Learning Ninjas

Everyone deserves a chance to learn.

News and Updates

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A New Era and New Leadership

I founded Learning Ninjas in 2010 to collaborate with the brightest minds in learning and development to create innovative, impactful solutions and give back to the community. Over the years, our collective found joy in working together, teaching others, and doing meaningful work for social causes. We are proud to create good in the world through our work and commitment to donate at least 10% of our time and revenue to charities and social causes. But, we can do more.

We believe learning can change the world, and every person deserves a chance to learn.


Hat tip to Shawn Rosler for his help with this video.

Announcing Learning Ninjas LLC

We’re forming Learning Ninjas LLC to grow our impact and take the organization to the next level. Through a strategic merger with Sarah Mercier and meLearning Solutions, we are expanding our leadership team and expertise to open new opportunities for growth.

In addition to experienced leadership and strong design strategy, Sarah brings excellent ideas for how to take Learning Ninjas to the next level. She founded meLearning Solutions in 2011 and later led and expanded the Academy at the Task Force for Global Health. She will continue to operate meLearning Solutions as the mobile learning design and development arm of Learning Ninjas LLC.

Sarah joins a leadership team consisting of myself and Sean Putman. Sean joined the organization as a partner in 2015. Through his experience in developing measurable, performance-based solutions, his expertise and writing about the Experience API (xAPI), and his passion for teaching others, he has helped the organization grow substantially. Sean’s vision helped bring us to where we are today.

What We Offer

Our business model isn’t changing. We continue to offer a collective of consultants, designers, and developers ready to support and teach our clients while we help them meet business goals. This merger brings additional leadership and expertise to our team, enabling us to further our mission to build effective learning solutions while teaching and mentoring others in our community. Along with some new strategic partnerships, we are excited to improve and scale our collaborative process, offer more workshops and learning events, and continue to pursue exciting products we have been developing.

I am proud to have turned a collective into an organization with drive and vision. I’m thrilled to enter this new chapter with Sarah, Sean, our partners, and our talented contractors. We look forward to providing opportunities for people to do the work they want, in the environment of their choosing, while educating and improving lives. This is our mission. We hope you’ll join us!

Contact Us

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Update #006 – Work and Giving Back in 2016

It has been a while since we’ve written anything about the recent work we’ve performed, so we’re wrapping up 2016 with a quick update. We hope all our clients, friends, and family have a wonderful holiday season and head into the new year with hope and ambition.

We have had quite a year working on refining our business model, building partnerships, and strengthening our abilities so we can better serve our clients.

Giving Back

Part of our mission at Learning Ninjas is to give back. We donate 10% of our profits to charities. Each ninja has an option to select one or more charities for us to support. This year, we’re proud to be helping out the following organizations:

  • L3 Foundation
  • Toys for Tots
  • Rotary Foundation
  • Wounded Warrior
  • 1% for the Planet
  • Moyer Foundation
  • North Shore Animal League
  • Fender Music Charity
  • The Water Project

Another goal of ours is to give back to the community with resources like the free webinar we’re hosting next week: Getting Started with xAPI Statements.

Last, but not least, we love creating jobs and freedom for people, and this year we’ve worked with a mix of new and long-time colleagues on some interesting projects with measurable impact. Collaborative work is rewarding!

What we’re working on

We’ve continued to Co-develop on eight new courses with one of our clients, helping them learn best practices, instructional design standards, and iterative design processes as we go.

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We’ve been helping the Public Health Informatics Academy refine the user experience of their learning platform and creating a pilot plan for rolling out Immunization Information Systems (IIS) training to state health departments.

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We’ve worked with another client on a Learning Management System (LMS) selection project, and are currently supporting implementation of the RISC VTA platform.

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Brian facilitated a discovery workshop and requirements gathering project for the Children Without Worms program to determine requirements for a performance support platform to organize and deliver research and toolkits.

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We continue to support the rollout of a learning platform (OnPoint) for Integrated Disease Surveillance and Response (IDSR) through our work with TEPHINET.

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Sean has spent the last couple of years writing a book with Janet Laane Effron called “Investigating Performance”.  2016 saw the book project come to fruition and the book is in the final stages of editing with a release date early in 2017. Sign up here to be notified when it’s available.

Where we’ve been presenting

Sean presented at all of the 2016 xAPI Camps and at Torrance Learning for the xAPI Parties and Download Conference. He also presented at a corporate conference on the process of collecting and using data.

Brian delivered a keynote, “Design for All: Accessible Learning Experiences”, at the BLR Learning Conference in November.

Brian and Sean both presented at DevLearn:

Brian Dusablon presenting at DevLearn Hyperdrive event on lessons learned from a project.

Brian also won an award as a finalist in the DevLearn Hyperdrive event.

It was a great year for us presenting and talking with people at various conferences throughout the year.  We are looking forward to presenting at and participating in more events in 2017.

What we learned this week

In case you missed it, Sean is delivering a free webinar, “Getting Started with xAPI Statements”, next Wednesday. Following that will be two add-on authoring tool sessions on Thursday covering xAPI basics for Captivate and Articulate Storyline.

