Clive on Learning

Digital Learning Content: A Designer's Guide

2012-01-24T14:18:00.000Z

This week sees the release of my new book, Digital Learning Content: A Designer's Guide. The book is for anyone with an interest in helping others to learn. You may be a teacher, trainer, lecturer or coach. You may be a subject expert with knowledge you want to share or an experienced practitioner who wants to pass on their tips. You may already be a creator of learning content, looking to update their skills. Whatever your interest, this guide will help you to design learning materials that really make a difference.

Digital learning content takes a wide variety of forms, including tutorials, scenarios, podcasts, screencasts, videos, slideshows, quizzes and reference materials. The book provides you with fundamental principles that you can apply to any content creation activity as well as practical information relating to specific content types.

Here's the table of contents:

Making the most of this guide
Coming to terms with content
Building on sound foundations
Determining roles and processes
Working with subject experts
Starting with some universal principles
Exploiting the power of interactivity
Working with the basic media elements
Distributing your content
Assembling your toolkit
Creating learning podcasts
Creating learning slideshows
Creating learning screencasts
Creating learning scenarios
Creating learning videos
Creating learning tutorials
Creating quizzes
Creating reference information
What does exemplary digital learning content look like?

The book is currently only available through Lulu, priced at £19.95 or local currency equivalents. Distribution through Amazon and other online book-sellers will commence in the next few weeks and e-book versions are in development.

If you're at Learning Technologies in London this Wednesday or Thursday, stop by the Onlignment stand (133) where we'll have plenty of copies for you to leaf through.

iBooks Author: Any relevance for learning in the workplace?

2012-01-22T21:27:00.000Z

As I've just returned from a week walking in the sunshine of Almeria, I'm probably the last to comment on Apple's announcement of it's publishing platform for multimedia text books on the iPad. If you missed it, see iBook Author here.

Let's be absolutely clear, there is nothing whatsoever new about the idea of interactive multimedia books. As Managing Director of Publishing for Epic, back in the 1990s, I was involved in quite a few CD-ROM projects that mirrored quite closely was is envisioned for the iPad. True we were restricted to distributing on PCs via the offline medium of a laserdisc, but the creative product was almost identical. You may remember the wonderful interactive products that Dorling Kindersley produced back then, not to mention Encarta. And there's nothing stopping you from creating interactive multimedia 'books' now (I hesitate to keep using the term 'text books' because surely that's exactly what they're trying not to be) - you just set up a website. Last time I looked, HTML was quite capable of displaying pages of text, combined with pictures, video, animations, audio and games.

The difference is that iBooks Author creates a tightly formatted, packaged product that can be sold, just like a CD-ROM or a paperback. It's also likely to offer a more elegant user experience than you would normally expect when exploring a work in a web browser, but without all the connections to other resources and the opportunities for interactivity. So who benefits? Well, Apple of course, because they take 30% off the top of every sale. Big publishers will have another route to market which could be attractive if very significant numbers of students use the iPad as their primary computing device and not some other smart phone, tablet or laptop. They won't be too bothered about the authoring tool, because they are probably already using something like Adobe InDesign to lay out their print versions and would prefer to output directly from this. Self-publishing authors will enjoy using the tool, assuming their ideas exploit the multimedia concept in some way. If all they are offering is text, they can publish to Kindle and iBooks already using their word processor.

But what are the implications for learning in the workplace? Probably very little, because text books have very little relevance to training. Highly interactive, multimedia content is obviously of more interest, but then all the e-learning authoring tools will get you to that same place sooner or later. The main issue is that, in the workplace, the iPad still has very low penetration - growing yes, but still early days. If an employer wants to hand out iPads by the truckload, the last reason will be because of the availability of electronic books. If the devices are going out there for another reason, then any e-learning content developer will be happy to go along for the ride.

E-learning and L&D salary data for the UK

2012-01-19T18:01:00.000Z

The Blue Eskimo training and e-learning work and salary survey for 2011 makes interesting reading but leaves many important questions unanswered - at least for me. In total, 813 people from Blue Eskimo's client databases, predominantly UK-based, completed the survey. Blue Eskimo is a recruitment consultancy, so it is possible that this skews the results somewhat, because presumably only people interested in getting work will be on the database in the first place.

Participants were mostly from the private sector, with 32% working in IT training, 21% e-learning, and 20% soft skills training. Of these, 13% were designers and 27% trainers, with the rest in various management and sales roles. Some 80% were in permanent positions.

Some key findings:

Salaries were holding up well for permanent employees, although 60% had not received an increase in the past year.
There was a definite downward shift in daily rates for contractors, with more people moving into the sub-£300-a-day bracket. This would not be surprising if most of these contractors were classroom trainers. With a lot of redundancies in L&D, supply of freelancers is bound to increase and that will affect rates.
Some 80% work longer hours than they are paid for, a few more than 20 hours a week. This seems to me to be a sign of organisations pushing harder to get more work from less people. It might also mean that those in work are prepared to put up with a lot because at least they have a job.
Most are quite or very happy with their work (let's face it, there are worse fields in which to work) and 70% feel challenged/stretched - perhaps there's a relationship.
On the other hand, nearly 60% are considering changing jobs in the next 12 months - that's assuming they can find one.

So why are there questions unanswered? Well, for me, the really interesting data would come by comparing the data for those primarily involved in classroom work and those in e-learning. You would expect very different results in times such as these. Let's hope Blue Eskimo break this out next year.

How much is an authoring tool worth?

2012-01-10T16:33:00.000Z

The recent release by Trivantis of Snap! Empower, a rapid Flash interaction builder, for the princely sum of $99, got me wondering if I have any idea any more of what an authoring tool is worth. Empower looks like it is much more powerful than Articulate Engage, which sells for four times as much, and almost certainly cost Trivantis much more to develop. So why the low price? Presumably Trivantis feels that there is a vast market of enthusiasts on the look out for Flash authoring tools - certainly way beyond the numbers employed in e-learning development - and they're a price sensitive lot who are only interested at hobbyist prices. They may be right - and the interest which is shown in free and low-cost tools on Jane Hart's C4LPT site bears this out - but does this really help us to determine what a tool is actually worth?

Time was an authoring tool cost at very least $1K and often much more. Popular tools such as Captivate, Articulate and Trivantis' own Lectora still do. If you're a serious graphic designer, you'll pay $3K for Creative Suite; and audio and video engineers pay similar prices for their software. These tools are expensive because they cost a lot to develop and the target markets of full-time professionals are relatively small.

The same goes for just about any trade or profession you can imagine. Getting yourself kitted out with the right tools and equipment costs many thousands. These investments may seem substantial, but over time represent a very good investment indeed when related to the income that they allow the purchaser to generate.

For the same reason, I have no problem with the idea of spending $1000+ on a tool, assuming it is something I am going to use regularly to help me earn a living. If any employer balks at spending this much to equip their employees to do their jobs properly then they need better accountants - they simply don't understand what tools are worth.

If, on the other hand, you are talking about toys as opposed to tools of the trade - and I like toys as much as the next person - then $99 seems about right. When I buy a toy I have modest expectations about utility and don't expect any support. In fact many toys never get used. If Empower proves to be much more than a toy then that's fine, I'll enjoy using it. But I wouldn't choose it over another tool on the basis of the price, because when you invest in the tools of your trade, quality and functionality are what you depend on - price is secondary.

2012: A time for highly connected learning specialists

2012-01-05T12:18:00.000Z

I'm finding it hard to regain my focus after the holidays. It only takes a couple of weeks for me to shift my attention almost entirely to matters other than learning technology, so I shouldn't have much trouble retiring when the time comes. So, this post acts as a way for me to re-focus on the issues that need addressing in 2012.

In the Western world at least, we will continue to feel the effects of the worst squeeze in my lifetime. That means lots more job losses, constrained budgets and a lot of defensive decision-making. I don't think I'm being negative in saying this, just realistic. This comes at a time when the nature of work itself is changing, as Lynda Gratton describes in her book The shift: the future of work is already here. I will return to this book in future posts, but for now here are two short extracts:

Our assumptions that general skills will be valuable has to be questioned. It seems clear to me that in a joined-up world where potentially 5 billion people have access to the worldwide Cloud, the age of the generalist is over. Instead, my prediction for the future is that you will need what I call ‘serial mastery’ to add real value.

Our assumptions about the role of individualism and competitiveness as a foundation for creating great working lives and careers have to be questioned. In a world that could become increasingly fragmented and isolated, I believe that connectivity, collaboration and networks will be central.

I believe that there are serious implications in what Lynda has to say for those working in learning and development:

You will not be sufficiently marketable if you do a bit of everything in much the same way as everyone else. True we need some managers to pull everything together, but working for these people will be specialists, whether that's in highly-technical subject areas or in new, more scalable approaches to learning, i.e. those that make use of technology. It doesn't take a genius to work out that when there are less jobs available overall in l&d at the same time as a critical skills gap in learning technologies, there's an opportunity there just waiting to be taken.
Teaching and training has historically been a rather isolated profession, particularly for those spending their lives in classrooms. To keep up-to-date and search out opportunities, l&d professionals need to be more connected than ever before. To some degree that can happen in traditional ways, but more than likely it will mean networking online.

I'll leave you with those thoughts. The new year is under way. Let's make it a good one.

Profile of a learning architect: Dick Moore

2011-12-29T19:32:00.000Z

Throughout my book The New Learning Architect I take time out to look at real-life examples of learning architects in action. In this final profile, we look at the work of a learning architect who has worked within what is very much a top-down learning environment and on a very large scale. Dick’s work at learndirect helped to ensure 2.8 million people across the UK were able to make a start on their learning journey.

Delivering the UK’s largest online learning service
Dick Moore was Director of Technology at learndirect over nine years. Operated by Ufi Ltd, learndirect’s mission is to transform skills, productivity and individual lives by providing the best of online learning. As an adult learning provider delivering widespread access to online training, learndirect has become one of the leading contributors to the UK government's skills agenda. Since 2000 it has used technology to enable more than 2.8 million adults to gain the skills they, their employers and the economy need, helping them on their way into further training or employment.

Over Dick’s nine years at learndirect, he had to completely re-engineer the offer. With 500K enrolments per year, a significant number of whom have a relatively low educational level, Dick had the task of developing a technological architecture that was not just functional, but scalable, reliable and capable of providing a positive user experience.

In addition to rebuilding the learning platform Dick was asked to reduce his budget by 50% and to deliver twice as many releases per year. Dick achieved this by bringing much of the work in-house (insourcing) and creating a user panel involving all key stakeholders. They consulted and listened to the advice of usability experts, and employed an agile approach which involved a great deal of prototyping. Dick believes that involving users throughout the systems design rather than just at the end during testing is advice that is often given but seldom taken.

The basis of learndirect’s offer
At the core of learndirect’s provision is a ‘supportive triangle’ which includes the learning content itself, the system and the support staff at the 1000s of learning centres where many students take the first steps back onto a new learning journey. Many of the courses provided by learndirect lead to National Vocational Qualifications (NVQs), which require evidence rather than test-based assessment. The system, therefore, has to accommodate the storage and management of hundreds of thousands of pieces of evidence stored as an ‘e-portfolio’.

The learndirect offer is essentially one of formal learning with assessment, with an emphasis on vocational and skills-based training leading to nationally-recognised qualifications. While formal, the process is essentially bottom-up, in that the courses are typically chosen by learners (‘pulled’) rather than imposed by employers (‘pushed’).

The measure of learndirect’s success is the unit cost per enrolled, completed and successful student. Retention is key, so a high emphasis is placed within learning centres on ensuring that customers (learners) have appropriate threshold skills. Students are assessed to see whether they really have the time and the motivation to complete a course. This is particularly important because the courses are low cost to the learner and therefore not always highly valued. Another technique is to use entry-level taster courses, which give local tutors on the ground a chance to check out a student’s propensity to learn.

Once students are enrolled the next priority is to keep them on track. With no formal teacher to engage students, the content and the system have to deliver the learning experience supported often by learning centre staff and on-line tutors. Importantly, learners need a way to chart their own progress across time and tutors need to be able to keep an eye on this as well.

Dick was particularly concerned that the system was all very simple and accessible: “Learning is not always fun; however it is rewarding, like the gym. When you’re learning, you’re trying to rearrange your mental model. And with assessments to complete as well, there’s going to be an element of fear. In a situation like this, you need to avoid all extraneous noise.”

The system was re-designed so that the interface persisted while the student was working with content, so they could send messages at any point. And because a typical learning episode was a whole morning or afternoon, it was absolutely critical that the student didn’t lose their work through a connection problem. Any incident of this sort would be remembered by the student for a long time and would cause them to lose confidence in both the system and often in themselves.

Harnessing informal learning
There was an assumption that students would jump at the chance to use chat rooms and forums, however without active support and guidance such chat rooms were often ‘like the Marie Celeste’. Dick believes that they would have been more successful if tightly integrated with individual courses, but as optional extras they didn’t work. Whereas, these sorts of communication technologies can be highly successful in tutor-driven courses that are delivered in cohorts, for learndirect students the informal learning element came in the learning centre or at home, person-to-person. In Dick’s view “it is almost an oxymoron to try and control informal learning.”

Still, customer satisfaction was 94% and has since improved beyond that. This rating reflects students satisfaction with their experience and he believes also reflects an increase in students’ self-esteem. As Dick explains, “If you can give people an experience that makes them feel good about themselves, they’ll feel good about you!”

Providing tutor support
An important element of the learndirect experience is that students know they have a tutor and someone to ask for help. Tutors have their own interface to the system, organised according to their workflow. This requires them to validate student outcomes by looking at scores, reviewing any free text responses and messages, and then writing a note to the student. As this process became regulated by the system, it improved retention and success. Before, this was largely dependent on a particular tutor.

The tutors received online training in using the new system, primarily with the aid of short screencasts which allowed them to watch and practise at the same time. The screencasts also constituted a valuable on-demand learning resource. Again Dick placed a high emphasis on simplicity: “It seems the glossier something is the more we tune out. Perhaps we are conditioned by adverts.”

What learndirect has achieved
Dick’s success in creating a scalable and highly accessible learning platform can be demonstrated by some of the numbers:

8,200 people log on and learn with learndirect every day;
more than 2.8 million learners have taken a learndirect course;
90 per cent of learndirect learners are qualified below level two or are assessed as having a basic skills need;
433,000 Skills for Life test passes have been achieved with learndirect;
altogether, more than 467,000 online tests in literacy and numeracy have been taken with learndirect;
23,396 people have achieved an NVQ through learndirect;
learndirect has worked with over 5,000 businesses through Train to Gain, resulting in more than 10,000 qualifications;
learner satisfaction with learndirect currently stands at 96%.

Technology should be architected to deliver a service not a solution, having the audience at the centre of your design and architecture and ensuring that your systems are instrumented such that you have a measure of the client satisfaction rather than relying on ‘happy sheets’, completed by those for whom the experience was a success, is an architectural imperative.

Dick Moore has worked as an educational technologist for 30 years and now runs his own company Moore Answers Ltd, an IT interim/consultancy and change management house that is particularly keen on charities, education systems and infrastructure. Dick was until May 2010 Director of Technology at learndirect, one of the largest e-learning organisations in the world with some 3 million learners on the system and delivering 500,000 enrolments annually.

Previously Dick was Vice-President for Systems and Information at a Los Angeles-based dot.com company thedock.com, an industrial auction site, and before that was Director of ICT at both Sheffield College and Doncaster College, two of Europe's largest Further Education institutions. During the 80s, he was Director of a new media company Interactive Media Resources, working with interactive video and educational software, where he wrote educational software and simulations for The Stock Exchange, Shell and Tandy Corporation, amongst others.

Dick has a BSc in Botany, specialising in Taxonomy, and is a trustee of the Association for Learning Technology and chair of their publications committee.

In case you missed it – 2011 in posts

2011-12-21T08:46:00.001Z

Where is the model for e-learning?

2011-12-20T09:58:00.001Z

With most learning media, there is an expectation of how it should look and behave based on the mass media. We can benchmark what we do against 1000s of everyday examples. We can model our learning videos on what we see on TV and on YouTube. We can model podcasts on what we hear on the radio. We have endless examples from print media and the World Wide Web on which to model our text-based materials. And even when it comes to learning sims, we can relate what we see to our experiences with video games.

But when we think about page/screen-based, tutorial e-learning, there really are no mass media parallels, unless of course you count business presentations, and in most cases they set a very poor example. So, our stakeholders have no standards by which to judge what we produce and no common vocabulary with which to engage with us. As designers, we don't have that steady stream of everyday examples to give us inspiration. E-learning has no counterpart in the mass media and I believe this explains to some extent why we don't always achieve the standards we would like to see, even after 30 years of trying.

Massively scalable training

2011-12-15T08:45:00.002Z

Some fantastic progress has been made recently in realising the concept of massively scalable education. You've probably already heard plenty about the Khan Academy, which has contributed to the maths education of millions, as well as the free online courses being run by faculty at Stanford University. An Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, led by Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun, attracted some 160,000 enquiries, of which 25,000 or more have made it through to its conclusion. If you are not familiar with these projects, you can see Khan, Norvig and Thrun discussing the implications of their work in Reinventing Education - 45 minutes of very watchable YouTube video (thanks to Seb Schmoller for alerting me to this).

Interested as I am in all this, my work is not in education, it is in training. There is, of course, an overlap. Both aim to impart knowledge and foster cognitive skills. But in a training context this is very rarely the endgame. The goal is typically to develop competence, the ability to do a job. And while you can do a reasonable job of measuring knowledge and some cognitive skills using a computer-gradable, online assessment, the majority of competences require a human eye. Of course, graduates of Norvig and Thrun's course may one day be able to use sophisticated artificial intelligence to assess skills like interviewing, graphic design, welding or using Photoshop, but for now the only reliable judge is another human.

So, yes, you can teach maths and science to millions at practically no cost using videos and quizzes, and this is a fantastic step forward, but can we make similar gains in the teaching of other skills? Currently, skills development is a labour-intensive and very costly business, typically involving a great deal of face-to-face contact with a trainer or coach. Some individuals, some organisations, some countries have been able to afford this and will be able to sustain this investment even in a harsh economic climate. That leaves an awful lot of skills gaps and unemployed people.

So what would a massively scalable online training programme look like? Well, it could, like the Khan Academy and Stanford courses, make extensive use of online media to impart ideas and demonstrate skills. Trainees could, themselves, supplement these resources. It would be easy enough to use forums and all sorts of social media tools to allow these ideas to be discussed by trainees. So far so good, but now comes the difficult bit - providing opportunities for practice. So many online training courses over-focus on knowledge and cognitive skills, because these are the only computer-assessable elements, but competence comes through practising and obtaining feedback, not taking tests. With a little care, you can dream up activities which provide the right level of authentic practice to meet the trainee's need. The problem comes with providing feedback. If trainers do this, then any hopes of massive scalability go out the window. Which is why trainees need to do this for themselves.

Can trainees be relied on to provide each other with reliable feedback? I believe so, given very clear criteria and plenty of examples of what is acceptable and what is not. They may even be more rigorous in applying these criteria than the professionals, because it is in their interest for course completion to be held in high esteem. Yes, there would have to be checks and balances to protect against abuse - as there is on Wikipedia - but even this could, if necessary, be peer-driven.

I know there will be examples of situations where peer-review of competences will simply not work, where only the eye of an expert will do. But I'm also sure that there are plenty of situations where this approach would solve a lot of problems. What's more, I'm inclined to give it a go.

Face-to-face is for special occasions

2011-12-09T13:26:00.000Z

Ask yourself. What proportion of the music that you consume is at a live performance? Chances are it's something between 0 and 10%. What proportion of the drama that you watch is at the theatre, rather than at the cinema or on TV? I'd be surprised if it's more than a few percent. And what proportion of the sport you watch is in a stadium rather than on TV. You get the idea.

And yet, there's a good possibility that those live events that you have attended - music, drama, sport or whatever - are among the most memorable occasions of your life. Perhaps even peak experiences.

If you wanted to up the percentage of time you spent watching live music, drama or sport, it would come at a considerable price in terms of admission fees, travel, time and sheer adrenaline. Chances are that, unless you're rich and with considerable discretionary time, it would be completely impractical. In fact, with all the rush of modern working life, you're probably finding it increasingly impractical to watch TV or listen to radio at the times at which the programmes are broadcast. A great deal of your media consumption is asynchronous - under your time control - using iPods, hard disk video recorders, streaming media and the like.

Is it too fanciful to apply the same logic to learning? The default position is now asynchronous and online, giving you complete control over time and place. If you want to share an experience with other learners in real time, you go synchronous, with Skype or web conferencing. If you need a rich sensory experience that you'll remember for years, then spend the money, put aside the time and meet up face-to-face at a conference or workshop.

There was a time when the only way you could listen to music, watch a play or a sporting event, or attend a class was live and face-to-face, because there were no ways to transmit or record these events electronically. Quite clearly those days are gone and we are the richer for it.

Can we dispense with email?

2011-12-05T17:55:00.000Z

I was interested to read the following news in a post by Scott Gavin:

Atos, the largest IT services firm in Europe, is going to do away with internal e-mail. Atos CEO Thierry Breton says that only 15 percent of the 200 e-mails his staff receive on average are valuable, and that staff are wasting between 5 and 20 hours a week handling e-mail. Instead of e-mail, he wants staff to use instant messaging and other chat-like communications media.

The same story was picked up by Mark Bethelemy in Internal Communication - Beyond Repair?

There's no doubt the employees at Atos are getting too many emails, as we all do. On the other hand, a fair number of these - 30 per day/week (it doesn't state) - are, apparently, valuable. That's a lot of communication that needs to be protected. While some sort of policy response is obviously called for if some of Atos' employees are wasting half their working week handling email, banning this medium completely in favour of a synchronous alternative may be a little rash. Babies and bathwater come to mind.

First of all, can a synchronous communication channel, like instant messaging, do as good a job as email when it comes to handling all that valuable and necessary communication? Maybe, if the aim is to quickly resolve an issue or make an arrangement, but only if all of the parties that need to be involved are available at the same time. Communication through synchronous media is quick and relatively informal, but it is extremely intrusive. Before we forget, asynchronous media, such as email, have a lot going for them. You can (although many choose not to) control when and where you access and respond to emails. You don't have to be open to email communication at all times, which means you have a fair chance of getting some concentrated work done. You can also take your time and provide a considered response to an email; there is no opportunity for reflection with instant messaging.

There are also practical advantages to asynchronous media, not least the fact that you get to keep a record of the communication. I have 100s of mailbox folders in my email application and these provide an absolutely invaluable way for me to stay organised and cut down on hard copies. If I worked within a large organisation and it had a really great online project management app, then that would be even better, but my clients and my collaborators are all over the place and I really do need to look after myself.

If I was CEO of Atos, I wouldn't ban email, but I would seek to change the way it is used. First of all there's the junk mail. Presumably they have spam filters to remove the obvious stuff, but all staff should be encouraged to divert what they don't need to their own junk folders. Probably a much bigger issue is that far too many people are copying far too many others on emails which are of limited value to them. This can be stopped with a few simple policies: Only copy other employees in on an email when they might need to take action as a result or they simply must have a record of the communication; and certainly don't copy attachments to people who are not required to read or store them.

Email has served us well for 30 years. While it is over used and other channels have emerged which do a better job of handling certain types of communication, there are plenty of circumstances in which email is the right choice. We just have to use it intelligently.

Profile of a learning architect: Darren Owen

2011-11-29T10:11:00.000Z

Throughout my book The New Learning Architect I take time out to look at real-life examples of learning architects in action. In this profile, we look at how on-demand learning can be integrated with formal training to provide the basis for a highly-successful software launch.

Hewden Stuart plc is the number one plant hire and equipment rental company in the UK and Europe. The company has approximately 1600 employees geographically dispersed over the UK in 100 branches and one head office in Manchester. Darren Owen started work with the company in 2005 and became involved with Project Horizon, a major enterprise resource planning (ERP) project. He ultimately became the training lead for the launch of the system.

The problem was how to get 1600 employees trained in eight weeks. The audience ranged from those who hadn’t been in a classroom for 30 years to some who couldn’t wait to get started. A proportion was worried that the new system might mean a cut in jobs. Some were relatively tech-savvy but many did not even know how to turn a PC on. Under the new system, everyone was going to be using a computer and in a very different way to the old DOS-based systems which the company had used previously. As Darren explained, “They needed bringing into the 21st century.”

