 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Christa Burns, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly online event. We are sometimes called a webinar, a webcast, an online show. Whatever you want to call us though, we are always here live Wednesday mornings online at 10 a.m. central time. However, all of our shows are recorded. So if you're unable to join us on Wednesday mornings, that's fine. You can always go to our website that I will show you at the end of the show. And you can watch recordings of all of our previous shows. We post the recordings, any presentations, if there's PowerPoints or anything that people have, handouts, links to websites that are mentioned during the show. All of those are collected together and put onto our archives pages. Both the free show and the archives, both the live show and the archives, are free and open to anyone to watch. So please do share with any of your friends or colleagues who might be interested in any of our topics. We do a mixture of things here, presentations, book reviews, many training sessions, interviews. Basically anything library related we have on the show. We do bring in guest speakers from outside of Nebraska, outside of the Nebraska Library Commission, and outside of Nebraska. But we also have presentations that we do from our own Nebraska Library Commission staff. And that's what we have this morning. To my left is Laura Johnson, who is Library Commission's Continuing Education Coordinator. Good morning. Good morning, Laura. And she's going to tell us about a new service. Relatively new service. Last year, sure. Yeah, exactly, it went live. For Nebraska Library staff to work on skills and things. So I'm just going to hand it over to you to go ahead and take it away. Well, thank you. Okay, we titled this, Integrate Those Desktop Skills with Online Classes. And what that means. Well, as many of you know, and this really is today largely for a Nebraska audience. And I'll explain why in a minute. As you know, several years ago we had this big grant and we put a lot of computers in libraries. And that means that you've got a lot of people using those computers in your libraries. And when people use computers in libraries, it turns out they frequently need help with them. Which meant that many of us needed to kind of brush up on our skills a little bit so that we could help people. And we had tried a lot of different kinds of training. We've had training through the community colleges. We've had workshops. We had a special set of workshops where we cooperated with the Nebraska Extension Service. And so we knew that there was kind of a need for some skills training. We also knew from the reactions we have gotten to the programming we've been doing in the last several years that convenience is a big deal. And not just because people want convenience because people have busy lives and they're working and trying to fit time for a workshop into their lives is difficult. There's a lot of travel involved and that's a lot of expense. So we were trying to find something that would fit in with people's lives that would give them the training they needed. And that we could afford because that's kind of a big deal for us too. And really we came up kind of with a list. And I really was looking into a list of places that offered this kind of training when an opportunity came up through Web Junction to participate in what is essentially a group purchase of access to skill soft classes. Now before you go, you said that this is mainly geared towards Nebraska libraries. And that everything that we're going to talk about that has been offered and created is for Nebraska libraries. But people who are not from Nebraska can still get ideas from this. They certainly can. And there's, I think, seven or eight other states that are also doing this. So your state may be doing the same thing. Or like you said, I didn't realize that I didn't even know it was a group purchase with Web Junction. Something that maybe you or you can get your state involved with doing it. See if they aren't already look into this. Okay. Yes. Yeah. Now skill soft is a company that was started by Chuck Moran. He's out of Nashua, New Hampshire. A little over 15 years ago, it is the biggest company that offers these kinds of trainings. And they're very well regarded. So we essentially have a contract through Web Junction with skill soft for access to their catalog of courses for all Nebraska library staff. Technically the catalog says it's 813 people. I'm not sure why I don't know where they got that number. But it's okay. So what does skill soft offer us basically online learning at your fingertips whenever you want it when you need it. And that for us was key that this would fit into the user's lives and really fulfill their need. It is sponsored by the Nebraska Library Commission. We are paying for this, which does mean that we will be looking at it to see if it's used. Because it takes a while for people to get used to something and try out something new. But on the other hand, we can't go on paying forever for something that very few people are using. Now this isn't something that had to do with those grants that we had the money for this. No, no, the money did not. It's just with the grants we were able to get so many computers for libraries. But that has kind of, in some ways we created a need. Yes, we did. A victim of our success. I guess we are. So we're sponsoring this. What is available to you through this 450 self-paced courses and over 4,000 short videos. A sample of some of the course