Mediaboss Marketing

Two weeks ago, PayPal shuttered the account of the Free Speech Union, a London-based organization founded by social commentator Toby Young to advocate for free expression. PayPal also closed Youngs personal account and that of his news and opinion website, The Daily Sceptic.

On Tuesday, PayPal reinstated the accounts, but only after sustained public criticism of the companys apparently viewpoint-discriminatory actions.

Forgive me if I dont leap for joy, Young told The Telegraph newspaper. The last two weeks have been a nightmare as Ive scrabbled to try to stop The Daily Sceptic and Free Speech Union going under. PayPals software was embedded in all our payment systems, so the sudden closure of our accounts was an existential threat.

In typically murky fashion, PayPal initially gave Young no reason for the bans other than to say that the accounts violated the companys vague acceptable use policy. However, a PayPal spokesperson told the press, Achieving the balance between protecting the ideals of tolerance, diversity and respect for people of all backgrounds and upholding the values of free expression and open dialogue can be difficult, but we do our best to achieve it. Other reports indicate PayPals decision to close the accounts had to do with alleged COVID-19 misinformation.

As you would expect of any free speech group (including FIRE), the Free Speech Union has defended controversial speakers. After all, it is unpopular and dissenting speech not speech aligned with majority opinion that most needs protection.

The Free Speech Union incident is only the latest in PayPals long history of speech-chilling actions against its users.

One would hope PayPal understands that defending a speakers right to freedom of speech, or defending free speech as a cultural value, is not the same as promoting a speakers underlying views. Or, at a minimum, that PayPal as a payment system shouldnt take it upon itself to be the arbiter of allowable speech.

Even if the Free Speech Union were advocating controversial political views, that shouldnt matter. Whether in the U.K. or the U.S., payment processing companies like PayPal (and its subsidiary Venmo) are not bound by the First Amendment, but there are important reasons these companies shouldnt discriminate against users based on their views, as FIRE explains in a statement issued today:

Access to online payment systems is crucial for the innumerable individuals and organizations that rely on financial support for their expressive activity. Its essential to content creators ability to earn a living, to websites and other businesses ability to raise revenue, to fundraising by political candidates and nonprofit organizations, and to everyday Americans ability to consume content and support causes they believe in. When payment processing services act as political hall monitors or moral arbiters deciding what speech and viewpoints are out of bounds, they present a grave threat to free expression.

As the Electronic Frontier Foundation notes, because a small number of companies dominate the market for online payment processing, they have tremendous power to control the speech environment by turning off the financial spigot for users who express disfavored views or wade into controversial subject matter.

The Free Speech Union incident is only the latest in PayPals long history of speech-chilling actions against its users.

In May, PayPal suspended the accounts of independent media outlets Consortium News and MintPress, both of which have been a source of skeptical reporting about the Russia-Ukraine conflict. One month later, PayPal shut down writer Colin Wrights account shortly after Etsy banned him for selling merchandise that promotes, supports, or glorifies hatred or violence towards protected groups. Wright is a critic of transgender activism, and his merchandise included text like Realitys Last Stand (the name of his Substack site) and Defender of Reality.

Groups like the ACLU and EFF have criticized PayPals lack of transparency and failure to provide due process to users whose accounts are frozen or closed.

PayPals greatest hits on free speech also include suspending WikiLeaks account after the organization released diplomatic cables and warning an ebook distributor to remove certain works of erotic fiction.

Other absurd actions appear to be a result of PayPals reliance on poorly tailored algorithms. For instance, PayPal suspended a user for buying a t-shirt from Isis the heavy metal band (which formed years before the terrorist group rose to prominence).

While PayPal ultimately restored Youngs accounts, there is little reason to believe this would have happened without significant public pushback. What about ordinary users who cannot attract the level of attention and support mustered by the Free Speech Union?

Groups like the ACLU and EFF have criticized PayPals lack of transparency and failure to provide due process to users whose accounts are frozen or closed including giving users detailed notice of the alleged policy violation and a timely and meaningful opportunity to appeal the decision. When Colin Wright sought more information about why he was banned, for example, all PayPal told him was that an attorney or law enforcement officer would need to submit a legal subpoena.

After PayPal reinstated the accounts of the Free Speech Union and The Daily Sceptic, a company spokesman said, PayPal is dedicated to providing safe and affordable financial services to people of all backgrounds with a diversity of views, and we are a strong supporter of freedom of expression and open dialogue.

Thats a welcome sentiment. The question is whether it will actually guide PayPals actions going forward.