Gently, gently catchy monkey

Darren did consider using e-learning for the formal element of the training, but quickly realised that this was inappropriate for the audience at this point in time. He explains: “Hewden excelled at technical training, in other words pulling a CAT digger apart and repairing it, but getting employees to learn a new computer system – certainly on this scale – was something new. The face-to-face aspect was really important.”

Darren also looked at using assessments as part of the course, but the senior leadership in the company felt that this may damage morale. Instead the plan was to give the authority to the trainers to keep an eye on the learners and highlight individuals that may need extra support or training. Most employees attended classroom events, but in some cases the anxiety level at attending a course was so high that they provided 1-2-1 tuition in a small number of cases.

In an effort to make the training as friendly as possible, the classroom sessions were run by the trainees’ colleagues rather than by outsiders. These were trained first and went on to become ‘super-users’ who could provide support when the project went live.

No more door stops

Another important aspect of the project was the support that was provided to employees in terms of on-going reference material. Darren explains: “We could visit any branch and see old training manuals wedging doors open and I just didn’t want our manuals ending up being used the same way. ERP implementations are notorious for the volume of change and most of it at the last minute. We also couldn’t justify the huge printing and distribution costs for paper based manuals, particularly when they would inevitably change very quickly.”

Hewden took what was for them a big leap into the unknown by using LearningGuide as a platform for reference materials to support the roll-out. Employees were introduced to LearningGuide in the classroom, where it was used as the basis for exercises that simulated the real-world environment. It was also here that expectations were clearly set that there were to be no printed guides.

The performance support strategy was to use LearningGuide as the first line of support, followed by support from the trainer and, if all else failed, a call to the help desk. At first the habit was to follow the old familiar route and to ignore the online resource, but that habit has since been reversed. When people rang the help desk, they would send them a link to the LearningGuide. It also helped that Hirewire, a new intranet, was set up around the same time by the corporate communications team, and this got employees used to going online for important information. In addition, support material covering the Microsoft Office applications was added to the LearningGuide system, further reinforcing the trend.

The LearningGuide materials used to support the ERP system were developed mainly in-house but with help from a supplier. Darren admits this was a big job, but is sure the effort was worthwhile: “The performance improvements were very visible. We knew whether or not they could follow the new process and work with the new system. In that respect it was pretty black and white compared to some other training programmes.”

Darren was born in 1975, obtained a BSc in Computation at UMIST and has since obtained 11 years’ consulting experience in the field of technology education, covering government, private and public sectors. Having worked in over 30 countries, Darren has learnt to adapt the style of his training programmes to suit learning styles, personality and cultures. He is now working in Canada on a major global ERP project.

Shepherd accused of sensationalist claptrap

2011-11-25T10:43:00.000Z

Jay Cross, someone who I respect immensely professionally and like as a person, has accused me, with some justification, of 'sensationalist claptrap'. At a time when, in the UK, we are in the middle of the Leveson enquiry, which is looking at the 'culture, practice and ethics of the press', Jay's comment hit home. No-one has been more angry than me as, every day, more evidence is revealed of the disgraceful practices of the UK tabloids, yet perhaps, in my own small way, I am as guilty as any.

When I started blogging, I saw it primarily as an activity for personal reflection, a way of clarifying and externalising my thoughts. And when you start blogging that's pretty well all you can do, because it takes time to attract readers. Over time, as more and more people followed my blog, it became apparent that what I said could have a positive or negative impact on other people, much like a column in a newspaper.

It soon also became clear that blogging had become the domain of a select bunch of die-hard enthusiasts and was never going to become a tool for the masses, for whom Facebook status updates and tweets are more than adequate forms of expression. As a result, I came to the conclusion in 2009 that blogging is journalism, pure and simple.

In 2010 I took this analogy a step further, when I posted why we're all headline writers now:

"... we’re all becoming skilled headline writers, or at least we should be. With emails and blog posts, our messages will never get read if the headlines are not sufficiently enticing. With tweets, SMS and status updates, all typically short messages, the message itself has to become a headline. If not, it will be scanned in a microsecond and quickly cast aside."

In many ways I preferred it when I could write whatever I thought on my blog and no-one noticed. But I have to accept and take responsibility for the fact that my blog is in the public arena and that, if I am just a little clumsy in the way I express my thoughts, I can hurt people.

My crime, by the way, was to suggest that you beware who's selling informal learning. My point, slightly tongue in cheek, was that many commentators on learning and development, myself included, are getting on a bit, and have maybe forgotten how useful formal learning can be when you are a novice. Only a thought.

Beware who's selling informal learning

2011-11-23T08:35:00.001Z

There is no doubt whatsoever in my mind that historically we have underplayed the importance of informal learning, whether that's experiential, on-demand or social. I'm equally convinced that, with the proliferation of great social networking tools and the ever-increasing confidence that learners are displaying when it comes to managing their own learning, informal learning should rightfully play a central role in our future learning architectures.

But I'm also as sure as I can be that we will still have plenty of need for formal learning in the workplaces and colleges of the future; that means a curriculum, professional tuition, formal materials and some form of assessment. Why? To some extent because employers need assurance that critical skills and knowledge are in place. But mainly because employees themselves want to equip themselves with the core competences of their new trades or professions and it is really important to them that there is tangible evidence of their achievements through some form of certification. Perhaps even more importantly, lacking the elaborate mental schemas of expert practitioners, they desperately need structure and support; they don't know what they don't know and they don't know how best to address this.

Therein lies my concern. Experts suffer from the curse of knowledge. Their responses to the demands of their everyday jobs are mostly automatic. They find it really hard to empathise with the difficulties encountered by novices. They find formal, structured learning interventions tiresome and patronising, largely because they no longer need the formality and structure. They cannot remember that once upon a time they too were beginners. They can no longer see the relevance of qualifications, forgetting that qualifications are only important if you don't have them.

Given that it takes at least ten years to become expert in anything and often longer, most experts are older, and informal learning tends to be most strongly advocated by older, very experienced, expert and independent learners, i.e. those for whom informal learning is the preferred option and all that is needed. And before you say anything, I will happily put myself in this category. I haven't been on any sort of formal course related to my work for more than twenty years and definitely prefer to manage my own learning. When I was in my 20s and 30s it was a different story. I set out to take advantage of every formal learning opportunity I could. I collected qualifications and professional memberships, because at that age it's what you do if you're reasonably ambitious.

Models like 70:20:10 only serve to confuse. As Ben Betts explains in The Ubiquity of Informal Learning, the model implies that we should be putting 70% of our effort into experiential learning and 20% into social. Yet, if the model has any use, it is not as a prescription for future projects but as a way of reflecting, as we look back on our careers, how much we have learned in different ways. Our learning architectures do need to encourage and support the experiential, the on-demand and the non-formal, but we shouldn't forget that the 10% can be an important catalyst for all other forms of learning, and a lifesaver for novices.

So be cautious of oldies like me if, in their enthusiasm, they over-sell the idea of informal learning. We have forgotten what it's like to be a beginner.

P.S. I may be about to break my 20-year fast when it comes to formal learning. I am seriously considering joining one of the new series of free, online courses being offered by Stanford (see post from Stephen Downes). I rather fancy the one on human-computer interaction.

Blending is a continuum

2011-11-18T07:57:00.000Z

Sometimes it seems that the more you think about blended solutions, the harder it is to define what is and what is not blended. This decision is complicated by the fact that there are so many aspects of an solution that you can choose to blend:

Learning methods:

You can blend the educational and training strategies that you use (exposition, instruction, guided discovery, exploration).

You can blend the social contexts in which the learning takes place (the learner alone, the learner with a teacher/trainer/coach, the learner with a group of peers).

Learning media:

You can blend the primary medium used to deliver your methods (face-to-face, offline media, online media, telephone).

You can blend between asynchronous media and synchronous media.

I'm coming to the conclusion that blending is a continuum, from not blending at all at one extreme, through to very significant shifts in methods and media within a single solution. Let's look at some points upon this continuum, starting with the least blended:

You use a single method and medium throughout, e.g. (1) reading from a book, (2) coaching face-to-face.
You use a variety of methods, albeit within a single social context, and a single medium, e.g. (1) a classroom course with case studies, presentations, discussion, role-play; (2) an e-learning course including demos, simulations, quizzes.
You use a variety of methods, employing different social contexts, but still only a single medium, e.g. (1) within a face-to-face classroom course, there is a mix of self-study, one-to-one coaching and group work; (2) within an online distance learning course, there is a mix of self-study, one-to-one support, asynchronous collaboration and live online group sessions.
You use a variety of methods, employing different social contexts, but this time you use a variety of media as well, e.g. a mix of face-to-face workshops, self-study with printed materials and CDs, online forum discussions, telephone tutor support.

Clearly number 1 above is not blended and number 4 is, from any perspective, but what about 2 and 3? They are blended in some respects but not others. And does it really matter whether a solution can be defined as blended or not? Surely the only important issue is whether it works.

It would be easy to argue that, with so little agreement on definitions, the concept of a blended solution is not actually that useful, but I can't accept that. So many solutions, particularly in workplace learning, employ a single approach throughout when this doesn't really deliver the results. The approach may work for some aspects of the solution but not for all. A good example would be a stand-alone classroom workshop that attempts to deliver a body of knowledge, as well as provide opportunities for practice and discussion. The classroom may do a good job of the latter but not the former. And it ignores the fact that learning continues beyond the classroom into the workplace, and may need to be supported by coaching and reference materials. The whole idea of blending is to use the right methods and media at each and every step in a solution, and not only the obvious formal elements, but the non-formal, the on-demand and the experiential as well.

Want to write? Get on a train

2011-11-11T11:39:00.000Z

I've been trying to figure out for years now why sitting on a train is such a productive environment when it comes to designing and writing. It has occurred to me in the past that, when I'm struggling to get something done, I'd be better off getting a ticket to somewhere - anywhere - and not getting off until the job's done.

Obviously this doesn't work if the train's so crowded you have to stand. That's why at peak times I'm happy to pay for a first class fare if it means I can concentrate properly on what I'm doing. The economic argument is straightforward: the additional cost of a first class fare v the value of a really productive work environment. In other words, think of the fare as an investment, not an expense.

Which doesn't explain why the environment is so productive. There's one obvious reason of course: you are at least partially protected from interruptions. Yes, you can get calls on your mobile and yes, with a good signal, you can receive emails, but somehow it seems so much easier to put these to one side and get on with the job. But there's something more. Something about the way you are cocooned in a tight space with just your screen in front of you. Something about the motion of the train. It just works.

Of course, the same argument works for learning. A train journey is also ideal for reading, viewing, listening and interacting with learning materials, particularly on a tablet (see Why does learning content seem so much more exciting on an iPad?). And with a set of noise-reducing headphones, you really can escape into your own little world.

Three posts this morning. How come? I travelled up to London yesterday and returned just now. On the train.

Why does learning content seem so much more exciting on an iPad?

2011-11-11T11:18:00.000Z

I'm convinced that the future of e-learning will be on tablet devices. Not so much performance support, because you need that to hand every minute of the day and a smart phone is the obvious vehicle. But for learning, a tablet seems such a perfect fit. Since DevLearn last week, when it seemed every other person was carrying an iPad, I've been trying to figure out just what it is that tablets offer as a delivery medium for learning which a laptop can't do equally as well. I'm still not really sure but here are my first thoughts:

There is still a degree of novelty about using these devices. That will fade, of course, but for now using a tablet seems more fun, more contemporary, more engaging.
A laptop is a tool associated with work, with all sorts of stress-inducing negative connotations. It's a 'lean forward' device, goal-oriented and pressured. A tablet comes with no such baggage. It's much more likely to be used in a 'lean back' mode, which is more conducive to reflective learning.
A tablet is portable enough to use on a train or a plane, or when you're hanging about waiting somewhere. But it has a big enough screen to display just about any learning content with ease. And screen resolution is only going to get better.
The display on a tablet is bright and colourful. Somehow everything looks more vibrant and exciting. More importantly, you can only look at one app a time, so you're not constantly distracted by what's going on in other windows.
Tablets are extremely easy to set up and use. They are computers but they don't look like them. It's hard to imagine a learner so technophobic that they couldn't use one with ease.

That's a lot of reasons, and I've only just started.

No wonder every tool vendor is rushing to make sure they can output to every tablet device out there, especially the iPad.

Reading from a script is not for me

2011-11-11T11:14:00.000Z

This time last year, I wrote the following in the Onlignment blog under the heading Why I’m not going to speak from a script again:

For some reason, there are lessons that take a long time to learn – however often an action leads to negative consequences, you just seem bound to repeat it. One lesson I really hope I have now learned is that reading from a script doesn’t work – at least not for me. In the past few years I have tried this in numerous situations:
giving speeches (such as at the E-Learning Awards a week or so back)
when presenting a Pecha Kucha (that’s 20 slides each displayed for 20 seconds if you’ve yet to be initiated)
when recording a screencast (it sounds so much better when improvised)
when recording a podcast (free-form interviews work much better)
There are good reasons for thinking that reading from a script will work. After all, the best TV presenters do it convincingly. And you can be absolutely sure that you’re going to cover every point clearly. However, reading from a script doesn’t work well in a face-to-face setting because it forces you to lose eye contact with the audience for sustained periods. And even when you’re recording a voice-over it’s really hard not to come over as wooden and rather boring.

Can it be made to work? Well, perhaps, but professionals have one of two advantages: either they’ve got the luxury of a teleprompter, which allows them to retain eye contact with the audience or camera; or they’ve rehearsed well enough that they’ve got so familiar with the words that they only need to refer to them periodically. As Mark Twain said,”It usually takes me more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.”

I’ve made two resolutions. First, to avoid having to use any type of script if at all possible. Far better to trust in your instincts and talk around some key headings. Second, where a tight structure is absolutely essential, make sure I write the words in a form that suits being spoken and not read, and then put in the hard work as actors do and learn your lines.

As a natural speaker, my father is my model here. He would quite happily get up and speak at any occasion. He never prepared and he never had a single note. He just said the right thing without fuss and sat down again. No slides and few jokes, but effortless.

So, last night I tested my resolve from last year and delivered my speech at this year's E-Learning Awards without any script at all. I had a rough outline which I sketched out in Evernote and revised periodically over a couple of weeks. I added to this on the day to include references to new data such as the release of Towards Maturity's 2011 benchmark report and Donald Clark's review of the UK e-learning sector. This would have been more difficult to achieve with a highly formal speech. I ran through the key points in my mind perhaps four or five times on the day to make sure I wasn't going to forget anything important, such as thanking the judges for all their hard work, but I was only memorising a sequence not a form of words.

Did it work? Yes. In fact it worked just fine. It is much more engaging for an audience to hear you speaking naturally rather than reading aloud, and it is much more enjoyable for you as speaker. You've just got to trust yourself. After all, every one of us speaks on a whole variety of topics to a whole load of different people every day of our lives. Why should a formal event be any different?

Over-engineered for information transfer, under-engineered for learning

2011-11-04T17:18:00.000Z

I've seen some really good examples of self-study e-learning in the past few weeks. First when I sat in for a day judging for The E-Learning Awards and second during the Demo Fest at DevLearn 2011 here in Las Vegas. These were programmes that delivered on the promise. They tackled a topic that for which e-learning was an appropriate solution and they didn't compromise in making sure that there was a successful learning outcome for the learner.

On the other hand I've seen some terrible stuff over the past twelve months, and I've met plenty of people outside the ed-tech community who have admitted to me that they can't stand e-learning. This should not be the case, at least not on such a widespread scale. After all, we've been doing this for at least 30 years now under various guises. We should know what we're doing.

There seem to be two problems. We over-engineer for information transfer and we under-engineer for learning.

Let's take the first. Cammy Bean did a great job in her session yesterday, called Clicky, clicky, bling, bling, of drawing attention to the absurd lengths to which we sometimes now go supposedly to engage the learner. It's gloss. It's razzmatazz. Sorry, but for me it's a turn off. Extravagant, glitzy graphics don't entice me to pay attention; they signal that I'm about to be presented with a commercial. It's time to put the kettle on.

Mostly, the developers of these programmes are going to these lengths because they know that they're really just passing over information. They feel embarrassed about this, so they want to compensate with all sorts of extra goodies. But surely all that matters is that the information is relevant and useful. If it's not, why are you delivering it at all? If it is, aren't there simpler ways of putting it across? What's wrong with a nicely written and well illustrated web page or PDF? When I'm looking for information on the web, I don't complain if I get presented with simple web pages or YouTube videos. In fact I'm really happy with these. Equally I don't complain when the books I read are full of words. Surely that model's worked well now for hundreds of years.

The second problem is that so many e-learning programs simply don't take people far enough on their learning journeys. Yes, they present the underlying facts, concepts and processes. Yes, they may include some modest case study or scenario, perhaps just some sort of quiz. But it takes a lot more than one superficial practice activity to build a skill. Usually our first attempt at any new skill serves only to alert us to its difficulty. It's a case of conscious incompetence. It takes repeated practice with realistic challenges and personalised feedback to build the confidence required to go to the next step. Designing this stuff is difficult, but then no-one said instructional design was easy.

Perhaps what I'm saying is this. Do less formal e-learning. Use other, much more straightforward media instead for information transfer. And the e-learning projects that we do undertake we should do more thoroughly, making sure that our learners really do achieve the required competence. Don't over-engineer, don't under-engineer. Get the balance right.

Storyline and ZebraZapps: seriously powerful, seriously simple

2011-11-02T21:13:00.003Z

Here at DevLearn 2011 in Las Vegas I've got authoring tools on my mind. Why? Because I have been able to take a look at two new tools today, which I'm sure are going to have a major impact. The have one thing in common and lots of differences.

First up is Storyline from Articulate. What I saw was still in beta and with no definite launch date, but it looked in good shape to me and so it's probably only a few months away. Storyline is a desktop authoring tool which Articulate would probably position alongside their current Studio suite of Presenter, QuizMaker and Engage, but for me this is definitely a replacement.

The Articulate Studio has been incredibly popular and some developers have achieved impressive results. But for me the PowerPoint add-in approach to authoring is an uncomfortable compromise. Yes, you have the familiar PowerPoint interface but all the interactive elements are completely separate and never quite integrate as you'd like. Storyline addresses this shortcoming with remarkable success. It borrows much of the Microsoft Office look and feel, including the ribbon interface, so it's easy to learn, but inherits none of the limitations. Looks to me like you could do some really nice work with it, without being frustrated by lack of functionality.

A few highlights:

The demo I saw was running on a Mac, so that's a plus for me.
Screen recording is built right in, which makes this a promising tool for software training.
You can import from PowerPoint or Articulate Studio tools if you need to.
Looks like you can manipulate every object on the screen in all sorts of flexible ways, without the need for a scripting language.
You can build templates and themes and share these between projects and developers.
The tool includes a library of cartoon characters which you can manipulate using different expressions and gestures for use in scenarios. This demonstrates really well, although this style will definitely not suit all audiences. I think there are photo-based characters as well.
It exports to HTML 5 as well as Flash, although I'm not sure they've perfected this yet. This is a big deal, because iPads and iPhones don't support Flash. Given that every other delegate here is using an iPad rather than a laptop, you can see how important it is to get this right. It is about time to move on from Flash anyway, because you hardly see it on everyday websites anymore. Apart from games, e-learning is one of its last remaining niches.

No announcements yet, but I guess Storyline will cost something similar to Articulate Studio, so that's over $1000.

Next up is ZebraZapps from Allen Interactions. I managed to have a quick chat with Michael Allen and he explained just what a major undertaking the development of this tool has been. Michael was, of course, the creator of Authorware, a highly powerful tool from the CD-ROM era, which Adobe eventually gave up on after they inherited it from Macromedia. Authorware was a serious tool that you could use for serious projects, but with a friendly interface. Since its demise, the market has been filled almost entirely with rapid tools. Anyone who wanted to do top-end development had to do serious coding in Flash.

So what's special?

This is a cloud-based tool, not a desktop app, and that means design and development can be truly collaborative. Enterprise users will have the option to work offline and then synch to the cloud.
You can storyboard and prototype directly in the tool, as you iterate towards a launchable product.
You can incorporate as much interactive logic as you like without programming.
There is huge potential for dynamic and personalised feedback.
Animation tools includes.
Supports the creation multi-player games and interactions that you can share on social media sites.
Publish your work to ZapShopps.

There is a low-cost, $8.99 a month option already available with limited functionality. I've no idea what the professional and enterprise versions will cost. It runs on PCs and Macs. Currently it doesn't output to HTML 5 for iOS, but that's planned for version 2. There's 60-day free trial available if you want a play.

What's in common between these two tools is that they are both trying to significantly up the ante when it comes to sophisticated interactivity. In effect, to give us back what we had with tools in the 1980s and 90s. They both achieve this with an elegance which definitely surpasses anything I've seen before.

At first sight, Allen's tool has more power than Storyline and is really trying to break the mould with its crossover to social media. It also wins for me by operating in the cloud. On the other hand, Storyline looks like it will be more than powerful enough for the majority of projects, will be straightforward to learn and will export to mobile.

I'd like both please this Christmas.

Portrait of a learning architect: Rob Bartlett

2011-10-28T13:50:00.003+01:00

Throughout my book The New Learning Architect I take time out to look at real-life examples of great learning architects in action. For this profile, we turn to Rob Bartlett, from Farm Credit in Canada. Rob has achieved success by integrating formal and informal learning activities in pursuit of clear strategic business objectives.

Rob is Senior Consultant, Organisational Development for Farm Credit, Canada, a government-owned financial institution making loans to farmers across Canada. The company has 1500 employees based in more than 100 offices across the country, with 600 based at the head office and around 1000 customer-facing. The employees are on the whole well qualified and work routinely with computers. On the other hand, the culture of the bank is still very much one where representatives get out to see customers face-to-face as much as is possible.

In the four years that Rob has been at the bank he has seen some dramatic changes:

A major cultural transformation stressing 100% individual accountability for impact on results and on people.
A revamped banking system based on SAP.
A shift in the customer base to fewer, much larger farms operating more like corporate entities and with correspondingly bigger loans.

Formal programmes
Three programmes dominate the formal schedule:

The lending essentials programme: This takes employees from day 1 to 18 months and covers all credit and customer service policies. Each new employee is supported through the programme by a team of mentors. Rob looks at each element of the programme on a highly granular basis to determine whether it should be tackled in a face-to-face class, using e-learning content or directly through mentoring.

The orientation programme: Every new employee gets the chance to travel to head office for a face-to-face orientation programme. This allows them to take a look round, meet other new hires, find out what the company is all about and hear about plans for the future.

The leadership development programme: This takes place over an 8-month period and is provided by an external contractor. The programme starts and ends with an online 360 degree analysis, involving the learner’s manager, peers and direct reports. The three weeks of residential classroom training are interspersed with assignments and conference calls. The President of the company attends the last session in which they present their solution to a current work problem.

Communities of practice
Rob works closely with the company’s Knowledge Management function to look for any opportunities for the two departments to collaborate. One outcome of this has been the creation of a number of voluntary communities of practice bringing together those with common interests from across the organisation. These communicate regularly using conference calls and get together face-to-face every two years. Communication between members has been enriched by the use of monthly webinars and by the collaborative tools provided by Microsoft SharePoint. Rob admits it is early days for online collaboration but that this is likely to become a core component of the scheme.

Performance support is not extensive but necessary information is available on the company’s intranet. Alternatively, employees can direct questions to Knowledge Management who will endeavour to track down an expert capable of providing an answer.

Taking stock
Rob believes he is well on the way to establishing a cohesive architecture that brings together the formal and the informal, and both l&d and knowledge management. The overall learning strategy has been taken to the senior executives and is supported wholeheartedly.

Rob is keen to make sure that each intervention is deliberate and not just another case of ‘putting them on a course’. Managers within the business come to him knowing that he will look at each requirement on its own merits and come up with a solution that is right for the job. No way will Rob ever be an order taker.

