The Information Age is a period of unprecedented innovations and mobilization of these innovations to transmit and consume large amounts of data. Part of these innovations is message delivery via pictures and video. “A picture is worth a thousand words”, they say. Imagine the worth of a video!

With internet-video fast becoming the ubiquitous mode of communication and entertainment, a host of innovative tools and services have sprung up to maximize the potential of this particular means of communication.

Key advantages of the video medium for learning :

• Communication consists of Body Language, Tone and Words. Videos are therefore the closest to conventional teaching, especially if “blended” with collaborative systems
• There has been a significant growth in video viewing (YouTube serves over 100 million videos a day). This of course means a significant growth in available content too.
• Internet infrastructure has been scaling up to meet video demands
• Delivering trainings through recorded videos brings about time savings, and increased trainer productivity
• On-demand videos enables creating a library of recorded lectures
• Selling lectures and educational material also gives way to commerce opportunity for training providers
• Video-over-internet is now a ubiquitous medium; users are very familiar and comfortable with this medium
• Recording a video-training no longer needs professionals. Cell phone cameras recording a classroom lecture are equally useful for learning, as a high quality professional setup
• Distributing video-based distance learning content to global audiences and to regional centers around the world was already being done via older means; it is far more easier to do so via internet-based-videos
• Mobile devices and networks are also capable of playing videos; thus on-demand learning takes a new meaning
• Streaming video enables employees to obtain consistent communication of corporate direction, philosophy and policies all over the world, no matter where the employees work
• Streaming video systems makes it easy and economical to deliver up-to-the-minute broadcasts to knowledge workers right at their desktops, hand-held or mobile devices

The presence of huge amounts of data and information pieces on the Internet has given rise to a new trend of combining this data: Mashup. A set of services is dedicated to allow combining (Mashing up) various sources of information into a creative new piece, which then becomes part of the mashable content cycle. An Information Ecosystem is thus created.

eLearning via videos can become all the more effective if multiple videos can be "combined" together, along with images, audio and text to enrich the training content. Examples are overlaying dubbed audio voice-overs for foreign language translations, closed caption texts, text and images pointing to various items in a video, multiple viewing angles combined together to illustrate a point clearly, presentation slides and speaker's video running at the same time, etc.

Although video and mashed-up rich media content, would be a highly effective medium of learning, they are still largely a one-way message delivery medium. In other words, once having published a training, the author is left guessing:

• Who has watched my content and how many times?
• Was the video watched completely, skimmed through or even abandoned midway?
• Did the viewer understand my message?
• How many people actually viewed the commercial ad that I inserted at a specific point in the video?

In other words, an intelligent “feedback mechanism” that is present in live conversations, is largely missing for on-demand, and even live video content delivery. Such feedback is essential to:

• calculate ROI's for training programs
• measure each individual learner's skill growth
• improve on a training that is not being understood or highly rated by viewers
• determine the capability of trainers and teachers
• monitor fulfillment of training requirement for regulatory compliance or organizational policy

The ROI Challenge:

Calculating Return on eLearning Investment is a challenge, that gets all the more challenging when we notice that the act of Learning itself transforms the capability and human capacity of an organization. In other words, not only is measuring the delta of learning in a person difficult, the side-effects that such learning produces should be factored in as well. These side effects are there because in a skilled or knowledge-working business, each learning step increases the 'production capacity' of the skilled person . The return is therefore multi-folds. This of course is good news, however calculating such increase in numbers and comparing to investments remains a challenge.

The UltraLearn Suite is a set of unique products that rejuvenate and transform videos (and other rich media) into an interactive and highly effective e-Learning medium. UltraLearn allows users to:

• Combine multiple videos, audios and images from any source on the internet or author's uploaded content
• Add multiple text captions
• Add feedback forms, such as Quizzes, Surveys and Polls to gauge learner's comprehension of the training content, satisfaction with the training, sampling data, etc.
• Track an individual's learning behavior, such as viewing entire or part of a training, time they spent on a quiz, etc.

UltraLearn does not claim to completely calculate the ROI of a training program; however, the tools that it provides to training authors, enable stakeholders to dig deeper into the learning effectiveness and knowledge delta of each learner. This is accomplished by embedding feedback forms within video-based trainings, to understand the comprehension achieved thus far. This is also augmented by the tracking data, analytics and reports which show learners' behavior while viewing particular training videos.