a Corporate University or Education function, you will most likely determine that you need a full blown eLearning course with a didactic structure including knowledge checks and smile sheets (surveys) to help you gather your feedback.  You may go through all of this when really, just an email and a call to action is necessary to deliver the message and elicit the correct response. 

Where content governance and a content governance process can help is at the beginning of the process and through the review cycles. It can help identify a significant amount of redundant messages or content and can help alleviate the user from having to wade through a sea of content that may or may not be important to the company or to them. 

Within the eLearning industry, companies worldwide face issues managing their content within their Learning Management System (LMS).  They may face differences in culture and differences in how people approach learning and training or they may face differences in how they are measured from a business perspective and these policies impact how their content is entered and measured in their LMS.  This inconsistency in governance and management of the metadata can cause significant issues and create a severe lack of efficiency in content management.  One example of this would be a large company with over 75,000 employees was rolling out a new product.  The introduction to this product and the training of the developers, sales people, and support people necessitated the creation and delivery of content to all these various groups.  Each of these groups went forward and created content for their own group rather than working on it together because one group was unaware of what the other group(s) were developing.

For the purpose of argument, let’s say that it costs 40 effort hours to create a 15-minute introduction to product X.  If the average employee makes $35/hour for instructional design, that is a cost of $1,400 per asset created.  In just this one product example, we see that rather than spend $1,400 on one asset, the company spent $19,600 just on the creation of 14 assets that were <5% different from each other.  They did this because they did not have a centralized governance process.  Additionally, this company spent an average of $180 per course on administration (180x14=$2,520).  In total this company spend $22,120 on extra work that was not necessary.  If they were able to collectively work on content, view pipelines of content creation, content availability, and quickly determine where a piece of content is in its life cycle, they would be able to realize a return on the investment in a system and process to help govern their content creation.

OutCons can help you realize this return on investment and can even help you justify the cost to implement a process and potential tools.  We have significant experience in the content governance processes, change management, tool development and deployment, and we can even help with the integration and hosting of your content so that your employees get back to the core business they are focused on rather than worrying about their content or the content governance process. 

Now that we have identified the need, our next discussion will cover how you execute on your governance plan!  Stay tuned to this blog for more info.

Welcome to OutCons and Welcome to our Conversation!

Welcome to OutCons and welcome to our conversation!

Hello!  Our people have been focused on Learning, Learning Management, and services around learning for over 15 years.  OutCons is a small but growing firm that started through the shared friendship of Mike Reedy, and Plamen Kasabov.  Mike and Plamen laid the groundwork and started to build the business in 2014 by working with a few clients on custom websites and corporate learning programs in large companies.  In 2015 Jason Siesko joined and began to help lay out the financial and sales processes.  Together the 3 have been working to help clients build custom software, lead projects to completion, or implement and enhance corporate learning systems. Together with the team they are building they have created a quickly expanding firm that is ready to help you with your needs!

This website and this blog are here to help you understand what we can do for you at a high level.  There will be additional blogs posts that will help frame some of our experiences and will begin to expand on some of the trends we see in the market.  If you have questions or would like to see us provide our thoughts on market trends, you can comment here, email us directly via the links below or at info@outcons.com .  Additionally, you can follow our tweets at @OutCons1 or @J_Siesko

Upcoming topics for the blog and tweets include Content Governance, Content Hosting in a Global Environment, Trends in Learning Today, SCORM/AICC/Tin-Can and potentially some additional topics on custom UIs for SAAS systems such as SuccessFactors Learning.  This list will be changing and we will update it as we go along our journey of learning together.

The posters for this blog will be expanding and growing but will include the 3 partners as well as some of our Bulgarian colleagues and our US based colleagues.  Stay tuned and we hope we can help you turn on your performance management solution!