Comments on: Quality or Quantity?

By: Mohammad

Mohammad — Mon, 08 Jan 2024 00:58:32 +0000

“I am hearing people saying “how can I use this to work faster”, put out more content per unit time”, etc, instead of “how can we use this to make our learning more impactful”.” I like so much this section. great points.

By: Robert Spence

Robert Spence — Sun, 07 Jan 2024 02:25:29 +0000

Perhaps we should be considering professionalism that extends well beyond utilising design models and techniques. Having the ability to argue the need for quality over quantity, starting with becoming a proactive solution provider rather than a reactive order taker and justifying the cost based on a value proposition, is often lacking. Over the years I have observed that organisational business units are usually good at business analysis but not so good at performance analysis. The problem can be that typical organisational learning functions are not so hot on performance analysis either. Think of performance outcomes, have those ratified and “owned” by the business unit and then frame your design around them – maybe by starting with the design of the assessment. Questions to the business unit like “How will you know when this (intervention) is successful” helps with clarification and determining the necessary balance between quality and quantity. Sharing an evaluation model with the business unit – such as Reaction, Learning, Application, Impact, ROI, Sustainability and Sharing the Benefit (of the learning) can often help.

By: Ray

Ray — Wed, 03 Jan 2024 22:48:26 +0000

I forget which movie this was from, but there’s a scene I recall of characters sitting in a restaurant. One of them complains about the poor quality of the food. The other piles on with “And such small portions!”

Our industry is largely like that restaurant that serves sub-standard food. Serving more of it will not be an improvement.

Many IDs still don’t know how to design effective performance-oriented learning experiences. But even some who DO know how, generally don’t because of tight time constraints and low expectations from their management. The institutions they work for don’t recognize that the info-dump training is bad. If the ID wants to change the minds of the higher-ups, the ID will have to do so within the extremely limited time and budget that’s required to create info-dump “courses.” It’s in these situations where efficiency gains from AI can be usefully deployed to try to demonstrate the value of better-designed training, without running afoul of institutional time and budget expectations.

Another area where AI efficiency gains can be helpful is for institutions who already produce high-quality training. Certain regulatory requirements, such as making an interactive e-learning course accessible to differently-abled people (e.g., those who use screen readers, or who navigate without the use of a mouse) is excruciatingly time-consuming. My time would be much better spent designing the next quality training intervention then spending hours on tasks like setting focus order for keyboard navigation, creating audio descriptions of the visual content of all my videos, etc. These are tasks I want AI to do for me. AI can do this without messing up my learning design.

I am very skeptical of letting AI create the whole course. The training set would inevitably be filled with tons of garbage designs, so in all likelihood, the AI would just become highly efficient at churning out more garbage. What I want from AI at this stage is targeted assistance that works within the framework of my performance-oriented design. In other words, I want PRODUCTION help, not DESIGN help.

Now, if a training set could be assembled consisting of enough high-quality, performance-oriented designs, then there would be HUGE value in letting the well-trained AI generate instructional designs. But I have yet to see anything like this to date.

Until then, let good IDs create the design, and let AI provide targeted production assistance. In other words, in the short term at least, I think the best we can hope for is efficiency gains.

By: Neil Von Heupt

Neil Von Heupt — Tue, 02 Jan 2024 21:58:47 +0000

I was often asked when parenting was it more important to give children quality time or quantity. I always responded ‘both!’. For me, it’s the same here. Continue to work on quality (as the priority, I agree), then produce more of it. I think both can be aided by AI, when used well.