titles. We really got this thinking that the desktop skills were going to be a big deal. But there's a lot of different kinds of classes you can see that some of them are desktop. Some of them are computer network kinds of things. But some of them are customer service, communications. Like the leadership. Leadership. Management kinds of things. So there's a lot of variety in the courses. But for instance, if we took, one of the things they do is they take sort of topics and break them down into bite-sized pieces. They're very big on bite-sized pieces. So, for instance, if you were, if you wanted to learn Word from our Word 2013, there are five classes that you could take. The advantage of this of course is that you can just take a little bit at a time kind of digest that and then go on to the next thing. And you can definitely work at your own pace. So this is sort of a pattern for them that they will have a major topic and they'll break it down into smaller pieces and then break it down even further. Now, as far as the videos are, these are the courses. As far as the videos, because they have all these videos. Again, some of them are desktop kinds of things. There's a lot of things on Windows 8. But Google Apps, web browsing, quick. And these I literally just picked up the titles out of their catalog. Videos tend to be about, oh, between five and 15 minutes long. No, it's usually, you know, we have said that programs have to be at least half an hour long for people to get CE credit for the librarian certification program. What I want to do here, I think will work, is if you view several videos that add up to at least 30 minutes on the same subject. It's like those ones are all about word because they obviously, I assume, I haven't done it myself, but I want to. They lead into each other necessarily? Yes, they kind of, I think you can kind of jump around a little bit, especially with the videos. But say you did four videos on Microsoft Windows 8.1 and they added up to 36 minutes. That would be 0.5 CE credits. So that's what we're going to try to do here. Now, I had a few people who have already done some of the classes. I contacted them and asked them, you know, what their experience had been like because I thought that it would be useful for people to hear what some of their colleagues thought. When did this actually go live? When did we actually start? I actually started it in January. It was January when you first started doing these. Naomi Hemphill from Madison said that she tried the Windows 8.1 because they were changing and she wanted to learn it and that she felt that it really helped her. So I'm glad to hear that. Perfect timing for them. Yes. And remember, we're all going to be changing operating systems. Windows 10 is coming up in a matter of days now, isn't it? And I haven't seen any classes for Windows 10 in the Skillsoft catalog yet, but I'm expecting them. So this may be a really good way if you're going to be upgrading your operating system to think about training for people in your library. So is that something that the classes that are in the catalog could change over time? Yes, they do change. They will add things or update things. It's not like we bought only these classes and if we want more, we have to pass. In fact, it's the whole catalog. Yes, it wasn't particular classes. It was the whole catalog. So as they come up with new ones, they'll just get added and we'll have access to them. So in order to get started, what do you do? Well, I created a launch page. I thought that might make it easier for people. So you just go to our front page, you know, nlc.nebraska.gov. And if you choose education and training, the flyout menu will come up and Skillsoft is listed right on the front page. So you don't really have to remember anything new. You can always find it this way. This is the page. I created it kind of thinking, well, let's give people a little explanation of how to do this and answer some questions they might have. I also took the catalog because the catalog is, well, formidable. There's a lot of stuff. That's a lot of classes. So I took the catalog and picked out the classes that I thought people might be most interested in and listed them here. So if you want to go to this PDF on our website, it is courses from Skillsoft. And of course you can view the whole Skillsoft catalog, but if people want to look at this, that's fine. But do notice over on the right hand column, they tell you about how long they think the course will take. And so we thought, OK, that's how much credit you will get for taking the class from Skillsoft. So if they say one hour, that's one CE credit. So we go back to our launch page there. And here is the URL. When you go to that URL, you see that you get to Skillport, which is the software that brings you the Skillsoft classes. And again, it's webjunction.skillports.com. The first time you go here, you have to register. And it's that little bitty thing down at the bottom. See? So remember to register. And when you do that, they're just going to ask you, basically, who you are and are you really from Nebraska? And so you have to tell them, yes, please. One of the reasons you have to register, oh, I have another testimonial here. Linda McHales from West Point said, she does recommend Skillport, the Skillsoft classes. And she had a good experience doing them. And she thought it was very user-friendly. And it was easy to navigate through it. She's starting a whole new one. Cool. Yeah. So when you register, then you get your personal homepage. Now, there's a reason for this. And that