View post:
PayPal is no pal to free expression - Foundation for Individual Rights in Education

The opportunities to automate within an organization are broad and deep -- including within IT, finance, HR, supply chain, and customer services, and interest in automation continues to deepen.

Automation remains one of the fastest growing enterprise software categories, with a recent reportby research firm Gartner stating it expects global robotic process automation (RPA) software revenue to increase nearly 20% over last year.

While RPA solutions traditionally focused on automating tasks via screen scraping, todays modern RPA solutions focus on an API-first approach for process automation.

Meanwhile, RPA vendors are continuously enhancing their API integration capabilities to offer both user interface-based screen scraping and API-first integration capabilities to their customers.

Vendors are focusing on evolving their RPA offerings into a broader automation platform with complementary technologies, such as process mining and task mining for process automation, monitoring and improvement, and wide range of integration capabilities, says Gartner senior market research specialist Varsha Mehta.

She explains RPA adoption depends on organization needs and priorities -- if process automation and improvement is one of the initiatives or achieving operational efficiency and productivity improvements, RPA should be considered as one of the potential technology candidates to help achieve these goals.

RPA plays an essential role in driving the trend to hyperautomation, a discipline that helps to combine several technologies in an orchestrated manner to deliver end-to-end, intelligent, event-driven automation, she says.

Mehta notes competitive vendors are increasingly expanding their RPA offerings into a more advanced automation platform that includes various hyperautomation-enabling technologies for growth.

This includes low-code/no-code, process mining, task mining, decision modeling, intelligent business process management (BPM or iBPMS), integration and API capabilities, among others, on top of their existing RPA offerings.

With these continuous additions and technology enhancements, vendors are envisioning to provide an all-encompassing hyperautomation-enabling technology platform in the near future, she says.

Ted Kummert, executive vice president of products and engineering at UiPath, says RPA should be viewed as a long-range capability meant to empower organizations to evolve strategically and increase business value.

It is a journey that can start small, within one division or one department, and grow organically across the business as additional ideas form and the organizations vision for automations potential comes to fruition.

He says RPA can clear backlog, create new capacity, and free up resources, and improve data quality by integrating software robots into workflows.

It is a truly transformative technology that can reduce or eliminate manual tasks and elevate creative, high-value work, Kummert says. Digital transformation is often talked about, but many times can fall short of its goals. Automation is the driver to achieve true digital transformation.

Adam Glaser, senior vice president of engineering for Appian, says many businesses use one automation technology, adding third-party capabilities in patchwork fashion to automate complex end-to-end processes.

It works for the moment and generates some short-term value, but patchwork isnt seamless, and this kind of automation strategy isnt built to last, he says.

When an organization plans to adopt RPA, it should take into consideration all its automation needs and ensure that RPA is considered as a part of a larger strategy.

Generally speaking, the key IT decision makers are leading this effort, but the C-suite should also be on board, Glaser explains. Automation impacts the business as much as technology, and as a result we are seeing RPA being most successful when it is combined with business process optimization and engages both business-line leaders and process owners.

Kummert says that another element organizations should not overlook is training both for RPA practitioners and business users who will engage with automation as it scales across the business.

He says the most successful customers are those who think top down about what they want to accomplish, set bold goals, and identify strong use cases.

A great example is Uber, which implemented automation from UiPath first in its finance division and then within more divisions, he explains. To date, Uber has more than 100 automations in production, which saves the company an estimated $10 million per year. Uber achieved 350% ROI in a single year.

Jesse Coomber, vice president of operations at smart home and small business security specialist ADT, explains that RPA has helped the company reduce manual interactions between their field technicians and operational agents.

Once a technician completes an install, instead of making a phone call to an agent, the technician will use a chatbot to perform all the checks and tests that the agent previously performed, Coomber explains. Once complete, the robot will return the confirmation number to the technician.

Projects are also underway to introduce RPA for customer self-service features, including system checks/diagnostics, system/device reboots and battery replenishments.

Our RPA journey began two years ago with a solution for the purpose of increasing value add time for finance personnel, call center agents and technicians and increasing agent and technician productivity, he explains. We wanted to increase the speed and accuracy of information and improve the quality of identification of exception audits and compliance.

Other goals were increasing operational efficiency and increasing employee engagement due to fewer repetitive tasks, according to Coomber. He also sees additional roles for RPA implementation in the future.

We'll be tapping into the technology to integrate our systems to work together seamlessly, which includes equipping all of our operational agents and technicians with RPA digital assistants that assist in serving our customers throughout the day, he says.

The company then plans on extending those same digital assistant and automation features to their customers as self-service capabilities.

Enterprise Guide to Robotic Process Automation

How to Choose Which RPA/Intelligent Automation Platform Is Right for You

How to Measure Automation Success for the Enterprise

Read the rest here:
Roadmap to Robotic Process Automation - InformationWeek

The latest point-release of Onlyoffice, a free Microsoft Office-compatible suite, is here with multiple small improvements and better support for Asian and African writing systems.

Despite Microsoft's seemingly unassailable hegemony, Office does still have rivals other than Google Docs. There's more than one free-and-open-source productivity suite out there. Onlyoffice has a few points in its favor, and the new version 7.2 increases its appeal.

Onlyoffice 7 came out at the start of the year and this is the second point-release. This version has improved font support, notably for handling ligatures the combined characters created by joining two (or more) letters together. This isn't a big deal in English; it's useful for some words of Latin origin, such as ansthetic. However, for some alphabets, where most or all letters join together, support for this is critical, so this means Onlyoffice 7.2 now has much better support for Bengali ( ) and N'Ko (), among others.

There's improved specification of data-entry fields in forms. Spreadsheets can be inserted into other documents as OLE objects, meaning that they remain live and can be edited and updated. The suite's user interface now can be displayed in Portuguese, traditional Chinese, Basque, Malay, and Armenian. There's also an updated plugin manager.

Not only does it have Dark Mode but now there's a Dark Contrast view. There are other, smaller UI improvements, too, around select, cut, paste, paste special, and linking charts to their source data range in spreadsheets. The Navigation panel has been renamed to Headings, and there are new options for sharing documents, listing co-authors, and more. As well as the normal Edit mode, there are also Commenting and View modes, and the View mode can now show the changes made by other contributors live in real time.

Native builds are available for Linux, Windows, and macOS, free of charge, plus mobile versions for Android and iOS, or check out the AGPL 3.0-licensed source here.

Onlyoffice is relatively new, first appearing just a decade ago. Because it was implemented in JavaScript using the HTML5 canvas element, Onlyoffice can also run inside a web browser. You can sign up for a demo online, and the company's own hosted version is free for up to five users. You can also host your own version, either directly on a Linux server, in Docker, or in a cloud VM, and this edition can interoperate with files held in NextCloud, OwnCloud, Confluence, SharePoint, and various other online file-storage solutions. In this mode, the suite rivals the cloud-based Collabora Online suite.

As such, its competitive position up against the other free office suites is that Onlyoffice has a more modern ribbon-based interface, and claims the best Microsoft Office file compatibility around. The modern user interface, and strong compatibility with Microsoft Office, are both also true of Kingsoft's WPS Office but while that is free for personal use, and even comes pre-loaded in some Linux distributions, such as Ubuntu Kylin Pro, it's not open source.

Onlyoffice's developers pay for all this via their commercial Docs Enterprise and Workspace offerings. Workspace adds considerably more functionality to the suite, including email, calendaring, customer relationship management, and project management.

Here on The Register FOSS desk, we actually prefer the old-fashioned menu-driven UI of LibreOffice and its relatives, but if you prefer something that looks more like Office 365, and perhaps has rather better file compatibility with it, Onlyoffice is shaping up strongly.

PS: Yes, we know it's spelled ONLYOFFICE. But we didn't feel like SHOUTING all the way through the ARTICLE TODAY.

Read more here:
Is it a bird? Is it Microsoft Office? No, it's Onlyoffice: Version 7.2 released - The Register

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AMD boosts performance in OpenGL-based CAD / 3D software - AEC Magazine

In early 2022, Software Advice polled nearly 300 HR leaders for the Toxic Culture Survey[*] and found that nearly half (49%) are spending more than they have previously on upskilling employees in 2022. However, despite the increase in resources devoted to training initiatives, organizations are struggling to create engaging, effective training modules.

At least, thats what employees are saying: Recent research from Gartner revealed that more than 40% of employees report that the compliance and ethics training they received in the past 12 months did not help them perform their job better[1].

Obviously, this is not the outcome that employees that are responsible for developing training programs are hoping for. But the reality is that if you want to create more memorable training programs, youre going to need to go beyond the basics and start incorporating advanced e-learning elements into your training modules.

So, if youre a corporate trainer or team manager whos taken on the task of leveling up your current training modules, say goodbye to hastily slapped together slide decks, because weve laid out a step-by-step process for creating effective e-learning training modules.