Rob Bartlett is the senior organizational development consultant with Farm Credit Canada. Rob was responsible for the development of the organization’s overall learning strategy, and is responsible for the on-going maintenance of the strategy. Rob has a varied background in learning, including safety training, systems, sales, task procedures, cultural change and interpersonal skills. Rob continues to champion the cause of connecting learning to on-the-job performance, both in the individual events and the strategy. Rob is married with one son, and lives in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada.

Cases in custom content development: tentative suggestion 2 - never regard a job as finished

2011-10-21T17:57:00.001+01:00

Some work has to be right first time. Let's take a feature film for example. With hundreds of people that need to be tightly co-ordinated over a relatively short period, spending millions of dollars in the process, a film shoot has to be prepared with extraordinary precision. It is unbelievably expensive and sometimes completely impractical to go back and re-shoot a scene that didn't turn out right. It hardly ever happens. And once a launch date has been set and the films and DVDs manufactured, there is little or no way of making changes. This is a right first time business.

The development of desktop computer software used to be the same. Once you'd pressed the CDs and mailed them out to paying customers, you did not want to be finding serious bugs. You certainly wouldn't expect to make any mods until the next version, perhaps a year away. Now the situation with desktop applications has changed somewhat. Automatic online updates make it practical to fix mistakes, handle usability problems and add new features on a regular basis. You still don't want your software to be buggy, but you have a way out if the worst comes to the worst.

With websites and cloud-based applications, there are no practical barriers to changing your software as and when you want. If you find a problem, it can be remedied quite painlessly just as soon as you have a fix. If there is a clamour for a new feature you can add it in not much more than the time it takes to write the code. Now you'll have your own plans as well that you work towards systematically over time, but when you need to be responsive you can be. By and large this process is working and no software vendor or customer would want to return to the old system.

E-learning development processes have their origins in the days when courses were delivered on videodiscs and CDs, when updates and fixes were to be avoided at all costs. Because videodiscs and CDs are offline media and hard to maintain, it's not surprising that a model similar to that used for film production and desktop software development was applied. The e-learning development model is typically applied in waterfall fashion - water can flow down step by step but it can never flow back up. Analysis, design, development, implementation and evaluation occur once and once only. Any iteration is an admission of error.

How unlike classroom courses. Yes, a great deal of care can be put into designing a new classroom event, but no-one will be surprised when, the first time the course is run, what actually happens bears only the faintest resemblance to the plan. Learning is not an exact science and learners are not perfectly predictable. Major changes will need to be applied for the second running of any course and yet more substantial amendments before the third. Chances are, many years later, minor changes are still being made to fine-tune the methodology and adapt the content. The design, development and delivery of classroom events is an on-going and highly iterative process allowing for continuous fine-tuning. A course is for life, not just for Christmas.

So we find ourselves in a situation in which traditional classroom training follows a model not a million miles from online software, while e-learning is developed according to the rapidly outdated offline media model. Excuse me, but I sense a disconnect.

Why is a more agile model desirable? Well, there are plenty of good reasons. Here are some for starters:

Because try as you might to do all your analysis before you start your design, you never stop discovering valuable new information about the requirements you are aiming to satisfy and the audience you are targeting.
Because try as you might to gather together all the creative ideas you will need in the design phase, great ideas can and do surface unpredictably at any point thereafter. Some of the best ideas occur long after the course has launched. Sometimes they come from learners.
Because requirements change and audiences change for perfectly valid business reasons.
Because new technologies make opportunities available that were not there when the course was originally conceived.

Perhaps the most important change that's needed is to stop looking at an e-learning course as a project and to start seeing it as an on-going commitment. Once you've shifted this mind-set, course maintenance ceases to be an annoying waste of resources and manifests itself instead as an exciting process of continuous improvement. The development of the Google search engine, Facebook or iTunes are not projects; they are never-ending quests for perfection. Why should e-learning be any different?

See the cases

See suggestion 1: consult early and widely

Cases in custom content development: tentative suggestion 1 - consult early and widely

2011-10-17T15:13:00.002+01:00

Over the past couple of weeks I've shared four case studies in custom e-learning content creation, each bringing out a number of problems that occur regularly in real projects. A few days ago I had a chance to test these cases out on a group of aspiring designers and project managers, who were yet to be exposed to any formal development model, ADDIE or otherwise. I was interested in what they would regard as good practice, based only on their general work experience and with no axes to grind. They did not disappoint. In fact they had lots of great ideas and it would take far too long to discuss them here one by one. So I'm going to try and draw out a few key themes, the first of which can be simply summarised as follows:

Consult early and widely

There are many stakeholders in any e-learning project, large or small, and they are going to have very different perspectives based on different areas of expertise and different motivations. If you believe in the concept of diversity in society at large then you're also likely to believe that a variety of perspectives on an e-learning project is going to be more useful than one. Even dictators should be able to listen, even if more often than not they reject every opinion but their own - the chances are they'll hit upon some cracking good suggestions from time to time, which of course they will claim as their own. Most e-learning people are not dictators, so they have even more to gain.

Consult widely to get ideas

After you've done all your analysis, you have plenty of decisions to make in terms of learning strategies, modular structures, media mix, look and feel, tools and technologies. Assuming that, as a learning designer, you're not Leonardo re-incarnated, the following people will have plenty to offer:

Subject experts: Obviously you have already consulted them, because they know the content, but they will also have ideas about how to teach this content, even if only at a tactical level. More than anything else, subject experts have plenty of authentic examples, war stories and also a fair few jokes. These will be treasures to your learners, so make sure to collect them. Subject experts have probably also had quite a bit of experience trying to teach their subject to others - they know which concepts and principles learners find difficult. They may even have some strategies for overcoming these obstacles.

Creative people: Graphic designers, audio and video producers, writers, artists, musicians - you don't need to consult them all, but chances are at least one of these will be central to your project. As career professionals in their disciplines, they will have plenty more ideas than you will ever have of how to exploit their particular medium to the full. They will understand narrative, characterisation, tone, style and much more. They could make a big difference.

Technical people: Some learning people are a bit scared of those they consider geeks, perhaps sometimes because their brains seem a little over-developed and their social skills somewhere in the opposite direction. In decades of working with software engineers and other techies, I've found their input unbelievably helpful. Not only do they know how to get jobs done more quickly, they also have a handle on what it is possible to achieve with the technology you are using. They are not scared of making e-learning more interactive, more adaptive, more responsive. They just can't understand why you would put up with software that was anything else.

Consult widely to check out these ideas

So far we've consulted with insiders, those who have an active interest in delivering the project. But these are not our customers. Before we get too far down the road of scripting and developing our e-learning, we'd better check out the people who will be paying the bills and the end users that they represent.

Clients/project sponsors: You might think learners are your customers, but that's rarely the case. Selling training is like selling dog food. You don't sell to the end user - the dog or the learner - you sell to the owner or, as they are more politely called in a work context, the manager. Clients can be a pain. They can have very bad taste. They often understand very little about what works - in fact they may be more interested in what makes them looks good. But you do need to bring them with you. So show them how it is going to look as early as possible and save yourself a lot of trouble later.

Dogs (learners): I've never met anyone who wouldn't agree with me - even if only eventually, after a little rational discussion - that learners shouldn't be consulted in terms of the training that they are going to receive. It's just that hardly anyone actually does it. The software world overcame this barrier many years ago, and user-centred design is now widely accepted. In e-learning, everyone believes they speak for the learner - they don't. I'm absolutely certain that this is true, because I see so many e-learning products that break practically every known rule of usability and learnability. These issues are invisible to clients, subject experts and other project participants. Why? Because they are not looking for them. When they test the product the one thing they are not trying to do is learn from it. And beta (user acceptance) testing is all far too late. Test with learners early.

Next I'll discuss what my group had to say about being flexible in your approach to e-learning development. Never regard a job as finished

The Big Question: Does Gamification have a role in Workplace Learning?

2011-10-17T11:02:00.000+01:00

October's Big Question at the Learning Circuits Blog addresses the application of games to workplace learning and in the process uses the word that everyone loves to hate - gamification. This is not a word to use outside the e-learning community without ridicule, but it does have some value in that it describes succinctly that you can add value to what would otherwise be a game-free medium by adding some of the characteristics of games. However contemporary and fashionable the word might be, the idea is, of course, anything but new. In a learning context, I wouldn't be at all surprised if many thousands of years ago, parents and teachers weren't already livening up what otherwise might have been the unattractive prospect of yet more learning by devising little games. They may have set goals, perhaps in terms of output, perhaps time. They may have pitted one learner's performance against another, or against their own previous attainments. They may have come up with rules to make tasks more focused or more challenging. Who knows, they may even have had learners progress through levels to some ultimate prize.

If this is gamification, then please let's have plenty of it. Learning is hard. Humans are not endowed with an excess of self-discipline. A little help can only be useful.

Cases in custom content development - 4

2011-10-11T11:28:00.000+01:00

For some background to these cases, see my initial post.

Case 4

You are the project manager for an e-learning programme that has recently been completed. The purpose of the e-learning programme was to brief managers and senior professionals about a major policy change.

You have just conducted a project review with your client and the following points were made:

The policy change was being made in response to an urgent need, yet the quickest that you were able to deliver was three months. This delayed the implementation of the new policy by some eight weeks. Your client felt the process that you followed seemed cumbersome and bureaucratic for dealing with an urgent need. She would take some convincing to go with e-learning again for anything other than a major, long-term project.
Feedback from users was very positive in terms of the look and feel of the e-learning. They were impressed by the animations and video game-like features. On the other hand, several users commented that they would have been just as happy with a simple briefing, perhaps even a web article or a PDF file.
The client was a little frustrated that a good suggestion that she had for a content change could not be included because the script had already been signed off. She felt this policy was unrealistically inflexible.

You want to reassure this client about the future potential for e-learning and avoid similar problems occurring in the future. What would you recommend?

Cases in custom content development - 3

2011-10-10T11:56:00.000+01:00

For some background to these cases, see my initial post.

Case 3

You were the project manager for an e-learning programme that was launched six months back. The purpose of the programme was to train administrative staff in a major systems change.

You have just met with your client who has raised a number of issues:

The system is due for a revision within the coming month and this will require some changes to the e-learning materials. Unfortunately, the project team has been disbanded and there is no-one available to oversee the changes.
Your client has heard some rumours that the company who developed the e-learning is experiencing some financial problems. He is worried because this company used their own proprietary development tool and, if they were to go out of business, there would be no way to maintain the content.

You are keen to avoid similar problems occurring in the future. What would you recommend?

Cases in custom content development - 2

2011-10-07T15:35:00.000+01:00

For some background to these cases, see my initial post.

Case 2

You have been the manager of a project to develop a new e-learning component to your organisation's induction programme. The e-learning will be used by all new employees.

You have just conducted a project review with your team and the following issues were raised:

The development phase was significantly delayed because you discovered that the output produced by your chosen authoring tool was incompatible with many of your organisation's PCs. You had to switch to a new tool and this involved considerable re-work.
During the testing phase, your client saw the finished output for the first time. Unfortunately she disliked the style of illustrations used throughout the programme and asked for them to be changed. This resulted in a budget over-run and a delay of two weeks.
Once the programme had been implemented, it became evident that many users were confused by aspects of the graphical interface. Until this point, the only people who had tested the programme were members of the project team. Revisions were swiftly made to the interface and this resolved the problem, although negative feedback had spread quite widely by this stage.

You want to avoid similar problems occurring in the future. What would you recommend?

Cases in custom content development - 1

2011-10-06T16:12:00.001+01:00

I have been developing a set of cases to use at a workshop I am running next Thursday in Munich. They are designed to bring out a wide range of issues related to the development of custom e-learning content. I want participants to be aware of the sorts of problems that all too frequently occur, but also the difficulties with coming up with a process that suits all stakeholders and all requirements. I thought I would share these cases with you over the next four working days and then later provide you with some feedback on what participants thought were workable solutions, as well as my own comments. So here goes ...

Case 1

You have been the manager of a project to develop a new equal opportunities e-learning programme for use by all employees in your organisation.

You have just conducted a project review with your team and the following issues were raised:

There were major delays to the project because the subject expert (SME) took a very long time to approve designs and scripts. The SME claimed that he had no idea he would be required to put in so much effort.
Midway through the project, a high profile discrimination complaint brought by an employee meant that modifications had to be made to the content. Development had already commenced and some re-work had to be undertaken.
Feedback from early users was negative. Many found the materials were over-long and text-heavy, with insufficient and unchallenging interaction. Few felt that the programme would make any real difference to behaviour.
Your graphic designer claimed that she would have been able to make the materials much more engaging but was simply asked to implement what was in the script. Your developer made a similar point, claiming that there were many opportunities to include more appropriate interactivity but that the person writing the script was not aware of what was possible.

If possible, you want to avoid similar problems occurring in the future. What would you recommend?

You can't get a cloud in your hand

2011-10-06T10:01:00.000+01:00

With iCloud appearing on the horizon, I was reminded yesterday of just how vulnerable you become when you trust all your data to a third party to store for you online. I made a simple change to my Blogger template and pressed Save. Some bug in Google's software then rendered my blog as a complete dog's dinner of code. My instinct was to revert to the previous version and put this down to experience. Surely, there must be a copy of my template somewhere. After all, I'd been using it for six years. I had links to all my favourite blogs, assorted badges, and code snippets to Google Analytics, Technorati and all sorts of other stuff. Stuff that would take ages to re-assemble. I decided not to both. Vanilla will have to do.

I had a similar experience a few weeks back. An automated upgrade to M/S Office on my Mac for some reason deleted all my contacts. Unfortunately, my contacts, along with my calendar, are synched to my laptop, my iPhone and my iPad using MobileMe, which means all four copies would soon be emptied. I just managed to make a backup on my laptop before that moment came and restored my Mac. Now losing your contact list is more serious than losing your blog template, so I resolved to make regular backups offline.

Some time ago, I realised my vulnerability to third party online storage and copied my whole blog archive to my trusty Evernote. No problem there. Except, of course, that my Evernote database is ... er ... online.

Thanks if you voted for me!

2011-10-05T17:45:00.000+01:00

Profile of a learning architect: Charles Jennings

2011-09-28T17:21:00.000+01:00

Throughout my book The New Learning Architect I take time out to look at real-life examples of great learning architects in action. Next up is Charles Jennings, who believes firmly in the power of social and experiential learning at work, and has successfully applied these beliefs within the complex and fast-moving environment of an international news agency.

Charles Jennings originally went in to Reuters (now Thomson Reuters), the world’s largest international multimedia news agency, in 2001 as a consultant, tasked with drawing up a new learning and development strategy. His client liked the approach and, as in what Charles describes as “every consultant’s nightmare”, he was asked to come aboard and implement what he had recommended.

Assessing the situation
Charles joined an organisation with a unique profile, employing more than 18,000 people, including 2,500 editorial staff, journalists, photographers and camera operators, and offices in 200 cities in 94 countries. Reuters is the largest provider of content to the internet and supplies data on almost one million shares, bonds and other financial instruments. It updates its financial data at 8,000 times a second (23,000 at peak) and publishes approximately 30,000 headlines and over eight million words every day.

He set about finding out what was currently being spent on l&d. He discovered that when all the hidden costs were taken into account, actual costs were much higher than was previously thought. Charles describes how the regional training operations were run as “fiefdoms, all in competition with each other. There were no standards and massive duplication of effort. Little was shared.”

Charles identified six issues which needed attention:

The lack of a coherent global learning strategy.
A lack of accountability – the supply and demand of learning services were separated organisationally and in budget terms.
No ability to gather global management information, including costs.
A lack of consistent standards – many different approaches to analysis and design of learning solutions.
A drive for volume rather than value – essentially they were running a training fulfilment service. Charles describes this as a ‘conspiracy of convenience’: performance analysis is not done or done poorly; business managers want ‘training’; training managers deliver it; no-one measures it.
The lack of a global vendor management strategy, leading to inefficiencies in procurement and inconsistencies in learning outputs.

Charles set up a global learning function, with the aim of developing a common infrastructure – in terms of both structure and systems – and common standards for stakeholder engagement, learning and technology. To steer this new global initiative, Charles took the important step of establishing a company learning governance structure, as embodied by a Learning Advisory Board.

Charles knew that this body needed to be populated primarily by key stakeholders in l&d, not by HR and training people. In spite of its name, this group was not just advisory; it was responsible for decision making. As an example, Charles presented compelling evidence to suggest that moving some aspects of l&d online would not impact on effectiveness. As a result, the group made a clear decision: if the requirement was concerned with knowledge acquisition, then they wouldn’t try and meet it in a classroom. As Charles emphasises, “It is better that decisions like these come from stakeholders, not from l&d.”

The group set out four key challenges:

To build a world-class l&d service more closely aligned with business strategy and priorities.
To embed best practice processes in all l&d activities across the company.
To provide fast, effective deployment of mission-critical skills and knowledge.
To support the business in managing budgets and vendor relationships more efficiently.

One of the first priorities was to push accountability back to the line with functional rather than regional heads and a small central co-ordinating unit. The change in culture was emphasised by changing all job titles from ‘training’ to ‘learning’, emphasising the new role as enablers rather than providers.

Learning is a process, not an event
Charles made extensive use of the 70:20:10 model (sometimes referred to as the Princeton University Learning Process) to shape Reuter’s learning architecture. This maintains that 70% of learning at work takes place from real-life and on-the-job experiences, 20% through interacting with and observing others and receiving feedback, and 10% from formal training. In other words, a large proportion of learning is experiential in nature, as we are defining it in this book.

Charles acknowledges that these proportions cannot be applied rigidly and that different balances might be needed at different stages in a person’s career. He also foresees a shift to something like 45:45:10 if greater use is made of social media within organisations: “Learning is always social. This was at the heart of our approaches at Reuters and our use of learning technologies. Where there is maximum collaboration among learners and where employees can easily capture and publish best practices, then the community as a whole can re-use and leverage its intellectual capital.”

The learner is at the heart of this approach, able to access libraries and knowledge bases, communities of practice, experts and coaches, collaborative learning environments, mobile performance support tools and classroom training.

As Charles explains, “We learn through experience, through conversations, through practice and through reflection. These are the criteria by which to assess any design for any learning solution.”

Charles Jennings is the Managing Director of Duntroon Associates, a leading learning and performance consultancy company, focused on helping organisations build their ability to deliver maximum business benefit from their workforce. Charles is also a member of The internet Time Alliance, a think-tank of leading practitioners helping organisations ‘work smarter’ through informal and social learning.
From 2002 until the end of 2008 he was the Chief Learning Officer for Reuters and Thomson Reuters where he had responsibility for developing learning and performance strategy and leading the learning organisation for the firm’s 55,000 workforce. He is a leading thinker and practitioner in learning and development, change management, and performance improvement.

Sometimes you need to take risks to avoid risk

2011-09-23T07:57:00.000+01:00

Last week I chaired the Charity Learning Consortium's conference in London. There were some excellent sessions from Sudhir Giri of Google, Iain Napier of British Telecom, Nigel Paine, and Simon Mercer and Kate Graham from Redtray. Each one of the speakers challenged the audience of L&D staff from leading UK-based charities to think differently about the way they manage learning and development in their workplaces, in particular to better harness the potential of social learning and to reduce the dependence on meeting face-to-face.

There's no doubt that the majority of the audience was convinced of the arguments, but it was also evident from the questions and the outputs from the activities that they were far from convinced that they'd be able to make much impression with putting these ideas into practice. One response came back time and time again to the question 'what's stopping you from putting what you've learned into practice?' and that was 'our organisation is too risk adverse'. Whether this risk aversion is in fact from L&D rather than the wider organisation is debatable but what is not is that the fear of change is a very real barrier.

In normal times we could probably live with the fact that we - or the organisations in which we work - are intrinsically risk averse. We may wish we were a little braver, but at least we weren't going to fall flat on our faces. The big dipper might look exciting, but for now the roundabout is suiting us just fine. And at a time when resources are being severely constrained and headcount is dropping, it might seem even more appropriate to keep your head down and hope that the problem will pass. But inaction could be your biggest mistake, for a number of reasons:

The problem is not going to pass in a hurry. Some forecasters now expect ten years of economic doom and gloom.
L&D has to be proactive in dealing with the crisis. If they are not, senior managers will make decisions on our behalf and we won't like them one bit. You can't complain if irrational policy decisions are made (such as 'no face-to-face under any circumstances' or 'everything must be self-study') if you haven't got in first with a more rational strategy that would have saved a similar sum of money and preserved quality.
If the worst comes to the worst and headcount is chopped then those that showed the greatest appetite for change will be the last to go and the first to be re-hired.

The reality is that we have to take risks in promoting new ways of learning, in order to avoid the much greater risk of oblivion and unemployment. I know which I'd rather go for.

Asynchronous and online should be the default to argue against

2011-09-16T17:02:00.003+01:00

Live, face-to-face communication has always been the default for human beings. At one stage it was our only option. But what held true 10,000 years ago does not have to hold true now, because now we have some very credible alternative options.

Yes, there are strong arguments for meeting face-to-face, when a rich, multi-sensory experience is really important to achieving a satisfactory outcome. But most of our routine meetings are not in this category - we can get along just fine using Skype, or some more sophisticated form of web conferencing. If we do meet online, we save enormously on time, cost, hassle and CO2 emissions. There's a very strong argument for making online meetings the default, in other words the way you always do things unless a very strong argument is made to the contrary. This is no different than suggesting that the default way of listening to music should be from recordings and the default way to consume drama or sports should be on the TV. In fact we take that for granted. Yes, it's much more fun to go to live gigs, the theatre or a sports arena, but these are special occasions.

Another default position should be communicating asynchronously. Yes, sometimes we do need to get together live (online, on the telephone or face-to-face) because we want a free flow of conversation or a quick resolution to problems, but should this be the default? Think of the disadvantages. Synchronising diaries can be a nightmare, and meeting at the same time forces us to communicate at a pace determined by others. Asynchronous comms, using email, forums, social networks, blogs and wikis - or any form of recorded media - allow us to regain control of our time. So, my suggestion is to start off by assuming that work will be carried out asynchronously unless a strong argument can be made for getting together live.

Asynchronous and online. Your starting point.

The Big Questions: Issues and Trends

2011-09-15T12:08:00.000+01:00

The latest Big Question on the ASTD Learning Circuits blog is designed to set the agenda for discussion over the coming months. The question is: What issues and trends do you think are having a major impact on the industry—and should be on the hot list for the blog to tackle?

I have been completely immersed in work for the past two weeks and have had no chance whatsoever to make any postings. On the other hand, I have spent plenty of time with l&d professionals in a variety of organisations across Europe trying to make change happen in very difficult circumstances, so I do have a few ideas for what the burning questions might be. I've added my first thoughts to the list, although really much more consideration is needed.

How can we continue to provide a worthwhile service in L&D when we have half the bodies available that we had a year ago?
First thought: You can do well, but not by simply doing half as much of the same old thing. Regard this as an opportunity to re-think learning in your workplace from the ground up. Become learning architects rather than builders, genuine professionals not order takers.

I have spent much of my life running classroom courses and feeling I was doing a really good job. Should I stick with what I know and wait for the good times to return?
First thought: If, as you say, you're really good and you teach a specialist subject for which there is still a strong demand for a face-to-face approach, and you don't have thousands of competitors all offering the same services, then probably yes. For the rest of you, I'd say look for other options. I believe the shift away from the classroom is going to be long term. Of course some needs will still have to be met using a face-to-face classroom approach, but that won't keep everyone who's currently a classroom trainer in a job, unless you want to earn half as much.

Could I re-train as - what did you call it - a learning architect?
First thought: Perhaps, if you see yourself carrying out a consultative role. But if you only really feel alive when you're performing in front of an audience, then this may not be for you.

Or should I re-train as a learning technologist? Is it even remotely realistic that a classroom trainer would be any good at creating e-learning?
First thought: Everyone in L&D should understand how best to use learning technologies and most should have at least some basic skills in, say, creating very simple digital content and facilitating in a virtual classroom - even if these skills are not going to be central to your job. But becoming a specialist in e-learning is another thing. Basically, you have to like making stuff, be organised and with an attention to detail. If that doesn't sound like you, you won't make the grade.