The Focus Summit is an excellent free series of video interviews on focus in your business and life.

Our friends Connie Malamed and Megan Torrance talked about “Applying Agile Principles To eLearning Projects.”

Mark Britz writes about the Tale of Two Socials.

Be well and be kind, everyone. See you next year!

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Update #005 – A Lot About xAPI

What we’re working on

Brian led the judging at the E-Learning Showcase at the 2016 ATD Houston Tech Conference. The project benefited the Houston Food Bank by producing compliance training courses.

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Sean and Brian and Art from RISC talking around table at lunch.Brian and Sean presented at the Torrance Learning xAPI Party in Chelsea, Michigan, and again at the Torrance Learning Download the following day. We enjoyed the events and the quality discussions around xAPI and how we can implement it.

Sean presented on the basics of xAPI statements and the state of xAPI in the rapid development tools.  Brian spoke about our experience creating LearnxAPI.com and gathered great feedback for future additions to the site. At the Download, Sean and Brian presented some of the good, bad, and ugly things we have seen in course reviews. Attendees joined in an energizing discussion and shared some of their own examples.

Thanks to Megan and the rest of the Torrance Learning crew for hosting these events – an excellent opportunity for networking and building the community.

Links to our presentations and others at the events can be found here and here (or use the direct links below).

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Co-development work with one of our clients continues, including storyboards, interaction prototypes, and visual design concepts. We will soon begin preparing them for developing the courses in Captivate. This has been an exciting opportunity to teach and coach as they grow their internal learning and development team.

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Last weekend was our first company retreat. Sean and Brian met in a secret location with a large supply of sticky notes and sharpies to brainstorm, plan, and create value for our clients. Stay tuned for more about what we learned!

What we found interesting this week

Moqups Update – Improved collaboration, markup, and commenting. Excellent!

Accessible Typography – “It’s hard to justify cutting corners in an effort to get stuff done faster at the risk of reducing access for some people.” (Also: Today is Global Accessibility Awareness Day)

Connecting the Digital Dots – Becca Wilson writes about her experience creating learning experience for digital product management teams.

Innovator Interview – Art Werkenthin from RISC is interviewed about CMI-5, LMS’s, and and a look to the future.

 

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Update #004 – Accessibility and an xAPI Book

What we’re working on

Brian was a guest blogger on the RISC Learning Corner blog this week. He wrote about accessibility in elearning.

Sean and Brian were fortunate to collaborate with Connie Malamed on a design document for an elearning course were co-developing with our client. For this project, we’ll be designing the course screens and structure. Then, we’ll work with our client in a paired-programming style development workflow to teach them best practices for screen design and development in Captivate.

Sean is writing a book with Janet Laane Effron called “Investigating Performance”. The book looks into the use of xAPI data and analytics by L&D professionals. Get more information and sign up to be notified when the first mini-book is released.

Brian will be leading the judging of an elearning contest benefiting the Houston Food Bank at the ATD Houston Tech Conference later this month.

What we found interesting this week

Data Storytelling: The Essential Data Science Skill Everyone Needs

What’s in A Name? Expanding the Vocabulary of xAPI

Life in a Post-SCORM World Part 2: Courseware Tools & LMS

Jane Bozarth talks about accessibility on the Articulate Community

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Weekly Update #003

What we’re doing this week:

After a busy couple of weeks, it is nice to settle down and write this update. We had a great time at xAPI Camp at the Learning Solutions Conference in Orlando. Sean presented on four of the current Development Tools (Captivate, Storyline, Lectora, and Claro) and their xAPI capabilities. The presentation was well received and led to some good conversations about the tools. You can read the xAPI overview of each tool at xAPI Quarterly in the Fall and Winter editions.

We completed and delivered our report reviewing 22 courses and LMS late last week. We are answering final questions for them this week, and then we’ll be writing about the project to show our work. We’re also moving into discussions about system architecture and designing and developing a “best practice” course for them to use internally. If you’d like us to review a course or courses, start here.

Brian’s trip to Africa to help implement a learning platform for disease surveillance training was postponed. Instead, he’ll be focusing on writing an article as a guest blogger for the RISC blog and working on conference proposals for DevLearn.

What we found interesting this week:

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Weekly Update #002

What we’re doing this week:

We are happy to be reviewing a set of courses for one of our clients. We were able to complete the reviews of the individual courses and the LMS, and spent the week documenting our recommendations for improving the consistency and quality of their offerings.

We are preparing for xAPI Camp at the Learning Solutions conference next Tuesday, March 15th. Sean will be speaking on best practices for using some of the common rapid development tools (read more about these best practices at xAPI Quarterly). If you are going to Learning Solutions, let us know in the comments and find us at the expo or around the conference area. If you’re not attending see the link below for the conference backchannel from David Kelly.

We’ve begun mapping out a scenario-based elearning course as part of a blended program to drive behavior change.

Brian attended the monthly Houston area Learning Innovation Technologists Stammtisch, and will be playing a role in the ATD Houston eLearning Showcase in April.

What we found interesting this week: