Bridging the e-learning skills gap

This morning I presented on ‘the e-learning skills gap’ for a webinar run by the Learning and Skills Group (LSG). The LSG webinars are always well attended (this one attracted 120) and ably hosted by Don Taylor. A recording of the webinar will be available here in due course, although there’s also a SlideShare version if you just want to flip through the slides.

I was asked by Don at the end to identify three skills which all l&d professionals need to beef up on if they are to bridge the skills gap. I picked out three:

1. Curriculum design: integrating learning technologies appropriately into the design for new interventions.
2. Content creation: the ability to put together e-content that is good enough to meet routine needs (without the necessity to become a specialist).
3. Facilitation: the skills needed to run successful live online learning events.

I asked the group what worked best for them in bridging their own e-learning skills gaps. Here’s what came back:

• CIPD course!
• Online resources
• Networks and resources, blogs
• Networking with others in my area of expertise
• Networks - learning from others
• Blogs
• Self motivation, blogs, discussion forums
• Screencasts
• YouTube
• Networks
• Events
• Short courses
• Webinars
• Webinars
• Networking and self-learning
• Feedback from learners
• Mini videos
• By encountering plenty of 'how not to do it'
• Blogs, tutorials
• Amazon
• Forums, engaging situations
• Discussion forums, online courses, webinars
• Listening to what learners like and dislike
• Books- sorry to be old fashioned :)
• Explored de facto resources and tools YouTube EDU, iTunes U, Facebook, Twitter, blogs
• Open University
• Use of elearnity brought us a long way
• Challenges at work, formal learning, practice, reassessing and self-reflection

Which only goes to emphasise how formal and informal approaches can work for different people at different stages.

Getting a life

Working life provides a great many valuable learning experiences, but it will never provide the diversity of opportunity that an individual can obtain by maintaining a healthy work-life balance.

Those who overwork are severely damaging their potential to learn, as John Medina points out in Brain Rules:

• Exercise boosts brain power (and, unless you're a professional athlete or a manual worker, chances are your work provides few opportunities for exercise).
• People who experience chronic stress are sick more often, and if the stress is too severe, or too prolonged, stress begins to harm learning (now home life can be stressful too, but the odds are that overwork is the major cause of stress for many of us).
• Sleep loss cripples thinking, in just about every way you can measure thinking (I know it may be your out-of-work pursuits that could be causing sleep loss - let's not go there - but overwork can be the problem too).

In their article Cognitive Fitness for the Harvard Business Review, Roderick Gilkey and Clint Kilts make the following recommendations to managers if they are to attain the highest levels of ‘cognitive fitness’:

• Work hard at play: participate in games and activities, particularly those involving some risk.
• Search for patterns: challenge and expand your mindset by experiencing new places and listening to alternative viewpoints.
• Seek novelty: study a new language, learn to paint, use new technologies, learn a musical instrument.

Above all, what this article recommends is for corporate drones to get a life. To be sharp, you need stimulus beyond your office walls. The opportunities for informal learning are severely restricted if your life consists of work, eat and sleep and no more. And if your day consists of the same experiences repeated over and over, you're not developing at all - you're probably not even going to be very good at your job.

The Big Question: How do I communicate the value of social media as a learning tool to my organisation?

This month’s Big Question in the ASTD Learning Circuits Blog is ‘How do I communicate the value of social media as a learning tool to my organisation?’

How indeed? Well one way to approach this issue is to step back from the technology and ask yourself whether bottom-up learning in general (which has always happened, but which social media facilitates) is appropriate for the target population?

Bottom-up learning is managed by employees themselves. Why? Because it is in their interests to gain whatever knowledge and skills they need to perform effectively. A bottom-up approach is needed to address the 80% of learning that is needed 20% of the time. It most needs to be encouraged in those organisations in which there is constant change and fluidity in tasks and goals.

Bottom-up learning is cheaper, more responsive, less controlling, less patronising and altogether more in tune with the times. But it is also less certain, less measurable and less suited to dependent learners who don't know what they don't know.

For bottom-up learning to thrive, employees need the motive, the means and the opportunity (just like in the crime novels). They will only have the motive if they are rewarded for effective performance. The will only have the means if employers help them to develop the metacognitive skills (the skills you need to learn independently) and provide the right tools (particularly the social networking software that is revolutionising the way we interact with each other online). They will only have the opportunity if employers are able to foster a culture which encourages self-initiative and does not penalise mistakes.

L&d professionals could do worse in future than to regard bottom-up learning as the default solution, the one they choose routinely except where it is obviously unsuitable. For too long, employees have been spoon-fed their education and their training, and have failed to develop as independent learners to the extent that they should have done. Those entering the workforce in 2010 have overcome these barriers and have higher expectations. Provide them with the motive, the means and the opportunities and their capabilities are likely to astound you.

Yet another renaissance for the training video

Last week I participated in a webinar hosted by Video Arts, one of the world's most successful vendors of training films, perhaps most famous for the comic 'see how not to do it, then learn how it should be done' videos featuring John Cleese and other comedy stars. Video Arts was formed in 1972 by a number of colleagues at the BBC, including Anthony Jay and Cleese himself, who were dismayed at the poor quality of the training films that the BBC were showing them and realised there was an opportunity to do a better job themselves.

My involvement began in the late 1970s, when I became a Video Arts customer, using their films to liven up and add some variety to classroom events. They were very successful at doing this job and most people can recall at least a few scenes from Video Arts films they saw many decades ago. As for me, I mainly remember having to set them up on a 16mm projector, with all the hassle this entailed. Luckily VHS came on the scene soon after, which simplified the process no end and helped to trigger the late 70s boom in corporate video.

In the mid 80s it looked like the advent of interactive video (typically PCs hooked up to laserdisc players to deliver self-paced, media-rich lessons) would spell the end of the simple, passive experience of watching a 30 minute training video. But although interactive video delivered some wonderful content (in many cases unmatched by today's e-learning), constant changes of media kept getting in the way:

1. The move from laserdisc to CD-ROM constrained bandwidth so significantly that video was an impossibility. Only ten years later were CD-ROMs fast enough to do the job, by which time text and still graphics had taken centre stage.
2. Then the shift from CD-ROM to online delivery set us back again, with no chance for years to come of video at any sensible frame rate or window size. Text and still graphics remained dominant and the only outlet for the training video was in the classroom,albeit now on DVD rather than tape.

But all good things come to those who wait and, with broadband now so commonplace, video is resurgent once more. Whether we'll see a return to interactive video as a more media-rich form of self-paced e-learning remains to be seen. Of more interest is the emergence of a third form of training video (although that now seems a rather quaint old term) - the short, how-to video nugget covering a single topic and designed for use in a variety of contexts. Perhaps the best examples of this new form are the videos from Common Craft, but expect to see many new genres develop. These videos can be used on a stand-alone basis, shown in class (real or virtual), integrated into self-paced materials or used as a trigger for online discussions. They are one of the first manifestations of YouTube thinking brought to the workplace and capture the mood of the times far better than their rather ancient predecessors.

Video Arts has changed hands many times (the founders got out a long time ago when the going was good) but is still doing good business nearly 40 years later. But they must realise that the days in which learners would sit passively for 30 minutes at a time are drawing to a close. The company is reinventing itself once again as provider of a versatile digital content library containing short chunks of learning material, You-Tube style. Whether chopped-up videos from years past will fulfil this function perfectly remains to be seen. Chances are they'll have to start creating new content to fit the new model. If they do then, who knows, they could still be going 40 years from now.

The case against multi-tasking is building

An article, The Myth of Multitasking, in this month’s Management Today magazine, adds to the backlash against the frenetic task switching that has become so common in the past few years, as more and more communication channels open up alongside new mobile technologies. See my posts A challenge to the multitasking assumption and The Big Question: How should presenters address multitasking?

The article collects some fascinating opinions and data. Here are a few quotes to whet your appetite:

"Multi-tasking might look impressive, but it's often just a muddle-headed displacement activity."