How long does it take to learn how to create e-learning? Will a two-day course be enough?
First thought: Could you learn to be a plumber in two days? A carpenter? A metal worker? No of course not. So why would you think you could learn to make digital stuff in such a short space of time? I believe the design of e-learning is a craft skill and that ideally you need to work alongside a master for many years. Of course, many people feel they know it all after a two day course, but then have you seen how bad so much e-learning is?

Does e-learning actually provide a much more secure future? Will anyone still do formal training in a future in which all learning is informal and on-the-job?
First thought: I'm not sure. I do believe that self-paced instructional e-learning is less widely applicable that many people think. Self-study is valuable for some of the time. Formal instruction is valuable for some of the time. But there's a lot more to learning that this. When it all settles down, there will probably be as many jobs in creating instructional e-learning as there are in classroom training. Neither will be what most current L&D professionals will be doing.

Profile of a learning architect: Julie Wedgwood

2011-09-04T13:02:00.001+01:00

Throughout my book The New Learning Architect I take time out to look at real-life examples of great learning architects in action. In this next profile we meet Julie Wedgwood who, almost single-handedly, transformed a very traditional IT training team into enthusiastic innovators capable of showing that formal training can be flexible, effective and fun.

In January 2008, Julie Wedgwood commenced working with the Cheshire ICT Service, which provides support for 10,500 National Health Service employees across the county of Cheshire in the UK. This shared service had been formed by bringing together the IT departments from three major NHS trusts. At the time, the HR function for the three trusts was also re-constituted as a shared service, although there was no real engagement by the l&d department with Julie’s ICT team. As Julie recalls, at one of her first encounters with HR, when she hinted at the changes she would like to see made, she was asked, “What on earth is someone like you doing in the NHS?” This was going to be tough.

Change begins with the team
In re-inventing the formal course curriculum, Julie was inspired by the words of Professor Stephen Heppel, who famously advised teachers not to “Do a Dick Turpin.” For those of you unfamiliar with this character from UK folklore, Dick was a highwayman who commanded those unfortunate travellers that he waylaid to “stand and deliver”. Julie felt that the lecture approach to delivering learning within the NHS was no longer practical or effective.

On the other hand, as Julie explained, “Our experience of being taught is how we expect to teach.” Most of the trainers had built their career by following this approach and it was, to some degree, expected by Julie that they would be resistant to the changes she was proposing as well as a little fearful that the NHS staff would not accept or warm to a more blended strategy of delivery. Julie wanted to help the trainers realise that ‘a tick in the box was no longer enough’ and that, by changing, they could make their training much more effective and meaningful. Julie suggested they held up a mirror and asked themselves whether people really were walking away from their training with changed behaviour.

This change was accomplished without the support of management who, according to Julie, “didn’t know what they were asking for and just wanted training to work as a service. They didn’t realise that training could have a positive impact on their business or that effective training could make people feel good about their organisation.”

Julie created a three-year blended learning strategy which, although approved by the Board, suffered budget cuts of 75%: “Management didn’t emotionally connect with it, they just said do it.” It became apparent that change had to occur by stealth, from the bottom-up, and that meant starting with the training team.

For Julie, their commitment was vital: “All trainers do is communicate. If they are not communicating positively about the changes they are being asked to make then they will sabotage them.” She invited the whole team to accompany her to the Learning Technologies exhibition in London. Many made their excuses on the day and, of the two who did come, one dropped the bombshell at the end of the day: “Thank you for a nice day out in London but I’m resigning tomorrow.” Undeterred, Julie created a programme of development for the trainers (‘21 Lessons’) which introduced a wide range of learning technologies to them, challenging and encouraging them to engage with and use them as part of their new blended learning delivery. A key element of the programme was to get the training team to collaborate with each other and this proved to be enormously influential in changing both the trainers and the organisation’s view of what training should and could be like.

Julie also made a point of going out and engaging with key stakeholders across the business, listening to what it was they really needed. She wanted to be able to understand their language, their priorities and the practicalities they faced. She profiled each audience and shaped the operational plan accordingly, realising that she needed a delivery mechanism that the middle management would commit to.

The new offering
Julie decided against a big bang approach, bringing change in slowly and helping both learners and trainers to ease into a new way of learning. The NHS was still very course focused, so Julie decided not to fight this head-on initially.

One simple innovation was to map courses to qualifications, an example being ELITE, the NHS EssentiaL IT skills course, certified by the British Computer Society. Julie describes her team’s delivery of the course as “incredibly blended, but all within a classroom. Learners were always discovering things, constantly being challenged and excited.” The qualification was a big draw, attracting people who had previously avoided IT. However, staff could also take the ELITE qualification by e-learning with tutor support by phone and email. This was a major change that was a big hit with community-based healthcare workers who found it difficult to take a full day out for training.

Subsequent qualification-based courses that were pure e-learning also had a huge uptake. Anyone who enrolled in e-learning was assigned a tutor who kept in touch with them by phone and kept them on track. The fact that they knew they were being monitored was an important source of motivation. The successful adoption of e-learning as an accepted method of delivering training proved to be vital during the swine flu epidemic in 2009. When the major incident team wanted to provide training to every member of staff, HR’s solution was to suggest a series of face-to-face courses. Julie’s team offered an e-learning solution which was quickly accepted.

John Turton, Central and Eastern Cheshire PCT Emergency Planning & Business Continuity Manager, had this to say: “From a basic outline of requirement, which changed daily as more national data was received, the team produced three initial pieces of e-learning that still stand good today, saving hours of training time and hitting the whole organisation.“

Julie started getting the good news stories out in the form of case studies and news bites. The team changed the way they delivered the ICT section of the Acute Trust’s junior doctors’ induction, including the provision of software simulations and e-learning to stop the previous practice of teaching new doctors very hurriedly on live data. This e-learning was accessible via the junior doctors’ mobile devices, providing them with access to the training they need 24/7. Julie describes how the new approach did a much better job: “The doctors could work at their own pace whenever they had down time. This was very much just-in-time learning. “ A bi-product of creating this e-learning was that it could also be used by other professionals that needed to understand and use the same healthcare systems.

The team was clearly starting to align itself to the business, as Wendy Barker, PGME Support Manager Education, attested: “We have worked closely with the training team over the last year and have always found them to be helpful and supportive. I feel the team works collaboratively with us so that we understand where we are each coming from and what we want to jointly achieve.”

Thinking synchronous
Next in line was to introduce synchronous online learning. With no budget, Julie took out a free 30-day trial of Adobe Connect and cheekily kept extending it. Julie explained, “We wanted to use virtual classrooms because a lot of people would not come on a full or half-day course – particularly if they only needed a bit or a recap or a top-up. We ran half-hour sessions on topics like email etiquette, better internet searching, or managing your inbox better. It helped that they didn’t have to get formal approval to attend because the sessions were so short.”

The team kept the groups small and adopted a very relaxed style, using discussion, Q&A and the sharing of screens. The aim was to take learners on to the next stage where they could continue the discussion in forums within SharePoint. Here they could also access short screencasts created using the free software tool Jing.

Julie admits she had no money to obtain Oracle’s performance support system (Oracle systems are heavily used in the NHS) but would have loved it. Instead they gave out very simple ‘how do I?’ booklets, which were also made available as PDFs on SharePoint. The booklets did not cover every aspect of every system, but concentrated on those tasks that learners most needed to know about and where the business benefit was greatest.

All’s well …
The leverage that Julie needed to really influence management came when they won awards from the Institute of IT Training for Internal Project of the Year and, most significantly, for Internal Training Department of the Year. To emphasise the point they won this again a year later. Needless to say, the money for Adobe Connect was soon forthcoming.

The training team has continued to provide an outstanding professional service to all manner of customers from across the Cheshire ICT Service footprint within Cheshire. The team continued to push the boundaries by embracing and delivering an innovative and creative service flexing to the needs of different organisations.

Stuart Lea, Associate Director CICTS, summarises well: “The team has opened my eyes to how users can learn both at a pace and in a style that suits them. We used to work in old-fashioned ways which I would not like to go back to. The training team are very much of the moment and continually looking to improve and move with the times.”

Julie has over 25 years’ experience of teaching and training across a wide range of industry sectors in the UK, Europe and the USA. With a particular focus on IT-related learning and change management, Julie specialises in the practical application of learning technologies in the real world, helping organisations, trainers and learners to learn and work smarter.

Julie is a Fellow of the Institute of IT Training and is a member of the Institute of IT Training Advisory Board. She regularly presents at conferences and events, both in the UK and globally online.

The prodigal Apple

2011-08-25T11:13:00.000+01:00

The announcement today that Steve Jobs is stepping down as CEO of Apple brought to mind how long has been my relationship with the company he established with Steve Wozniak in 1976. I'm not sure exactly when this picture was taken, but it is around 1980, as you can probably see by the kit. The Apple II was sleek enough, but what about the colour monitor, the 5.25" drives and the dot-matrix printer? Perhaps even more of-the-time is the poster above that reads "to live in a bus is enough for us".

As my friends and colleagues know, I am a prodigal son when it comes to Apple. I deserted them for PCs soon after this picture was taken and returned only this year. Anyway, I hope Steve Jobs forgives me and that he is able to overcome his health issues. Whatever the outcome he has left behind an iconic brand.

A book - is it a method or a medium?

2011-08-24T17:56:00.000+01:00

Ebooks: the great rekindling of our love of reading, in last Sunday's Observer, brought home quite clearly to me how confused we have become between methods and media in our discussions about the pros and cons of e-book readers sch as the Kindle. In the context of design for learning, there is a clear distinction:

Methods, the building blocks of our learning strategies, are essentially timeless. The methods that we use determine the effectiveness of our solutions.
Media are what we use to deliver these methods. The media choices that we make determine the efficiency of our solutions. Unlike methods, media are constantly evolving.

This distinction is complicated when we use the same word for both method and medium. 'Book' is one of those words. For many people it implies the function (a relatively lengthy piece of writing on a particular topic) as well as the form (sheets of paper bound together within a cover). So, when you say you love books, it could mean:

I love reading relatively long works of fiction or non-fiction, or
I love owning / handling / smelling bundles of paper

This confusion leads to all sorts of emotional outpourings, mainly by those who believe that by turning books digital we are depriving future generations of the joy of reading. No we are not, no more than using an iPod has turned us away from listening to music, i.e. on vinyl, tape or CD.

So, it was great to read in the Observer that, believe it or not, Kindles and the like are actually encouraging us to read more. E-book readers allow us to enjoy even more works of fiction and non-fiction. If it's actually the bundles of paper that we're in love with then we shouldn't despair - we'll still be able to see them in museums.

The corporate classroom as therapy

2011-08-23T17:10:00.000+01:00

I was chatting with a client the other evening after a workshop on blended learning. The client, head of competency development for a large European bank, expressed the opinion to me that a proportion of their employees would miss classroom training if it was to move online, not because of the opportunities the classroom provided for learning or even for networking but because of the respite it provided from the stresses and strains of the day-to-day work, the opportunity to reflect a little away from the 1001 daily calls for their attention.

My response was that although this benefit appeared to be very real, it was a dangerous game for learning and development to play. When the axe starts to fall, could they really justify running what was essentially a form of corporate therapy? The answer was less easy to counter: "Well surely somebody has to do this. It may as well be us."

Can a classroom event act as therapy? Well, for me it would depend on the subject matter. My client was primarily engaged in soft skills training (or 'hard skills' as they jokingly call it) for which the style was likely to be relaxed, informal and non-directive. You can imagine that providing some opportunity for a little quiet reflection, assuming the content wasn't too new age and pseudo-scientific. But I can hardly imagine anyone regarding a technical workshop as a holiday.

As training shifts from face-to-face to online, from formal to informal, the opportunities for a break from the routine undoubtedly diminish. You may learn more, you may have more control over how, when and where you learn, but you are unable to escape from the reality of daily pressures. A virtual classroom provides no protection from interruptions. A social network is more likely to increase your communication load than to reduce it.

Where does this lead us? Well, in my opinion, and assuming l&d doesn't get extended with an '&t' (and therapy), then we have to wave goodbye to the idea that we provide an alternative holiday destination. Stress at work is a real problem, but it's one for management to deal with, not you. If you want to operate at the centre of corporate life, better to add value by the impact you make on performance, not on occupational health.

Presentations in the cloud

2011-08-22T16:01:00.003+01:00

A week or so back I was given a sneak preview of a new tool for distributing recorded presentations online called dpcloud. The system allows you to deliver the presentation in three formats:

A video of the presentation alone
A video with media alongside (typically slides, but could also be Flash movies, Twitter feeds, web pages, etc.)
The media with accompanying audio

In the case of the second option that's a lot to look at, so the embeddable player provides the option of viewing the media component in a separate pop-up window.

This example shows Roger Schank speaking at Learning Technologies 2011. This Facebook version includes a video, slides and a summary of the presentation.

You can also attach documents as take aways and label the content with tags and descriptions. More interestingly, dpcloud's Facebook and LinkedIn versions can also incorporate all of those platforms' social media features, allowing the presentation to act as catalyst for an on-going discussion. If your organisation doesn't like the idea of its employees spending time on public social networking sites, then dpcloud could also be integrated into an enterprise system, perhaps something like Sharepoint.

Another novelty of this system is that you can link into the content at any point. If the section of interest is 45 minutes into a presentation, you can take the viewer exactly to that point, rather than have them search through.

You can create your content in two ways. Either you assemble offline using pre-recorded audio and video, or you record live, direct from a webcam or an external camera.

If you fancy a play, you can use dpcloud for free for up to three presentations. You'll pay £50 a month for 20, or £250 for 125. And then there are enterprise versions.

This is SlideShare on steroids, a way to effectively archive all aspects of a presentation and to view these in any combination on a variety of platforms. There may well be more dpclouds out there but this is my first encounter. Got to have a go.

What I learned about webinars from Adobe

2011-08-18T20:22:00.000+01:00

In June I participated in a webinar which Adobe ran as part of its Summer Masterclass series. I know it's taken me two months or more to get round to it, but I did feel the event taught me some interesting lessons.

First of all, this was at first sight an elaborately orchestrated event, staged by dreamtek.tv for Adobe. We had a formal panel show set and a full video crew. We also had an excellent and highly experienced interviewer, Helen Olsen, to host the event. Adobe invited a load of people and gave them a choice of being part of a live audience or attending online through Adobe Connect. The overwhelming choice was online. This may have seemed like it could have been a rather contrived corporate showpiece, yet the reality was quite different. Why? Because this was a great example of why webinars which let people interact freely work much better than when you simply get to make a presentation.

On the panel alongside me were Andy Jones, senior learning consultant from Thomson Reuters and Matt Wicks, MD of The Virtual Forge. Neither was easily constrained from having a view. Quite simply we chatted. Helen had some set piece questions, but many more came in from participants. It went on and then it went on some more until some two and a half hours later we came to a halt. How long was that? Yes, two and a half hours. But surely the limit for any webinar is an hour? Not in this case. You might have expected most of our audience to have logged off well before the end but they didn't. We must have got something right.

What did I learn? Well firstly video does help. So does an opinionated panel and a host. And so does an engaged and intelligent audience. None of these is in short supply.

Everywhere you look there's an app

2011-08-18T19:56:00.000+01:00

Thanks to Cammy Bean for alerting me to two more apps for learning technologists. I've loaded them on to my iPhone and taken a look. First up is Connie Malamed's eLearning Coach app, which is essentially a glossary of instructional design terms. Here's the menu ...

And here's a typical entry. It's never too late to learn about Gagne's nine events ...

Kineo has come up with its own e-learning top tips app. Simply pick from the menu ...

And learn how to love (is that possible?) your SME ...

These two apps have reminded me that I have an app myself half way through development for Onlignment:

The idea's similar and equally simple: a reference guide accessed from a menu. Now there's no rocket science in this sort of app, but that doesn't mean there's no real utility. When you're biding time fiddling around with your smart phone, why not learn a little more about design, or reinforce an idea you've lost touch with?

With the greater screen real estate of the iPad, Allen Communication were able to go a little further with their DesignJots app. Not sure what questions to ask the SME you love?

Looking to map out an instructional strategy?

These are early days, but it's good to see so many e-learning people having a go. The future's mobile so why not get yourself prepared?

What low growth and high debt mean for l&d

2011-08-11T17:56:00.001+01:00

Although here in the UK inner-city rioting is grabbing all the headlines, behind the scenes we are experiencing an economic sea change, one that will influence just about everyone in the western world. The markets have woken up to the fact if you're going to tackle crippling levels of national and personal debt then that necessarily means spending less and that economic growth will suffer as a result.

Whatever the arguments about how best we resolve these issues, prolonged periods of depressed economic activity will have an effect on l&d as on everyone else:

In the public sector, the spending cuts required to pay off national debt will mean that management will be looking critically at all non-essential expenditure.
In the private sector, the majority of enterprises can only continue to grow profits by cutting expenditure - there simply isn't enough growth in western economies to rely on sales continuing to increase as they have in the past. So, again management will be casting their eye over any activities that are not absolutely necessary.

This situation is not temporary. It isn't just a case of the normal economic cycle taking its course. It won't be enough to just keep your head down and hope that in a couple of years it will all be back to normal. We have to get used to working smarter and for l&d that's likely to mean the following:

Less courses, more resources: Teach the really important things well and reinforce with online information available on-demand.
Less face-to-face, more online: Some courses are still needed, but they don't always have to be face-to-face nor do they need to last for days at a time. Live online events run in virtual classrooms can be just as effective and are typically much shorter.
Less live, more self-directed: Live sessions are hard to schedule and inflexible, so provide more of your learning materials as small modules available anytime any place.
less trainer-led, more peer-to-peer: Enterprise social media tools make it far easier for employees to seek help from and share expertise with their colleagues. You won't have time to teach everything, so don't even try.

There's nothing new in this list, but there's even more urgency now to put it all into practice. Those showing a reluctance to move with the times are sitting ducks - and we all know what happens to them.

Michael Allen's e-Learning Annual 2012

2011-08-08T18:33:00.000+01:00

The postman has just delivered my copy of Michael Allen's e-Learning Annual 2012 (when I was originally asked to contribute to this book it was going to be a 2011 annual, but that's traditional book publishing for you!).

I'm a fan of Michael Allen. I agree with what he says about design and I respect the way his views have evolved in time away from the traditional ADDIE model into something much more agile. So I was delighted to accept his offer to add a chapter to this work.

There are 27 chapters covering all aspects of e-learning. There's nothing safe and predictable here, so expect to be unsettled. As Jay Cross writes on the liner notes: "The real learning at conferences takes place in the hallways. This wonderful book is like eavesdropping on those conversations, except that Michael has put the top thinkers in our field in the hall for you."

William Horton was complimentary too: "Just another academic anthology? Hardly! Michael Allen has convinced e–learning′s super–heroes to join forces to crush complacency, demolish dogma, rewrite rules, streamline strategies, and light a brighter future for e–learning. Warning: The accumulated wisdom and original thinking of this elite team of designers, practitioners, consultants, and researchers will leave you dissatisfied with your current e–learning efforts and aching to put their ideas into play."

Alright I haven't read it yet, but I'm going to enjoy doing so. My contribution? Rethinking the scope and nature of instructional design. Take a look.

Fotolia ticks the box

2011-08-08T17:01:00.002+01:00

A while back I was lucky enough to have a free trial of Fotolia and so, in order to get the maximum benefit from my good fortune, I spent quite a bit of time downloading images for all sorts of purposes - slides, posters, web pages, e-books and so on. At the same time, I've been dying to have a go at screenr, a nifty little screencasting tool from the guys at Articulate. I particularly wanted to do a screencast with very little preparation (you'll see what I mean). So, here goes, my tour of Fotolia courtesy of screenr:

I have a very narrow window for my posts so this is probably a bit small. Just click on the screenr logo to see at full size.

Practical guides rolling off the press

2011-08-08T12:12:00.000+01:00

Over on the Onlignment blog, I've been posting up a series of practical guides for digital learning content designers. These guides are not really meant for those who design content full-time, but for the increasing numbers of learning professionals who are occasional designers.

Anyway, so far I have completed the following guides:

In the pipeline are guides to creating quizzes and reference documentation. Have I missed anything?

All of these guide are also available as PDFs to download.

The guides will ultimately find a home in a book due for release later this year called Digital Learning Content: A Designer's Guide.

Questioning social media

2011-08-03T07:12:00.000+01:00

The recent arrival of a new social network in the form of Google+ has given cause for reflection from some long-serving social media users and advocates. Cammy Bean describes how she has been Taking a TechFast to relieve her symptoms of SoMeFat (social media fatigue), which has been "heightened now with the additional disorder of Multiple Social Network Disorder (Facebook, Twitter, and now Google+ to keep up with!)." Cammy should take a bow, because she seems to be matching Shakespeare in her ability to extend the English language.

More remarkably, George Siemens, the founding father of connectivism, reports how he is losing interest in social media:

Google+ was a bit of a breaking point for me. After recreating my online social network ( largely based on blogs from early 2000) in Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and Quora, G+ was a chore. I spent a few weeks of responding to G+ friend requests, trying to engage with a few people, posting a few random links, all the while trying to upkeep (occasionally) Twitter and (almost never) Facebook. I’ve concluded that most of the hype around social media is nonsense and that people, particularly the self-proclaimed social media elite are clothing-less. Sure, I’ll still continue to participate in those spaces periodically – as soon as this post is done, I’ll tweet it and share it on G+. Beyond that, however, social media is getting credit for things it’s merely flowing, not actually creating.

I must admit to having felt similarly fatigued at the prospect of engaging with Google+. No way did my life need another social network. It's hard enough as it is to keep up with Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. But the Google offering is significant. It contains some interesting innovations. And as someone who is expected to know about these things, I could not ignore it. Already I am in a network with several hundred people on Google+ who are doing the same as me - giving it a go.

For me there is a big distinction between social networking and social media in general. Blogging is a vital part of my life and, although very occasionally it seems like a chore, I could not do without it (see Blog Regularly, Sleep Easy). It stimulates reflection and amplifies the benefits I obtain from my professional experiences. Other social media activities, including podcasting, making and sharing videos, working collaboratively on wikis and even forum discussions, offer similar benefits. These are not fragmentary, attention-disturbing activities, as Nicholas Carr describes (see Life in the Shallows); in fact, they require sustained concentration and some serious thinking.

Blogging and similar forms of media creation are not for everyone. As the 90:9:1 rule suggests, only one in a hundred is going to be tempted to participate on a long-term basis. They are often professional or at least serious amateur activities (see Blogging is Journalism). Through their academic salaries, regular bloggers such as George Siemens and Stephen Downes are effectively paid to blog. Most people don't have the time, the inclination or the talent.

Social networking on Twitter, Facebook and the like is, of course, very different. By comparison with blogging and similar acts of media creation, it is, of course, relatively superficial and disposable. It can become habitual, even sad (see Becoming Invisible). But it is the perfect counterpart to media creation. It is how those acts become visible to anyone other than the author's regular followers. It builds audiences. It amplifies impact. By and large it also acts to successfully filter out the dross and bring the cream to the top.

Google may not be successful in introducing a new social network. Not because they don't have a good product or a massive marketing pot, but because it's not enough for a new product to be 10% better than what exists. It has to be twice as good for people to bother going through all that disruption to shift from their current supplier. But if it turns out to be twice as good, then the SoMeFat will have been worthwhile and we will all be re-energised.

Profile of a learning architect: Bill Sawyer

2011-08-03T06:03:00.003+01:00

Bill Sawyer, who works in curriculum development within the highly-technical and fast-moving environment of Oracle. As you’ll see, what might seem at first like a simple case of course-building, actually extends to the provision of a comprehensive technical support service, with major non-formal and on-demand elements.

Bill is currently Senior Manager of Applications Technology Curriculum for Oracle, based in Orlando, Florida. He leads a small team responsible for designing and developing highly-technical training programmes for IT professionals among both Oracle’s employees and their customers. The work of Bill’s team results in some $12m of course sales for Oracle.

Bill has been working on curriculum development for Oracle for some 15 years, but much has changed in that time. A rapidly-changing technical environment, with less than a year between major software releases, means that design times are highly constrained and that the courses themselves have a short shelf life. As Bill says, “You need to be brutal in decision-making and priority setting.”

Instructor-led training
Although it might seem that Bill’s work is entirely oriented towards the development of formal courses, he explains that the ratio is actually 2:1 in favour of the informal. Let’s take the formal first. Oracle University delivers instructor-led courses designed by Bill’s team. These can be delivered face-to-face, typically in 5-day chunks, as ‘Live Virtual Classes’, using web conferencing, or sometimes a hybrid of the two, where some students are there in person and some remote. Such long courses might seem a distant memory for many l&d departments but, as Bill says, “These are the folks that have to be trained.” The economic constraints suffered by many organisations are not affecting sales of these courses.

The instructor-led elements are supported by Oracle eKits, which replace traditional printed student guides. These are available a week before the course and then afterwards.

Flexible learning materials
Bill’s team has started to use an Oracle product called the ‘User Productivity Kit’, a development environment which simplifies the process of creating course materials, software simulations, assessments and job aids. Customers, particularly end users, are making use of the software simulations for short bursts of highly-focused formal training, as well as for performance support. The team also produces a wide range of other materials which help IT professionals to develop their knowledge and skills with new software:

Code examples
Online labs, which provide a ‘sandbox’ environment in which developers can test their code
Comprehensive development guides
Model implementations, providing examples of what can be achieved with the software and explaining how the results were accomplished

Just-in-time performance support
In the early stages of the development of a new software product, when the software is being modified and rebuilt daily, formal course materials and documentation are simply not available, so a much more responsive approach is required. Bill’s team meet the needs of IT professionals at this early stage using a combination of forums and wikis. The forums allow questions to be answered rapidly and for expertise to be shared. They allow a community to be built around all those people in Oracle who are responsible for getting the product online. The forums provide valuable insights to Bill’s team as they start to develop more formal materials which will ultimately be used with Oracle’s customers.

The wikis allow documentation to be created at a time when there is no one person with all the answers. The development community as a whole collaborates to make sure that everyone has the best information available at any given point.

Bill’s work at Oracle is an exemplar of the ways in which formal, non-formal and on-demand learning can be effectively integrated into an overall strategy which supports the learner at every stage of their journey without ever acting as a brake on what is an exceptionally fast-moving business.

Give Cruella a chance

2011-07-24T19:01:00.001+01:00

Epic have begun their Summer 2011 debate. The motion this year is:

“This house believes that as social learning increases, so the requirement for traditional training departments shrinks”.

I am speaking against the motion. Arguing against social media is like asking for support for Cruella De Vil in her quest to make a nice new coat from those cuddly dalmations. And taking an opposite stance to Jane Hart, a long-standing colleague and everyone's favourite spokesperson for social media, makes things even harder. Not that I had any choice. Jane, it seems, chose to support the motion. I was given the job of opposing it, take it or leave it. Not that I mind. The motion is, as ever, sufficiently ambiguous that it is easily possible to take either side. And it's quite fun to play the role of heretic, an antidote to the almost religious zeal which surrounds social media upon occasion.

But of course I am not arguing against social media. I am, after all, a long-time beneficiary and advocate. I am arguing, as so often seems to be the case, for rationalism over romanticism.

It is acknowledged that 80-90% of what people learn at work is learned informally. This is not a new phenomenon. In fact, before the invention of the corporate classroom it was probably closer to 100%. I don't think anyone could argue that this extremely dominant component to workplace learning will be facilitated and accelerated by social media. The remaining 10-20%, typically the responsibility of training departments - traditional or otherwise - and colleges, will not go away, because some degree of formal learning is essential. However, it will change dramatically in nature, i.e. less synchronous, less face-to-face, more fully integrated with informal learning. The role will change but the l&d professional will not go away.

The motion lives or dies not on your belief in the benefits of social media for learning but on whether you believe there is a causal link between a greater use of social media for learning and a decreased role for the training department. If you are thinking about supporting the motion then tell me - where is the evidence for this link? Both informal and formal learning will be enhanced by social media and we can all agree on that. But that doesn't mean that one is a valid alternative to the other.

A vote against the motion is not a vote against social media (or against Jane Hart). Nor is it a vote for training departments to stay stuck in a time warp. Both propositions are ridiculous. It is a vote against the idea that, should social media make significant inroads as a tool for learning at work (and we are a long way from this as we stand), then this will decrease the requirement for the formal learning which has traditionally been organised by the training department. I can't see the logic in this.

Give Cruella a chance and vote against the motion.

Social learning is not the same as social media

2011-07-21T13:50:00.000+01:00

I have noticed in recent discussions just how confusing it can get when social learning is regarded as synonymous with the use of social media.

First of all, social learning pre-dates social media by thousands of years. We have always and always will learn socially. It isn't the only way we learn but it is a highly significant element.

Secondly, social media has very many outcomes other than learning. People use social media to collaborate on tasks, to promote goods and services, to entertain each other, to exchange information and so on. Much of this is relevant to our work lives as much as it is personal. As a result, learning and development departments are certainly not the only stakeholders in workplace social media and they are perhaps not even the most important. The initiative to apply social media in an enterprise context is as likely to be driven by IT, internal communications or senior management as it is l&d.

What is important is that l&d is at the table, campaigning for the use of social media at work where this is likely to make a worthwhile contribution to the overall learning architecture.

Knowing where to look is more valuable than knowing what

2011-07-19T12:13:00.001+01:00

According to an article in last Saturday's Guardian, research conducted at Columbia University and reported in Science Magazine shows just how much people have come to rely on the internet as 'an external memory source that we can access at any time'.

In one experiment, participants were given pieces of information to type into a computer. Half were told the computer would retain the information and the other half were told it would be erased. Only those in the latter group attempted to memorise the material. The others made the effort to remember where on the computer the information could be found. The emphasis has shifted from knowing 'what' to knowing 'where to find it'.

These findings back up the concept of connectivism, as described by George Siemens in Knowing Knowledge (see my 2006 review). Siemens explains how:

"Instead of the individual having to evaluate and process every bit of information, she/he creates a personal network of trusted nodes: people and content, enhanced by technology. The act of knowledge is offloaded onto the network itself."

The research also backs up the idea that much less time should be spent trying to teach information that can now be easily accessed on-demand. Far better to concentrate on important underlying concepts and principles than on factual knowledge and routine algorithmic procedures.

What managers really want

2011-07-07T18:02:00.004+01:00

I've been returning over and again to the LMMatters / Towards Maturity survey of UK organisations on leadership development. The reason I keep returning is that I find it hard to believe the results. It's not that I doubt the honesty of those conducting the research (although they do, of course, have an interest in the results as I do), it's just that they surprise me so much.

Some 180 organisations were surveyed in April and May of this year, representing about 35000 leaders and managers. There are lots of findings which you can read for yourself here, but I'm going to focus on one table, which I've grabbed from the summary report:

The table shows preferred delivery media (and by implication in many cases) methods of managers at different levels. What surprises me?

The leaning towards on-demand and non-formal approaches in preference to the formal - particularly as managers get more senior.
The preference for new media in all its many wondrous forms (OK, I did notice senior managers prefer paper).

These findings shouldn't surprise me because they make perfect sense. It's just that I haven't seen them articulated before.

Has anyone told L&D?

The big question: How do you make e-learning fun?

2011-07-03T08:46:00.000+01:00

This month's Learning Circuits Big Question asks how you make e-learning fun. I can do no better than point you to my contribution to the eLearning Network's 2010 Pecha Kucha competition entitled Enjoyable e-learning: is it an oxymoron? You'll find it on YouTube as a narrated slideshow or on the Charity Learning Consortium blog in textual form. Enjoy!!!

Profile of a learning architect: Tiina Paju-Pomfret

2011-06-29T15:52:00.005+01:00

In this next profile, extracted from The New Learning Architect, we see another fine example of how a learning and development department has been able to break free from the confines of the face-to-face course to provide support for learning across multiple contexts.

Rethinking formal ICT training

Working alongside colleague Kerry Baker, Tiina has transformed ICT training at Bupa. The old model of lengthy, face-to-face, instructor-led courses was failing to appeal to the next generation of learners who Tiina recognised had shorter attention spans.

Tiina, together with her team of experienced trainers, established a new blended training model combining instructor-led training with self-study e-learning and support by telephone and email. A portfolio of learning assets was created, which included ‘above the line’ learning interventions (instructor-led classroom and online classroom) as well as ‘below the line’ (e-learning, email and phone support, with corporate social networking groups). All members of the team were trained to adapt their skills to working in the virtual classroom and they have now devised their own distinct methodology for delivering tight, 1-2 hour sessions. This was accomplished using Bupa’s Saba Centra virtual classroom platform.

The team still delivers some one day, face-to-face courses, but with a shift in emphasis away from simply teaching software applications towards focusing on how those applications can be used to help you work more effectively. A good example would be Bupa’s course on time management using Outlook.

Community and collaboration

Working alongside the new blended learning offering sits a powerful community, collaboration and social media platform called Bupa Live, which is based on Jive SBS software. Bupa Live originated as a business project at the very top of the organisation, with the aim of ‘creating one Bupa’ across the global business. Starting from a small pilot of around 1000 employees, usage grew virally and currently some 10,000 employees are users. Perhaps the most used feature of the system is the discussion forum, although there is a top-down element as well through corporate blogs, news and videos. In addition, Bupa Live supports communication amongst groups, a facility that has been used heavily as the IT community has shifted to a more agile development process.

Bupa Live also acts as a first port of call in Tiina’s strategy for on-demand learning: “We like employees to use this platform, perhaps posing a question to one of the forums. If needs be, employees can ring the IS Service Centre or one of the trainers.” The team also uses Bupa Live for more informal training needs analysis to gather requirements directly from the learner audience.

Bupa Live acts as a valuable repository for more informal learning resources, but direct links can easily be made to Bupa Learn, the Saba-based LMS. As Tiina says, “It’s all about making things easy for our learners.”

Agile course development

Tiina has adopted agile frameworks for her own team’s development projects. Using techniques borrowed from user-centred design, the team created personas of their key target groups and looks to ensure that every aspect of the design supports their needs. For each persona they develop ‘user stories’ which express in the everyday or business language of the user what it is that the user wants to achieve. These stories then form the basis for the modules of the course. The team are able to create courses quicker using a collaborative approach whilst maintaining quality. As Tiina says, “It works!"

In many cases the solution that the team will arrive at will be e-learning, which they produce in house using tools such as Captivate and Lectora. Increasingly the team is looking to create small nuggets no more than 5-15 minutes in length. Production values play second fiddle to simplicity and effectiveness. As Tiina explains, “It doesn’t have to be perfect and polished – it just has to do a good job.”

Tiina is an experienced and forward-thinking learning and development professional with a career in training and consulting that has covered a wide range of business sectors. She brings a strong level of innovation, creativity and passion for learning using a variety of methodologies.

Tiina is currently training manager in the Business Technology Training department at Bupa, an international healthcare group with over 10 million customers in more than 190 countries. The department was set up ten years ago to ensure the quality of ICT skills across Bupa’s diverse workforce. Since Tiina took over the department in 2005, she has overseen some impressive changes.

The l&d professional as curator

2011-06-21T21:38:00.002+01:00

I enjoyed attending the always-entertaining Julie Wedgwood's session at the Learning and Skills Group meeting in London last week. She was sharing her thoughts about the emerging role of the curator in organisations which have established systems to encourage user-generated content. Julie's argument for curation went as follows:

We really can have too much information.
Overload causes depression.
We suffer from the menace of continuous partial attention. We try to concentrate but we can't. As a result we can't get things done.
We actually cause our own interruptions because we're so addicted to staying in the loop.
Everyone suffers from occasional situational overload - searching for a needle in a haystack, but this is ambient overload - a haystack-sized pile of needles.

The content curator finds, groups, organises and shares information. They filter by relevance, categories, how long the content will take to read, the shelf-life of the content, by providing synopses. They encourage people to allocate a limited amount of time each day for their own development. They provide periodic roundups. They tell learning stories.

Julie described a retail case in which an l&d department, by providing an effective service as content curators, came to be seen as much central to the day-to-day life of the business. Employees were able to learn well on the job. They did find time.

How do I see the role of curator? Well, the use of social media as a tool for learning is an excellent example of an exploration strategy: you provide the best possible access to people and resources and then allow learners to access what they find useful when they want. Yes there is a role for l&d (or someone else) and curator is how I also have come to describe this role. Those with less experience in their field of work and who are less independent as learners will value this support. They are vulnerable to overload and don't know what they don't know. But not everyone needs support. Power users will want as few filters as possible between them and the 'raw data' and no amount of curation will reduce their addiction to staying in the loop. As Nicholas Carr explains in The Shallows, the brains of regular users of social media have changed and continuous partial inattention is the result.

Clips and tips are what you want when you're on the move

2011-06-18T10:47:00.001+01:00

I've been taking a look at the first iPhone app from long-standing training film specialist, London-based Video Arts. Back in November 2009, I posted about Yet another renaissance for the training video and marvelled at how Video Arts has been able to re-invent itself as each new opportunity presents itself.Well here we go again. Video Arts has a peerless library of video content and much of it is well-suited to use as an on-demand resource. This app provides easily-digestible clips and tips and shows just how mobile learning's time really has come.

The app is available for iPhone, iPad and Blackberry. Get yourself a demo here.

The Big Question: Breaking down the organisational walls to learning

2011-06-15T09:29:00.002+01:00

In the ASTD Learning Circuits blog this month, they comment on the fact that, in many organisations, learners are reaching outside of the organisation to enhance their learning experience, through social networking and other media. In other organisations, the learning audience includes partners and customers, and the learning ecosystem expands beyond employees. So, the Learning Circuits Big Question for June is:

How do we break down organisational walls when it comes to learning?

Many people don't see beyond the walls of their own organisation because they are simply not encouraged to have an external perspective. There's no time or budget allowed for exchanging experiences, benchmarking or otherwise interacting with their counterparts from other organisations. In other cases, there's no motivation to look beyond the organisational walls, because the people in question spend such a large proportion of their time at work that they have forgotten there is another world out there. This is much more likely to be true in a very large organisation than a small one - in a giant multinational, getting to know how your own organisation works is enough of a challenge, without looking outside. You can see parallels at national level. Why do so few Americans have passports and score so poorly in geography? That's at least partly because America itself is big enough that it would take a lifetime to explore and understand.

When it comes to the use of social media to interact with counterparts beyond the workplace, it would of course be ideal if employers saw the value in this and encouraged it. But even without an employer's blessing, this practice can quite easily be accommodated through mobile devices and home computers. The barriers are not that great.

In many cases, employees have no problem using social media outside the workplace - they will communicate quite freely. It's inside that the problems come. As Andy Jones of Thomson Reuters commented on our Adobe Dreaktek debate last week, "The problem is not outside the organisation but inside. People use all these tools freely for personal purposes but wouldn't dream of doing the same inside." This behaviour might seem strange, but when you consider how poorly knowledge sharing is often recognised and rewarded and the risks involved in putting your head above the parapet, then you sort of understand.

The other angle on this month's question is the opening up of learning opportunities to suppliers, partners and customers. I have to admit I can't see why there would be any problem here. It is in any organisation's interest to engage as fully as possible with their stakeholders - this may prove to be an income earner as well, as the P&Ls of customer training departments make all too plain.

Creating Inspired Activities & Interactions for Effective eLearning

2011-06-09T11:32:00.003+01:00

That's the name of a really fun Adobe webinar I participated in yesterday with Dr Allen Partridge.

Allen and I debated a whole host of issues and if you missed the event you can catch a recording here: http://adobe.ly/mQIfwY

Why we need less instruction

2011-06-07T16:24:00.003+01:00

One of the many problems I have with the term 'instructional designer' is that it implies that the only strategy of relevance to learning in the workplace is instruction. Instruction tends to follow this flow:

When it is done well then a good job will be done of exciting the learner's interest, the explanations will be kept to a minimum (at least initially) and the learner will be given plenty of opportunity for practice with supportive feedback. Instruction is a good strategy for algorithmic tasks - those that are based on clear rules. The trouble is that less and less of the tasks we have to perform at work are rule-based. After all, if they are that algorithmic, it's very tempting to get a robot or a computer to do them, or to move them off-shore. More of the work we do in the developed world is heuristic - it requires us to make judgements based on principles. Principles are not black and white - they need to be experienced rather than taught. With principle-based tasks, we're much better off using a strategy of guided discovery:

Let's go back to rule-based tasks for a moment. Another reason you might back away from instruction as a strategy is because it is more efficient to provide how-to materials at the point-of-need - it isn't learning that's required, it's performance support:

Don't get me wrong. I'm not in any way attempting to rubbish instructional design, just to place it in context. Instruction has an important role, as one of our strategies for learning and performance.

Just enough information to permit practice and no more

2011-06-03T11:03:00.001+01:00

I was at a client meeting the other day at which we were agreeing principles that would act as a foundation to their l&d strategy. We were discussing the all-too-common tendency to over-teach and under-practise in formal workplace learning interventions.Here's how one of the participants in the meeting summarised how the principle should read:

Provide just enough information to allow the learner to practise and no more

I'm really taken with this. It captures the idea perfectly in plain language. So what are the implications?Training is not education. In most cases the end goal is for the learner to be able to perform a task effectively and efficiently, rather than to acquire knowledge. Knowledge is useful, but only so far as it supports this goal.As you design a new course and are researching the topic, you'll probably consult a subject expert. Almost without exception, they will want you to pass over just about all there is to be known about the subject. Having long forgotten what it's like to be a novice, they believe it is all important.That's not how the novices see it. They're anxious. They want to have a go as soon as possible in order to build their confidence. If you bombard them with information early on, they will be overloaded and that just makes them more anxious.So, here's how I'd recommend teaching a task:

Engage the learner
Provide just enough information to allow the learner to practise and no more, including demonstrations and worked examples
Provide an opportunity for practice, starting simple
Have the learner critique their own performance / provide additional feedback / correct any misunderstandings / answer questions / add more detail where appropriate
Repeat steps 3-4, increasing the difficulty until the learner is confident enough to carry out the task for real on the job

This might sound obvious, but it's not what many of us do. We tend to want to provide all the knowledge up front, when it's more helpful to feed it in gradually as we work through the practical exercises. Classroom, on-job instruction, e-learning, makes no difference.

Profile of a learning architect: Peter Butler

2011-05-30T18:25:00.001+01:00

Throughout my book The New Learning Architect I take time out to look at real-life examples of great learning architects in action. In this extract, we show how, with the right vision and leadership, a large multinational company can successfully establish a bottom-up learning culture, in this case with the aid of the latest social learning technologies. Peter’s work with Dare2Share has demonstrated what can be achieved within what many would regard as a relatively traditional management hierarchy.

Peter Butler was for six years Learning Director at British Telecom, a major international telecommunications company with 160,000 employees and contractors, about 1/3 of which are based outside the UK. When he started the job, Peter set up a governance process embodied in the BT Learning Council which he chaired and which oversaw some £70m annually in direct training costs. Peter talked to each of the BT businesses and developed learning plans aligned with the strategic direction of each business. Initial priorities of the Learning Council were to rationalise down from 14 learning management systems to one, establish an evaluation strategy, develop an online learning planning tool, and to create a single system for procurement.

Phase two was to move from what Peter called “getting things fixed” to “doing things more effectively.” At the heart of this was Peter’s commitment to “breaking through the walls of the classroom” and embedding learning on the job. To encourage new ideas, he ran an innovation day in which a number of new proposals were put forward. One was selected for piloting – the use of social learning.

The place for formal learning

In starting to look at new, more informal techniques, Peter was not trying to replace formal training. Rather, he wanted the decision to engage in formal training to be more rational and explicit. He acknowledges that health and safety, regulatory and compliance training are business critical for BT, also that sometimes it is highly beneficial to bring people together off-the-job as with leadership development.

When it comes to induction and apprenticeship, Peter believes the mix has to extend beyond the formal. He would be more inclined to provide ‘learning nuggets’ in advance of their first day of work and to support formal courses with mentoring.

Daring to share

Peter is an advocate for hiring motivated young people and then coaching them to come through the ranks with the emphasis on informal learning in the workplace. He finds the emphasis on formal knowledge management techniques funny: “If you have the word ‘management’ in the title then that implies control and interference, and as a result people will be less likely to use it.”

BT’s Dare2Share platform takes the opposite, bottom-up approach. “Dare2Share means we are proud to let employees know how clever they are – the less management the better. After all, no-one determined what went up on YouTube. The idea is to create the right system and then let people use it as they see best. Just like YouTube we use peer ratings to help users determine what’s good to watch.”

Peter believes that what drives people to create video content – and video features heavily on Dare2Share – is the excitement around a newly-accessible medium. “The biggest incentive is seeing their mate on the screen, then wanting to do it themselves. That’s how young people think. And it’s important for l&d managers to keep their minds young. Ask yourself, when was the last time you watched your children learning? When did you last ask them why they use new technologies? You can’t understand social learning without participating in it.”

The project started with a proof of concept with just a few contributors, then moved on to a more widespread pilot over 6-8 weeks. There was some concern about the impact of so much video content on the network, which was justified when the system had 13,000 users within a few weeks. As a result the system had to be upgraded before launch to the population as a whole.

In practice, Dare2Share has become much more than Peter expected, hosting top-down learning nuggets, such as the 50 Lessons business series and messages from senior leaders, as well as content produced by employees. Although perhaps only 3-5% of employees do contribute content, this is in line with accepted averages and Peter is quite happy with this. With such a large workforce, this means a steady supply of new material from which the whole organisation can benefit.

Solving real business problems

BT has some of the finest research and development facilities available anywhere, so Peter is well aware of the fantastic advances in technology that we can expect in the near future. On the other hand he is mindful of the danger of latching onto a solution and then looking for a problem. As a result his priority is to work back from an identified business problem to look for creative solutions. He can see how BT’s thousands of engineers in the field could connect with one another to solve problems at the point of need and then capture that expertise for use in the future. He also knows that many of the problems which cause customers to call in for help could be resolved easily if learning content was made more available to them. He is conscious that the emphasis is shifting from pushing information at people to providing resources from which they can pull as the need arises. This will require search capabilities as extensive and powerful as Google’s, accessing material not only within the confines of a learning management system but across all available sources, including platforms like Dare2Share. This is a future that BT is well established to realise.

Peter Butler joined Lloyds Banking Group in October 2010 as learning director. Before his appointment he served as Director of Learning, BT Group plc from June 2004. He joined BT from RBS and was a formerly at NatWest prior to the merger in 2000. He was retained after the merger to bring together the learning teams in the respective banks. His previous experience included executive development, senior HR roles in the Retail business, corporate and commercial banking and a variety of HR roles.

His role in BT included chair of the Learning Council, the governing body responsible for the £70m annual spend, the acclaimed apprenticeship programme, where he secured £17m of government funding, and responsibility for the learning technology strategy and in particular the “social learning” agenda.

He is on the advisory board for the Skills Minister and was a key player in support of the IT & Telecoms sector skills council’s bid for funding to create the National Skills Academy for IT.

What I read on my holiday: Drive

2011-05-26T18:42:00.000+01:00

And finally to the last of the three books that I managed to complete on my holiday in Tuscany, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel H. Pink. So, is what Daniel has to say about motivation so surprising? Well, yes, to many people I think so. Conventional wisdom has it that extrinsic rewards, particularly financial, will encourage us to work harder and achieve better results. That's why we offer huge bonuses to executives, bankers and lesser incentives to those further down the scale. It seems the science simply doesn't support this. I'll give you Daniel's 'cocktail party summary':

When it comes to motivation, there’s a gap between what science knows and what business does. Our current business operating system—which is built around external, carrot-and-stick motivators—doesn’t work and often does harm. We need an upgrade. And the science shows the way. This new approach has three essential elements: (1) Autonomy—the desire to direct our own lives; (2) Mastery—the urge to get better and better at something that matters; and (3) Purpose—the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.

Of course we are not going to be terribly motivated if we're patently underpaid for what we do:

The starting point, of course, is to ensure that the baseline rewards—wages, salaries, benefits, and so on—are adequate and fair. Without a healthy baseline, motivation of any sort is difficult and often impossible.

And, if the job we do is algorithmic (routine and predictable), there may be an argument for incentives of some sort. Trouble is, many of today's jobs aren't of that nature - they're heuristic, they require us to come up with novel solutions.