is that you can stop a class in the middle. Remember, we said they were really designed in little chunks. So after you do kind of one chunk of a class, and you need to stop, then you can go back later and pick it up where you left off. So your personal homepage kind of keeps track of that. There's also a lot of stuff here for you. The first thing is there is a user guide. Now, I think it's worth probably downloading this. It's a Word document. It's 13 pages long. But it kind of helps you. It'll answer some questions and stuff. But if you don't want to, you know that it's always here. We go back to the point. There's always tech support. The help comes out in a pop-up window. And I thought it was pretty good. I found I was able to find what I needed in the help. And I thought it was useful. It was well written. Also, if you want access to the videos, this page will give you access to the courses. But if you want access to the videos, you need to click on this little link to the desktop and IT videos. And it takes you to another page, which is called Books 24-7. There are some books in here, though. I didn't think we would. If you're interested in the books, cool. But I didn't go in. So the books are part of our... Yeah, but I didn't go into it. But if you choose videos, for instance, I looked under the desktop video topics and you see, again, they're broken down into subjects. And I chose operating systems, Microsoft Windows 8. And here, let's blow this up a little bit so you can see it a little better. They explain what the video is. They tell you how long it is. Oops, should have gone back. They tell you how long it is. And these are very focused. But I thought, you know, these were pretty cool. And there's a whole bunch of them. Yeah, so I didn't say in the previous, there's like 65. Yeah. Came up for just Windows 8. Yeah, there's a whole bunch of them. So you easily could watch a cluster of these, if you wanted to see it. Okay, back to the personal homepage where you can get access to the catalog. Now, the catalog, as I said, again, the way they tend to make things hierarchical. So they have six main subject headings. Let's look at those. And I picked out one... When I did that list of sample topics, I picked out one from each of these. I thought that was a way to get a good cross-section. But if, say, we went to desktop curricula and we opened that up, you see there's all kinds of subjects, all kinds of software in there. And then, say, we chose beginning Excel. Actually, it was Excel classes that I tried. You see that there's five classes in beginning Excel. You can choose a class, and then it gives you a little explanation. You can launch the class from there. You can start it right there. It tells you how long it's going to take you. So, you know, I think they give you enough information that you really kind of know what you're getting into. You need to plan ahead for it. Yeah. I like also that on the list and the previous longer list, they do have classes for older things like Windows XP. Yeah, they do. Because there are still libraries and there will be out there that cannot yet upgrade to the newer versions that are coming out. I mean, yeah, Windows 10 is coming, but there are going to be people that still are going to be on XP, are going to have to be on the previous versions, and someone's going to be new to it. And I like that they still have some of those. It's not just for the newest stuff that might be coming out. So, when you launch, you get a page that, again, will tell you what the topics are. And generally, the classes, the couple of classes I've taken, they followed a pattern. First, there'll be an explanation of a particular kind of task. Then there'll be some examples that they'll show you. And these are kind of narrated, well, they're kind of video, but they're kind of narrated slides, really, because they're showing you screenshots. And you move ahead at your own pace, so you have to keep telling it, move to the next page, move to the next page, but it means that you don't have to go any faster than you want to go. Then there'll be some exercises where they'll literally say to you, okay, here's the situation. You do this. You'll do it. And then they'll come back and say, yes, you did it successfully, or oops, no, this isn't quite right. And then, so you can keep working on it. You can go back and try it over again until you really feel you've got it. And then there'll be a little test. So you can make sure that you really did get it. You kind of have to just work at that pace. I found sort of the hard way, the first class I did here, that skipping around wasn't really a great idea. It is done in a certain order for a reason. You just do it in their order as you go. It didn't take, I didn't think any time to really get the idea of how you navigate. If you see that sort of dull gray bar above the darker gray bar on that slide, there's two little arrows. You click those arrows to move ahead or move back. You can, if you see over in that bar, on the very right side, take the tour. That tour is about a six minute, a little over six minute tour. And I thought that was useful. It kind of showed you how you do navigate through the classes. So you might want a tour of how to navigate through the classes. And I thought it was kind of worth it. It made me feel a little more like I sort of knew what was going on. I think you learned pretty quickly. I would love to demo it for you, but all this stuff is copyrighted. And if this is going to be posted on the web later, I thought, well, no, we can't really use their