Follow the five steps outlined below to start building e-learning modules that improve training retention.

Before you begin the process of creating training content, you need to determine what it is you want your employees to take away from the module youre building. Is it a concept, a set of best practices, or a new process theyll be learning? Depending on the answer, how you format your training module will be different.

According to Ebbinghauss Forgetting Curve, people forget an average of 50% of new information theyre presented with within an hour and 90% within a week[2]. Knowing this, we suggest keeping your training modules short and focused (rather than trying to provide as much information as possible on a topic). This may mean breaking down a larger training objective into smaller milestones.

For example, lets say that youre working on creating an e-learning module that will help prepare a new sales representative for their first call with a lead.

In this scenario, the goal of your module could be for the rep to master the sales script your organization follows. Or, the goal could be to teach the rep how to research the lead theyre calling and tailor their pitch to their background.

Either way, the idea is to be specific about the training objective your module is targeting and to not cram too much information into one e-learning module.

One benefit of using an e-learning tool or learning management system to create training modules is that theres a whole wide world of content formats available to you. With that level of possibility at your fingertips, knowing which content formats to use (and when) to get a point across is essential in order to boost your employees knowledge retention.

Below, weve provided you with a cheat sheet that gives an overview of seven common types of e-learning content formats and what theyre best used for.

Use this table to determine what content format(s) your module should include, and to avoid overloading trainees, stick to two or three content formats per module.

Continuing with our example from the first step, if your goal is to help a new hire master your companys sales script, you could first show a video of two employees running through the script, then have new hires reinforce what theyve learned through roleplay (social learning) with another employee or through an e-learning simulation.

A roleplay scenario used to train customer service representatives in Day One[3]

Once youve determined what your content will cover and how you will present it, its time to start creating your e-learning modules.

A dropdown menu shows content format options in TalentLMS (Source)

Lastly, before you begin, have a quick brainstorming session, and map out the contents of your module in a data management tool, such as a Microsoft Word document or a spreadsheet. Keep this step simple: Write down the information you plan to share with the learner and the content formats youll use to accomplish that. That way, youll have a reference you can turn to when you begin building your module in your course authoring tool.

Now that youve built your module, all thats left to do is follow a few steps to ensure that employees know how to access it and by what date theyre expected to complete it. Follow the four tips below for a successful training rollout to your workforce or team:

Tool tip: Most LMS have a reporting feature that shows you completion rates for training modules. You can use this feature to determine who needs a follow-up reminder to complete the training, as well as how long it took employees to complete it, and how they performed in any knowledge tests.

A manager dashboard shows completion and participation rates in 360Learning (Source)

Lastly, in order to prevent the concepts or practices presented in your training module from becoming long forgotten, you need to provide a chance for your employees to use what theyve learned. Without doing so, the new information theyve taken in will fade away, and the work you put into building the training will have been a waste of effort.

For example, if you watch a YouTube tutorial on how to bake a souffl, but then you never pull out a ramekin or beat an egg white, the chances are low that youll remember the specific set of instructions youre supposed to follow.

So what does this look like in a professional setting? The truth is that it will be different depending on the subject of your training, but here are a few examples of how this step could play out:

As someone whos in charge of developing training programs for your organization, think about how the contents of each module you create will be applied in the workplace. Then, once a training module has been developed, look ahead a few weeks and plan an opportunity for employees to apply what theyve learned.

In this guide, weve covered five steps for creating engaging, retainable employee training modules:

Our final piece of advice is this: Adjust your training as necessary based on your employees performance and feedback.

As we mentioned in the fourth step of this process (plan for a successful deployment), most learning management systems have reporting functions. Use this feature to track your employees engagement with training modules, and ultimately, determine if your e-learning strategy is successful.

A reporting dashboard in Looop shows learners activity time and resource views over the course of a year (Source)

The majority (86%) of businesses that increased their L&D budget for 2022 say they plan to spend more on learning and training technology[*]. Join your peers; connect with an advisor to find a learning management system that works for your organization today.

Sources

Survey methodology

*Software Advices 2022 Toxic Culture Survey was conducted in January 2022 among 294 HR leaders at U.S. companies. An HR leader is defined as any HR employee with the role of HR manager or higher at their organization. The goal of this survey was to learn how the transition to hybrid and remote work impacted toxic employee behaviors.

Note: The applications mentioned in this article are examples to show a feature in context and are not intended as endorsements or recommendations. They have been obtained from sources believed to be reliable at the time of publication.

Read the original here:
How To Create E-Learning Modules That Boost Training Retention - Software Advice