The implications for motivation are vast. Researchers such as Harvard Business School’s Teresa Amabile have found that external rewards and punishments—both carrots and sticks—can work nicely for algorithmic tasks. But they can be devastating for heuristic ones.

Going down the route of the carrot and the stick will get you only short-term benefits:

There’s no going back. Pay your son to take out the trash—and you’ve pretty much guaranteed the kid will never do it again for free. What’s more, once the initial money buzz tapers off, you’ll likely have to increase the payment to continue compliance.

As managers and as teachers, we will continue to be frustrated if we treat our direct reports or our students as subjects to be controlled and manipulated:

Human beings have an innate inner drive to be autonomous, self-determined, and connected to one another. And when that drive is liberated, people achieve more and live richer lives. Living a satisfying life requires more than simply meeting the demands of those in control. Yet in our offices and our classrooms we have way too much compliance and way too little engagement.

What can I say? I agree.

CEGOS 2011 survey provides many new insights

2011-05-18T15:28:00.000+01:00

Cegos 2011 learning trends survey draft, final may 11

When I received this presentation from CEGOS, which describes the results of their latest survey of L&D practices across Europe, I couldn't understand why they wouldn't want to share every aspect of the results as widely as possible. It provides some interesting insights but also raises many questions. Anyway, I asked and they were happy for me to make it available here.

By the way, some of the terminology might seem strange. When they talk about video as a technique for distance learning, they actually mean virtual classrooms. There's plenty of support for new learning technologies in here, including mobile and serious games, but the priority is still fairly and squarely on learning on-the job and face-to-face.

What I read on my holiday: Switch

2011-05-18T12:37:00.001+01:00

On to the second of the three books I managed to whip through last week when not trekking in the blazing sun through the fabulous scenery of Tuscany. This time it’s Switch – How to Change Things When Change is Hard – from Chip and Dan Heath. I reviewed the last book from the brothers Heath – Made to Stick – back in 2007 and enjoyed it immensely. This one draws on much of the same wisdom, even thought the aim here is not to get things to stick but to make them change.

As with my last review – of Alina Tugend’s Better my Mistake, the authors make a key distinction between what we think consciously and what our more primitive, emotional system will have us do. They liken the emotional system to an elephant and the intellect to the rider of the elephant. The rider has one hell of a job to keep the elephant under control and will often get exhausted in the process.

So, what to the authors advocate in terms of a change management process:

Firstly, direct the rider: investigate what’s working and repeat it; be quite specific about the behaviours you’re looking for; point clearly to the destination.

Secondly, motivate the elephant: make people feel something; break the change down so it doesn’t seem so scary; cultivate an identity that supports the change.

Thirdly, shape the path: tweak the environment so it supports the change; build new habits; rally the herd.

So what relevance does any of this have for learning? Well, of course all learning is change – if those neurons don’t connect we’ve been wasting our time. Following Chip and Dan’s advice we’d do well to:

be clear about the behaviour that’s required
grab the learner emotionally
be careful not to overload the learner
allow plenty of time for the new behaviours to become habitual
try to ensure that the environment allows new learning to be applied

Great book.

What I read on my holiday: Better by mistake

2011-05-16T16:36:00.001+01:00

I had quite a bit of time as I travelled to and from Tuscany over the last week to skim read (sorry, but that’s what I do when it’s not a novel) some new books which all looked like having an interesting angle on learning. First up was Better by Mistake from Alina Tugend (annoyingly not yet on Kindle).

Alina’s book is sub-titled The Unexpected Benefits of Being Wrong, those benefits presumably being the opportunity to learn. She relates a great story about a mother driving her son home from kindergarten and asking what he learned. “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing? You didn’t learn a single thing?” “No,” he replied. “My teacher said you learn by making mistakes and I didn’t make any today.” Obviously this child would have had an even better day if they’d had the opportunity to make some mistakes. And hopefully they would have relayed them just as enthusiastically.

But as adults we aren’t always so positive. Alina quotes Tavris and Aronson: “Most Americans know they are supposed to say that they learn from their mistakes, but deep down they don’t believe it for a minute. They think that mistakes mean you are stupid.”

Sure, intellectually we all buy into the idea of learning from mistakes, but emotionally we hate them (and emotions are often more powerful than intellect, a theme I will return to in my next couple of reviews). Not that this stops us learning. In fact, at a subconscious (emotional) level we are learning from our mistakes all the time, as our dopamine neurons react to try and ovoid recurrences of uncomfortable errors.

But we can achieve much more by reflecting consciously on what we have learned at a cellular level. Alina quotes Jonah Lehrer: “Mistakes aren’t to be discouraged. On the contrary, they should be cultivated and carefully investigated. The best way to become an expert in your field is to focus on your mistakes.”

As we all know, the best learning interventions are those in which we are encouraged to make mistakes and to reflect upon them. Alina cites an experiment conducted by Stanley Gully and his colleagues:

Telling people to perform well during training resulted in higher immediate performance, but it also resulted in shallower processing of information, more superficial learning and less confidence. In contrast, those people who were told to learn – and not worry about mistakes – during training did more poorly initially but ended up with deeper processing of information, more complex learning and more confidence about performance.

As Alina explains, much depends on your view of yourself. If you believe that you are a pretty fixed entity and that it’s simply not possible for you to improve yourself in any significant way, then it’s logical for you to avoid mistakes at all costs – all they do is highlight your inadequacies. On the other hand, if you believe that you have the potential to develop and grow, then mistakes are just part of the process.

Alina recognises it’s difficult to shift deep-rooted cultural barriers, but concludes optimistically:

If we can all forgive our and others’ errors more often, if we can acknowledge that perfection is a myth and that human beings screw up on a regular basis – and that rather than feel bad about it and find someone to accuse, we learn from it – then we are on the right track.

In this respect, Alina is certainly not mistaken.

CIPD survey shows the cuts are hurting L&D

2011-05-06T15:10:00.001+01:00

The CIPD’s Learning and Talent Development Survey for 2011 has recently been released. Some 11,562 UK L&D practitioners were invited to participate, although only 601 did, which rather indicates that people have other things on their mind at the moment – like staying in a job.

So what does the survey tell us from an e-learning perspective?

Only 10% of CIPD members reckon e-learning to be the most effective approach, which is hardly surprising when you consider that the main drivers for using e-learning are efficiency rather than effectiveness and that the only e-learning many of the respondents will ever have encountered will have been self-study compliance courses (the CIPD is primarily an HR body and compliance is usually the responsibility of HR). Blended learning is not on the list of options by the way.
Having said all of the above, some 76% thought that e-learning was effective for training non-managerial employees. This figure reduces for management grades, which is probably a good call when you consider the type of e-learning we are talking about and the fact that instruction is a poor technique to use for management development (regardless of whether it is ‘e’ or not).
The use of e-learning is forecast to grow more than any other approach in both the public and private sectors. Beyond e-learning, the trend is to reduce external spend and bring as much as possible in-house.
Only 9% of respondents report their budgets growing in the past 12 months. In fact, 54% have seen a decrease.

A simple and rather predictable picture then. Money’s tight, so use more efficient approaches and do more in-house. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a similar picture next year.

Profile of a learning architect: Rob Bartlett

2011-04-29T08:37:00.001+01:00

For this profile we turn to Rob Bartlett from Farm Credit in Canada. Rob has achieved success by integrating formal and informal learning activities in pursuit of clear strategic business objectives.

Rob is Senior Consultant, Organisational Development for Farm Credit, Canada, a government-owned financial institution making loans to farmers across Canada. The company has 1500 employees based in more than 100 offices across the country, with 600 based at the head office and around 1000 customer-facing. The employees are on the whole well qualified and work routinely with computers. On the other hand, the culture of the bank is still very much one where representatives get out to see customers face-to-face as much as is possible.

In the four years that Rob has been at the bank he has seen some dramatic changes:

A major cultural transformation stressing 100% individual accountability for impact on results and on people.
A revamped banking system based on SAP.
A shift in the customer base to fewer, much larger farms operating more like corporate entities and with correspondingly bigger loans.

Formal programmes

Three programmes dominate the formal schedule:

The lending essentials programme: This takes employees from day 1 to 18 months and covers all credit and customer service policies. Each new employee is supported through the programme by a team of mentors. Rob looks at each element of the programme on a highly granular basis to determine whether it should be tackled in a face-to-face class, using e-learning content or directly through mentoring.

The orientation programme: Every new employee gets the chance to travel to head office for a face-to-face orientation programme. This allows them to take a look round, meet other new hires, find out what the company is all about and hear about plans for the future.

The leadership development programme: This takes place over an 8-month period and is provided by an external contractor. The programme starts and ends with an online 360 degree analysis, involving the learner’s manager, peers and direct reports. The three weeks of residential classroom training are interspersed with assignments and conference calls. The President of the company attends the last session in which they present their solution to a current work problem.

Communities of practice

Rob works closely with the company’s Knowledge Management function to look for any opportunities for the two departments to collaborate. One outcome of this has been the creation of a number of voluntary communities of practice bringing together those with common interests from across the organisation. These communicate regularly using conference calls and get together face-to-face every two years. Communication between members has been enriched by the use of monthly webinars and by the collaborative tools provided by Microsoft SharePoint. Rob admits it is early days for online collaboration but that this is likely to become a core component of the scheme.

Performance support is not extensive but necessary information is available on the company’s intranet. Alternatively, employees can direct questions to Knowledge Management who will endeavour to track down an expert capable of providing an answer.

Taking stock

Rob believes he is well on the way to establishing a cohesive architecture that brings together the formal and the informal, and both l&d and knowledge management. The overall learning strategy has been taken to the senior executives and is supported wholeheartedly.

Rob is keen to make sure that each intervention is deliberate and not just another case of ‘putting them on a course’. Managers within the business come to him knowing that he will look at each requirement on its own merits and come up with a solution that is right for the job. No way will Rob ever be an order taker.

Talking about blended learning – part 5 – in conclusion

2011-04-28T09:47:00.002+01:00

Part 5

In the fifth and last part of this interview, I address two final questions:

How would you summarise the blended learning design process?
What guarantee is there that you'll end up with a solution that is both effective and efficient?

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4
Complete 43 min interview

Talking about blended learning – part 4 – selecting media

2011-04-27T10:38:00.002+01:00

Part 4

In the fourth part of this interview, I address the following questions:

What choices do you have when it comes to delivering your strategy?
Why would you want to conduct a learning activity on a face-to-face basis?
What value do offline media have in an online world?
Surely online delivery is fast becoming your default choice?
What about the telephone? What value can that have for learning?
So our last consideration has been media. Why is that?

Part 5 follows tomorrow.
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3
Complete 43 min interview

Talking about blended learning – part 3 – selecting methods

2011-04-26T09:48:00.002+01:00

Part 3

In the third part of this interview, I address the following questions:

What's your next step once you've analysed the situation?
How do you begin deciding which methods to use?
How do the various social contexts for learning compare?
What options do you have in terms of an overall learning strategy?
How do social contexts and learning strategies interact?
Why start with methods rather than technologies for learning?

Part 4 follows tomorrow.

Part 1 Part 2

Complete 43 min interview

Talking about blended learning – part 2 – analysing the situation

2011-04-21T16:52:00.003+01:00

Part 2

In the second part of this interview, I address the following questions:

How should someone set about designing a blended solution?
What impact does the learning requirement have on your design decisions?
What audience characteristics have the biggest impact on your design?
What difference do the constraints and opportunities make to your design decisions?

Part 1
Complete 43 min interview

Talking about blended learning – part 1 – foundations

2011-04-20T11:34:00.003+01:00

In this extended interview, I address a wide range of key questions about blended learning, which I hope will be of interest to just about anyone responsible for learning and development in the workplace. In this first part, I attempt to answer the following questions:

What's the case for blended learning?
What's so new about the idea of blended learning?
Isn't blended learning just a euphemism for e-learning?
Aren't blended solutions just another way of bundling up the same old formal learning approaches?
When is blended learning appropriate?
So, is blended learning always the right option?

I’ll tell you about the remaining four parts of the interview in subsequent posts, although you’ll find the complete 43 min interview is already uploaded.

Developing is not for everyone

2011-04-15T17:06:00.001+01:00

It’s beginning to dawn on me that a wide range of development tasks associated with e-learning, including the use of authoring tools, plus the post-production of graphics, animations, audio and video, are not going to be for everyone. Why? Because they all require you to be incredibly systematic and, above all, organised. There is probably a minority working within learning and development who simply don’t have what’s required to develop these qualities; a more significant proportion simply have no inclination.

If you work alone, as I do, there’s a chance you’ll be able to get yourself reasonably well organised. You’ll be able to find things. You’ll back things up. If you work in a large organisation, it will all become much more difficult. You may have a reasonable system of shared drives, but most likely this will be completely chaotic. If you look after your own files, then – let’s face it – these could be anywhere.

If you set out to be an accountant or a software engineer, then chances are you’ll not only put in the effort to keep everything in order, you’ll actually enjoy it. Unfortunately most people do not enter the l&d profession with the same predilections.

Even the simplest authoring tasks require a lot of organisation. Perhaps you develop your work in PowerPoint, but it’s quite likely there’s a host of source files – photos, logos, charts, screen grabs, not to mention videos and audio files - and that you’ve gathered along the way. And you may have these in multiple formats – the huge file that you downloaded from your camera; the smaller, cropped and corrected version; the one you adjusted to fit in with your colour scheme. Then there are all the different versions you may have had to produce along the way – did you store all these separately, clearly numbered? I thought not.

Then there are all the output files, the Flash, the HTML, the SCORM wrappers, again in numerous versions. This is getting seriously geeky.

There is absolutely no doubt that by using online tools, where you develop in the cloud, you will have far fewer difficulties. These systems probably allow you to tag all your assets, and will store your versions in some systematic fashion. Most importantly, you will not be developing on an island – you’ll be able to share and collaborate with others in your team.

In the meantime, if you’re one of those who never keeps notes, has an inbox containing the last five years’ emails, and tries to keep your diary in your head, then some advice – when they look for volunteers for authoring duty, take a pace backwards.

The Big Question: How do you respond to the ‘I want it now’ demand?

2011-04-07T09:34:00.003+01:00

On the ASTD Learning Circuits blog, they ask the question “How do you address the ‘I want it now’ demand from stakeholders.” Now I know this question went up on April 1st but I’m taking it at face value. Why? Because wanting it now is an everyday request for many people in l&d. In fact, since the shift from the classroom to e-learning got under way, the demand is more common not less, even though the lead time for self-study materials has to be greater than that for the classroom.

Or does it?

There’s absolutely no doubt that it takes a long time – in many cases, much too long – to produce half-decent interactive lessons. We can speed up the process with the right tools, training and an agile approach, but it still takes longer than many organisations can wait.

So what do you do if your client wants it now? You could say no, insisting that it simply isn’t possible to cut any more corners. Or you could get on with producing any of the following and still be home for tea:

an audio or video interview with the subject expert (if they’re remote, record it on Skype)
if it’s a software launch, a series of simple screencasts (press record, show you to do it, press stop, publish)
a simple textual explanation, with diagrams and other pics for impact and memorability

But that’s not learning, you say, just information. Well guess what, providing information is a pretty good start. If you want to help make the message stick then you have some other quick-fire options:

set up a forum for Q&A
allow for comments, blog-style
prepare some short and simple worked examples or case studies
create a quick quiz

TV stations and newspapers have a plan B. If a big story comes in, they don’t hold it for the day after next, they spring into action and put something together now. They don’t get bogged down in documentation. They just build it and use any remaining time to refine this as best they can.

Does your design team have a plan B?

BTW: This posting took 15 minutes

A question of balance

2011-04-05T13:57:00.002+01:00

It is easy to get in a position where you feel obliged to take a stance on some aspect or other of learning and development in the workplace – in particular when it comes to challenges to the status quo. Typically you’re either with the old way or the new.

I’ve never found this particularly helpful, as there are usually plenty of good arguments on either side. The issue, as ever, is getting the balance right between taking advantage of new developments as they come available, while continuing to exploit the potential of long-standing approaches.

One of the most difficult balances to get right is between the amount of learning that takes place face-to-face and online. At present, as the slider shows, the balance is heavily weighted towards the traditional option of face-to-face. There are some good arguments for being face-to-face in special cases: you have a much richer multi-sensory experience; you can interact physically with people and things; you can pick up on body language far more easily than you can using webcams; and, let's fcae it, sometimes you really do want to say ‘I was there’.

However, most everyday communication does not conform to these special cases – you can achieve everything you need online, far more flexibly, with much less hassle, at lower cost and in less time. That slider needs to be moved right – not all the way, but towards the other end.

Another issue is the balance we strike between learning that is synchronous (live) and learning that is asynchronous (self-paced). Historically most learning has been live, typically in the form of classroom events and on-job training. Synchronous learning can be easily blocked out in the diary, and it allows learners to get quick answers to their questions and immediate feedback on their performance.

The trouble is, live events require all parties to co-ordinate their diaries and they take away the learner’s ability to learn as an when they want. Live learning, because it is not self-paced, is more stressful on the learner and allows them less time for reflection. We need live events in the blend, we just don’t need them all the time.

This slider may seem a little confusing. After all, the majority of learning has always been informal, taking place, as it does, outside the confines of something packaged up as a course. The problem is that the focus of most learning and development practitioners is almost entirely on the formal. The informal element needs supporting too, as I explain in The New Learning Architect.

I’ve borrowed this terminology from Nick Shackleton-Jones. Nick distinguishes between the formal nature of courses, where the focus, he believes, should be on engaging the learner emotionally with the topic and building their confidence to continue to learn independently, and the on-going provision of resources, both human and in the form of content, to support the learner as they continue to learn and apply their new skills.

There’s nothing wrong with courses as such, it’s just that we place too much attention on them and not enough on what happens afterwards. By and large, we would do well to teach much less and provide much more in the way of support. See my previous posting on courses and resources.

So, it’s just a question of balance. We probably need to push all these sliders along towards the right, but how far and how fast will vary enormously from organisation to organisation.

Profile of a learning architect: Sebastian Graeb-Konneker

2011-03-24T09:10:00.001Z

Throughout my book The New Learning Architect I take time out to look at real-life examples of great learning architects in action. In this extract, we take a look at how learning is architected within Shell, one of the world’s largest and most successful multinational corporations. Sebastian’s vision for learning covers all of the contexts that in which learning can occur at work.

Dr Sebastian Graeb-Konneker is a Learning Adviser, Design and Development for Shell International. Sebastian was inspired in his approach to learning by Professor Betty Collis, with whom he worked at the University of Twente in the Netherlands and later in Shell. Like Betty, Sebastian is a champion of work-based learning, aided by technology. He is responsible for designing learning solutions across Shell’s global workforce of more than 100,000 employees. His leaning is towards rich blends, going beyond the typical classroom plus e-learning mix to include both formal and informal elements. As Sebastian explains, “Learning happens as we speak. If you make learning look like work, then employees won’t believe that it’s a course they’re going to.”

The place for formal learning at Shell

Even though Sebastian favours informal approaches, he acknowledges there is an important place for more formal, structured learning, such as when transforming a graduate into a full working professional. He also accepts the need for compliance training such as for health and safety, although he acknowledges that this is sometimes “less about learning more about assuring that they’ve done it.”

In his design for leadership development and technical training, Sebastian brings a wide range of non-formal and experiential approaches into the mix, including a 360 degree feedback tool and job shadowing. Where it is required that participants meet, they can do this on the phone or with LiveMeeting (a web conferencing system), as they would at other times in their work. Sebastian is a big fan of asynchronous group activities, centred around Shell’s Moodle platform. As he says, “Working together far apart – that’s what work is like these days.”

Sebastian prefers his designs to be activity-driven, not content-driven, working back from the performance goal. The design process is global and, while highly systematic, also agile and iterative. Stakeholder management is of the upmost importance, with the learner an important voice in the process.

Learning beyond the course

Shell is really good at providing a myriad of other, less formal, ways in which employees can develop core competences, keep up-to-date with changes and prepare to take on further responsibilities. The whole approach is based on a framework of competencies. As Sebastian explains, “They expect you to be developing yourself. And someone is always responsible for supporting your development – with coaching from your line manager and mentoring. Communities of practice have been established for more 12 years, with well-defined policies and systems.

On-demand approaches

To support on-demand learning Shell has its own wiki, with 70,000 users and more than 40,000 articles. Backing this up is a knowledge management strategy based on the simple requirement to “ask, learn, share.” There is a strong incentive to share, particularly in the technical disciplines and, as a result, networking is vibrant.
As well as the wiki, collaboration is facilitated by the Shell International Global Networks, which allows employees to easily locate expertise and discuss issues using forums. This bottom-up approach has proved to be effective, although the degree of success does vary from area to area. Every employee is encouraged to establish a profile on the network.

Learning through blogging

Blogging is possible within the firewall using SharePoint, but hasn’t taken off in any significant fashion. On the other hand, employees are encouraged to blog externally. A good example of this is the blog of Sebastian’s colleague Hans de Zwart, Shell’s Innovation Manager for Learning Technologies. Here’s what Hans had to say about the ways in which the learning architecture in Shell is evolving:

“The one thing that I think that Shell is innovative about is in its complete focus of alignment of learning and work. We focus more and more on on-the-Job training, on learning events that are completely relevant to somebody’s work. The way that learning events are designed, they always have work-related assignments to them, and most of them require supervisor involvement. You need to agree with your supervisor on what you need to do. Learning is often integrated with knowledge management – through the wiki for example.”

“There’s really a broad spectrum in the delivery of learning, but everything is still delivered from a course paradigm and from the idea of competence profiles. What you are starting to see is that the course paradigm is starting to crumble a bit. So it’s called informal learning or on-the-job learning. I think what you will see (and we are starting to see it here in the way we are architecting our next steps in our learning landscape), is smaller, modular content pieces, a different perspective of what we consider to be a learning event. This is more of a ‘pull’ idea – learning when you need it, than a ‘push’ approach; specific learning interventions based around very current direct business problems – instead of through competencies.”

Sebastian is part of the Learning & Organisational Effectiveness team in Shell Project & Technology. Analysing the organisation's business issues, he works to ensure that learning solutions are aligned to the goals of management. Following a doctoral degree, Sebastian began his learning and development career in Japan, where he co-authored some 30 TV programmes tailored for students of the Japanese Open University.

Today his work includes clients as diverse as Philips, the Swiss Embassy in Indonesia, the Talented and Gifted Students Program at U.S. University of Oregon and the German National Academic Exchange Service. Key contributions for Shell include the development of the group's blended learning strategy, implementing the company’s global Virtual Learning System and establishing knowledge management as a key component in learning programme designs.

Sebastian is a Fulbright Alumni and founding member of the German-European Centre of Excellence at Japan's prestigious Tokyo University. He is author of five books, of which three have been co-authored, and has written over 30 articles and book reviews. He is also a certified retail salesman and has done a great deal of acting alongside his career.

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Adventures in self-publishing II

2011-03-21T17:38:00.001Z

Last week I described how I went about publishing what was essentially a fairly conventional, text-heavy book in paperback, for the Kindle and Sony Reader, and also to the Apple iBookStore, all without the help of a publisher. While most of my lessons were learned in this, my first experience, I thought I’d compare the problems I encountered when working with a much more elaborately laid out and visually-rich handbook – Live Online Learning: A Facilitator’s Guide.

This publication started off as a free e-book download on the Onlignment site, in PDF format. It was laid out in Adobe InDesign.

Publishing to paperback

As before, I published to paperback through Lulu. If anything, the upload was even easier than before, because the document was already in PDF format and InDesign is much better set up to go to print (unsurprising given that this is it’s sole purpose). Lulu didn’t do a great job of printing images that extended to the edge of the paper (it left a tiny margin at the bottom) but this was not a deal-breaker, at least not for me.

Publishing to Kindle

It quickly became obvious that an elaborately laid-out PDF was in no way suitable for input to the various e-book readers. I had to copy the text and graphics back out of InDesign and paste it into Word in a much more conventional, linear format. As you can imagine this was tedious and time-consuming. I also removed any fancy fonts, scaled down any larger text and re-built a number of tables. Having said that, the end result on the Kindle was perfectly acceptable.

Publishing to Sony Reader

SmashWords imposed yet more constraints, because their converter wouldn’t work with tables, so these had to be re-worked as plain text. Otherwise, I was able to work with much the same source document as for the Kindle.