"It pays to look busy. Who isn't in awe of the person who can speed-read a report, listen in on a meeting and keep an eye on their e-mails at the same time?"

"Multi-tasking works, right? Wrong. Very wrong. The great multi-taskers of our time turn out to be the ones who remember nothing and get the least done."

"What you give up when you work like that is depth. You give up the capacity to reflect, and any depth of emotion."

"Interruptions are a disaster for idea growth."

"Multi-tasking feels good because it releases dopamine."

"The cost of time lost recovering from informational interruptions is $1bn."

We have to get hold of this problem before we turn into a bunch of crazy, stressed-out air-heads.

Digital learning content does not have to mean CBT

I am becoming increasingly aware of the the need to make clear a distinction between the broad concept of digital learning content, in all its many varieties, and the much narrower idea of interactive tutorials of the traditional CBT (computer-based training) variety.

In the former category I'd put the following:

• how-to guides
• slide shows, with or without narration
• podcasts
• videos
• software demos
• quizzes
• polls
• learning games
• visual aids

I'd say that every l&d professional should have at least a basic level of competence in the design and development of digital learning content, at least those forms of content most relevant to the learning domain for which they are responsible. This is no more than a natural evolution from their traditional responsibility for the production of PowerPoint slides and handouts which support most classroom events.

What this is not saying is that l&d professionals need to be able to create interactive self-study courses which completely replace their face-to-face predecessors. While some trainers will have the aptitudes and interests which will help them to excel in this area, in most cases this will remain a job for specialists. It is much, much harder to create a set of fully self-contained instructional materials than it is to develop the components - the explanations, the examples, the demonstrations, the practice exercises, the assessments.

Unfortunately, most attempts to train l&d professionals in the design and development of digital learning materials begin and ends with the assumption that the end result will be a self-contained tutorial. Because it is typical to try and achieve this in a couple of days with only a minimal amount of practice, these interventions are very unlikely to lead to any useful level of competence and will most likely only reinforce the idea that this is a job to be put out to full-time instructional designers.

What is much more feasible and much more useful is to concentrate on far simpler forms of content:

• taking an existing slide show and converting it into a self-contained resource
• using screen capture software to make a software demo
• using a simple audio editor to record and edit a podcast
• creating interactive learning resources (Articulate Engage is great for this)
• developing a quiz
• taking publicly-available content such as YouTube videos and topping and tailing them to act as learning resources

The way I see it, the idea of rapid e-learning needs to work at two distinct levels:

1. The use of rapid tools and processes by e-learning professionals to create fully self-contained e-learning courses.
2. The development of simple digital learning components by l&d generalists and subject experts, for use as classroom aids, reference materials and elements in blended solutions.

What's needed is more training and encouragement to support the latter, rather than a futile attempt to develop advanced levels of instructional design expertise across broad swathes of the l&d profession.

The Big Question: How should presenters address multitasking?

I’m just in time to tackle this month’s Big Question from the Learning Circuits Blog. The question was prompted to some extent by my post Multitasking is now every presenter’s problem, in which I put forward the notion that it wasn’t just webinar presenters who had to deal with their audience multitasking, this was now rife at face-to-face events as well.

There were some great responses to the Big Question – I particularly liked the concept of Binge Thinking suggested by Ken Allen. I’m not going to rework the arguments here, but I would like to clarify my own thoughts and conclusions:

• Multitasking is an illusion – we are simply not capable of doing it. Those who attempt to carry out another task while a presentation is taking place will miss out to some extent, but then it could be the presentation is not worth concentrating on anyway.
• The very best presenters will always hold attention.
• Presenters tackling issues which are highly relevant to the participants will always hold attention.
• It is a fact of life that some participants will choose not to participate at some events and will stay glued to their toys. I don’t mind this as long as they are polite about it: show some interest when the presenter starts up; look up and smile once in a while; try not to look as if the presenter has somehow intruded on your personal office space. Personally, if I’m paid to speak, I’ll put up with a lack of politeness; if I’m not, I’m quite prepared to walk off. Life’s too short.