copyrighted material. Screenshots are good. You never know how to win things. Live demos are nice, but if you're worried about if they will work correctly or not sometimes. Having screenshots is a safer bet. Also, I wasn't sure if I got things wrong when I looked down. No, everybody. Because I did get things wrong. Excel is not something I knew very well. Or at all, really. And so this really did teach me a lot of stuff about Excel. I didn't know. I am more confident using Excel now than I was. Cool. See the testimonial from YouTube. Yeah. And when you get all done and they say, OK, you've completed everything, they will tell you that. Candace Gaston from Kimball says that she really liked the way the material was presented in bite-sized pieces. And that the tests really help you kind of consolidate what you've learned. I mean, the tests aren't mean. And if you don't do it, if you don't get a 100, you can go back and do it over again until you get a 100. So you get them all right and figure it out? Yeah. And you know me, I had to go back and do it until I got the 100, because you know. And when you've completed them, it goes on your progress. It says my progress in your home page. And it says completed. Now, there's supposed to be a little icon there where you can actually print yourself a certificate. But I had to call Web Junction and they're looking into it because right now I didn't have it. Ah, something's missing. But we'll get that. And you don't have to have a certificate, really. You know you've completed it. But we also heard from Angela Amelia at South Sioux City. And she said she would really recommend them. She thought that they were, the classes were good. That you did have to just kind of say, okay, I'm going to go with the flow here and go with the class. As I said, they're narrated. And the woman who narrated mine had a very faint. It wasn't irritating at all. In fact, it was fun. I enjoyed it. The tiniest trace of an Irish accent, which I thought was charming. Okay. So I really liked it. We'll give a question if we want to hear about the tests that you do from them. Someone says they're going to be training new staff and are looking for a way for individuals to be able to test out of training, meaning prove that you already know how to use these things. You don't need the extra training. Is there a way in here to just jump to taking the test without having done the class or watching the video? There is a pretest if you want to see how much you already know. And you can just go to the tests and take them. Did you say it was difficult to jump around when you're trying to learn, but you can just jump to the end? You can. But then if you didn't do okay on the test, you'd have to go back. Well, yeah. This is because of the way Skillsoft is marketed and essentially, for the most part, sold. It's sold to companies and sold to businesses who want to extend training for their people. So they're pretty serious about people actually completing and making sure that people are competent in the tasks when they're done with the training. So it's not... Is that something to really... It's not unpleasant. It's not this terrible burden or anything. It's not something you fool around with either. You kind of do go through it and do kind of get your head into it while you're doing the training. It's serious. So anyway. Yes, it could be used that way if it was. Yes, it could. It certainly could be. Okay, so there are some tech requirements and you have to allow pop-ups on your computer. They recommend that you're using the latest version of Java, although it will work, they say, with any version. You do have to have cookies enabled. And some browsers, it should work with almost any browser, although some browsers do work a little better than others. And if you need a little bit more about the tech requirements, Web Junction has this Skillsoft... I find that hard to say. I can see that, yeah. Skillsoft troubleshooting page. And they list some of the tech things to be aware of. Of course, these people are marketing, as we said, to many businesses all over the world because these come in a lot of languages too. I didn't see any point in learning Excel in Spanish, but I could have. So they do make it work with almost anybody's computer. That's not really going to be an issue. But for instance, if you have a pop-up blocker, you need to unblock it, at least for a few domains. And they ask if you have a problem, not to contact Skillsoft, but to contact Web Junction. And in fact, they have a little form here for you to contact Web Junction about any trouble if you have it. Skillsoft does, although, have a page you can go to to check to make sure that you do have all the tech stuff that you need. So you can just go to this page if you have a very old computer and you're worried. So it will actually access your computer and check to see what's going on. Because I see here it says your Java is enabled, you can use our name. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, they really have figured out how to make all this work for people. Skillsoft does have some things besides the courses and the webinars. There is a Skillsoft web page that is outside the skill port where they have the courses where you can learn more about the company. You can see a demo, although I'm not sure why you would, why you wouldn't just go into skill port and register since you can. But there is a Skillsoft web page. As I said, they have demos and you can see the catalog on the web without going into skill port. Although, again, I'm not sure why you would, but you can if you want to. And they have, evidently, they have conferences now about training because they're a big name in training. Corporate training is a big industry. And they do have the occasional webinar. I got this yesterday that they're going to have this webinar on Wednesday, August 19th. So, you know, I think so far I've taken two courses. I did get completions on both of them. I enjoyed them. I felt like I really did master the material. And, you know, it's so easy to go through a little demo and say, oh, cool. But then when you really get down to it, you think, well, what was that? How did I do that? So this, you really will know it. You will say, yes, I know how to do this now. So I thought it was, and I hope this works for people because you can do it anytime, really with any computer, with an internet connection. And because you can stop and start the classes. Always getting interrupted. So that's good. Yes. I felt like this really would work for people. And I hope that it does. As far as your CE credits, I had a little trouble at the beginning when we first started figuring out how to get the reports and stuff. But I have that figured out now. And I get a report from them. And so I'll know who's completed the course. But I decided because it tells me that it's even started a class. And I know, for instance, 168 people right now have gone in and registered. Nice. So they have to have said, you've completed the class for me to record CE credit for you. But I do get this and every week, most weeks, some weeks if they're very busy. I miss one because I'll get it the next week. And remember, it's not going to get lost. If it takes two weeks to get it recorded, it doesn't change the fact that you did it. Yes. And we know that you did it. We just haven't quite gotten to getting it recorded yet. So, but if you have a question, of course you can always contact me. So for CE then, people don't have to submit the CE form to let you know they did this. I will get the reports from Skillsoft. Skillsoft and you'll be able to take attention to it that way. The only time I can foresee a problem is if you view several videos and you don't do them all at once, then I have to make sure I watch the report and get those put together. So, you know, maybe you want to jog my elbow on that. It's okay, I have people jog my elbow. We're keeping track of over 900 people in the CE. That's a lot, yeah. Certification program and we do pretty well. But, you know, if somebody needs to remind me of something, I appreciate it. Or if you're not sure if something went through correctly, if there was some sort of technical thing you thought was wonky, to have, you know, you can check and see what the report said. Yeah. Always. So, and you can always contact me anytime. It's just laura.johnsonatnebraska.gov. And I know we're not, we haven't run to a whole hour today, but that was really kind of, you know, what we had to say about Skillsoft. Does anybody have any questions? Has anybody else tried it that they'd like to talk about their experience? Anybody has any questions? Use your questions in your face or if you have a microphone, let me know. And in there type in unmute me, I have a mic. And you can ask your question that way or if you've used it. Yeah, we definitely want to hear. Yeah. Unfortunately, the people that had used it, that Laura had their testimonials, none of them are available today to join us live. No, they couldn't join us. I do have a couple of questions. You said when the course is completed, when it's done, you get the completed application. If someone wanted to go back and refresh her, can they redo a course they've already completed? You know, I don't know. I do it this week. And then for whatever reason, don't use Excel for six months and need a reminder about what I learned or something. That's what I'm wondering. I think you could. I'll have to ask because I'm really not sure. Because it closed that course for you. I don't think so, but I really don't know. I think so. I think I would be tempted. Actually, if I wanted to just, you know, refresh myself a little, would be to see if there was a video. One of those 10-minute videos. The videos don't have a test or anything at the end of the course. No. Were you doing the actual exercises and actually using it? You said this is what we appreciate for all library staff in Nebraska. Now, does that include boards and trustees, or is it just staff members, or how picky is that? I am going to say that it does include library boards. It probably does not include volunteers or friends. I wouldn't even have thought about friends. That's usually something completely separate. Yeah, that's separate. And as I said, right now, our contract said technically, I think it was 813 people. We have 168 signed up. So we've got plenty of room. But I'm hoping that hundreds of people, after seeing this presentation, will run right out and sign up. I suppose if we get that 800 and something, there could be a discussion with Skillsoft about do we need to adjust our contract or something. That will be a future conversation. But right now, we have a contract. It started, a new contract started July 1. And as I said, we will be tracking this because if it's not working for people, then it's not working for us. On the other hand, I understand that it takes things a while to get some traction. So we're really hoping that people will try out the classes because I think they'll find that it's pretty effective. And this is for any type of library in the state. It's not just public libraries. It's for any