Conclusions?

Publishing to multiple platforms is clearly a lot easier if your publication is primarily textual, perhaps with a few diagrams or photos. In this case, where a lot of care had been taken over layout and visuals were really important to the message, something was clearly lost in the conversion to a format suitable for e-readers. That won’t bother most purchasers, who still get 90% of the benefit, but in a much more flexible format and at price that potentially be much lower than the equivalent paperback. I’ll do it again.

50 tips for better presentations

2011-03-15T15:14:00.001Z

In conducting some research on design for visual aids I came across this set of tips which I developed with my wife Sue some eight years ago now. Rather than see them gather dust, I decided to share them with you. In some respect presentations have moved on – we didn’t have Twitter back then – but most of these guidelines still hold true:

Nervousness

1. Don’t be concerned if you’re a little nervous

Practically all presenters are nervous to a degree, many seriously so. Surveys of the general public consistently show that people regard public speaking as just about the worst thing that could happen to them, so if you feel a little shaky before you take the floor, then you’re not alone. The fact is that a few nerves are not a bad thing; they show you’re taking the situation seriously and that you’re ready to give it your best.

2. Control your nerves by being prepared

The best way to keep your nerves under control is to be prepared. That means knowing your subject, being familiar with the running order and testing your slides and any equipment you will be using in advance.

3. If you can’t get properly prepared, say no

If you’re asked to make a presentation on a subject that you know little about and you don’t have time to prepare thoroughly, you are better off saying no than just winging it.

4. Avoid a dry mouth

If you’re getting a bit of a dry mouth waiting for your turn to speak, try sucking a boiled sweet. Just remember to take it out before you start.

5. Keep off the booze

Drugs and alcohol may seem like the answer to nerves, but the result is more likely to be slurred speech, slow reaction and a tendency to believe you are being funny when you aren’t.

Getting started

6. Provide your own written introduction

Help out whoever has to introduce you and ensure that what is said about you is appropriate by providing your own written introduction.

7. Pause for a second

Focus on someone near the back of the room and pause for a second. This will gain the audience’s attention and encourage you to speak sufficiently loudly.

8. Spare the thanks

Except on very formal occasions, you don’t have to thank the person who introduced you or the audience for coming or the organisation for inviting you. Get straight on with it.

9. Make your opening point

Don’t respond to a previous speaker’s remarks, make a comment about your audience or the location or to something that’s in the news. Make your first point relate directly to the purpose of your presentation. The rest can come later.

Body language

10. Stand naturally

Inexperienced presenters get anxious about how they should stand. The answer is to stand naturally, so you feel comfortable. Clasping your hands together in front of you are behind you, like the Duke of Edinburgh, looks overly formal and stops you from being expressive with your hands. When you’re not using your hands to make a gesture, keep them at your side. It’s not completely out of the question to put a hand in one of your pockets, as long as you’re not fiddling with what you find inside.

11. Control leakage

There’s a great temptation when the adrenaline is running to pace backwards and forwards (inducing the Wimbledon effect) or rock up and down on your heels (inducing seasickness). The experts call this ‘leakage’ and it’s not a pretty sight. There’s nothing wrong with movement as such; it just needs to be done consciously, for a good reason.

12. Don’t fiddle

Fiddling is another form of leakage, so put that pen down before you do what everyone’s expecting, which is to draw a line across your nice white shirt or blouse. Another common habit is continual grooming, which is a universally understood sign of sexual interest. So, to avoid any misunderstandings, keep your hands below your neck (and, while you’re at it, above the waist).

13. Be expressive

Hand gestures are an important element in communication, so use them freely to help you make your point. However, avoid pointing your finger as the effect of this is always negative.

14. See yourself on video

It’s a painful process, but an invaluable one. Try out your presentation and have a colleague record it on video. Nothing tells you more about how you look, how you sound and what mannerisms you have.

Voice

15. Step up the volume

It’s a common mistake to speak so softly that you can’t be heard clearly by all your audience. If you’re not sure how loud this needs to be, have a brief rehearsal beforehand and have a colleague sit at the back and provide you with feedback.

16. Slow down

One of the side effects of the adrenaline rush is that you tend to speak much too fast. There’s a simple solution and that’s to slow down. If it sounds too slow to you, then it’s probably about right.

17. Don’t act

Unless your accent is so pronounced that people will have real difficulty understanding you, speak naturally as you would normally.

Eye contact

18. Achieve eye contact

Achieving eye contact with your audience is one of the most effective ways of building rapport. Nervous and inexperienced speakers tend to look at their notes, at their laptop, at the ceiling or just about anywhere except at the audience.

19. Include everyone

You want to achieve eye contact with everyone in your audience, not just those at the front or those who are obviously the most interested.

20. Hold eye contact for five seconds

Scanning the audience quickly doesn’t count as eye contact; try to maintain eye contact with each person for about five seconds. This will seem like a long time to you, but will have an extremely powerful effect and exudes confidence and professionalism.

Notes

21. Don’t script your presentation word for word

If you are presenting a scientific paper, it’s possible that you’ll read it word for word, but even then the effect on your audience will be painful. Unless you’re an actor or a TV presenter, you won’t be able to read your words naturally and convincingly, so don’t even try.

22. Use your visual aids as a prompt

Now this may sound like a contradiction to everything you’ve read in the rest of this book, but it isn’t. We’re not recommending that you fill your slides with bullets that serve as your script, just that you use whatever visual aids you may have as a memory jogger. For most presenters this will be enough.

23. Put your notes down

If you are going to use notes, don’t hold them in your hand, where they will flap about and make a noise; put them down in front of you and refer to them when you need them. Some presenters make their notes on small cards and keep them in their hand, but it’s so easy for these to get out of order.

24. Make them big and bold

Your notes should be written in big, bold letters because, when the adrenaline hits and the lights dim, you won’t be able to read anything else.

25. Keep them short and sharp

A few keywords should be all that’s required to ensure you keep on track and don’t miss out anything important. However, some presenters script their opening and closing sentences word-for-word and you may find this helpful.

Humour

26. Use humour with caution

Although it may feel good to get a laugh or two, you don’t want to come over as a buffoon. Unless you’re setting out to entertain or you’re a complete natural, use humour with caution or it could compromise your whole message.

27. Be yourself

If you’re not the sort of person to crack jokes or come up with witticisms, keep away from humour altogether – you simply won’t sound natural and the best you can expect is a little polite laughter. The most natural expression of humour is a simple smile.

28. Don’t cross the line

Under no circumstances whatsoever, be flippant or insulting about subjects that could cause offence. You know what they are – gender, race, age, size, religion, politics. Get it wrong and you will die, painfully.

Visual aids

29. Launch your presentation directly

No-one wants to see you load your presentation into PowerPoint and then hunt for the right buttons to launch the presentation full-screen. Save your presentation as a PowerPoint Show and you can launch directly.

30. Don’t look at the screen

It looks really unprofessional to look up at the screen every time you change your slide. You should be able to see that the slide has changed satisfactorily from your laptop screen in front of you. Have confidence in the fact that your laptop is still connected to the projector.

31. Don’t hide behind the computer

Once you have changed slide, get your hands off the mouse or the keyboard, so they are free to make expressive gestures. The audience has come to see you, not a computer operator. If you’re feeling flush, buy a handheld remote for advancing the slides.

32. Leave time for the slide to be absorbed

When you change slide, leave a moment for the audience to take it in before you start speaking. You know what the slide means; they don’t. Your adrenaline is telling you to fill every second with words; they require space.

33. Don’t read it out loud

All audiences hate it when presenters read out word for word what is on their slides. Assuming you’re addressing adults, they’ll be able to read quite happily on their own and a great deal faster than you can read out loud.

34. Don’t get out of synch

If you have decided on the spur of the moment to make an additional point, have elected to take questions during your presentation or are engaged in a discussion with your audience, it’s easy for what is being said and what is on the screen to get out of synch. This is confusing for the audience, so be prepared to blackout the slide (by pressing ‘B’ on the keyboard), until you are ready to continue. Press any key and the current slide will appear again.

Handouts

35. As a rule, leave them until the end

If you want your audience to concentrate fully on you and your visual aids, distribute any handouts at the end of your presentation.

36. Unless they are essential to the presentation

Sometimes you need your audience to refer to a table or diagram which is too complex to fit on a slide. In this case, you’ll clearly need to distribute your handouts in advance.

37. Unless they are used for making notes

Some audiences like a handout containing all the slides on which to make notes during the presentation. The danger is that they’ll read ahead and you’ll lose their attention.

38. Unless you have an international audience

If you are presenting to an international audience, for whom English is not their first language, then a carefully prepared handout may help them to follow what you are saying. Try printing out your slides and accompanying each with a summary of your points, in whole sentences, not just bullets.

Timing

39. Keep it short

However interesting you are, your audience can only concentrate for so long. Limit your presentation to 15 minutes, 20 at tops. If you’re asked to fill a longer slot and really have no choice but to accept, break the presentation up with activities that allow the audience to participate.

40. Don’t overestimate what you’ll need

Inexperienced presenters dread having too little material to fill the time available. In reality, this almost never happens, and even if it does, finishing early is a benefit not a drawback.

41. Finish on time

Whatever you do, don’t over-run, particularly when it’s time for coffee or lunch. Have pity on those who are hungry, dying for a pee or desperate for a fag. If there isn’t a clock on the wall that you can see easily, place a clock or your watch on the table or lectern in front of you. You could set an alarm to warn you when there’s five minutes to go, as long as it’s not too loud, or ask a colleague in the audience to signal to you.

Wrapping up

42. Summarise

Audiences have a limited attention span and will remember little from a presentation, so make sure that what they do remember is what is important. Close with a summary of your key points and keep it brief (if you have more than five key points, chances are you need to revise your presentation). You could bring back your best visual to accompany your closing remarks.

43. Tell them what you want them to do

Presumably your presentation has a purpose, so don’t sit down until you’ve told your audience what you want them to do.

44. Be enthusiastic

Enthusiasm is contagious, so let your audience know just how much you are committed to your idea and how excited you are about it.

Questions

45. Leave them until the end

Unless you are experienced at interacting with an audience and handling questions on the fly, you’re much better off leaving questions until the end of your talk. Make this clear at the start: “You may have some questions, which I will be happy to answer at the end of my presentation.”

46. Leave a little time

When you do ask for questions, leave a few seconds to give the audience a chance to formulate what they want to say and gather up the courage to speak. A few seconds will seem like a lifetime to you, so you must be patient.

47. Have a question for them

If you want to open a dialogue with your audience but yet no questions are forthcoming, have one for them. For example, “How do you feel about my suggestion that we put back plans for our office move for another year?”

48. Repeat the question

With larger audiences, it’s a good idea to repeat the question before you answer it, in case anyone missed it.

49. Address your answer to the audience

Look at the questioner while they ask you their question, but then address your answer to the audience as a whole. Otherwise you’ll end up in a one-to-one conversation and lose everyone else’s attention.

50. If you don’t know, say so

Believe it or not, it is OK not to know the answer to every question. Never bluff and blunder; simply offer to come back to the questioner with an answer after the event.

In all other respects, do your own thing!!!

Adventures in self-publishing I

2011-03-14T14:46:00.004Z

Over the past couple of months I’ve had the opportunity to tackle many of the challenges associated with self-publishing and I now feel sufficiently on top of all this to share my experiences and recommendations.

I’m going to separate this out between two very different types of publication: (1) my book The New Learning Architect, which is primarily textual, and (2) Onlignment’s Live Online Learning: A Facilitator’s Guide, which is a highly-visual practical handbook. I’ll start with the easier of the two, the book.

I wrote the book in Microsoft Word with the intention of laying it out more formally in Adobe InDesign prior to publication. However, I eventually decided to stick with what I had because that way it would be so much easier to make updates and, anyway, Word was perfectly adequate for laying out text. I’m pleased with that decision because, although I could have given the paperback version more professional gloss using InDesign, I’d not have been in a good position to move publish on the e-book readers.

Publishing to paperback
I published to paperback using Lulu. Before uploading, I exported to PDF from Word (using Lulu’s own PDF template) and this worked fine. I created the cover myself, rather than using Lulu’s own editor, because I knew exactly what I wanted. This had to be a precise job, with exactly the right dimensions, including an allowance for the spine and a box for the ISBN barcode (which Lulu provide). I then exported the artwork from Adobe Illustrator to JPG to upload to Lulu.

Lulu publish from their own site but also through online retailers such as Amazon (but only after you’ve ordered and approved a proof copy). You get to set your own price and to see quite clearly how much you will receive as royalties.

Publishing to ePUB format
Lulu also handle publishing to ePUB, which is the format used for the Apple iBookStore. Conversion into the ePUB format was not trivial, because I had trouble generating a version that was accepted by Lulu as meeting the strict ePUB criteria (I had tried unsuccessfully using Calibre and ePubGen). In the end I imported my Word master into Apple’s Pages program and exported from there. My reasoning was that Apple’s own word processor should be able to export properly to Apple’s own e-book format and I was right - this time it worked perfectly.

However, don’t be impatient to see your book up on the iBookStore. The review process is taking ages, presumably because so many authors are doing the same thing.

Publishing to Kindle
Now this really was easy. Go to Kindle Direct Publishing and upload your Word document. Amazon does the rest. Your title will be up in no time at all.

Then go to Amazon Author Central to establish your author profile and claim authorship of any books you’ve already got up on Amazon.

Publishing to Sony Reader
I wasn’t going to bother with this, but I had a request for the book in this format and thought I’d have a go. If you want to self-publish, you have to go through an intermediary and I chose SmashWords. They will actually publish for Kindle and ePUB as well, but I’d already handled that so I stuck to the Sony LRF format.

This should have been easy but it wasn’t. SmashWords are picky about the formatting and won’t support either footnotes (of which I had hundreds) and tables. Nevertheless I did get a version up and running, which is now labouring through SmashWords and Sony’s review processes.

Would I do it again?
Yes, in fact I already have, and I’ll be sharing that experience later in the week. To publish in so many formats was always going to be a bit of a technical minefield, but by no means insurmountable. What you learn from the experience will make it much easier next time round and just think what you’ve achieved – publication in every known format, complete control over what you publish and when, as well as a much healthier share of the profits.

The Kindle – what is it good for?

2011-03-10T21:10:00.001Z

My Kindle has become one of those possessions that I would take with me almost anywhere – like my iPhone, my credit cards and my watch. It’s light, compact and is very low maintenance – in fact I often forget that it needs charging at all. It looks and feels like a book, yet in many ways is much more practical. In fact I’ve got so used to using it as if it was a book that the other day I caught myself trying to turn over the page.

However, every medium has its strong points and weaknesses, so what is the Kindle good for? Well, it’s designed and works best for text-heavy books that are designed to be read linearly, from start to finish – like a novel or a work of non-fiction with a strong narrative.

What it is not so great for is quick reference material used on a random-access basis – and that includes many professional how-to books. It’s so much easier to hunt down information in a printed book or with well-structured and searchable web-based materials. In this respect the Kindle doesn’t really compete.

The Kindle is also not well suited to books that are elaborately laid-out and visually-rich, such as software guides, books on design, photography, gardening and so on. The screen is simply not large enough to cope with the visuals and it is simply not possible to retain the formatting in the way you can with a PDF file or even a web page.

To sum up, the Kindle is great as a text display, which is perfect for most traditional books, but not ideal in many educational and training contexts. Here, the larger, higher resolution and full-colour iPad display is the obvious candidate.

The Big Question: how to assess informal learning

2011-03-08T15:17:00.001Z

The Big Question on the ASTD Learning Circuits Blog is long enough to fill a post all by itself:

How do you assess whether your informal learning, social learning, continuous learning, performance support initiatives have the desired impact or achieve the desired results?

I think we can group this stuff together as all those forms of learning which are not formal, i.e. courses. If you check out the blog you’ll find some fascinating answers to the question. As for me, I just don’t get it.

Why, because we don’t have to assess informal learning, at least not in the way we might (but very rarely properly) do for the formal stuff. There seems to be an assumption here that L&D have some sort of ownership over informal learning, but this never has been and never will be possible (or desirable).

Most workplace learning has always been informal and we haven’t felt under pressure in the past to measure it in any sophisticated fashion. The fact that some of it now might be online and use new-fangled tools doesn’t change anything.

Employers are not interested in learning, they’re interested in performance. So the measure of all workplace learning remains a very simple one – can people do their jobs the way we’d like them to? Can they perform? The answer to this question isn’t in any way hidden or hard to come by – just ask line managers and they’ll tell you. True they’ll mix up learning with all sorts of other performance-influencing factors (motivation, clear objectives, availability of necessary resources, etc.) but then your job has and always will be to unpick all this. Performance is messy.

L&D does have a role in encouraging and supporting informal learning – making sure the infrastructure and the culture is as supportive as it can be. But informal learning is not an intervention – you’re not supposed to be intervening. So don’t beat yourself up if you can’t assess informal learning in the same way you would a course. They are not the same thing.

Can self-study be social?

2011-03-01T18:01:00.001Z

In my last post, a review of The New Social Learning, I proposed that, with the rapid rush to using e-learning in the workplace, we are at greater risk of a surplus of isolated self-study than we are an explosion in the use of social media. This got me thinking about the differences between what I regard as the four primary social contexts for learning:

Self-study - you learn alone
One-to-one - you learn with an expert, coach or teacher
Synchronous group - you learn in a live event with peers (typically in classrooms, physical or virtual)
Asynchronous group - you learn at your own pace with peers (typically using social media)

I regard these as the primary building blocks of blended learning, each with very distinct advantages and disadvantages.

However, I'm beginning to think that - at least from a psychological perspective - these contexts may be less distinctive than seems obvious at first look. In particular, I'm beginning to wonder whether self-study can feel social.

When you read a book, one that has an author with a name written on the cover, the book acts as a useful mediator between the author and you. It saves the author from the quite ridiculous prospect of having to communicate with you individually, by providing you with your own hand-written copy perhaps, or reading the book out to you in person. But, as you sit alone and read the author's words, surely the experience is not that much different from attending a reading or a presentation given by the author.

Surely the same could be true for e-learning self-study content. I believe self-study could feel very much like one-to-one learning if the content was prepared with a degree of personality. Ideally that would mean you got to know who designed it, a rare occurrence for sure, but something you would take for granted in the classroom, where trainers are anything but anonymous. It would also require that the content be written using a conversational tone, with the author's personality shining through - their stories, jokes and examples. Again, this is not the norm, but it could be if designers would hold back on the corporate drone and their managers lightened up a little.

Web 2.0 content - blog and forum postings, YouTube videos, etc. - is consumed with gusto because it has personality. Policy manuals, corporate brochures and self-study compliance courses are not, because they don't. With most e-learning, you feel like you're interacting with a corporation - a horrible mix of the PR and legal departments. You're very much on your own and, as social animals, you don't like it. Time for e-learning to get some personality. If it does, even self-study can feel like a social experience.

The New Social Learning - a review

2011-02-23T18:22:00.002Z

In my third review of books on social learning in a month (see my posts on Jane Hart's Social Learning Handbook and Jane Bozarth's Social Media for Trainers), I turn to Tony Bingham and Marcia Conner's The New Social Learning, a book recommended by both the Janes.

Before I get on to the book, I want to share what was the most striking insight that I obtained while I was reading. As you have probably gathered, I don't regard social learning as synonymous with the use of social media for learning - social learning has never in human history been anything other than routine and everyday. And up until now it has not been discouraged - in fact we've regarded learning with trainers/teachers, subject experts or peers as our default option, whether formal and off-job, one-to-one on-the-job or completely informally.

The problem is that, now we have such fantastic tools to enable social learning across geographic, departmental and organisational boundaries, we're facing the first real challenge to social learning we have ever faced - at least in the workplace. What is that challenge? Ironically (at least for me, because this is what I do) it's e-learning. Not e-learning with other people, live or asynchronously, but self-study. On your own and typically unsupported.

Yes, an over-emphasis on self-study is a real potential threat. We may have under-used self-study in the past, given it's huge efficiencies and flexibility, but the economic crisis is driving us towards an over-reliance. In my view, self-study is great for small chunks of learning or as preparation for or follow-up to a more social learning activity. While learners like self-pacing, learning in small chunks and learning on-demand, they want all that within a social context. Why? Because they need to externalise their learning, to test it against the perspectives of others, to benchmark their skills.

I can do no more than quote from the book (p39):

"In a landmark study, Richard J Light of the Harvard Graduate School of Education discovered that one of the strongest determinants of students' success in higher education - more important than their instructor's teaching styles - was their ability to form or participate in small study groups. People who studied in groups, even once a week, were more engaged in their studies, were better prepared for class, and learned significantly more than students who worked on their own."

Oh yes, I nearly forgot about the book. In a word, excellent. I'm not going to pretend I read it cover to cover, because in my case that really would be preaching to the converted. But from what I have seen, this book presents a highly credible review of the arguments for a new social learning, enhanced by technology. It includes plenty of real-life cases that prove the point and a great source of practical ideas. I'm sure I'll be referring to it for many years to come.

By the way, I couldn't find a Kindle version when I bought my copy, but Tony Bingham has assured me I can find it right here.

Profile of a learning architect: Nick Shackleton-Jones

2011-02-22T12:43:00.001Z

Throughout my new book The New Learning Architect I take time out to look at real-life examples of great learning architects in action. Some of these have very well-defined responsibilities for specific populations or projects, others a broader remit across whole corporations.

This extract shines the spotlight on a real innovator who has successfully broken free from the confines of the traditional training course and, in doing so, challenged out-dated models of learning and development.

In his profile, we will be examining two very different populations for which Nick has architected learning solutions – those responsible for production safety and all those in the BBC with a desire to contribute creatively.

Ensuring production safety

Something like 9000 employees in the BBC have a responsibility for some aspect of safety relating to the BBC’s productions. As well as permanent employees, this population includes freelance, contract and temporary staff. Every one of these is obliged to complete safety training appropriate for their role.

Initially the training effort was targeted at meeting specific knowledge objectives, but Nick soon realised that what was really needed was a change in behaviour, and that this was largely driven by underlying attitudes to safety. Instead of adopting what Nick describes as a ‘teacherly’ approach to the training, he worked with the safety team to shift the emphasis to a less patronising, more ‘grown-up’ strategy in which employees are encouraged to take responsibility for their own decisions. The underlying rationale is that employees will develop, and make use of available resources, where they feel the need to do so. This is in contrast to the prevailing approach which sees employees much like blank slates.

The starting point was a colossal 13-hour self-study course which had been in place for at least a decade, originally on laserdisc and subsequently online. Nick described the course as an institution.
Assisted by senior colleagues in Safety, Nick’s team set out to adopt a more collegiate, peer-to-peer tone, building a relationship with employees through an authoritative presenter with whom they were familiar in Matt Alright. Nick realised he had to think around the ‘emotional geography’ of the course, finding ways to hit home the points through stories and scenarios and trying to ensure that the connection with the learner was not lost at any point.

The end result was three core modules, supplemented by role-specific content. Nick soon realised that employees didn’t want to listen to trainers talking to them (or a proxy reading a script); they wanted to hear from their peers – an experience that was authentic. In order to achieve this, Nick’s team filmed people in different parts of the organisation, asking them what they did and how they handled safety issues in real situations, then inserting this content into an interactive panorama of the production environment. The result was a much more immersive, exploratory experience in which employees could discover how productions really work, and get a sense of what their role models genuinely thought about safety.

What the BBC team accomplished was to take an informal, peer-learning approach and fold it into a formal l&d intervention. Their current model is shifting away from courses and towards resources – pieces of content that are a few minutes long, such as a story, an interactive scenario, a short video demonstration, all backed up with a discussion forum. You look, you answer some questions, you comment on what you have seen and you see other people’s comments. Each area of the BBC decides which of these resources it needs for their particular safety curriculum. Underneath this is still compliance training – a course that simply has to be done whether you like it or not – but delivered flexibly and authentically.