kind of library. Public libraries, the academics are welcome. Whoever, yeah. K-12 is the home. Anybody who works at a library. When we get up to 800 people, then we'll worry about it. If we need to. But right now, we're fine. Okay. Well, nobody typed anything in yet. Does anybody have any questions? That's all the questions I can answer. Okay, well. If you have any questions, comments, thoughts, I guess nobody, has anybody here done it yet? I don't, nobody has said they did. So I'm going to guess that many of you on the line have popped into any of the classes yet. Let me know. If you have some thoughts about it, let me know what you think. I think it's very cool. I meant to actually get into it and take some before today because I wanted to be able to speak more coherently. I don't know what the way is with actual knowledge. And I just never got around to doing anything. There's definitely stuff in there that I would want to learn more about that I kind of, you know, muddle my way through things like Excel. I know how to use it, but I'm sure there's things I could do better. I muddle my way through. And I know a lot more. I've taken two of the Excel courses. I would like to do the rest of them. The basic Excel courses. And I would like to try one of those leadership or management courses just to see the difference between those and sort of a technical skill. I think that would be interesting. I really like that those different kinds of courses that this isn't just, that's how we kind of promoted this show today was your online skills, your database, your work and what. But having all the other types of things in there I think is really good for people more in the managerial type. The director of the library, the people, they need to know the things too. But this got that other coming out on the other side. I like that for some people that are maybe new to being a director, library director or administrator. I don't even know what to do with these people in my staff who are. So we'll all have to see. But this is something new and we're really hoping that it helps fulfill a need for people. Well, nobody's typed in any urgent questions. I'm going to assume we've typed everything you need. So let me know if you have any questions, problems, comments and we hope that you find these classes interesting and useful. All right. Well, thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you everyone for attending today. That will wrap it up for today's show. I'm going to go to there we go. So that will wrap it up for today's Encompass Live. Something else I also I did. You said you showed how over here on the education skillsoft is over here. Yeah, I also was able to search for it on our site. I just wasn't sure what come up. I just did that keyboard type skillsoft and it comes up as the very first thing going right to that page that Laura set up for starting off the classes. So definitely you can go right there easily to search our site as well to get a hold of everything that you need to take the classes. So that will wrap it up for today. Let me take today's show. It has been recorded as I said and will be posted to our YouTube channel. This is our Encompass Live website. The recording will be right down here in our archived Encompass Live sessions is where everything goes and you will have, let's see if we had last weeks Yes, we'll be recording. There'll be a link to the presentation, the PowerPoint that Laura had up here and any links that she mentioned in the presentation. I do quick links to those as well so you don't have to type them in yourself if you don't want to. So sometime later today we'll say that would be available there. So thank you very much for attending this week. I hope you'll join us next week when our topic is another Library Commission centric topic from the basement to the west wing the Talking Book and Braille Services new space. Over the last year or so, not sure how long it took our Talking Book and Braille Service used to be in the basement of right to which floor is below where we are right now the atrium building. And they have moved out of there are now right across the hall from us on the first floor. They have windows. It's awesome. They have new sound booths built and everything new meeting rooms over there. So Dave Ortley and Scott Schultz and maybe some other staff and volunteers to be determined will be joining us next week to talk about how they pulled this off. Huge project with a lot of a lot of moving and work and organization and coordination. I don't know how many thousands of books they had. The shelving. There's all these Talking Book little plastic boxes that they send out to people and I mean it's a whole library of these things. There's thousands of them that they moved. Amazing service and this whole move was a huge endeavor. So sign up and join us next week for that if you'd like to or any of our other upcoming shows that we have coming up in the next couple of months they're on our schedule. Also Encompass Live is on Facebook if you are a big Facebook user please do pop over there. And like our page every week I'll post reminders like here's the one from this morning from Randy Piela log in on the fly for today's show when the recordings are ready I will put them up here reminders about coming shows will be on our Facebook page so if you are big on Facebook do go over there and like our Facebook page. Other than that that wraps it up for today. Thank you very much Laura. Well thank you. Thank you everyone for attending and we'll see you next time on Encompass Live. Bye bye. Bye.