The BBC’s architecture for safety training includes a sophisticated on-demand element. The main responsibility for delivering just-in-time support and identifying the correct training interventions lies with the local safety reps, and much of this is provided person to person. To assist in this process, the BBC has constructed an expert ‘safety adviser’ tool. Via a series of branching questions about what you actually do within your job, the tool suggests the most appropriate modules. A number of areas within the BBC have found this task-based approach much more flexible than one that starts with role-based competencies, because tasks regularly shift from role-to-role, rendering the competency frameworks or learning journeys out of date. By aligning the modules to tasks, this problem is avoided.

Encouraging creativity

Although there are many jobs in the BBC with specific creative responsibilities, there is a much wider population, right across the organisation, which has creative aspirations. The solution we will be reviewing here is aimed at anyone who thinks they have something creative to offer.

In developing the BBC’s internal social media platform, MOO, Nick’s team talked to commissioners and programme makers. Their provisional aim was something along the lines of a ‘dating service’, putting people who wanted ideas in front of those who had them, bypassing the conventional hierarchical process that had developed during the corporation’s long history. The team recognised the importance of senior sponsorship, which they achieved with Danny Cohen, then Head of Commissioning for BBC3, now BBC1. The result was the BBC’s first Creative Ideas competition – an opportunity for anyone employed by the BBC to upload a video pitch or example of their programme proposal. The value was twofold: a chance for the BBC to discover new talent and creative ideas; and an opportunity for BBC staff to demonstrate their creative potential. The latter is significant, since many BBC staff join with tremendous creative skills and energy. Danny agreed to judge the entries (including pitches from the five top entrants) and to make the best idea into a programme. Entrants were asked to submit their ideas in the form of a video, which more than 100 employees did. The winning entry, called Wuhow, was indeed broadcast on BBC 3.

As a platform MOO has matured, and in the process, Nick gained many insights into the use of social media in the workplace. Employees didn’t necessarily want to use the facility in the way that was originally expected; they wanted a service that could be orientated around the team in which they worked, that could be used in a way that made sense to them. In retrospect, Nick realises that it was a mistake to assume that people would engage with an internal network in the same way some would outside the firewall – blogging, cross-linking to each other’s resources and so on. Rather than asking employees to replicate the effort they put into their out-of-work network, the system now hooks into external channels like Facebook and Twitter directly.

The exchange of best practice does indeed take place on MOO, but this activity often needs some degree of support from the learning & development team, reflecting a shift of emphasis from courses to learning resources.

Experiential learning at the BBC

Although outside Nick’s remit, he is well aware of the importance of job experience to the overall learning architecture. He described two schemes operated by the BBC Academy: Stepping Stones which encourages employees to take longer term assignments, and, Hot Shoes which offers shorter placements. The latter operates on a two-way basis: managers can advertise for employees looking for assignments in their departments, and employees can market themselves as looking for a placement. In this respect, this scheme has much more of a bottom-up feel than typical programmes designed to encourage greater job experience.

What makes for a rounded learning experience

For the most part, Nick was not required to formally evaluate his learning interventions beyond completion, but decided to conduct his own research to find out from employees what had most influenced their career and their behaviour and what resources they used on a day-to-day basis. Whilst most research grapples with the possible outcomes of specific learning interventions, Nick wanted to understand those elements of the learning process most likely to be significant from the perspective of designing learning interventions. The results from this survey helped him to develop the Learning Design Toolkit, which outlines key components in a truly rounded learning experience.

Nick was able to draw a number of key conclusions from his research:

L&D departments and professionals often feel they are responsible for learning, but in reality it is learners who are the locus of control for learning activity. The emphasis therefore needs to shift from meeting learning objectives to one of building confidence and inspiring employees to learn, utilising the resources and opportunities to hand.
Resources play a far greater role in the overall learning landscape than do courses.
The natural process of learning is described in terms such as: inspiration and connection, challenge and confidence. Learning is hardly ever a result of a formal learning experience.
An employee’s line manager is often a major influence on an employee’s career, influencing their development and their attitude towards development. A central theme was the employee’s desire for a mentor-figure.
Often what employees really want from a learning experience is not knowledge, but to build their confidence in an environment where it’s safe to fail.
You build a learning culture by building an appetite to learn. This is predominantly a bottom-up, peer-to-peer, process.
Top-down learning interventions occupy a relatively small corner of the learning landscape, typically mandatory or compliance-related learning. This is still a vital role, however.
Technology is helping to transform our view of learning, as it both supports and highlights the role of informal learning.

Nick Shackleton-Jones started his career as a psychology lecturer, teaching a mix of mature and immature students and publishing psychology study guides. An interest in technology and its application to learning brought Nick into the corporate world, where he has led the development of online learning strategy, content and delivery, most recently in his role as manager of online & informal learning at the BBC. In December 2010 he joined BP as Group Head of elearning. His teams have won several awards in areas including online content development, staff development strategy, innovation, and more recently for their pioneering work in the areas of rapid development and social networks for learning. Nick is a board member of the Institute for IT Training and a regular conference speaker. Nick also founded the 5000-strong ‘e-learning professionals’ Facebook group, blogs at aconventional.com and tweets as shackletonjones.

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Fresh thoughts on competence and consciousness

2011-02-16T07:16:00.003Z

I must admit I've always thought of the four-step process that sees a learner move from unconscious incompetence through conscious incompetence to conscious competence and finally unconscious competence (see the Wikipedia entry) as an amusing play on words and not much more. But I've been finding it quite useful recently as a way of explaining the learner's journey as they develop new skills and I'm finding a very snug fit with Nick Shackleton-Jones' concept of courses and resources (see my post on this), currently my favourite way of explaining the relationship between formal and informal learning.

In case you haven't encountered the four steps before, the idea is that the learner starts in a state of unconscious incompetence with regard to a new area of skill. They don't know what they don't know. The skill looks straightforward enough. There's probably not a lot to it.

Of course, when they do get to have a go, they find it's a lot harder than they thought. They don't have any of the elaborate schema built up by expert performers over time and they flounder. Now they are in a state of conscious incompetence - they know that they don't know. At this point, some will turn and run, but assuming the skill is worth having, most will be highly motivated to learn.

Repeated practice with supportive feedback will bring those that persevere to a state of conscious competence. We can perform the skill - just - but because the elements of the skill are still not sufficiently drilled in, our working memory is overloaded with 'things we mustn't forget to do' and we're sweating to hold it all together.

The reward comes in time. Eventually the skill becomes so deeply embedded that we are hardly aware of what we are doing. We may even be able to carry out the skill in the background, leaving our working memory free to cope with the unexpected or to carry out another task altogether. This is unconscious competence.

So how do courses and resources fit into this? According to Nick's model, the course (which we can regard as any more or less formal learning intervention) has two purposes: (1) to inspire the learner, to have them care about what needs to be learned, to arouse the emotions, and (2) to instil confidence. So how do these map to the four steps? Well, one of the ways that you generate an emotional reaction is by demonstrating that there really is a learning need. You want the learner to be thinking "This stuff seems to matter. I should probably know how to do it but I don't." In other words, the learner is consciously incompetent. That's what any skill-building course should accomplish early on but so many don't. If you haven't put the learner in a situation where their lack of skill becomes obvious to them, then they won't realise. You have to let them have a go. Starting a course with a load of theory isn't going to demonstrate need. Far better to engage the learner in a practical activity (case study, scenario, group challenge, simulation, etc.) that puts their skill (or lack of it) to the test - safely, of course, and without embarrassment. When they become frustrated by obstacles to their progress then, believe me, they'll be willing to learn.

Most skill-building courses, even those that devote too long to the theory, will provide some practice. The trouble is that this is often limited to one or two brief attempts - just enough for the learner to be conscious of their incompetence. This is not a happy state in which to end a course - in effect, the learner is worse off than when they started. When you're learning any new skill, you need plenty of safe practice. Mistakes should be encouraged, even welcomed. Nobody gets hurt and no-one's out of pocket. Ideally, no-one's trying to impress their peers, just to develop their skills. Most courses end with the learner in a state of conscious incompetence, but if the aim of the course really is to instil confidence, then it needs to get the learner well on the path to conscious competence - perhaps not all the way there, but confident enough to progress more independently. Only with confidence can the learner move on from the course to take advantage of the resources, whether these are in the form of content, or support from a coach, buddy, mentor, supervisor or peers.

Relevance drives out resistance

2011-02-07T16:44:00.003Z

The most recent Towards Maturity Benchmark Study was largely positive about the inroads being made by e-learning in the UK, but there was also evidence that quality may be being sacrificed in the drive for cost and time savings. Most alarming of all was the finding that only 51% of organisations feel that the e-learning that employees are receiving is relevant to their job. The e-learning is not relevant? The obvious question is why are they receiving it then? Surely when money is tight, the first priority should be to prune the training that is not relevant, not to rework it in a new format.

If learning is not aligned to business need (and the needs of employees) then it is much more than useless, it is positively harmful. You can try as hard as you like to engage learners, using flashy media, games, quizzes and other interactions, but if the learner does not feel the content is relevant then engagement is just about impossible.

There are two possible reasons why an organisation is delivering irrelevant learning. One is that they haven't taken the trouble to find out where the business is going and to determine, as a result, the competencies that will be required. This could happen through ignorance, laziness, a lack of l&d clout in the organisation or just plain non-assertiveness. The second and just as likely reason is that the training is being conducted for compliance purposes and that competency is the last thing on anyone's mind.

When compliance training is mapped to meaningful competences then you stand a chance. When the sole purpose is to tick boxes and cover management backsides then you're wasting your time trying to engage learners. It's all a game and employees know this.

It's not as if you can get employees to be motivated to take the training seriously by offering incentives. As Daniel Pink explains in his excellent book Drive, incentives can cause more problems than they solve:

"The problem with making an extrinsic reward the only destination that matters is that some people will choose the quickest route there, even if it means taking the low road."

Pink does suggest a role for incentives and disincentives when the performance you are seeking to encourage is routine, and now I think about it, clicking Next to progress through a series of slides is probably about as routine a task as you can get, so I do take some of that back. But is clicking through what you're really looking to achieve? Surely at least some of what you cover in those compliance courses is interesting and useful. Are you really trying hard enough to make this work?

Let's face it, irrelevant training means disgruntled learners, and when that training is delivered online, then it's e-learning that tends to take the blame. Eventually the novelty of saving money using e-learning will rub off and there'll be a return to quality. Let's hope that the medium (e-learning) doesn't get blamed for what is a fault of management.

As a participant on a recent workshop advised me, 'relevance drives out resistance.' If you're encountering resistance from your e-learners, you might try providing them with e-learning that matters.

Social learning handbook - a review

2011-02-03T20:23:00.001Z

I must admit that I'm slightly uncomfortable with the use of the phrase 'social learning' to mean 'learning with social media', because it implies (1) that social learning is anything unusual and (2) that social media is the only way of learning from and with one's peers. There is hardly a person alive who hasn't learned socially, just as there isn't a person who hasn't learned many things on their own or through the efforts of a teacher. L&D are the last people to need convincing of the benefits of social learning because, after all, aren't they the first to complain when anyone suggests that a 'social' classroom experience should be converted to a very non-social self-study piece of e-learning.

Having said all this, the new social media really do make a big difference. They amplify the opportunities for social learning to an extraordinary degree, extending reach way beyond those who you can connect with face-to-face and empowering all of us to be teachers as well as learners. Bit by bit, the astonishing take-up of social media tools in all parts of the world and amongst practically all sectors of society is not only changing how we all behave, it's changing what we are.

L&D have a tough job introducing social media tools into workplace learning; they are fighting not only the prejudices of senior managers but their own. Just as e-learning has been a game changer for L&D (in most cases resisted fervently), so is social media. But whatever the obstacles, social media tools will become ubiquitous because our use of these tools outside the workplace is becoming so pervasive that it will be unimaginable that we will not try to realise the same benefits at work. All that's necessary is for the key decision-makers in organisations to become avid social media users themselves - and that is only a question of time - and the doors will fly open. When that happens, L&D will have increased opportunities not only to extend the use of social media within formal interventions but to help in architecting the social learning organisation. Even if they don't, it will happen anyway.

All of which brings me eventually to the fact that I've been reading Jane Hart's Social Learning Handbook, just released in paperback (Kindle version soon, please). I'm not surprised that Jane would have written a handbook; after all, she is the official curator of the learning technologies museum (if in doubt, see Jane's Centre for Performance and Learning Technologies). Much will be familiar for those who have read Jane's many articles and postings, and who have seen her speak, but here it all is collected in one place and organised very systematically. The first half of the book presents the argument for social learning and provides a number of ways of making sense of the phenomenon. I particularly liked the reasons not to ban social media and the description of the new role and skills of the workplace learning and development professional.

The second half of the book presents '30 ways to use social media to work and learn smarter.' This is Jane in her element, sharing information on tools and how to use them. Only complete social media fanatics (and, to be fair, there are plenty of them) will find nothing here of value. No doubt this stuff will become out of date in no time at all, but as Jane explains, this is an unbook, perpetually work-in-progress. That's why it makes sense that she's publishing through Lulu, a print-on-demand service, which allows her to update the manuscript at any time.

Anyway, enough of all this. As Jane concludes, rather ironically, at the end of her book: "Social media is not something you talk or read about, it is something you do."

Social media for trainers – a review

2011-02-02T17:06:00.001Z

As I have been travelling east and west across the UK this week, I’ve been taking a look at Jane Bozarth’s Social Media for Trainers on my Kindle. What motivated me to get on and read the book was a chance encounter with Jane at Learning Technologies last week. Jane’s a likeable character from the deep south of the USA with an infectious enthusiasm, which I felt sure would be reflected in this book. I wasn’t wrong.

Social media for trainers isn’t really aimed at people like me, even though I’m seriously engaged with social media and, at least some of the time, I qualify as being a trainer. It’s primary focus is on the classroom (or virtual classroom) instructor who wants to enrich their offering with social learning techniques but doesn’t know where to begin. This is not a book that spends a lot of time developing a theory of social learning; this is highly practical stuff, and the better for it.

Jane talks about the way in which social media can be deployed to support informal learning, but the focus here is on the course, and the way social media tools can be used before, during and after.

Somewhat riskily, given the rate of change in this field and the inherent slowness of conventional book publishing, Jane deals at length with the opportunities provided by specific tools such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Indeed she admitted to me that she had been caught out by the demise of Google Wave, which she does cover briefly. This may cause some frustrations for readers (particularly a year or so from now), but those who can get past the detail will be more than adequately compensated by the fabulous ideas for learning activities that can be undertaken with each tool. Jane has obviously given a lot of thought to these and I’m sure I won’t be the only one to shamelessly steal a few of these for my own courses. If you’re wavering on whether to part with the money, then I can assure you that one idea successfully applied will pay for the book many times over.

Jane is obviously in vogue as a name for those involved in social media because next on my list will be a look at Jane Hart’s new offering.

Avoiding humiliation

2011-01-31T18:55:00.001Z

At school we have no choice but to have a go at everything that teachers require of us. At some tasks we excel, attract praise and thereby gain confidence. These are the tasks we will look to incorporate into our lives in the long term. Inevitably, there will be other activities at which we do less well and, kids being kids, our predicament will usually attract a great deal of amusement and in some cases derision. Somehow our humiliations seem much more painful than the pleasure we gain from our successes. Most of us will resolve to avoid carrying out these activities (reading in front of the class, drawing, writing essays, speaking Spanish, football, mental arithmetic or whatever it is for you) for the rest of our lives. If we're lucky we'll succeed.

One area of our lives over which we have much less control is the training we receive. Although training works best when the practical activities match the tasks we carry out in the course of our jobs, this principle is rarely applied. After all, how many of us will be expected to engage in role plays, Lego-building tasks, quizzes or group hugs when we come into the office on a working day? When you enter the classroom (or log on to an online course), you are completely at the mercy of the trainer (or the online course designer). You hope you won't be asked to relive the humiliations of your childhood, but you know there's a possibility.

As an adult, one of the worst things that can happen to us is to be humiliated in front of our peers. Training is not the only situation in which this could occur (after all, you might be asked to deliver a speech at a wedding), but it's one of the most likely. Perhaps the greatest responsibility of any designer of learning experiences is to reduce this threat. Let's look at some typical situations:

Participating in role plays: Most learners hate them, but they are sometimes the only realistic way of allowing for skills practice. Of course, you could use an online simulation, in which no-one gets to laugh at your mistakes, but these can be expensive to produce and may not always provide the necessary realism. If role plays are unavoidable, the risks can be reduced by allowing for repetitive, short practices in twos or threes, rather than one major, do-or-die exercise in front of the whole class.
Posting to forums: It's surprising how anxious people can be about something which many of us regard as quite trivial, but remember that not all of us find it easy to articulate our thoughts in writing - this might even be one of the activities we are most trying to avoid. Posting will be easier to contemplate when the only viewers are other members of the learning group and when the expectations for the number of words, punctuation, spelling and grammar have been clearly communicated (hopefully as liberally as possible).
Speaking with a mic in a virtual classroom: You might think that this would be no problem at all - after all, we have to talk every day. However, you are very much the focus of attention when you take the mic in a virtual classroom and for many this will have the feel of a presentation. The problem is exacerbated when the student is being asked to speak in a second language. Luckily, virtual classrooms do provide alternatives, including the text chat.

It is incumbent on the facilitator to create as safe an environment as possible for learners. Feedback should be honest, yet always constructive and never personal. It should be made quite clear which activities are for experimentation only (so mistakes are not only accepted but welcomed) and which are for assessment.

I'm not suggesting we take this too far, otherwise we get to the ridiculous situation that we reached in some schools, when all competitive sports were banned. Competition is an integral element in our lives and can motivate us to higher levels of performance. On the other hand, no-one learned anything when so stressed they feel like being sick.

Learning by making stuff

2011-01-28T16:17:00.001Z

I had the pleasure to chair a session by Ewan McIntosh at Learning Technologies 2011 earlier this week. Ewan asked members of the audience ‘What were your happiest memories as a learner?’ and ‘What were your least happy memories?’. He then showed the results from all those people that he had asked previously. From a show of hands it looked like there was general agreement. I hope Ewan won’t mind me sharing his slides, starting with the happiest memories:

And the less happy ones:

There’s plenty to chew over here, but what rang a bell with me was the passion that we obviously feel for making stuff. I know there is nothing knew in the idea that we’re happiest when we learn by doing, but sometimes we get stuck – as designers of learning experiences - when we try and work out what we’d like learners to do.

So I thought back over the last few years to try and identify what I reckoned had been the most successful learning activities that I’d facilitated. And, what do you know, but they all had one thing in common. They all involved sending learners off, individually, in pairs or in groups, to research some topic or issue and then report back to their colleagues with a highly tangible output. The format of this deliverable doesn’t seem to have mattered too much – a podcast, a video, a game, a presentation, even something as simple as a report – although there was definitely an added thrill when the format was unfamiliar to the learners.

Now I’m a particularly goal-orientated person and I love to finish an activity with a product of some sort, but I would hazard a guess that many others feel the same.

Learning by making stuff. An idea to really explore further in 2011. Now what sort of deliverable should I aim for?

Straightforward with a human touch

2011-01-25T17:26:00.001Z

At a recent blended learning workshop, one of the participants shared with me the guiding principle that they use in their organisation (a sizeable bank) when putting together learning solutions:

Straightforward with a human touch

This really appealed to me, because it seemed to capture so much of what is important in a design:

Being straightforward:

Deliver the learning in small chunks
Use simple language
Focus on ease of use and access

Employ a human touch:

When creating content, avoid what Cathy Moore calls ‘'corporate drone’
Add audio and video to your content (not for the sake of it, but where it does add a personal touch)
Provide support from a tutor
Encourage collaboration with peers

There you are. Simple isn’t it?

Laura's learning cupcakes

2011-01-20T10:51:00.001Z

Laura Layton-James is a long-standing colleague of mine who has recently started her own blog, Purple Learning. I couldn’t help but be intrigued by one of her recent posts on learning cupcakes.

She writes:

I like to think of traditional training as a wedding cake: a rich mix of the right ingredients to make a delicious creation perfect for the traditional wedding. But it is costly to make, it takes time to bake and rest. The care and expertise is needed for the decoration, the tiny sugar flowers will take days to fashion and not everyone may like it.

I like to think of blended learning like a collection of cup-cakes the more modern weddings have. They are bite-sized, can be a variety of different flavours and colours to match the event and the guests. They can even be personalised easily and added to quickly if more guests are attending.

I don’t know anything about baking cakes (although I know a little too much about eating them), but I get the idea. Readers of this blog will be well aware that this is how I also think about blended learning and, in particular, learning content.

Large-scale, elaborately crafted, fully-integrated e-learning courses are, in most circumstances and for most of us, a bit of a luxury. They require a great deal of expertise to design and develop, are inflexible in the ways in which they can be deployed and are hard to maintain.

If you de-construct these materials and instead treat each element as a separate resource, you will not only cut your workload, you could dramatically reduce the amount of specialist skill required. True, you can’t get away from the need to carefully analyse and articulate the ideas contained in your materials, but you might not have to have much in the way of specialist e-learning skills.

So, instead of producing an e-learning wedding cake which has animations, interactions, videos, quizzes, simulations and external links all built-in, consider developing a variety of cupcakes:

Stand-alone videos (or links to videos on YouTube or elsewhere) or podcasts
Short sequences of highly-visual slides, perhaps with narration, exported to Flash
Activities involving on-screen interaction
Reflective activities that have the learner doing something more challenging than answering multiple-choice questions
Quizzes and surveys
Handouts in easily-printable HTML or PDF formats
Links for further exploration

And, of course, you can intersperse collaborative elements into this list, including work in forums and wikis.

OK, with the wedding cake, you have one link in the learning management system, with the cupcakes you may have 10. But so what? - links are free!

Wedding cakes look nice for the special occasion, but they’re not for everyday. I’d rather spend my time learning how to make cupcakes.

Totara: re-shaping Moodle for corporate use

2011-01-17T17:28:00.001Z

Last week I asked Can the ‘big LMS’ break clear of formal training? - I wanted to know whether Saba, one of the most successful of the big LMSs, could reinvent itself to accommodate informal learning. This time I’m exploring whether it is possible for one of the world’s most popular academic virtual learning environments, Moodle, to be adapted to suit the needs of corporates.

In the UK we do use two very different terms to separate between those platforms which are designed to support the learning of students (virtual learning environments – VLEs) and those designed to support the learning of employees (learning management systems – LMSs). I don’t believe the distinction is so clear in the USA, yet it really needs to be.

There is some overlap: both types of platforms can deliver resources and both can support certain types of learning activities. But the nature of those resources and activities is typically very different. A typical VLE is designed to support formal academic courses, whether face-to-face, online or blended. It provides a place for course materials to be shared, for students to collaborate and for assignments to be uploaded and graded. In essence, most VLEs house a collection of course websites.

The LMS is also typically orientated around formal learning, but of a very different nature. The LMS catalogues all the learning opportunities that an organisation provides, mainly classroom courses (including virtual ones) and self-study e-learning, and makes them available for booking by employees or their managers. It tracks progress and completion in order to update personal development plans, competency databases and compliance records. Of course the LMS may extend way beyond these confines, but these are the essentials.

So it has been more than a little surprising to me over the past few years to see Moodle, an open-source VLE, used so enthusiastically by corporates. It is capable of doing many of the LMS basics, but it certainly wasn’t designed for the job. Various companies have offered customisation of Moodle to make it fit better to corporate needs, but TotaraLMS is the first example (as far as I know) of an out-of-the-box Moodle implementation designed wholly for corporate needs.

Steve Rayson of Kineo stopped by a couple of weeks ago to demonstrate TotaraLMS to me before embarking on his trip to China (the results of which I’m sure he will be announcing shortly). Totara is a joint venture of Kineo and New Zealand-based Catalyst. It adds a whole load of LMS functionality to Moodle:

Learning plans aligned to courses (in the fullest sense, or in some cases just a simple resource or activity), competencies or learning and development objectives, each with their own evidence criteria
Learner and manager dashboards
Measurement of competence against primary positions and aspirational positions
Bookings for classroom courses (including virtual)
All sorts of standard management reports

TotaraLMS builds in as standard much of the functionality that Kineo have been offering their open source clients in recent years. It can be hosted or installed within the firewall. While all elements of Totara are open source, it is not free, but then I’m not sure many corporates really want free – they want easy.

I know some big brand companies are going to give it a try. It will be interesting to see how they get on.